J. Beever

I may have been living in a hole lately, or at least in a little microcosm of cultural deprivation, but a friend recently sent me an email with photos of some of Julian Beever’s works, which is the first I’d heard of him.

Imagine walking out for your latte or wheatgrass pick-me-up and seeing…

Meeting Madame Butterfly

If you love this kind of stuff the way I do, you can see more at his website. Or maybe soon on a street near you…

Update: When I showed this to the MPM and his reaction was thoroughly Umm, yeah… and??? It occurred to me that maybe I’d better point out that that photo up there? Is of a chalk drawing on the sidewalk, and not a 3-D object. You got that, right?

will click for rice

It’s not as if I have endless — or really any — time to fritter away and I bet you don’t either. But then again, if I can click to play AND feed hungry people, well, now, that can hardly be considered “frittering,” now can it? Even if it’s essentially Trivial Pursuit with a mouse?

At freerice.com, for each correct multiple-choice answer, 20 grains of rice are donated to the UN World Food Program. And if you answer wrong, no one shows up at your door to demand rice from your larder. I checked.

You can choose your subject — English vocabulary or grammar, art, world capitals, multiplication tables, chemical symbols or even 4 “learning language” categories — and difficulty level, 1 to 60. (I never made it past level 46 on English vocab, a topic in which I consider myself reasonably versed. But I learned a bunch of words.)

Go fritter do good a while. Or send the kids. Did I say multiplication tables?

(And if you’re thinking 20 grains ain’t much, you’d be right; it takes about 48 grains to make a gram, and it takes about 400 grams to feed one person for a day, on average. But FreeRice FAQ reports that its first five months of operation generated enough rice to feed more than one million people. So in some sense, every grain counts. Now go play already.)

21, love

I don’t suppose every woman would consider a ping-pong table a pinnacle of romance. In fact, I know at least one who counts the table her husband gave her for her birthday as one of his Great Mistakes. (It’s a long list, but the ping-pong table is right on up there.) But when I went downstairs in the basement recently and saw that toys and whatnot had been cleared, and our table set up, I got to feeling all squishy and such. He’d even dusted it off, not a cobweb to be seen. And there was a new pack of balls too.

one thing and another

You see, being that our lives are generally full with one thing and another, finding opportunities to do the things, the together things, that we once loved to do has gotten more challenging.

We still run together — our standing Friday night date in the early years — every once in a blue moon. He pushes the double Chariot, with a total gross weight upwards of 80lbs, which does at least mean I can keep up with him fairly handily. And not infrequently we saddle up ‘n’ ride our two-wheel steeds, with both girls along in one conveyance or another, though we are a far sight from approximating the standards of pace or mileage of days gone by.

But a number of activities, like backpacking, have fallen by the wayside of Logistically Untenable; others, like ultimate frisbee, have failed to breach the bar of time-divided-by-interest.

So apparently my husband’s extensive years of higher education led him last week to the realization that ping-pong has no requirements for babysitters, large blocks of time, or even clement weather to cloud its accessibility. And that there’s a lot of good that comes of time together with laughter and perhaps a wee bit of competition between spouses.

Not that I’m competitive. Or that he is. (One of these statements is a bigger lie than the other, but I’ll leave it to you to figure out which).

Now, it should be noted that any sport or activity involving a ball is generally my husband’s arena rather than mine; he’s got head-turning speed, great hands, and that innate field sense that can’t be taught. He pitched for his high-school baseball team and even gave walking on at Minnesota a try. (The coach reportedly told him, “Son, this is the Big 10. We’re looking for that 90-mile-an-hour fastball.” Husband, who’d struck out a number of the hitters he’d faced in tryouts that day regardless, weighs all of about 155lbs sopping wet in his high-tops. There was no 90mph fastball, and hence no UMinn jersey, in his future.)

Be that as it may, while I am unflinchingly suck-ass bad at many ball sports, due to some early years in an alternative education environment I’m actually a decent ping-pong player. Husband’s years in a grad-school housing environment, however, honed HIS skills to a degree I’ll never achieve if I devote my entire life to the game. If we were to play straight, he could gently return shot after shot, merely allowing me to make my own mistakes each point. Aside from being painfully boring for him, this scenario would no doubt thoroughly piss me off. Hardly the point of the endeavor.

So we long ago borrowed a trick from my dad, one he developed to keep from losing his substantial mind while playing games of skill with his children: the rolling handicap. Husband spots me 10 points. (If I win, he spots me 9 next time. If I lose, I get 11.) Starting 10 points down means he has to work hard and take chances to get back up to evens. We play right before bed, so keeping the game interesting for both of us, and the final score within a few points, has benefits too numerous to mention.

Husband ain’t no dummy.