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Here’s what I’m working on right now for my book project, tentatively titled something like The Time Traveler’s Pocket Reference Guide. I’ve had some input from helpful astronomers at the US Naval Observatory [transcript of conversation so far], and I’m using the unbelievably kick-ass software Starry Night to simulate astronomical observations from ancient times.

Basically, the book is a pocket reference and survival guide for time travelers. One of the first problems confronting a traveler to the distant past is to find out when they are, starting with broad epochs. Hopefully, the traveler will be able to do this with only naked-eye observations, and reference to charts that can fit in a small book (that also will be crammed with blueprints for the internal combustion engine, maps of major trade routes, phrase books for important languages, and the hottest stocks to buy in 1900.) Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

HOW TO DETERMINE THE APPROXIMATE CENTURY FROM THE STARS:
(Still to come: how to determine a more precise year, if you find that you're within
the scope of recorded history.  This will likely come from Dr. Thomas Corbin's suggestion
to use a table of synodic periods for Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus.)
1. Determine whether you are on the northern or southern hemisphere by reference
to a simple constellation chart [star chart to be included].  Locate the
constellations that lie along the sun, moon, and planet's path across the
sky.  These constellations are the familiar Zodiac constellations, and are
useful for reference, especially if you can collaborate with a local astronomer.
2. Locate the four points of the compass by finding Polaris (northern hemisphere)
or by finding Sigma Octantis (southern hemisphere), then determining the
locations of east and west on the horizon.  You may wish to erect markers or
standing stones to help remember these locations, as many ancient peoples have done.
3. Each day, monitor sunrise to find the day at which the sun rises most exactly
to the east.  This is the vernal equinox, the day on which day and night are
exactly equal everywhere in the world.  There are two equinoxes
each year; the vernal equinox and the autumnal equinox.  Since the chart
below references only the vernal equinox, you'll need to determine
which equinox you're looking at.
* In the northern hemisphere, the sun will rise a small amount further to
the North each day as the vernal equinox passes, and each day will get slightly
longer and warmer.  The opposite is true of the autumnal equinox.
* In the southern hemisphere, the sun will rise a small amount further to to
the South each day as the vernal equinox passes, and each day will get slightly
shorter and cooler.  The opposite is true of the vernal equinox.
4. Note in what constellation the sun rises on the day of the vernal equinox, and
refer to the chart below to determine the your approximate
temporal location.
LOCATION OF SUN
AT VERNAL EQUINOX     	YEAR
Pisces		 2000 CE -     1 CE
Aries		    1 BCE -  2000 BCE
Taurus		 2000 BCE -  4000 BCE
Gemini		 4000 BCE -  6500 BCE
Cancer		 6500 BCE -  8000 BCE
Leo		 8000 BCE - 10500 BCE
Virgo		10500 BCE - 12500 BCE
Libra		12500 BCE - 15000 BCE
Scorpio		15000 BCE - 17000 BCE
Sagittarius	17000 BCE - 19500 BCE
Capricorn	19500 BCE - 21500 BCE
Aquarius	21500 BCE - 24000 BCE
This cycle repeats, so it's possible that if the sun rises in Aquarius, you're
either temporally located in 24,000 BCE or 48,000 BCE.  Add 26,000 years to each date
to determine other possibilities for your location.
Further back in time than 50,000 BCE, you may not be able to recognize
constellations.  If this is the case, you'll need to pay less attention to the
astronomical date and more attention to the geologic and evolutionary progression
of the Earth itself.
This method will not work if you are very close to either the North pole
or the South pole.  If this is the case, however, it's assumed that you'll have
other, more pressing issues to worry about than the exact year.  You may look for
Polaris to determine if you are in immediate danger of being hunted by a polar bear:
polar bears are only found in the southern hemisphere, in Antarctica.

Kate and I had newborn care class yesterday morning, and breastfeeding class in the afternoon, and the little baby is growing larger and larger and continuing to do fetal karate. I’ve been reading a chapter of Anne of Green Gables to Kate and the baby every night (and now, sometimes in the middle of the night when Kate can’t sleep.) We started with Penrod books, but they were full of shrieking boys, and since the family is now likely to be two-thirds female, I accepted the majority preference and we switched from Penrod’s mustachioed and ensanguinated “HARoLD RAMoREZ THE RoADAGENT” to Anne’s much more feminine dryad.

And, of course, we’ve been thinking a lot about parenthood:

The Lanyard
By Billy Collins

The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room
bouncing from typewriter to piano
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the "L" section of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word, Lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past.
A past where I sat at a workbench
at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips into a lanyard.
A gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard.
Or wear one, if that�s what you did with them.
But that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand
again and again until I had made a boxy, red and white lanyard
for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold facecloths on my forehead
then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim and I in turn presented her with
a lanyard.
"Here are thousands of meals" she said,
"and here is clothing and a good education."
"And here is your lanyard," I replied,
"which I made with a little help from a counselor."

"Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth and two clear eyes to read the world."
she whispered.
"And here," I said, "is the lanyard I made at camp."

"And here," I wish to say to her now,
"is a smaller gift. Not the archaic truth,
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took the two-toned lanyard
from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless worthless thing I wove out of boredom
would be enough to make us even.”

Kate and I attended our fourth (and last) childbirth class on Monday night. There were ten couples in all; somewhat older than I would have expected (late twenties and early thirties), and much more affluent than I would have guessed (Chester county is more of a Volkswagen area than a Mercedes area, but the cars in the birth class’ parking lot were definitely of the leather-seat variety.) No wonder every time Kate tries to buy something at Mimi Maternity or Babies R Us, the person behind the counter tries to shake her down for her valuable personal information.

Seriously, just as I have become a tinfoil-hat type at Radio Shack, so has Kate become at the maternity stores: paying in cash, refusing to divulge our zip code, wearing a bushy set of ginger whiskers while examining infant seats. I’m afraid that ChoicePoint or one of the other big data vendors has already spotted us, holding us in its baleful orange gaze like the Eye of Sauron, and that we’re doomed to receive a deluge of targeted promotional materials for the rest of our lives. Pottery Barn! Frontgate! Free trial subscription to Parenthood magazine! Resistance is futile!

In the birthing class, the nurse explained to us that the baby will be LoJacked within moments of birth (which doesn’t bother me too much), that the footprints will be taken within minutes (again, no problem), and that the baby will not be released from the hospital until we have applied for a Social Security Number. (!!!)

Sigh. Just as the baby already has worldly possessions (five or six stuffed animals, some onesies, some really great books), I wonder what the first marketing datum captured will be. Our use of a diaper service, triggering a trial subscription to Mother Jones magazine? An automated search on this blog:

“SELECT ssn FROM indexer.findAllBlogs() WHERE ‘baby’ NEAR ‘mercedes’ ADD TO Oracle.tables.rich_assholes”

That last Blog post about how I’m not in my twenties any more was kind of lame and fatuous.


Please accept my apologies, and check out this much more interesting article:

• Oh Mikey! — a Japanese show in which all the actors are mannequins.
  

Sure enough, having a baby changes your priorities. “No kidding,” you say to yourself. “Way to learn life’s weighty lessons, John.” Yes, but listen to this — last week, I located the original Mahnahmahnah song used on the muppet show. Not the version that appears on the Muppets — that’s freaking awesome, but pretty easy to find online — but the actual song that Jim Henson orignally heard. I originally went on a bezerk online research rampage in 1999 to try to find this song, but without any success. Two years later, others succeeded where I failed, and now the CD is available as an import.

It turns out that the song was written by Italian film soundtrack composer Piero Umiliani, and the track “Mah’ Na’ Mah’ Na’” is from a 1968 film entitled “Svezia: Inferno e Paradiso.” Sweden: Heaven and Hell: from the liner notes, it’s one of those 1960s lounge-core titillation-fests, literally and figuratively: “A visit to a den of drug addicts! See what happens inside a lesbian bar!” R-i-i-i-ight, it’s all educational, like the sideshow tents that lured the eager yokels in for purposes of “education only!” I don’t quite think it was a porn film, quite, but who cares. THE SONG is right there, track number 4. Ripping it to iTunes, I was conscious of a giant thrill of…

…well, nothing, really. Hey, I got the song, that’s great! I’ll enjoy listening to it! Um, now I’ll go play with another European import that, it seems, I’m much more excited about. Yeah! Freaking AWESOME! ASS-KICKING NURSERY MOBILE!

I spent almost the whole day in the car yesterday, making a business trip to Reston, Virginia. It was my first road trip as an iPod owner; I visited the library last weekend and checked out a couple of audiobooks to rip. “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”, Agatha Christie’s first novel, is a six-CD set, and I was making elaborate plans:

1. Rip six-CD set to iTunes (50-60 minutes)
   
2. Synchronize iTunes with iPod (2 minutes)
   
3. Attach iPod to FM transmitter (2 minutes, many cables for non-Apple-designed transmitter.)
   
4. Locate unused radio frequency (7 minutes)
   
5. Transmit audiobook to car radio using iPod and FM Transmitter (bring fresh batteries for FM transmitter.)
   

Then, in a blinding flash of insight, I figured out that I could just listen to the damn CDs on the car’s CD player.

Kate and I went to Longwood Gardens today. Longwood is a colossal set of formal conservatory gardens built by the DuPont family (“Sorry”, read a sign coming in through the main entrance, “the east conservatory is closed for renovation. Enjoy our 16 other indoor conservatories and 20 outdoor gardens.”(!))

All the floors are hollow with steam pipes running through them. There’s a flooded ballroom with a centimeter of water over the marble tiles, and a set of trees reflecting in the shallow pool. It’s warm and there are tens of thousands of flowers, and you can go to the fernery and imagine how the Victorians liked to sit around and get an illicit thrill from all the savage, primitive, uncorseted fauna.

Longwood is packed around the Christmas season, but it wasn’t too bad when we went today. There was a cameraperson from Channel 6 news in the main conservatory; I guess she was there on assignment to get some growing things to use as a counterpoint to the wintry weather outside. When a little girl in a pink overcoat came in with her family, a little media feeding frenzy ensued. The girl looked at the tulips, the mother photographed the girl looking at the tulips, the cameraperson filmed the mother photographing the girl looking at the tulips. And now, of course, I’m blogging about it.




There are more pictures at pbase, including one I’m very proud of: Kate doing the Red Queen in front of a big DuPont topiary bush.

Many infant seat manufacturers, I am delighted to discover, have roots in the aerospace industry. Witness, for example, the “Triumph 5” car seat pictured at right, which clearly has some sort of explosive ejector device in case the toddler needs to make a sudden atmospheric re-entry. Seriously, look at that thing: Ring any bells?

Kate and I are starting to spend more and more time at Babies R Us (that’s Kate examining the infant seats in the background, armed with the Baby Bargains book.) I particularly like the fact that infant seats are now modular: you strap the kid into the armored baby bucket once, then snap them into the base mounted in the car, the base mounted in a stroller frame, etc. My baby’s going to have a convenient, ergonomic carrying handle and an integrated quick-disconnect system? Yes, SIR, sign me up!

There are great pictures on Kate’s blog.

After the successful conclusion of an eBay auction last week, I bought myself an iPod^*. During a 60-minute hole in my afternoon schedule, I went down to the Apple store on Prince street. Okay, I’m going to make this short, since it contains nothing that hasn’t been said a million times by other bloggers:

1. Everyone in that store is freakin’ begging for a gigantic wedgie, including:
   
   
   
   • “Omar”, the sharp-jawed white guy with the big ol’ dreadlocks demonstrating the iSight camera with a toothy shit-eating grin on his face.
     
   • The 34-year-old art director with the black nylon Eisenhower jacket and the messy frosted rocker hair listening to Omar.
     
   • The 60-year old lady in the expensive car coat asking the salesperson if the model of iPod she’s buying will be obsolete next year.
     
   • The 24-year-old salesperson who works as a physical trainer telling the lady “Uh, I don’t know, ma’am, they don’t give us that information.”
     
   
   I’d like to blow-dry my hair, put on a yellow polo shirt with a standy-uppy collar, burst in through the tall glass doors of the Soho store with a pack of smug, blond jocks and leave all those losers swinging from the coathooks outside the locker room, wide swaths of tidy whities proclaiming their shame.

2. The iPod is really super-great. Really super-great.
   

That is all.



^*I didn’t want one for Christmas, I hasten to mention, since Tikaro’s readership has almost exactly a 1:1 correspondence with people who buy me Christmas presents.

Our next-door neighbor Todd is an event producer, marching-band choreographer, and parade producer. His many roles intersect, and so do the resources at his command: at the climax of last year’s Thanksgiving day parade, Santa and Mrs. Claus were escorted up the wide granite stairs of the Philadelphia Art Museum by a double file of glittery Roman centurions. The centurions, complete with five-foot feathered and spiked helmets, were borrowed from West Chester University’s “Glory of Rome” halftime show, and I believe they were merely added to fill out the procession. The martial pomp gave Santa’s arrival an unmistakably triumphalist flair, however. This was no jolly, freelance elf arriving unannounced on the rooftop, but a conquering hero marching in force, an imperial mascot for an imperial time.

Earthly power fades, however, and cobwebs grow fastest on laurel and holly alike. Turn on the radio at noon on Christmas day, and you’ll hear the coup announced in shrieking tones: “Santa didn’t get what you want this year? Visit our after-holiday half-price sale!” “Elf let you down?” “Got the post-Christmas blues?” “Now that the holidays are over, switch to carrot sticks! Work off those unwanted pounds!” After an extended coronation, red-faced elves are immediately out. Cold blue colors and lean, cheerless models in spandex are in, marching their penitence on an aluminum diamondplate floor for a low introductory rate.

Nowhere is this cruel ouster more evident than on Todd’s front lawn, where since November Santa’s disembodied head — a relic of some Fifties float — has sat, surrounded by a guard of seven-foot wooden soldiers. Before Christmas, the giant disembodied head merely seemed odd, but after the holiday it fits. Santa Claus is our king Kerkyon, a sacrificial ruler raised high in an orgy of ceremonial pomp, then swiftly decapitated at the climax of festivities. Unlike Kerkyon, however, Santa will be resurrected at the break of dawn next Halloween.

The mild, apologetic look on Santa’s face makes it clear that he’s an unsuspecting party to this deep and bloody mystery. Santa suspects no Salome, bears no grudge, and (I’m sure) isn’t aware of each year’s Christmas-afternoon coup d’etat mustering in the rustle of wrapping paper. Santa is an unassuming emperor, and — unlike earthly rulers — he’ll be just the same no matter what pedestal we find to hoist him on next year.

The king is dead! Long live the king!