Yesterday (25 May, 2000) I sprayed rutile blue glaze onto a bowl. This was the first time I've sprayed glaze since I left Seattle, and only the second time I've done so anywhere except at Bruning Pottery. I'm extremely pleased -- it's really a very small thing, but it seems like quite a milestone to me. I need to be able to spray in order to put clear glaze on whiteware evenly, for example. I now have my jar mill here too, so I can finally mix up more of my pet porcelain and make excessively plain objects again.
The bowl didn't make it into this firing, so I won't know for at least a couple weeks whether the glaze works in the Glen Echo Park kiln, but that's okay. I can wait.
In the meanwhile, my crucible appears to have gone to bisque, which it good because I need it in order to make the susceptor material for the second prototype wireless electric kiln. I have the insulating board, the microwave oven, and the magic high-emissivity coating material from ITC, so I'm hot to trot on that project. I will need some mullite tubes, but those are easily had.
(Saturday, May 27th, 2000)
Though this is not Seattle, the weather out there is Seattle perfect -- gray, slightly drippy, warm, joyous. (I know, you probably hate it. Most people do. Happens to be just right for me, however.) I have succeeded in making a cup of tea, but not in drinking it. I want my nap... This is what happens the day after I eat a bunch of stuff I'm allergic to. (Hey, it beats having a lousy gut for two days!)
(01 June, 2000)
This time, however, I'm not going to ram it down your throat; if you wanna see the latest glaze tests and commentary, you know how to find them.
We don't seem to have photos on the Web yet, but Doug's boat arrived this afternoon. It's quite something. I'll try to put up a photo or two, or point you to a URL with photos.
(06 June, 2000)
I have now met the neurologist, and she's good. (I like her Web page too, which is why I include the link.)
The EEG apparently shows lots of high-frequency activity, probably beta (which doesn't appear to have clinical significance), but is otherwise nominal.
She sent me for a doppler ultrasound, to rule out circulatory involvement. That appears to show some stenosis of the left external carotid artery, but the external branches don't supply the brain, so it's not the droids we were looking for. (Needless to say, I'm just as happy.) What it means, if anything, I won't know until I get the report back, but it is clear that it's a side issue.
It is once again a beautiful day in the neighborhood, warm and slightly drippy, Seattle glory. I'm still a duck, and I still love it. The sweetpeas are beginning to blossom out there; I've moved the poor four-o'-clock back outside; the sun and rain have destroyed the writing on one of my trays of seedlings so I don't know what those peppers are; ...all in all, things go well.
I actually mixed up a batch of porcelain the other night, first time since I came out to Laurel. This is Special Stuff -- I'm now milling 2/3 of the kaolin, to see whether I can achieve a nice broad range of particle sizes, which should help the plasticity a bit. So far, it looks like this may actually make a difference. I haven't put any of the result onto the wheel yet, but I hope to do that tomorrow evening. True, I am easily amused, but I must confess that I'm pretty excited.
Unfortunately, the porcelain is too wet; I had to add extra water in order to get the first batch of kaolin out of the milling jar, and there was a bit too much to begin with. I think I should grit my teeth and cast myself a plaster wedging mat. At the moment I'm drying it out on a flat piece of glass, which is an excruciatingly slow process. It's approximately throwable now, but still too soft to be optimal. (If I throw it when it's mushy, it tends to be lopsided. This is partly because it lacks strength, and partly my mediocre technique.)
I'd like to wax eloquent about the joys of porcelain, but it's such a deeply kinesthetic thing that I don't really think words cut the mustard. Porcelain feels like silk when you throw it... but of course it doesn't really feel like silk, it feels like... well, like porcelain. Suffice it to say that I find it very pleasantly sensual to handle porcelain, and especially so to put it on a wheel and make things out of it. True, stoneware has higher wet strength, and you can make considerably larger things of it (I'm working on this), but the plain fact is that even ungrogged stoneware Just Ain't The Same, and grogged stoneware is definitely for Those With Firm Hands. (Pardon my capital letters.)
7 June, 2000
I have a wonderful mint, which smells like Christmas candycanes. I think it's Mentha aquatica, but I'm not entirely certain. I was thinking about it today, and got off onto the question of whether the Romans had the same theta sound that we have in Greek and modern English. (They probably aren't quite identical, but they're certainly close enough for folk music.)
I figure that there is a fair chance there was no such sound in Latin, and that Mentha should probably be pronounced "MENT-huh", at least approximately.
It then, of course, occurred to me to wonder just how pointful it is to attempt to pronounce botanical Latin "correctly", when much of it isn't even Latin and the Romans who spoke Latin are long gone in any case.
About the time I got through another two go-'rounds on this theme, it occurred to me that there are persons who would regard the entire exercise as hopeless masturbatory horseshit, pointless hairsplitting. To any such persons, who might issue the header up there (which translates to "Gedoudda heah, ya stinkin' haihsplitta!"), I can only say, "Go! Ignore the difference between sweet and hot peppers, and pay the appropriate postprandial penalty, preferably with Red Savina!"
If I may put that another way, I quite enjoy fussing with ideas and pursuing them down various byways, and to claim that doing so is pointless is to miss the very point, which is that some of us play with ideas the way others play with rackets & tennisballs or with electronic games or cars or computers. "Arguing" about whether one is doing botanical Latin correctly may have little or nothing to do, per se, with botanical (or any other) Latin... or it may have lots to do with Latin of one sort of another. Doesn't matter: people get to have their fun, so long as nobody gets hurt. (If you are hurt by other people committing hairsplitting and enjoying it, you have a problem!)
Just by the bye, I don't really remember the Latin or Greek for "split" or "splitter"; "trichotome" is basically pseudogreekish for "haircutter", so the phrase could just as easily mean "Get thee hence, o thou barber with B. O.!" Translation is almost never an uncomplicated maneuver.
No, not that kind. Harrumpfh.
After an early dinner, I drove down to Glen Echo Park with my whiteware sample and some slightly dirty Coleman porcelain. (Hey, it was late at night, I was thinking about many-several things, and there were two buckets. Does it have to be my fault that a fat handful of potting soil got into the wrong bucket?)
Ahem.
As I was saying, I went down to the pottery with two kinds of porcelain, and threw both of them. The Coleman, which had some of my usual additives in it, was a wee bit on the moist side, but I had partly dried it, and it was definitely throwable. I'm not sure how well I like it without the additives, but with even a tiny bit of help it's just fine. I'm running a glaze test to find out whether it has approximately the same expansion coefficient as the other commercial porcelains I've used.
I had, on the other hand, succeeded in drying out my own whiteware, perhaps even slightly too much: it was quite stiff on the wheel. I made a largish teacup from it, and found it reasonable, but noticeably on the rubbery side. I think the next batch is going to get very little in the way of additives, aside from the 1% of bentonite I used in this batch. (Bentonite doesn't, or at least shouldn't, make the stuff rubbery.)
After pottery class, I went back to the lab and mixed 300 grams of what should be a pleasant hare's-fur glaze, if I can believe the last set of glaze tests. Took several bisqued pieces with me and waxed them, so they'll be easier to clean up after I glaze them. I think I'm going to spray the hare's-fur glaze onto a teacup, and I think I'm going to dip the rim into something slightly less corrosive, so it won't be so rough -- the hare's-fur has a grittiness to it on edges and rims that I don't really care for the feel of, especially on my mouth. (Robert Tichance points out that the original ancient Tenmoku glazes were so corrosive that many surviving teabowls have metal-covered rims. I will have rims with a thicker glaze instead, one that contains a much higher proportion of clay.)
I also repaired, I hope, a large stoneware bowl that is a slightly sad story: when I threw it, I half-noticed that the base was a bit thin. by the time I trimmed it, I had forgotten this, and barely avoided punching through. I added considerable clay on the inside of the bottom, and set it out to be bisqued, thinking I'd probably fixed it. Unfortunately, the remains of the original bottom cracked partly free during the bisquing. What I've done is to inject first water and then a thinned clear glaze under the flake, in the hope that the glaze will stick the flake in place. The version of this glaze that I use on whiteware will hold things in place, but I've never tried it with stoneware before. Probably make a horrendous mess; but if it actually works, the bowl should be rather decent. It's a pleasant rounded shape, and one of the largest things I've made in quite a while.
June 10th, 2000
I 'spect we all cheat at Haiku; the actual Japanese form is (like many things Japanese) very formal. I believe that a Haiku must contain some sort of seasonal reference, and I further understand that the writer must not be mentioned specifically. None of this "The harvest moon gives me goosebumps" stuff (besides, that's 8 syllables). I'm not entirely sure whether you get to mention other persons directly.
That said, here's a cheating Haiku with a hidden reference.
Sweet honeysuckle breeze;
Why, dear heart, are there snowflakes
Melting on your cheeks?
(I've been through various versions of that, and I may change it again before I settle down.)
What, you wanna know the reference? The first line is a takeoff on the title of an English madrigal, "Sweet Honey-Sucking Bees".
A couple months back I was at Fresh Fields, up in Rockville (chi-chi fancy organic food kinda place, owned by Whole Foods), and got to talking food with someone in the checkout line. Either the clerk or someone who was assisting the clerk told me that there's a Tanzanian restaurant in The District. Tonight we managed to eat there.
Serengeti is a small bar with a few tables, in a slightly bombed-out area of Georgia Avenue, actually not all that far from Crisfield Seafood Restaurant, which is a whole 'nother trip for a different story. The words "NO DRUGS", painted on the window, gave us a moment's pause, but we walked in anyway (I was with Jim Young). The people behind the bar seemed friendly enough, and were happy to show us a menu, all one page of it. The woman (who was studying a "Teach Yourself HTML" book) even came over to the table and explained some of it to us -- turns out that Tanzanian Swahili is slightly different from Kenyan Swahili, and several of the words on the menu were basically incomprehensible even to Jim, who has spent some time in Kenya but has yet to visit Tanzania. (I have essentially zip familiarity with Swahili, so I would have had to ask in any case.)
One of them turned out to be something on the order of polenta. She said it was close to fufu, but made from cornmeal. (I thought it was actually closer to attieke, but maybe that's neither here nor there.) Another item was collard greens. These two things aside, however, this is clearly not a happy place for a vegetarian.
After a little while Marisa Frieder and John Todd arrived, and we decided to order several different things so we could get a sense of what they have to offer. We started with somosas, which were wrapped in phyllo pastry and were served with lemon slices rather than the tamarind chutney one might see at an Indian restaurant. They were outstanding: hot, meaty, savory. The lemon juice suited them perfectly.
The rest of the menu is your choice of goat, beef, or chicken, with the collard greens and either the polenta/fufu equivalent, a chapati, or rice. Down at the bottom they have three specials: grilled goat with one, two, or three other items.
Jim went for the chicken; Marisa and John for the regular goat; and I went for the special goat with the works. It took a long time for the food to arrive, but when it did we were extremely pleased. The collards were little short of perfect; the polenta-stuff was just the kind of comfort-food it should be; the chicken was in a gently spiced but beautifully complex gravy (the goat likewise); and the grilled goat was rich and savory.
The prices were also entirely reasonable -- in addition to the food we drank two beers, two tonic waters and at least four sodas, and I think the entire thing came to a little over $16 apiece, including tip. For those who do not succumb instantly to colliwobbles upon sight of the Inner City, I can definitely recommend Serengeti, at 6210 Georgia Avenue NW, DC, with one caveat: as I mentioned earlier it's a bar, and people sit at it and smoke. While the tables are off to the side a bit, it is not possible to avoid the smoke entirely.
I've been through this before, I think; but I can't find it, so I'm going to do it again.
A few years back, Geri Younggren and I (we may still have been married at the time, in which case it was probably 1994 or 1995; if not, it was probably 1996) were sitting at an American restaurant in Bellevue, Washington, and she made a remark about "Hamemide food" (she pronounced it "huh-MEM-ih-dee"), while pointing at a neon sign in the window. We got into a protracted and rather silly discussion of The Foods of the Hamemides (the sign actually spelled it "Homemade", but that's obviously a modern corruption) and what they might have been like.
Geri is like that -- on her better days, anything can set off a huge chain of wonderful ideas. (Alas, on her worse days she hurts so badly that she can't get out of bed, can't think straight, and is decidedly not a happy camper. But that's a different story.)
We pursued the dazed and bleeding Hamemides through several aeons of their history (now, regrettably, lost in the mists of time), concluding that although it's impossible to be absolutely certain, it seems entirely likely that restaurants claiming to provide Hamemide foods today are falling short of the actual mark: the Hamemides were clearly rather formidable kitchen warriors.
Ahem.
Pseudo-mailto: jon [at] bazilians [put it here] org
Last modified: Mon Jan 29 20:14:27 PST 2001