way to break typecasting

Overheard in the puppet castle:

PRINCE (played by a large hen): Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!

RAPUNZEL (played by Piglet): Okay!

RAPUNZEL lowers herself ears-first out the window to the waiting Prince. Prince latches on to an ear with his beak, and RAPUNZEL pulls him up into the castle.


Also observed: a toddler force-feeding a tarantula to a pterydactyl. Yum!

encounters with Jesus

I met Jesus today. He's about 3 feet tall, and I caught him climbing on the dragon in my library. To be fair, the dragon looks like a fancy playground piece, even though he was designed to hold and display books. Later his mom called him back from lapping the children's area, then from splashing out a complicated Morse code message using the drinking fountain. He just left, run/walking at a good clip down the aisle, elbows pumping energetically.

Yes, Jesus is an Hispanic three-year-old.

But how different was the real three-year-old Jesus? Traditionally he's painted as a serene, wise-beyond-his-years child, but that's later in childhood. I don't assume to know how God Made Man behaved through his Terrible Twos and Threes, but I'd like to think that he had some of the energy and high spirits of today's little Our Savior of the Dragon's Back.

And with millenia of Christianity all over the Western world, why is it that only Spanish-speaking countries name their children Jesus with any regularity? I'm sure it says something deep about cultural differences, but I can't devote the brain power to it tonight.

Random Public Library Moment

I've been on a little self-inflicted computer break this month, and rather than catch you up, gentle reader, with photos and tales from my lovely backpacking trip along the North Shore, I will go the lazy route: Cheap Laughs!

When learning a language, cognates are a beautiful thing. Even if I didn't study for that junior high German quiz, I could guess what an Autobus was and what Hans was supposed to do with it. Beware, however, of the false cognate. A classic example is the Spanish word embarazadas, which sure sounds a lot like "embarrassed," but actually means "pregnant."

False cognates can also mislead you if you're browsing through the Russian children's DVDs at the library. If you for some reason read the back of this box first, you would know that it's the story of a good Communist boy's magical adventures on a flying carpet, circa 1956. Read the title first, and you might have different expectations. I know did, although I must say my first reading of the title didn't quite jive with the prominence of the leering, bearded genie.

well, I tried.

Some things are better than you remembered them as a child, like mustard. Or beer, not that I had extensive experience.

Some things are worse, like Nancy Drew books. Seriously, have you gone back and read any childhood favorites lately? It's a risky business. But that's another topic.

And some things are about the same. My biggest food hatred as a child was beets. I would sit at the table for hours, all alone in front of a fast-cooling plate of beets, rather than eat those accursed things. Hating beets is actually one of my earliest memories; I remember sitting at the table of a house we left when I was three, trying to work up the mental and gastronomic strength to take a few beet bites. Now I'm an adult, and I sometimes choose to eat various things I used to avoid: broccoli, for example. So when my CSA farm sent some beets this week, after the initial shudder I thought, sure, why not? I've hated and avoided beets for so long, maybe something has changed in the last 28 years or so. So on my sister's advice, I sauteed them in olive oil, salt and pepper along with some other fresh CSA goodies. And I ate them.

Verdict? Blech. Yuck yuck yuck. I declare my intense dislike of beets officially a lifelong trait. Sure, it's fun to pee magenta, but for me the thrill is not worth it.

chalk up

Friday afternoon I joined a few workmates from REI and went climbing near Taylor's Falls at Interstate State Park. I used to think that the name looked out of place on the state park map, too much like infrastructure and pavement. But once I visited, I realized it's not interstate as in highway, it's interstate as in between states, since the park is on both sides of the St. Croix River. We were climbing on the Wisconsin side, for those in the know.


Hello, Minnesota!

At last, climbing on actual rocks! I've been gym climbing in the past, but not lately, and never in nature that I can remember. It was incredibly fun, not to mention satisfying when I hit the top. I'm afraid my new climbing shoes may gradually be followed by my own harness and other spendy gear. Major props to Jeff and Amanda for being such good climbers, teachers and belayers.









Shiny, happy climbers on a rock

Random Public Library Moment

I wish I had a camera handy for this one. But I didn't, so description will have to do.

We've got a bulletin board in the children's area of my library that we use for a kind of question of the month that kids can answer and post. For example, in April the bulletin board looked like a baseball field, and kids wrote their favorite position on a baseball. This month we have big, tall multi-scoop ice cream cones, each paper scoop bearing a favorite ice cream flavor.

As I was posting a few new entries, I noticed a smartass scoop that someone had snuck in. Their favorite ice cream flavor? "My Boobies".

See, that just doesn't make any sense. They should take a lesson in public smartassing from the person who added another one a few days later: "Bootilicious". At least that one is uses a hip-hop influenced reworking of flavor nomenclature. What that flavor would mean for Baskin Robbins, I shudder to think.

Yes, I'll eat them in a park! Yes, I'll eat them close to dark!

My wandering gypsy friend Dawn is in town, and Friday we made plans for the evening. After a nice walk outside, we thought we'd try a random little Nigerian restaurant. Why? Well, why not, but also, Dawn is the undisputed Queen of the Happenings Book. And this little hole in the wall place was in the Good Book.

We arrived at around 7:45. It was an hour before the posted closing time, but we had to get takeout since the owner apparently had somewhere else to be. One menu item was Yams with fried egg, tomato, and onion.

Fried egg and yam?

Would I? Could I?
In a car?
Eat them! Eat them!
Here they are.

As a matter of principle as a children's librarian, that's what I ordered. Plus, yams sounded good. And as it turned out, we didn't need to eat them in the car; there was a park complete with picnic benches not far away.

When I opened up the container, I was surprised to find a certain lack of...orange.


I had no idea that large, white, and mostly tasteless was an option for yams, but there they were. So no, Sam-I-am, I do not like Nigerian yams that much, but the rest was good. Apparently the local squirrel population isn't really down with big white yams either. A little beggar was loitering, so I threw him a small chunk. I had never before in my life seen a squirrel forcibly spit out food and run away. I'm serious. I think his bushy little tail was even flicking at me in disgust.




The bottled beverage you see is called Malta India, which our all-too-brief hostess described as "kind of like root beer." Yeah, not so much. If there's such a thing as malted molasses, we have now tasted it. Not horrible, but....hmm. Kind of what I imagine third-world sarsaparilla would taste like.

Our next stop, and really the goal for the evening, was a random little independent film festival, but by the time we got there the watching short films part was over, and a Q&A with the filmmakers just isn't quite as interesting when you have no idea what they're talking about. But on the upside, I did get to meet my favorite boozing robot in the entryway, so the trip wasn't wasted.