Finishing a paper.
Working on a Big Project I hope to reveal in a week or two.
Not working enough on a different Big Project I hope to reveal in a couple of months.
Grading starts next week. (Cf. The Scariest Moments in Law Teaching.)
No blogging today, at least not until late, please feel free to talk amongst yourselves….
I'm hearing crickets chirping.
“Crickets Chirping” is sort of bloggers' cliche: it's often used to mean a silence so deep on some issue (where there should be noise) that one can hear the crickets. But since Sunday afternoon I'm really hearing real crickets chirping — two transparent bags of them fresh from the pet store. They're going into school with one of the kids tomorrowtoday to feed the science teacher's bearded dragon. And meanwhile, they're loud.
(The picture is nothing like what the bags look like. I just liked the picture.)
My email appears to be down — if you are trying to reach me urgently, I suggest the phone…
The problem seems to have started late last night, so anything you sent after, say, midnight my time is sitting in a queue somewhere.
Update: Partly fixed. I'm getting new mail. Not clear what happened to the mail sent while I was down.
This is the time of year in Florida when I get a very violent allergic reaction to something in the air. When up lived in New England, the allergy season was final exams, which I guess means that it's Spring here now.
There seems, most years, to be a strong correlation between when the mangoes bloom and when I sneeze hard enough to cause damage, but my doctor once assured me that since there aren't any mango plants very near where I live, and I sneeze like crazy in the yard, odds are that it's not mango pollen itself because it is a very heavy grain and doesn't travel that far from the plant. It is, he said, likely to be a tree that pollinates on the same schedule. And indeed, there were not a lot of backyard mangos in New Haven.
But what tree? How to tell?
Weatherbug says “Predominant Pollen: Cedar/Juniper and Bald Cypress.”
But JustWeather.com says the pollen count is “low”. Yah, right.
Weather.com agrees, but adds, “Most active tree pollen types: Oak” (and there's a big live oak in the law school courtyard where my eyes itch and water…hmm…). They also say today's pollen will be worse than yesterday's. Oh joy.
Local Pollen Types for Miami-Dade County, Florida in Winter offers a veritable cornucopia of suspects in the tree category (not mention the grasses and weeds):
Alvaradoa (Alvaradoa)
Avocado, Bay (Persea)
Bayberry (Morella)
Blackbead (Pithecellobium)
Castor-Bean (Ricinus)
Cherry Palm (Pseudophoenix)
Coconut Palm (Cocos)
Coral-Bean (Erythrina)
Elder (Sambucus)
False Sensitive-Plant, Mimosa (Mimosa)
False Willow (Baccharis)
Hercules'-Club, Prickly-Ash, Toothachetree (Zanthoxylum)
Holly (Ilex)
Leadtree (Leucaena)
Mulberry (Morus)
Nettletree (Trema)
Oysterwood (Gymnanthes)
Punktree (Melaleuca)
Royal Palm (Roystonea)
She-Oak (Casuarina)
Soapberry (Sapindus)
Not that knowing would probably do me any good, but I'd still like to know the true name of Nemesis. Meanwhile pass the Fexofenadine.
According to dynastree.com,
[T]he surname Froomkin the 391176. most frequent name in the US.
That is all.
I got a new cell phone a little while ago, because my old one just plain died after five years of abuse. The new one allows me to download .mp3 snippets as ringtones, and I've had some fun playing with it and putting in custom tones for the people who tend to call me. My wife gets the Monty Python Theme song (aka The Liberty Bell March), because she likes it.
Since I got the new phone, I've been using a “yes we can” audio clip as my default ringtone. (You can hear the part I use from the latter part of this video.) I got the idea from reading about South American electoral campaigns, in which I gather it is common for campaigns to produce ringtones and for supporters to use them. If nothing else, “yes we can” got a lot of knowing laughs.
But in my mind that was always a pre-election ringtone. Now I need something more permanent, or at least different. Ideally, I'd like something mixing the optimistic and the cautious, probably political, but more appropriate for the next months, a period in which the poetry of campaigning ripens into to the prose of governance. The ideal song would not be too obnoxious to others, and would sound nice to me, lend itself to excerpting, and no doubt meet many other criteria I'm too tired today to formulate.
Got any suggestions?
Note: I have never ever liked the sound of Happy Days Are Here Again. That is Not An Option. I also rejected these stanzas from Talking Heads' Don't Worry About the Government because, much as I like the song, it's too jangly for a ringtone I'll hear over and over.
That song, incidentally, has always meant “Rosslyn, Va” to me for no obvious reason except it seems to fit….
Jotwell Blenderlaw