My husband just came home and said, “I brought you mice.”

Yes, I did a double take as well. He handed me a package of, yes, white mice. Little ones, about the size of a peanut. They’re candy.

“I got them free with my Sloche today,” he said. “And I know you love trying to figure out the Sloche ads, so here.”

‘Dead in your hand, Alive in your mouth’ the slogan proclaims on the back. I opened the package; we tried them. They’re raspberry-flavoured gummy mice. I love them. He hates them.

Woo-hoo! More mice for me!

Heavy cream is lighter than light cream because it contains more butter fat, which weighs less than water.

Hunh?

Science. It gets me every time. It explains the unexplainable. And proves, of course, exactly how much we don’t get it; how much we just don’t understand the world around us. Even when we think we do.

Take, for example, the popular expression “it’s so hot you could fry an egg on the sidewalk!” Sure; it’s a figure of speech. But Robert Wolke, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, actually tested it out for his book What Einstein Told His Cook. Others have done this (even at least one person of my own acquaintance). Wolke, however, went a step further. Actually, he took a whole hike further:

To investigate the egg assertion, he actually went out and measured the pavement temperature in Austin, Tex., during a heatwave. He found that the hottest it got, even on blacktop, was 145 degrees F — well below the 158 degree minimum needed for an egg to start coagulating. Not satisfied with pure theory, he cracked an egg on the pavement and waited. Nothing happened.

Helpfully, Wolke then went around measuring the temperature of other surfaces, and reports that a dark blue Ford Taurus reached 178 degrees F, making it a better frying pan than sidewalks or roadways.”The wonderful thing about science is that it can even explain things nobody needs to know,” Wolke concludes.

Heck, yes.

Makes you want to go out and experiment. Our dark blue station wagon won’t work; it’s a Saturn and made of resin. Hmm; I know someone with a dark blue Ford. I wonder if she’d be willing to experiment – all in the name of science, of course.

(Check out BusinessWeek Online’s article called Plenty of Food for Thought, their review of Wolke’s latest venture into science.)

Over at The Times Online, author Jeanette Winterson has written a rather straightforward look at art in our time, what it means to create it, and what it means to appreciate it.

Of course much of what passes for art today is merely hype, or fashion, or showmanship, but this has always been the case. Art makers and art fakers live side by side in any century. Time sieves them out. What matters is not to be endlessly labelling and judging, but to be open to our own culture � to assume we have something to say. The past was not better or richer, but it was slower. Art needs time. Our impatience with art might be just that � we�re in a hurry, and art needs time.

Hmm. Wasn’t I arguing this a month or two ago? Something about our contemporary culture being rush-rush and beset by microwaves and lightning-fast internet connections, and losing our ability to appreciate culture?

Winterson says something similar:

The released energies of art, in whatever medium, are a kind of radar trying to steer us back to sanity. We are not sane. We live in a 24-hour emergency zone called real life, where money is the core value, and where our inner life is denied.

Hmm. So, art validitates inner worth? Art constitutes a sort of moral compass?

When you sit down to read a book or to listen to a piece of music or walk round an exhibition, without interruption, the first thing you are doing is turning your gaze inwards. The demands and distractions of the world have to wait.

This, I think, is the problem. People can’t stop to listen to what art evokes from within them, because they’re afraid. Why else do we stop up our metaphorical and literal ears with noise and busyness? We’re losing our ability to listen; yes. What should we do about it? Telling people to go walk through an art gallery is fine, but will it actually succeed? I doubt it. The people who are going to go to an art gallery are those who are already predisposed to do so. Those people who are filling their lives with white noise are precisely the ones who have no idea that silencing the tumult around them might be beneficial.

As appreciative as I am of the article, and as much as I agree with it on the surface, I sense an imbalance. I know it’s supposed to focus on art as opposed to the rest of life, but it seems to infer that anything not art (nice, quiet, slow, coaxing out our valuable inner lives) is detrimental. The article is, of course, arguing for a balance, a contrast, a healing change of pace now and again, but she’s preaching to the converted, I think.

Magneto: He’s a supervillain AND an allegory!

The Brunching Shuttlecocks review Marvel Supervillains. And this is only part one.

Okay, last post for a while, I promise. I’m moving to the laptop where I will write.

For a while now I have been sneaking tastes of Going Bridal, a truly well-written blog that details a bride-to-be’s insanity of planning her wedding. Having gone through this personal hell not once but twice, I enjoy her site immensely. (Just to be clear, I only actually got married once.) Anyone who has been through Wedding Hell should check it out.

I don’t know if I could have been that erudite whilst in Wedding Hell. I recently found a whole file of e-mails to people during the six months, however, and I appear to have had some sort of sense of humour. (Except when it came to the co-ordinator at the McMichael Gallery, where we had our reception, who tracked me down at 8:30 am the day of my wedding at the hairdresser’s to tell me that everything was under control and not to panic. Not to panic? Well, thanks; now you’ve got me worried, passing your worry-germs on to nice, calm me, who was actually having fun with my maid of honour and the hair stylist until you called.)

Example: On September 10, 1999 (that’s fifteen days before the wedding) I found this in an e-mail I had written to our musician, a lovely flautist:

“Well, the wedding hell that everyone warned me about with such glee is beginning. The odd thing is, it seems to be everyone else who’s obsessing about it, not Ron and I, nor our parents!”

And warn us with glee they did. We planned everything down to the last minute and the co-ordinator at the McMichael still managed to mess things up, forgetting we had asked for a full bar service (fixed seven days before the wedding, thank goodness), forgetting we had asked that the gallery be open to our guests (fixed two days before the day), and conveniently forgetting our entire schedule so that the reception room wasn’t ready for the guests when they arrived. (With grim and great joy my husband sent Taras and MLG after her. Muah-hah-hah-hah-hah.)

Also found this gem from the same day:

“Ah, yes, that game called “Real Life” where if you miss your perception check you either end up owing a lot of money or with a healthy chunk of foot in your mouth. In the words of the Immortal ROb, “Real Life? I hate that game”.

Rain “rescue me from wedding hell” Murphy”

That “guy who said he had until Aug 25 to tell us if he was coming or not” was in fact the best man. He eventually sent us his reply card so he could actually be counted among the final number in order to be fed.

A day later, September 11, 1999, the subsequent message sent out to the same people:

“Apology graciously accepted. Things aren’t funny these days, just very irritating. If one more person asks if I’m nervous I’ll eat their liver. No, I’m not nervous; it’s everyone else’s stupid questions I have to put up with. And that includes the wedding co-ordinator at the McMichael and the attitude-problem minister in charge of the Doctor’s House. I’m fine; Ron’s fine; the parents are fine (even though Ron’s great-aunt is positive his mother collapsed of stressing out over the wedding (ha!)). We’re not stressing out over details like people seem to keep gleefully hoping. We’re stressing out because we’re trying to keep up with normal lives while making final lists for travel, outfits, scheduling, putting up with stupidity and people not thinking things through on their own. […] You know how much I hate organizing things and making sure everyone is set. Well, some people are conveniently forgetting that. All this to say that tempers are short and please be careful.

“Gods this was depressing. My deepest apologies back at both of you. I – we – are going to need a lot of support and understanding in the next thirteen days. Yes, thirteen days. And I *still* have to buy stockings. Sigh.”

I think I ended up buying stockings less than a week before the day. Yes, I bought two pairs – just in case. One is still in the package. The other pair which I wore doesn’t even have a run.

That’s as bad as I got, though. Didn’t lose my temper with my husband-to-be, or with any parental unit. I remember being surprised that we were as relaxed as we were. (I sincerely hope we disappointed the McMichael co-ordinator, and all of the elderly relatives who were being doomsayers.)

No, I certainly don’t miss organising a wedding. But I am enjoying being a voyeur over at Sara’s Going Bridal. Especially since she’s making a corset to wear under her dress. Ooooh. Maybe instead of a nice blue patterned satin I’ll do one in sage green.

So I took the plunge and before I went to Pennsylvania to meet a bunch of people I’d never seen in person before, I made up business cards. You know, so I wouldn’t have to find a pen and scribble my e-mail address on a scrap of paper that people would lose the first time they sent their jeans through the wash.

I say “plunge” because on a business card one usually puts one’s career path or job description somewhere. No longer being in sales or management, I got to choose how to describe myself.

I chose the word “writer”.

I mention this because I just came across the first one I did, put aside for sentimental reasons. I quite like it. It’s stuck on my monitor now, so I can remind myself frequently.

AAAAUGH! Organ music on CBC Radio Two! Quick – to the Moulin Rouge CDs!

I think my hair is definitely nearing Pre-Raphaelite-ness. (Pre-Raphael-ity?)

Three cheers for me.