Subliminal messages?

A neighborhood coffee shop changed owners and the new owner, Cafe del Sol, had an open house last weekend. They had free coffee, and they gave Judy a cup to bring home to me. Nice folks!
But the lid on the to-go cup struck me as ambivalent. One first view, it's a smiley face (how very 80s!) But if you look closely, there seem to be hands on either side of the face; is it Edvard Muench's "Scream"? Or the "Home Alone" movie? Or do I just have an over-active imagination?

Heee's Baaaccccckkkkkk!!!

It wasn't enough to give the Presidency to the President Dick Cheney in 2000; now Ralph Nader apparently hasn't felt that he got enough attention lately, so he's tossed his hat (his head?) in the ring again. OK, I'm anything but unbiased on this; look at James Fallows in the Atlantic Monthly.

So will Nader make any difference? I've been avoiding listening to any punditry on TV today (not easy...) but my thoughts are:
1. If Obama is nominated, Nader will make no difference at all. Obama is pushing forward; Nader is always fighting the last issues.
2. If Clinton is nominated, Nader won't make a difference. The people who will vote for Nader have so much ABC feeling (anyone but Clinton) and they won't vote for Clinton anyway.
My conclusion is that Nader is irrelevant, insignificant, and yesterday. Goodbye, Ralph...

Libraries

Remember Marian, the librarian? Her central role in The Music Man (set in Iowa, remember) isn't all that far from the important role that libraries play in public services in Iowa City and Coralville. Coralville has just opened a major expansion of the Coralville public library (photo) and Iowa City did the same a couple of years ago. It's great that residents of either city can get cards for both libraries.

One of the things that we really like about the Coralville library is their used book sales. They always have a table of books for sale (50 cents for paperbacks, one dollar for hardbacks) and they have an annual book sale; last week we picked up a dozen books there (enough for the next two or three trips). We love the libraries and are very, very happy to live where libraries are valued.

Words

I admit it -- I'm a word geek, and I'm not alone. Both my sons are fascinated by words, and since long before there was an "us", Judy and I have shared the joy of finding great words and funny word uses. Sometimes it's the word itself, and sometimes it's a peculiar way that words are used together. For an example of the former, a colleague once challenged me to spell "eleemosynary" and define it. I think he intended to challenge me, kind of like throwing the fastest pitch he could and seeing if I could catch it (for the record, I did). For the latter, I recently overheard the owner of a restaurant in Iowa City tell a customer "We're still organic, but we have a computer." The juxtaposition of organic food and using a computer struck me as funny, since the owner seemed to feel like he needed to justify having a machine.

If you're interested in words, you might want to look at Free Rice, Rinkworks, or the Merriam-Webster word-of-the-day sites to expand and perhaps challenge your vocabulary. Have fun, but beware -- it's catching!

Fresh snow

We had another snowfall yesterday and got perhaps 6" of fresh snow. This brings the snowfall total so far this winter to over four and a half feet. That may not sound like a lot if you live in Rochester (Hi, Nan and Walt) but it's a lot for Iowa; this is perhaps the fifth largest amount of snow on record here. And there's a lot of winter left...


Some freezing rain preceded the snow, and some very strong winds followed it, so travel was discouraged all day and almost all public activities were canceled. The picture shows the snow falling in the front yard, where it turned our deer screen into a big piece of lace, and in the back yard, where it made the woods quite magical. We were snug as a bug here and had a fire in the fireplace all day. We're again reminded of how very fortunate we are.

Birds

This weekend is the Great Backyard Bird Count, and I've been keeping track of the birds at my feeders in my yard. Many birds winter in Iowa, and I've seen several of them at my feeder: cardinals and blue jays; downy, hairy, and yellow-bellied woodpeckers; slate-sided juncos, tree sparrows, and house sparrows; goldfinches and house finches; chickadees and titmice; nuthatches; doves and starlings. Many of these were around over the last day or two.

There are other birds that don't come to the feeders but we see with greater or less frequency. There are lots of Canada Geese who don't have sense enough to fly south, there are wild turkeys who keep mostly to the deeper woods, and there was a pileated woodpecker who came by one day a couple of months ago. For years I'd been trying to see one, and it just flies to a tree in my yard that has some damage up high and digs for bugs for a half hour. Go figure.


And there are eagles, great wonderful bald eagles, who come to the few spots on the Iowa River that are ice-free all winter. These beautiful birds are commonplace to those who grew up near rivers in the upper midwest, but not to me. I always get a rush seeing one flying over our house or along a river. The photo shows a group of eagles along a winter river; it's an NPR shot, not mine, though we sometimes do see groups like this on the Iowa River. The best viewing in Coralville is probably from the Iowa River Power Co. restaurant. Although I can see eagles from the road or from a viewing point, it's nice to be warm, indoors, and having a good lunch while I'm enjoying seeing them.

Tracks

We had a fresh snowfall a couple of days ago, and so far the neighborhood kids haven't been out sliding down the hill in our back yard (which they're always welcome to do; what use is a hill in snow unless somebody is sliding down it?) So we've been able to see what the local wildlife is doing when we're not watching. We have both large animal tracks (several deer trails and a set of person tracks):


and small animal tracks (birds and bunnies):


Snow is great for showing you how many other creatures we share our space with!

Plzen

The WSCG conference I referred to a couple of posts ago was held in Plzen, a lovely town in Western Bohemia, at the University of Western Bohemia. Plzen has a really nice open square in the center of the oldest part of the city, and the photo above is the facade of one of the buildings along the square. There are a number of these sgraffito buildings with wonderful decorations around the square and in town.

One of the most touching things I saw in the city is the monument thanking America for the US Army liberation of the city in 1945. Perhaps the US will once again find the kind of respect in the world that will inspire others to thank us. Perhaps this could even happen in the mideast. But I'm afraid it will take a great deal more than a new administration to earn this; I strongly doubt that it will happen in my lifetime. But we have marvelous young people in the family, and I truly hope they can see it.

Eating out in Prague

We enjoy travel; we must, because we do so much of it. One of the things we enjoy is finding good meals, preferably with some significant local flavor. Sometimes guidebooks or local advertisements help us do that; sometimes serendipity takes over. Two examples from last weekend in Prague...

Serendipity led us to the restaurant "U Vltavy" ("At the Vltav"; the Vltav is the river in Prague that may be better known as the Moldau). It's on the corner of Brehova and 17. listopadu, not far from the Rudolfinum and just off the Parizska street. (There are accents that I'm not including here because I just don't know how to get them or how they'd work on this site.) GREAT Czech food -- I had a wonderful half roast duck with dumplings and red and white cabbage, and Judy had a venison stew in a really cool bread bowl. But the restaurant isn't listed in any of the guides we saw. (It also has a Greek menu, but we'll stick with Czech food in Prague, thank you.)

The guidebooks, on the other hand, all include the "Hostinec U Kalicha" on Na Bojisti near the Pavlova metro stop. The main claim to fame there seems to be its link to "The Good Soldier Schweik" described in the pages linked above, and the restaurant walls are covered with drawings that were (I believe) done by the artist who illustrated the book. Look for the navigable images on the Web pages! More on the book and on Schweik later, but the bar at the restaurant is supposed to be the place where Schweik planned to meet a friend "at 6 o'clock after the war." We had roast piglet there, and again we found this Czech specialty to be really wonderful.

So -- the next time you're in Prague, these are two personal recommedations. I hope you'll enjoy them as much as we did!

Back home

We're back home from the Czech Republic after attending the WSCG 08 conference in Plzen (I was programe co-chair, though Vaclav Skala really developed the programme) and having a couple of lovely days in Prague. I'll have more to say on the trip and the travel in the next couple of days, but right now we're getting settled back home.

Winter travel can be challenging, but it was a surprise to be called at 4:30 in the morning we were leaving to be told that our flight out of Cedar Rapids had been canceled and we couldn't get out of that airport in time to make our connections to Europe. Fortunately we were able to be switched to a flight out of Moline, but that meant that we had to drive 60 miles in the snow. It worked and the rest of the trip went well. Returning things went well as far as Chicago, but another snowstorm gave us a delay getting back to Iowa and made us dig out the car at the Moline airport. Still, we're home and our bag is with us.

We did miss a lovely snowstorm while we were gone, apparently. Our back yard has at least a foot of great snow that made it fun to go out and fill the bird feeders this morning. But the streets are quite passable and we're warm, even if it's cold outside, so we're again reminded of just how lucky we are.

Music we remember

On a long flight recently I heard some music that took me back to my younger days. We all have those pieces or songs, of course, and they differ by generation and by kinds of music we prefer. Mine were on the classical music channel on the plane, of course, though the channel was a "pops" channel (*sigh*)

Three of the pieces brought back memories for me. One was a movement of the Schubert 5th Symphony, one of only two classical 78s that my parents had. I cut my musical teeth on that one, I suppose. One was from a radio/TV show I recall; it's the Dona Deana Overture by Resnicek that I first knew as the theme music from Seargent Preston of the Yukon. And the third was the Warsaw Concerto from one of the 1940s "Disturbed Composer writes his Concerto" movies. I don't know what this collection says about me, but I leave you to draw your own conclusions!