Buddha, Picasso, and Mini-Muffins

Today I puttered down to the Art Institute to mark my day off with something interesting. It is currently under construction so many galleries are closed. This got me off my familiar beaten path and looking at things in new light.

I first wandered through an exhibit of the photography of Yousuf Karsh. He took portraits of many famous people and the gallery was full of recognizable faces, like Clark Gable, Queen Elizabeth II, and Kurt Vonnegut. What was much more interesting were the faces of people I knew, but wouldn't recognize.

Carl Sandburg

Pablo Picasso, 1954

There were several others that I wanted to capture, but I got yelled at for taking pictures.

Wandering around the rest of the museum, avoiding the droves of children on field trips, I ended up tracing the changes in the presentations of Buddha as Buddhism traveled from India to China to North Korea and Japan.

On the left are depictions of the life of Buddha from India in the 10th century. In India, it seemed Buddha depictions referred to one entity.

Below is a seated Bosatsu from Japan. A Bosatsu is just below a fully enlightened Buddha and acted as an intermediary. Seems a little more complicated.

Further into the Asian exhibits I found all sorts of different complications in figures that appeared to me as just Buddha symbols. Pictured below is a Bodhisattva, which is a merciful deity that helps to guide men to salvation. They are portrayed as more humanistic, reachable and less formal than the Buddha would be. See how the hand is open and the left foot is reaching down from the pedestal? There you have it. More humanistic.

The last "Buddha" picture is actually of a Kannon from Japan during the Kamakura period around 1300. A Kannon is a bodhisattva of compassion. Though I think this one looks a little bored, they are supposed to be eager to help mankind!

I wandered around the rest of the museum, bought a coloring book and some postcards, and came home to make some cherry-orange corn muffins to get me through the weekend of dropping temperatures we're facing. Stay warm!

In other news: Magpies join the elite group of animals that can recognize their own reflection; People actually feel colder when they're lonely and lonelier when they're colder; And winter just isn't over YET.
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Makeover Wednesday

Somebody recently told me I should grow my hair long. While that would mean less frequent trips to the salon, it would also mean more care. And I'm not sure I'm a long-hair kind of person! In the spirit of down-to-earth, valid and meaningful research, I went to Daily Makeover to find out.

Here is what I came up with:

Thank goodness it isn't the eighties anymore and I don't have to wear light pink lipstick!

This is my Ashlee Simpson hairstyle. The eyemakeup was fun to try and I don't have to worry about trying to scrub it off!

My Barbie doll look!

This is my witness protection program look.

So - what do you think - should I go with any of the above styles?

Happy New Year

Usually I take some time to reflect on the year that just ended and rarely do I make New Year's resolutions. But, I have been hearing everywhere recently that it is time for a change. So here goes: Goodbye 2008!

In 2009 I resolve to:

1. Hang out with friends regularly
2. Play more at the piano
3. Get through the winter by cooking something beautiful every week.

Pictured below is my first experiment with resolution number three. It is called a Sunlight Souffle, and it was delicious.


So, friends..... wanna come over and hang out for my next delicious creation? I'll provide the yumminess, you trek through the cold to get here! Fair deal?

In other news: Russian gas giant Gazprom has accused Ukraine of stealing gas meant for other European countries; Coral growth in the Great Barrier Reef is at its slowest rate ever due to the increased acidity of seawater; Jennifer Love Hewitt just became single; And to avoid getting the flu this year, I am going to eat.

Other People's Creativity

cheep cheep!

Eggnog ice cream and red wine? THUMBS UP.

Pumpkin ice cream and red wine? Not great at all. Really. But, not so horrible that I have stopped eating either one of them.

Cheers!

Staycation 2008

Times are tough, money is tight, and my family is HERE. So instead of escaping to someplace tropical to sip pina coladas on a beach, I remained in an urban environment, snug in the comforts of home, sipping hot tea in my pajamas. That's right. I have been on staycation.

I spent most of my time at home.
Playing with my dog,
Taking baths,
Drinking tea,
Wandering around childhood places,
Spending time with family,
Goofing around,
Eating sumptuous meals,
Playing in the snow,
Wearing funny hats,
Celebrating,
and sleeping in.

And of course, for those of you who do travel, don't forget to send me a postcard!

Flowering Tea and Needle Sculpture

To make sure this day didn't blend with all the others, I started my morning with a beautiful flowering green tea:


and then watched this incredible video:

I'm amazed by some of the things people do with their lives!

In other news: Australia's Navy has been given two months off for Christmas; homeschooling is great if you're Louisa May Alcott and get lessons from Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne; And movie buffs are agog over the new James Bond movie - here are some do's and don'ts on the James Bond lifestyle.

Booooo!!!!!

I think booing is crass. Many of John McCain's supporters booed during his concession speech last Tuesday. Even though they were booing his praise of Barack Obama, it couldn't have been comfortable for him to stand there as it happened. Why would people be so mean-spirited and rude? When did this become acceptable?

Booing has a long tradition in entertainment arena. A friend of mine who does poetry readings explained to me the system of hissing, booing, and snapping that the audience uses to let a reading-poet know how he has offended them. By as long ago as the 6th century B.C., this type of audience participation was commonplace at the annual Festival of Dionysia in Athens where playwrights would compete.

A system of booing was also used in ancient Rome during gladiator games and I have read that it even helped determine whether a competitor survived or not. How grim! How aggressive! Surely we don't want to behave the same way today!

It wasn't until the 19th century that the word, "booo," came into English use. And since, it has become quite common in sports to comment on an unfair call or unsportsmanlike behavior by the other team. It is true, booing is often over-used, especially by mean-spirited kids. And that is what I think of when I hear booing such as I heard on election night. Nobody was being unfair to John McCain up there. The timing was wrong. If a supporter wanted to boo, the time was when the election results were determined. Not when John McCain was giving a speech that must have been hard enough to deliver. There was no beer and hotdog devouring on bleachers, and the offenders were not teenagers - I just can't imagine what would bring that out in a person.

But now I have gotten carried away. What I really came online to share were a couple of pictures from the rally in Grant Park on Tuesday. Most of them didn't turn out. But, I was there and I have never seen Chicago in such a state. I hope the Olympic games stay away!



In other news: Ethiopian wolves are dying out fast - as few as 500 still survive today; President Bush and President-elect Obama have their first White House meeting today while both teams hastily try to make a war-time-economic-crisis transition go smoothly; Even Rachel Wood breaks up with Marilyn Manson; And octopuses are smarter than you may think!

Greenland

I’m baaaaaaack!!!

I have actually been back for weeks – forgive me.

I took a vacation. Some of you with more sorority-like hipness know it as a vacay.

Knowing my distaste for cold weather, with winter approaching, one might assume I went someplace to gather those last few rays of warmth – to bake my bones a bit in preparation for the dismal grey of Chicago’s winter season. HAH! Gotcha! Instead, I took a freezing military plane up to the northern part of Greenland (700 miles north of the Arctic Circle) where I got to experience my first snow of the season; wear a down coat, tights under my jeans and all the typical winter trimmings; and visit my husband who is stationed up there with the Air Force.


Monte and I climbed a bit of a mountain, which was a little scary not for the height, but for the loose rock that continually slipped from beneath us as we climbed.


Greenland has no squirrels. Nor any brown bunnies, centipedes or children. I did see huge arctic hares, ravens and arctic foxes. Pictured below is a brown fox. A day after I arrived it started snowing and the foxes started shedding their summer coat for a white one to keep them hidden in the snow.


The base is pretty utilitarian (ugly) with all the buildings looking like metal shacks and you would never know that building 105 is a cozy dorm and that building 2 something something (how quickly I get rid of useless information!) has a bar, the best karaoke I have ever been to, and a very nice restaurant inside. The one below might be the post office. Or maybe a dorm. Or the community center? I have no idea. Snow is not a good landmark.



When we weren’t out trying to make the most of my trip



we were indoors relaxing – reading, cooking, playing board games and rearranging furniture. For more on how interesting Greenland is, you can check out Monte’s blog. For more about Thule Air Station (where it is currently twelve degrees with a windchill of -4, and there remains only about four hours of sunlight), you can check out their official site here.



I’m back in Chicago and in the swing of things – I just turned on the heat in my apartment yesterday and can’t wait for Thanksgiving – scalloped pumpkin anyone?

Where Else Would I Be?

Confederates in the Attic

In an attempt to bond with my husband I read the book Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz. I just finished tonight and enjoyed it.

I found it to be an honest and curious look into how the Civil War has shaped the South - what real memories and consequences there were as well as what iconic ideas have been latched onto. Horwitz travels through fifteen pertinent southern states interviewing an interesting collection of people (each with their own vehement opinion) to report on relevant stories of prejudice and obsession and a certain way of life that continues to separate the North from the South to this day.

While the book made me really feel how close in history the Civil War actually occurred, it also shocked me when it led me to understand that this far-off, long-ago time of bloody heroism is still so present in so many different ways for so many people.

Next week I'm in Greenland, but for now it is all mango yogurt smoothies for me!

Enjoy the weekend! And if you'd rather not, go ahead and take the ABC News Match-O-Matic quiz to see which of the presidential nominees' politics you align with most. I came out split almost down the middle with only one more check in the Obama column.

Got a ticket for my destination

We can finally put that age-old (generation-old?) question to rest. In what part of the country do you use the term 'sneakers,' and in what part do you use the term 'tennis shoes' or 'gym shoes?'

Nah. I'm just kidding! Most of my readers are adults! We don't care about THAT! The real question is where do we use 'soda,' where do we use 'pop,' and where do we inexplicably use 'coke?'

Here is your answer:

And for those of you that are adult-enough to not be able to see this clearly, you'll be happy to know that the term 'martini' is (ab)used the same way in all parts of the country.

The Accidental Purple Dinner

Someone I don't know posted a blog a while back about a food/photography experiment of eating only one color food per day. I thought of this creative consumer tonight as I sat down to my mostly purple dinner.

Beets, blue mashed potatoes and wine. Not bad! Not a lot of protein, but at least it satisfied me!

In other news: It is hurricane season (no!); As it turns out, it is NOT more stressful to be rich than it is to be poor (see article); Wooden pencils are probably better for the environment than mechanical pencils; and Lindsay Lohan has thoughts on politics.

Dragons, Unicorns and Mermaids, Oh My!

Another vacation day in Chicago. I went to the Field Museum to see their exhibit on Mythic Creatures. This exhibit was SO COOL.

Covering the well-known creatures like dragons and unicorns to lesser known and cultural-specific creatures, the exhibit showed their origins, told their stories, and gave me a sense of where they belonged in history.

This is called a Bunyip. It is an Australian man-eating swamp monster that has since been softened into a well-known children's book creature.

Unicorns, for hundreds of years were thought to be actual animals and what I found fascinating was reading Marco Polo's description around 1300 of a unicorn he finally encountered. Having only heard descriptions, he was dismayed to find them to be stocky, lumbering, thick skinned and hairy and not at all the gentle animal that would lay its head in a maiden's lap! Natural historians believe he must have encountered a Sumatran Rhinoceros. The horns believed to belong to unicorns were often the tusks of male narwhals (Arctic whales).


Part of the exhibit was looking at fossils and seeing how easily one could imagine some of the more fantastic creatures when seeing some of the bones of less-fantastic (though just as hard to imagine) creatures laid out on display.



The picture of a Griffin, whose body frame corresponds quite nicely to fossil remains of the Protoceratops.

Below Left - the Rhinoceros skull thought by many years to have been the skull of the dragon that terrorized the town of Klagenfurt, Austria. A statue replica can still be seen in the town center.

Below Right - the skull of a dwarf elephant. The sinus cavity that leads to the trunk in the center of the skull was thought to have been where the Cyclops's eye was.

In addition to seeing many artistic depictions of mythical creatures, the exhibit had Greek coins depicting griffins from between 495 and 350 BC, Greek coins depicting a Pegasus from between 650 and 510 BC and Coins from all over Europe with pictures of dragons on them from between 600 and 1995 AD!

Seeing and reading about how all these creatures came to be believed in or used in story telling was fascinating. The only two things that disturbed me at all were the Giant Squids (there are Colossal Squids too!) and the Aepyornis, a half-ton bird that lived in Madagascar. One doesn't need to use any imagination to be enthralled by the pretty implausible constitutions of these monsters!

For a pretty complete tour of the exhibit, if you can't make it downtown before it leaves on Tuesday, click here.

A Day at the Park

Peanut Butter and Jelly, a Bag of Chips, and a Fruit Rollup

It is that time of year! The days are starting to get shorter, school supplies are one of the biggest commodities, and Labor Day is just around the corner! Like many of us, I am struggling to make the most of it - forcing myself to enjoy every last minute - anxious to make it last.

Calm is all nature as a resting wheel.....

Complacent fictions were they, yet the same.....

Days undefiled by luxury or sloth....

In other news: Birds in France, not having gotten the memo about climate change, aren't migrating quickly enough to satisfy their needs worry top French ornithologists; The most recent discovery of a bigfoot turned out to be another hoax - a rubber gorilla suit in ice; And a wild dolphin is apparently teaching other members of her group to walk on their tails, a behavior usually seen only after training in captivity.

Frank Lloyd Wright

"Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities." - Frank Lloyd Wright.

Other notable things he left us:





























A friend and I took a tour of his home and studio today. What an eccentric man! He built his house wired for electricity, though it didn't come to the area for another two years; he used optical illusions to make space look larger (a balcony had decorative bands placed closer and closer together so from the ground the space above looked larger); and he built his grand piano into a wall so as to maintain the feel and action of a grand, without taking up the space in the room.


As you can see, it was a beautiful day.

In other news: Teachers in one district of Texas will be allowed to carry concealed guns to school; Two US men say they have found the body of a Bigfoot; and Olympic viewers are clogging exercise equipment help lines by trying to get their machinery set to keep pace with Olympians while they watch them on TV.

A Day Off in Chicago

Despite the exorbitant entry fee for the Shedd Aquarium, I visited today, along with tons of loud-mouthed children and foreign tourists. It was really cool - and really gross - and quite creepy.......

A Dwarf Caiman. Falls under the category of "creepy."

A River Otter - my favorite. Definitely under the "cool" category.

Giant Japanese Spider Crabs. Spectacular. Then creepy when you think about them running around your kitchen at night.

I have no name for this turtle. He was just so funny looking!

Strawberry Anemones in the foreground, a California Moray in the background. Gross.

The tank in the middle of the Aquarium - you can see a shark, a sting ray and Waldo. Enjoy.

In other news: Tobacco may help treat cancer; the 37th Francophone Scrabble World Championships are taking place in Senegal this week; and completely unexpectedly, Lindsay Lohan wears see-through shirts.

Things to Celebrate