Jefferson stand up desk from monticello.org

A week ago, Karen, always finding ways to improve my life, sent me a link to a New York Times article “Don’t Just Sit There” criticising our sedentary lifestyles. Turns out that our ritual of 2 3/4 mile walks are insufficient. All of the time spent shifting from one gluteus maximus to the other in front of the computer and on the phone has such negative effects that I might as well forgo the walks and have another donut.

Dating back to my days at Augat (in the ’80s) I have wanted a stand up desk. Never got around to it, though I did look for stand up desks in furniture catalogs and knew that  they were very common in earlier times. Jefferson used them including the one in the photo. Otto von Bismarck reportedly began his day at a stand up desk. Hemingway was photographed at one.

Then there are the health claims for standing. The ArtOfManliness.com has a lengthy discussion. I particularly liked their images of jury rigged stand up desks. Right up my alley. Or. another discussion at The Graham Peterson Desk Company.

I examined a few do-it-yourself options. Some cheap and bad. Some expensive and maybe good. One peculiar design came from the LifeHacker.com website. I like the 2x construction.

My problem is that I already have a desk custom built (ipse fecit) to fit in the space allotted to me. I can’t very well start to agitate for a new corner office.

The only one available is out in the barn. It is drafty out there and I would have to share with whatever critters might happen along. And, because of my already proven sloth, we have a conduit underground, been there for a year, but no one has dragged electric power out there.

Maybe I could work with the LED headgear Ed gave us last year for Xmas. Worked fine camping. Wonder what the clients might think on Skype?

So I came up with my own solution. $34 of material (mostly for the extravagant oak veneer plywood) and now Mr. Wonderful is vertical. If I had done this earlier I could have saved on the real extravagance of the plush office chair that inclines and reclines in every imaginable direction.

BTW – since the photo was taken I have filled in the screw holes, sanded, and slathered three coats of urethane on the desk.

from LifeHacker.com Is the fan on the floor part of the cooling system?

Untitled - 1962 (8 x 7 x 8 inches) from John Chamberlain Choices - exhibition catalog Guggenheim 2012

Miss Remember Ford -1964 (25 x 36 1/2 x 30 1/2 inches) by John Chamberlain - exhibition catalog Guggenheim 2012

Kiss #12-1979 (30 x 31 x 27 inches) by John Chamberlain-from Guggenheim show catalog

Though he is apparently usually noted for his wide use of car parts in his sculpture, he noted, in an audio clip, how annoying this is to him, “Do you ask a painter what brand of  paint do you use?” Any connections to Pop Art or other commentaries passing as art was clearly not his intent or desire. The car parts were just material to him.

As I moved up the ramp it dawned on me that his use of painted/colored metals introduced, for me, color as a major element of sculpture. Although there is obviously color present in every sculpture, for the most part, I have been most focused on the 3-dimensional form not its color or even surface textures. Looking at Chamberlain’s work I started to see the color not as a surface element but in an entirely new dimension.

As I moved around the sculptures, the fields of color shifted into new juxtapositions of color. Because my mind does not process 2-dimensional forms with much interest I have always been left mostly uninterested in abstract expressionism and other non-figurative 2-dimensional art. Chamberlain’s work has given me new access to these forms of abstraction.

As we were leaving the Guggenheim I purchased the catalog. A bit later I opened it to a few of the photos of works that I had liked the most. I was immediately struck by how unsatisfactory these photos turned out to be. Though the photos were of high quality and the reproduction on the pages very good. They lay flat. It was not possible to get any of the experience of moving around the sculpture.

This reminded me that for years I have taken multiple images of sculpture with the intent of providing a weak simulation of this experience. With this in mind I went back to my photo collection and created a little slide show of a work Karen and I saw earlier in the winter on a walk through the field sof Omi International Arts Center in Ghent NY.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Excuse me for being very late to comment about the piece you wrote last year regarding the frequency of letters used in the English language. The article was posted on September 15, 2010, but I have only recently just read it. Anyway, in the article you had given the assumption that the frequency of letters used in English should be based upon their frequency as occurring in the Concise Oxford Dictionary. I have no objection to using that dictionary for the frequency of letters used in English words, but to assume that the frequency occurring in English words is the same as the frequency occurring is English usage is an absolutely untrue assumption. This is because not all words are used equally.

The simplest way to explain this is that while there is only one word “quiz” in the dictionary, and only one word “the” in the dictionary, why would you expect that the two words (and their component letters) to be used with equal frequency? My point is that you will hear (or see) the word “the” (and its component letters) hundreds of times more frequently than you will see or hear the word “quiz”, yet you only counted each letter (T, H, E, Q, U, I, Z) only once in your analysis of the dictionary. Most analyses of English usage that I see reveal a rather different ranking for letter frequency from the one you showed in your posting of 15 September 2010.

Thank you for your time in considering my opinion on the matter.

In thinking again about this question it struck me that in the case of Scrabble, though a word may be appear more than once on the board, there is no real connection between the words on the board and words used during conversation and in writing. Scrabble players select words to place on the board based on the letters available to them and the maximization of the score based on the scoring rules of the game. One could play Scrabble with just the lexicon of chemistry and find the game works quite well, though with a much smaller universe of likely players.

Thus, the issue for the frequency of the use of the letters in the lexicon of English is the appropriate question, not the frequency of the letters as found in a real stream of communication or “usage”.

This frequency topic reminded me of how peculiar frequency can be in human language.  Consider the English phoneme “th” (e.g. in the word “then”) in words in a lexicon of over 70,646 in an advanced learner’s dictionary and the frequency of use in the spoken text. The phoneme “th” occurs in only 0.12% of the words, yet comprises 3.56% of the phonemes in spoken usage. It ranks 43rd out of 44 phonemes in English as occurrences in the lexicon but 6th in spoken usage.

Below is a chart for further exploration.

One small revelation is that my recent lust for a fedora (thanks to that all around maven of the hip, David Drake) has been replaced by the need to get a hat like Popeye’s (not the spinach eater).

Karen informed me that this is actually Hackman’s hat, not the invention of the wardrobe dept.

Dinner, pot roast, I always get potted food on airlines, much less likely to be anything more than potted, was incongruously accompanied by a fortune cookie. The message is propitious,especially in light of my conversation in Berkeley Heights in the morning before departing for the airport.

The Santa outfit was inexplicably lacking a beard. A quick call on the local Web for help brought this offer from Matthew Tudor-Jackson up the street (left).

My first reaction was that this was something from a run amuck costume show for Louis XIV. On further consult with the fashionistas of BeLo3rd it was determined to be BeLo3rd!

So, I was ready for my outing as Santa for Winter Walk, December 3rd.

I dropped the big wig and just went with the ZZ Top length mustache beard combo.

You can see more pictures of this at the Davis Orton Gallery news page.

I was very busy with lots of little kids and not a few babies for three hours. I was amazed that the Santa myth continues merrily along despite the enormous seemingly every larger maw of commerce.

I discovered that kids in the 3 to 4 yr range know who Santa is but don’t know yet that they are supposed to tell Santa what they want for Christmas. I stopped asking and quickly moved the conversation to the imminent arrival of a candy cane. I guess that 3 and 4 yr olds are a blind spot in my life’s experiences.

7 to 10 yr olds wanted lots of electronic games and Ipod Touches (very specific about those). 11 to 12 yr olds wanted a phone. I foolishly asked the first few if they wanted a cellphone? They looked at me quizzically until I realized that they did not know that phones used to have wires coming out of them. What most surprised me is the persistence of some old toys. A significant number of 4 to 6 yr old girls asked for Barbie dolls and accessories. Only one girl requested an American Girl doll.  Their male counterparts asked for trains. Bicycles and scooters are also still popular.

One girl, age 12, (I asked each for their name and age) told me that she wanted a Merry Christmas for her family. I asked how many were in her family, “Two, Five, how many?” She thought for a moment and said “Forty”. “Oh, a merry Christmas for the extended family?” “Of course.” she replied.

Karen and I made our annual Thanksgiving pilgrimage to Berkeley Heights and the Morgan-Ortons. This year we went via Roosevelt Island in NYC to drop of exhibition prints from our October show Street Photography / Surveillance with Bojune Kwon.

Ed went upscale on the wine for this meal

Wednesday evening dinner was cooked by Mr. Wonderful who brought back an old favorite for a re-run, meatloaf. This is the same meatloaf that was the subject of several earlier postings here. Of course all of this attention on a dish which has no recipe necessitated some head scratching. Once I got started in Meredith’s kitchen (I know that Ed makes rice and beans and other delicacies there, too, but this is Meredith’s kitchen) she hung around to kibitz. This lead to the discovery, not surprising given her penny pinching propensities, that she added oatmeal to her meatloaf too. The Wheatena I include was a novelty for her but I left out the carrots that hers included. Since my earlier jiggling of the memory banks I recalled that I also added either canned diced tomatoes or tomato juice to give some fluid for the cooking of the oatmeal and Wheetena. Spices include variably, basil, garlic, red pepper, black pepper, Worcestershire sauce, Pickapeppa, and catsup. Actually, the catsup is a required sealant for the surface of the meatloaf.

Not to get carried away further with TMI (where is Nyla when I need her steadying editorial hand), I also made a dish that was a real novelty for the Morgan-Ortons, kasha varnishke. My original plan was to make a basic Russian kasha, but Karen demanded the Jewish variant familiar in the US. I followed a recipe (this happens occasionally) at yourjewishmother.wordpress.com.

Thanksgiving Day

Since Meredith has to put in an appearance at the annual football contest between her high school and the local rival New Providence HS, we arrived fashionably late half way through the second period and departed after the half time extravaganza marching band foolery. Always the opportunist, Meredith stopped to feed the fish in her classroom after filling up on the the adulation of the crowd.

Before we could get Ed to peel a few potatoes, the following goofiness broke out:

Andrea, Noah, and Nyla arrived. Then next door neighbors Roland and Andrea. The feast was ready to begin. Karen took this panoramic shot over dessert. (Click on the image to see it full size)

Novelty Item

We had not noticed this little bit of wit from Meredith earlier. This inspired by one of Ed’s bad habits. Strikes many that there must be many more of these hidden about and to come. Ed has a lot of bad habits.

This is just to the left of the front door.

We named our team The Turkeys. This proved prescient. Despite much heckling on our part, Karen’s dispatch of a glass of wine to the floor, and much more laughter than justified by our performance, we squeaked out a place somewhat above last. But, as the saying goes, much fun was had all around.

Trivia Night at The Spotty Dog - Enid doing the work while we goofed.

I should fess up that I have rarely used a recipe. My genius is to open the refrigerator door, look in the pantry, wait for inspiration, then make something with what is at hand. Only in my recent ventures into Indian cuisine have I used a cookbook. Even that I gave up when I discovered the wonders of manjulaskitchen.com.

I have a picture of a 2007 version of my meatloaf. I am sure it included the signature Wheateena and oatmeal, canned tomatoes, and ketchup coating. I must have had a lot of onions and green peppers hanging around This one seems less gloppy than many that Jonathan and Andrea would remember. Maybe I got distracted and it was desiccated by a bit too much time in the oven?

I took special pride in making my meatloaf with so many additives that it looked as though the refuse from the grain aisle at the food coop had fallen in the mixing bowl along with a seasoning of hamburger. Oats was always a starting point along with plenty of chopped onions and green peppers. I also regularly added Wheetena, bulgur, even leftover brown rice. I always topped the mixture off with a coating of ketchup. But, even if put two eggs in to give it some structural glue, the meatloaf never actually loafed. It was always gloppy.

At some point, Jonathan thinks the late seventies, I was awarded a family medal. It is now seriously faded, but a medal nevertheless.

But the big news is that I received a medal! I am so excited. I don’t think I have ever gotten a medal for anything before. Not sure exactly why I am so enthralled. Every participant who finished the race, even the crawlers, received a medal. Still, I am excited.