Adventures in the Pointless Forest

No, what you you REALLY want.

Dear Redfox,

What are you, some kind of cultural imperialist? France is the old regime. Also, pictures of yourself are exceptionally dull. Next you will be telling us about what you ate for lunch and whether or not it gave you indigestion. BORING. We demand new looks for a new era!

 

Dear Internet,

Very well.

What you really want.

Dear Redfox,

You grow tedious. Please send une moustache and otherwise stuff a sock in it.

xoxox,
The Internet

Dear Internet,

Love,
Redfox

Time capsule: MEAT!

These days, I hear, every twenty-something in Brooklyn runs his own abattoir. Everyone knows his primal cuts. One out of every six has learned at the knee of a master butcher how to "fabricate" a rib roast and disjoint a rabbit. One in ten has written a terrible memoir on the subject. But once upon a time, these were all dark mysteries.

Many years ago, in that less enlightened era, I worked as a sub-sub-contractor on a series of interactive educational CD-ROMs that ConAgra, the vast multinational food conglomerate, put out for their meat distributor clients. It was an intriguing glimpse into the middle stages of the industrial process. The primary audience for these CDs consisted of:

- the people who sell the meat to the people

- who only later cut it up into the pieces of the size that people like you actually

- take home and eat.

...all from a thoroughly agribusiness point of view, and with no expectation that the viewer would need to learn how to do anything with the meat him- or herself. He or she just had to know all about what other people had done or could do with it.

I've found a reference to the series on the website of one of the contractors much higher up the stream than I was:

D-Cypher Productions played an instrumental role in the development and success of ConAgra Beef Company's revolutionary "Beef 101" interactive CD-ROM program. Doug's video capture, editing and creative talent provided the base for the CD series, and considerably enhanced the creative concept and design of the programs. Over 20,000 copies of the 4-disc set are in circulation, and have received industry-wide acclaim.

The CDs were actually very well designed and impressive, for what they were: interactive collections of far more information than I ever imagined wanting to know about different cuts of meat, meat storage safety, serving suggestions ("This cut is suitable for roasting, grilling, and institutional use," the very deadpan and professional voiceover advised), pricing schemes, and "fabrication," which as you are no doubt aware but was, I think, less common knowledge then, is the industry term for just how a given cut of meat is removed from the dead animal as a whole.

Moo.

There were many Quicktime videos of white-coated men carving up large pieces of meat. One of my tasks on the project was QA, which involved watching each video many times. It was a strange job for a vegetarian, and I wished many times that I was a video artist, that I might steal the material and do something fascinating with it.

Little did I know that ten years later I'd think it would have been sufficiently fascinating just to "post" it on "youtube". What a missed opportunity. I apologize. Still, if you want a further window onto this particular past, you can see some pretty fantastic highlights in the screenshots here.

Pretty things.

A. brought these presents with her from California. They feel good in the hand, as well as being charming to look at. Note the well considered dent under the handle on the mug.

Anteater and wombat.

Pink insides for the wombat, fleeing ant on the outside for the aardvark.

Wombats have thick, leathery rumps. "I live in Australia."

I feel rather bilious today. Maybe it is time to break in the new china with some mild-mannered tea and treats. Steve just put a very sizable hank of crispy seaweed in his mouth at once. This is about three levels too challenging a snack for me right now, but I admit that the effect was impressive.

Bedknobs and what?sticks

Thursday night the following arrived at our house in quick succession:

1. A gloriously not-bent bed part. The correct one, even.

2. Weekend house guest, in town for a small and lovely Celebratory Pre-Birth Event held in my honor yesterday.

3. Saintly friend, inexplicably full of vim, vigor, and willingness to help Steve turn a very heavy assortment of bed parts downstairs into a solid, compete actual bed upstairs.

Saintly friend took off his shoes and rolled up his trousers in a dashing piratical style, then he and Steve set to work. I followed the traditional gendered division of labor, filling the time by staying well clear of all heavy lifting, feeding everyone, plying them with liquor, and advising house guest on her quilting project.

And now we have a BED, a real true bed, and though I am still not clear on what exactly makes it a better container for our mattress than the floor (beyond being pretty, which it is), I am pleased to report that whatever it is most assuredly DOES make it better. It is sunshine and lollipops and a happy lower back. Bed! Bed. Dear, wonderful bed.

+

My fecundity and I have been fêted. F, who was hosting, entertained us with a remarkable booklet from 1946. This document came along with your set of silver, to teach you how to entertain in a suitably elegant fashion, although the silver company's idea of what constitutes suitable elegance was perhaps not the same as yours or mine.

A highlight was what we swiftly renamed "The Racist Pie Game." The idea is that they present you with a list of people and it is your job to determine what kind of pie each person or group of people should be expected to like. You are aiming to dredge up the "correct" answers, as provided by the wise authors of the game. So, for instance, Eve of Eden fame likes apple pie, Mark Twain likes huckleberry pie, and the undertaker likes berry (bury) pie. And then...

Q. "The Yellow Race"

and

Q. "A mulatto"

WELL GOSH! That certainly is a lovely complement to your fine sterling, Mrs. Higgenbottom.

The answers, incidentally, are that the Orientals like lemon pie, and biracial people like chocolate. Yellow pie for yellow folks, chocolate pie for brown folks. Obviously.

If that game doesn't do it for you, you could always try this one, also well suited to elegant gatherings of well heeled adults: Everyone takes a sheet of paper and writes a list of attributes down the side, beginning with "Eyes, Nose, Hair" and continuing on through "Hat" and "Sex Appeal" with any number of other things I no longer remember along the way.

Then you rate each person on each quality on a scale of one to ten, including yourself, gather up the papers, and read the ratings aloud, making the group guess which person each set of ratings is meant to describe.

Everyone will have a merry time. "No offense can be taken at low ratings, as all is in the service of good fun."

Indeed. How could it possibly go wrong? At least, I suppose, you could steal the teaspoons as restitution. And your hat got a ten, anyway.

Box springs eternal.

We haven't had an actual bed since the Ikea one we bought back in 2000 or so responded to being rogered upon, not even with unusual vigor, by collapsing promptly and decisively into a pile of wood bits. Since then it has been just a mattress and shitty box spring, for nine-plus years.

Box springs are strange. They cost real money and act as if they are marvels of springy engineering, but actually as far as I can tell they're made entirely of cardboard, junkyard debris, and fusible interfacing. They do hold together better than the Ikea Slat Heap but it's all an illusion. In the end what you have is a roughly box-shaped thing holding its innards, but to no supportive purpose, rather like the frog in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek after the giant water bug has injected it with liquifying toxins but before it's been sucked dry.

Anyway, all this time we've been talking about getting a bed, eventually, some kind of platform bed, we thought, so that we could do without the box spring/frog corpse. It could look chic and support our weary backs and even provide some sort of headboard against which we might prop ourselves while reading in bed, as one likes to do. But we're picky and beds are expensive, so instead we've generally contented ourselves with looking at beds for sale, mulling over the question at length, and ultimately rejecting them, a soothing routine that has sustained us for many turns of the calendar.

But then! At last! We decided to commit! We picked out a sleek modern thing with a simple headboard and a sturdy base made of cunningly designed springy steel mesh set into a wooden frame, plunked down the credit card, and waited for delivery.

Isn't that nice? (If you hate it, I don't really want to know. Also, rest assured that our bedding will never look half as minimal and severe as this; imagine big disheveled heaps of pillows and sheets and blankets instead.)

Because solid wood and steel are rather heavy and I am rather pregnant and it is rather snowy and our bedroom is rather on the second floor, we paid the extra fee for premium indoor delivery service.

+

At the beginning of the week, the nice people call and let us know that it will arrive on Friday. Friday morning, therefore, we leap into action, dismantling the box spring and its frame and turning the mattress on its side against the wall all ready to be flopped onto our new assemblage of modernist slabs. We both set about working at home.

Doorbell rings; cat loses mind. Steve shuts cat in bathroom; cat flings itself against the door and howls. I go sit in the bathroom with the cat. I am helpful! It's soothing, sitting in a warm small room with a reassured small animal. It sits on the book I am trying to read.

Noises float up from below. They are not the sounds of well equipped movers smoothly bringing new furniture into the house and bundling packing materials away. They are the sounds of Steve doing something effortful. 

I emerge to learn that the shipping company has sent only one person, a driver rather than a mover, and that she and Steve have been dragging enormous, heavy boxes of bed parts though the snow. Both look exhausted.

"This box was damaged when they got it. Do you want to take a look?"

Inside are some very sturdy looking steel pipes wrapped in packing paper. Nothing looks scratched. We agree it looks okay but write "box damaged" on the manifest before signing it. Steve looks at the other, very large, box, which contains the main vast slab of wood and steel. "Do you think you might help me push this up the stairs?" he says to the driver. Her face is filled with despair.

"Oh, god, let the poor woman go," I say. "This may be what we thought we were paying for, but it's obviously not what they paid her to do."

She flees.

"We may as well put the parts together down here, where there's more space. Then maybe we can entice someone to help us move it upstairs afterwards." We clear all the furniture out of the way--gosh, beds are big!--and begin unpacking.

There are no instructions. After a phone call to the manufacturer, we obtain some online. That is when we realize that something has gone even more wrong than we knew.

These pieces are supposed to be identical. The discerning eye will perceive that they are not quite.

The shop that sold us the bed was very, very apologetic. They have refunded our shipping fees and tell us they are having the replacement piece sent as quickly as possible. In the meantime, our ground floor is rather dominated by bed parts and we are sleeping on a mattress on the floor. It's all sort of larky, though, so that's all right. We pretend it's the Kon Tiki, only with better blankets and a raftboard cat.

However, I really stand in awe of the machine responsible for munging that box. What do you suppose it was? It must have exerted considerable force, but it's done it so very neatly. There isn't a crimp or scratch in the metal, which is why nothing seemed particularly out of place when we just looked at the pieces out of context.

Gundam?

A stampeding elephant? Bender?

?

(God that was long. Sorry.)

Just mice.

Thank you for the many fine suggestions in response to the last post. I am also gratified to learn that many of you agree that Facility has a real ring to it. Just now I realized that a fine French alternative would be Utile. Non? Ah, Marie-Utile, you are looking especially lovely today! Oh, Utile-Françoise, you flatterer.

I am currently stuck in my office, having promised someone who is both a late riser and on West Coast time that I would be available to receive a phone call. This was an error, but it is difficult to choose a better course of action when the other person's work day apparently begins right when one's own usually ends. Yes, we live in a glorious post-office world (not to be confused with a Post Office world) in which I can talk on the phone anywhere I like, ATT's dire coverage permitting, but in this case I would like to be able to take and refer to notes, sit in privacy and comfort, and so on, which selects strongly in favor of my dear old friend the office, with its desk and paper and pens and central heat and reliable reception. So here I am. Hélas.

Speaking of my office, a mouse found its way in over the holidays. It gnawed at the baseboards, chewed through the Ethernet cable, and then quietly died. Poor thing. It did perish in the most considerate possible way, from my point of view. First it made its way through to the other side of the wall so that the person in the next office over could be the one to find it, instead of me. Then it thoughtfully met its demise early enough in the winter break that the odiferous corpse period passed entirely unwitnessed by human nose. Thank you, little mouse.

My mother likes to tell a story about when I was a little girl that goes about like this: we were on a walk, and I wanted to pick some crummy little flower or other growing on the side of the road.

"Don't pick them, darling. They'll just die," she said. But I was determined, and they didn't belong to anyone, and parenthood, I've heard, involves choosing one's battles, so soon I had a few clutched in my little paw, and soon after that, of course, they were wilted and dead.

"Oh no!" I said.

"Well, I did warn you they were going to die."

Then -- or so she says, and it makes a good story -- I looked at her, stricken. "Just flowers, right? Not people?"

So: just mice, right, not people?

Sadly, no. People go around dying all the time, sometimes even before the new year has gotten started properly, and I don't like it. (I'm fine. But death is shitty and I don't approve. Happy new year!)

Gasket.

Today I learned that you can search the 1911 census of England and Wales online. I am finding it fascinating. First I looked up my old relatives, then I found Virginia Woolf (which is to say Adeline Virginia Stephen), then I got into looking for misspelled names. Fans of Terry Pratchett will be happy to learn that there are eight Magrats listed, though no Note Spellings.

This comes up because we are currently stuck for a middle name. On the one hand we have an assortment of serious options, all about equally as appealing as the next, all carrying a distinct risk of being all too trendy, blah blah et cetera. On the other hand we have

Zucchini

"It's popular in Japan!"

Vlurma

Fresh from the biography of America's oldest senator, Robert Byrd.

Facility

"It's a virtue name!"

Any other bright ideas?