Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Bits and pieces I meant to write about days (or weeks) ago and kept forgetting ...

Internal Dialogue

Does this thing I composed fit on a fiddle playably? [picks up mandolin] Hmm. If I switch the octaves of the two lines from how I do it on guitar, it can be fingered ... [plays a bit] Okay, sounds different but still has some of the effect I wanted. [starts writing it down] Oh. Whoops. Double-stops on violin, unlike the mandolin, really only work if the two strings you're playing are next to each other, don't they? Playing the first and third strings together isn't going to cut it. [pause] I guess I should score it for two fiddles instead of one, and one will be a little bored. Or maybe I'll just label this a mandolin part instead.

Olfaction

A week and a half ago I was digging in the back of the freezer because (for various reasons) I'd kept putting off grocery shopping. A few nights I had spaghetti with frozen vegetables mixed in, and I usually just dumped a handful of veggies into the boiling water to thaw while the spaghetti cooked. One night I decided to warm the veggies in the microwave and add them after the pasta was drained, instead.

Oddly, the frozen broccoli smelled like death as it warmed up. Deadness, dead-thing-itude. It didn't smell like it was rotting, it just smelled dead. It didn't quite smell like garbage, and it didn't smell anything like the normal "glad it tastes better than it smells" scent of broccoli being cooked. It just smelled ... dead.

Dead-plant dead, like grass that got too long before it was mowed, and then got rained on, and hasn't started to rot/ferment yet but smells completely different from living or fresh-cut grass. It definitely pushed a button somewhere in the neighbourhood of my olfactory nerve that lit up a sign saying, "Dead/Death" in my brain.

(Fortunately that impression went away once tomato sauce was added. But it still wouldn't have passed for fresh broccoli, of course.)

I wonder how long that package had been in my freezer with a twistie holding it closed. That was the last of it though.

Back when I became a vegetarian, a few weeks in there was a stretch of time when meat, especially cooked meat, smelled like garbage. Rotting garbage. Yes, this made eating next to someone who was eating meat uncomfortable; no, I didn't make a fuss about it, because I figured it wasn't really their fault and I didn't want to impose. Eventually that went away (it comes back sometimes, but usually only for a few hours at a time, and not often), and meat went to simply smelling like not-food (with a few exceptions). This episode with the Dead Broccoli reminded me of that, though it was not as intense. I'm not sure whether this was a) something about that particular bag of frozen veggies, b) something I'm going to notice about frozen broccoli being warmed in a microwave in general, or c) just a bizarre and passing sensory quirk.

Photo Lab

The Sparcstation at the photo lab is up and running. I never did figure out what was wrong with both his CD-ROM drives, so I put my Sun CD-ROM there and took one of his home to tinker with. But then the Sun wouldn't come up at all, not even to display the ROM monitor. Well just before Thanksgiving I made it out there again -- the owner had gotten the screen to display the boot prompt but couldn't get it to load the OS -- and after a bunch of fussing with it, all of a sudden it started showing a GUI and a login screen. When I left, it was talking to the film scanners again. *whew*

Chemistry

Acetic acid turned out to be no substitute for the universal solvent after all. Acetone has been suggested. Or I guess I should ask Google what other people use for this task.