Ladies and gentlemen, if you look to your right you will see a sad, sad cat.

To no fanfare, Mike’s Weblog at Larkfarm turned two this week. His weblog continues to be the best one out there, and his entire collection of pages provides me with endless inspiration. Congratulations, Mike!

To help balance out the heavy writing earlier this week, I must point to the cutest kitten ever.

Here’s a bittersweet news item I found today while browsing the newspaper for the town where I went to college. A former student of mine, Alex Franklin, has become Socorro High School’s valedictorian. His grandmother was just given one week to live, so the school arranged a ceremony so his grandmother could witness. His grandmother is a wonderful woman, a survivor of the atomic blasts in Japan. Alex has grown into a fine upstanding young man, as well. As his interview states, in Junior High he was not exactly a model student. I taught him at a small private k-8 school, full of a diverse mix of hyper-intelligent professor’s kids and poor Navajo children. It was a catholic school, but the student body was not. Alex was a sixth grader when I taught him, just beginning the travel through adolescence. He had the same trouble focusing that I had at that age, and I took a kinship to him (With a class of eleven students, I actually took a kinship with them all.). His class was my favorite, as they had just emerged from elementary school wide-eyed and full of promise. I taught them math and social studies, and every day I could see their brains turn on to new ideas and ways of thinking. Every new concept in math was an adventure. We started the year reviewing multiplication, and by the end they had a taste of calculus(!). Alex didn’t have the self confidence that he does now, but he was eager to learn and excited to demonstrate the new things he mastered. When I’d see him at a restaurant, for example (it was a small town; this happened often), he’d come over and tell me of his newest conquests. This happened even several years after I taught him. I’m very happy (and proud) to see that he carried this into high school and rose to the top. I felt a special connection to his family. His mother was in charge of student accounts when I started college. I arrived without a penny in my pocket, naive as can be, expecting to apply my grants and scholarships toward my balance and pay off the rest through the year. The system doesn’t work that way, and I very nearly wasn’t allowed to take classes. She felt for me, far beyond what her position should have allowed her, and created loopholes for me. I worked my way through, holding down several odd jobs at a time while taking 18-24 hours a semester. At every turn, she was there for me, writing letters to the administration waiving certain fees, deferring due dates, finding emergency loan money when I couldn’t buy books. She was my lifeline, keeping me in school when the system wanted to throw me out. She retired my senior year (well, the second of three… I earned three degrees in five years, and due to the absurd number of hours I’d racked up, I was a senior my third year), but by that time I had become the chairman of the student body. I was a voting member of both the faculty council and the institute senate and was in a position to change the system to make things easier for those who followed me. I graduated and took the teaching position, and when I found out Mrs. Franklin’s son was in my class, I knew that I had to be the very best teacher he’d ever had, if nothing else to return the effect his mother had on me. I don’t know if my effort had any bearing on his becoming valedictorian, but I’d like to think so.

As our probes are sailing across (and out of) the solar system, they’re slowing down faster than they ought to. Perhaps we don’t know all there is to know about gravity.

The St. Louis Blues have made things hard on themselves by losing the first two games to the Colorado Avalanch. Now, they have to win four before the Avs win two. It could happen.

The celtic mummies found in western China have gotten a lot of attention over the last few years, including a feature spread in National Geographic. Canadian Magazine Saturday Night has a wonderful follow-up article, going into the behind-the-scenes action the other articles have missed.

I’d wanted to write this yesterday, but just got too busy. I am a bit of a reader. I’ve always been that way, going to when I first learned to read. I was taught by my mother, even more of a reader than I am, before I even began kindergarden. I couldn’t begin to guess how many books I’ve read, and they’ve been from all over the Dewey Decimal System. When asked which author, living or dead, has influenced me the most, the answer has always been (well, since high school) Douglas Adams. So, yesterday’s news was terrible for me. I began, of course, with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I read each of the volumes as it was written, devouring them all. Great classical literature, they’re not, but they don’t pretend to be. They’re full of loose ends and improbable plot twists. But they’re also my favorite. In these books, Adams showed me that humor can be found in the most mundane of things by turning them upside down, inside out. What’s the secret to flight? Throwing yourself at the ground and missing, of course! (The key is getting distracted by something right before you hit.) By the time I got to college, I knew that the series actually began as a BBC radio series and had watched the TV adaptation several times through. I’d wanted to do radio drama myself, and I discovered during orientation weekend that my new school had a free-form closed-circuit radio station that gave away DJ slots for the asking. One of my newly-met fellow freshmen (Shawn, whom I was to later marry to Gypsy) had the BBC scripts, so we got people together and did the show ourselves. I was in charge of the operation, mixed sound effects, and narrated ("… with Eric Wagoner as ‘The Book’…"). I still have the cassette tapes we made – they’re awful. But we had a great time, and people actually listened to us. From there we went on to do The Hobbit (I wrote the adaptation myself) and most of BBC’s version of The Lord of the Rings. Later, we did a few scripts from Firesign Theater and quite a few wonderful episodes of The Goon Show. Our senior year, we re-did Hitchhiker’s , and these were much, much better. A few weeks ago, I discovered that some of my friends who helped with that last go-around got a new bunch of folks together and did it again this Spring. Adams’ treatment of the Hitchhiker’s story taught me quite a few things. Unlike most stories that have been adapted for different media, Adams’ didn’t worry about canon. The four adaptations (there was a text-adventure computer game, as well) each began at the same point, but quickly diverged. Most of what happens in the radio series never appear in the books (and vice versa), and while the studios tried to keep the TV show true to the book, it too diverged. The game has its own storyline altogether. There’s a framework that kind of holds them altogether, but barely. His publishers were put off by this (“But the readers expect continuity!”), but Adams kept true to himself and we’re better for it. He wrote other books, of course. His two Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency book were a whole other sort of lunacy. I wished he-d written more in the series. Last Chance to See should be required reading for everyone – the scene where he recounts being served a pregnant river dolphin at a banquet made me cry and stands out as one of the most memorable passages I’ve ever read. He recently collaborated with Terry Jones (of Monty Python) on the fantastic multimedia (book, computer game, and website) Starship Titantic. He also wrote several episodes of Tom Baker-era Doctor Who. His humor style has greatly influenced mine. His unique way at looking at the world has influenced my vision. His refusal to get locked into a style, defined by publishers or our expectations, has helped me keep my options open. He will be missed.

Oh, it’s a sad, sad day. One of the greatest things about reading someone’s journal is you get to, for a little while, be that person. Or imagine it, anyway. It’s also one of the worst things. I’ve been reading Kaycee Nicole’s journal living colours (a diary of survival) since she began. Fresh out of high school, she had a terrible cancer. She documented the ups and downs and shared with us her incredible spirit. Just a few weeks ago, riding high from a successful bone marrow transplant, she looked like she’d won. Then she shared with us the news that while the cancer may have been beaten, the toll it took on her body was too much. The last couple weeks have been nearly too painful to read as she set about finishing life on her terms. Painful or not, I won’t be reading her story any longer. Yesterday, after writing an especially poignant entry, Kaycee passed away. I’m going home. As Marjorie said yesterday, I hate crying at work.

While I was away over the weekend, the garden decided it was time to harvest. Everything waited for me to get back, though the broccoli did open a bit. Last night I blanched and froze three quarts of snow peas and eight quarts of broccoli. The rutabegas are beggin’ to be pulled, too. It may have warmed up too much for the cauliflower, as they’re not forming heads yet. It’s been really hot, nearly ninety, and extremely dry this month. The summer seeds are sprouting much more slowly than they ought to.