Archive A

6/21/05- Tuesday

Hello everybody.

The internet has demonstrated its reach and usefulness by bringing you here, to gaze at my phosphor and furniture. And we've already found the most expensive piece of furniture on the planet, The Badminton Cabinet, by scouring the web. We've done all sorts of comparisons, contrasts, and downright hatchet jobs on the domestic foibles we've discovered all over the internet. But I've found the most fun there is to be had with furniture in the world, outside the "What's New " column, of course.

And here it is:

I don't care what anyone says, that's the Ugliest Couch in the World.

Click on the picture to go to Norwood Mall, and vote for your choice for the "Ugliest Couch in the World."  I have no affiliation with the nice folks who run the site, I literally stumbled upon it, but it seems swell, and didn't try to hijack my browser or sell me Amway or anything, so I think we're cool.

Now, I've made it too easy for you, really, because I posted the picture of the winner, hands down. But you can still vote. But just look at that thing- it's a mortal lock. Come to think of it. that might be the ugliest manmade object of any kind, never mind couch, that I've ever seen. Napoleon Dynamite wouldn't sit on that thing.

Now this particular divan is deeply disturbing to me, and not for the reasons you might think. Put on some welding goggles and take a good long look at it. The most troubling thing about it is, it's in good repair. That is, I mean to say, someone is taking good care of this monstrosity. It's a prized possession. perhaps. And that idea frightens me like no ghoul or goblin or ghostie ever could.

And a worse and more terrible notion is the idea that a factory was built somewhere on this Earth, or the nearby solar system anyway, to manufacture this thing, and others like it, and that plain scares me. What are they making now, now that this Sino- Japo- Muscovite-Martian- Bulgar- Schizo- Saddam's Rec Room look is out of style? Iron Maidens? Anthrax? We must find this installation, and stop them before they upholster again.

The contest pictures are like a car accident. You drive by real slow, afraid of what you might see, but secretly hope for the thrill of a glimpse of the cadaver. Not to worry! This website has a whole furniture mortuary to look at.

You know, people don't always know what's ugly either. Amongst the nasties, I noticed couple of empire sofas I could reupholster and sell for $5000.00, each, easy. I won't identify them, though, so the contestants will ALL think I'm talking about their couch , and save it. Hee Hee.

But there is more than mirth here, dear reader, although the snickering comes in fifty gallon barrels when you look at these horrors. There is a cautionary tale being told, to those that see it. This furniture was new once. Most of it probably wasn't cheap. And setting aside the few high victorian settees that simply became too ornate for our modern ascetic tastes, the rest of them were ugly right out of the gate. And people were possessed to plonk down good money for these monstrosities, because the manufacturers caught their eye with an ephemeral bit of frippery or filigree, and fooled some people into buying this stuff. And a few years later, you thought- What was I thinking?

Our purpose here, at Sippican Cottage, is to never give you that feeling. Because well designed and proportioned furniture, finished tastefully, might get dirty, it might get battered by time and neglect, but it will never make you enter it in a contest, to compete like the Hunchback of Notre Dame in the ugly contest.

Now think about this: How much pocket change and how many remote controls are lost in those couches because they're too hideous, scary, and dirty to look through them? These people are sitting on gold mines, if they only knew.

6/20/05- Monday-

Gettin' Used to It.

Greetings, all. Let's talk about gettin' used to it. To be  more specific, becoming inured to it. What's the "it" I'm refering to? Well, that's up to you. I'll tell you what "it" means to me, you tell me what "it" means to you. Because what I'm talking about, is becoming inured to some aspect of modern life, blind to its charms or warts, because it is common, and unexceptional. And there are two dangers in this gettin' used to it, dear reader.

The first problem, is ingratitude. Our lives are transformed, for the good, by the march of events, but precisely because these developments are ubiquitous and useful, we don't notice them. You'd notice them plenty if they disappeared, though. Generally, the useful stuff we take for granted is the stuff we love to hate. I hate my cellphone, you say. I hate Home Depot, you say. Add your own example here, it's not difficult, even if you're of tender age, because the march of events these days is swift. Now try to imagine life before those items. I hate people talking on the cell phone in the car, you say. Well, I remember before we had cellphones to yak on in the car. And I remember that car breaking down. In the dead of winter. In the dead of night. On a deserted highway. And to this day, over 25 years later, I remember that 5 mile walk, wearing only clothing suitable for the car heater full blast, not the winter full blast, to the nearest place I could get in out of the cold.

 I like cell phones.

The second problem is when our lives are diminished, but it creeps up on us, and we don't see it because it is lost in the landscape of everyday life;  we become used to it, before considering it. And by the time you can consider it dispassionately, and critically, and point your finger at it, and make gagging noises, it has become ubiquitous, and replaced something else that used to be ubiquitous, and was better. And you're left looking like a crank if you point it out to anyone.

Now, you've hired me to be your official crank, if you're reading this daily essay, and I do not wilt from the responsibility. It's my job to notice things, I guess. And my furniture is not a fly stuck in amber, I hope, because what is good in design is often timeless, and what people call improvement is sometimes just tinkering. And so our perspective is everything. We can read history books, and add to the perspective of our own experience, and read current events, and found out about contemporary experience, or we can read science fiction, and fantasize about what we might have to abuse and take for granted in the future.

So I'll tell you what I noticed, the very first time I saw it, and saw it immediately for what it was: An eyesore that has become a regular part of American life, and made me a crank.

That, ladies and gents, is what I call a snout house. And what a snout house is, is a glorified garage, with a house stapled on its ass end. To me, it's the architectural version of a plumber with his britches slung too low, and his shirt untucked, and walking backwards, bent over, all the time. And I hate it like poison. And I hate its designer, and builder. And I hate the realtor who's selling it, even though I don't know him, and I hate his car, and his sweater, and his eating habits, and his molecules.

No, not really. We don't hate anybody here at Sippican. But I don't like snout houses.

I remember like it was yesterday the first time I saw a snout house. Because it wasn't one of those things that snuck up on me, really; the first time I saw it I was fascinated and repelled, and knew I was going to be stuck with it for a good long time.

I was living in Los Angeles at the dawn of the eighties, and would go to the cavernous and elderly movie theaters there, because I liked the gaudy interiors, the big screens, and the air conditioning. Mostly the air conditioning. And I wasn't all that fussy about what was on the screen, really. And it was beastly hot one day, and we went to a matinee of E.T. the Extraterrestial. The movie theater seemed empty as you entered, but that was just because all the patrons  were too short to show over the top of the chairs, and it was a zoo in there the whole time. We didn't care. The boisterous laughter of children never really grates, at least on me. We sat in the back row, in the blessed coolness, the movie a trifle, but not bad, and  Elliot rides his bike down a cul-de-sac completely fronted by garage doors. And I was in shock. Is this the alien part, I thought? This Martian streetscape? Then I realized that Spielberg probably chose some Simi Valley subdivision to film at, thinking he was being wry, and pointing out his idee fixee, the "soullessness" of suburbia, and unwittingly doing infinitely more to help make suburbia unattractive than the people he looked down his nose at, by giving free advertising to the snout house.

And since then, the snout house has moved inexorably eastward, like architectural locusts, and has consumed the landscape from sea to shining sea.

Now I don't share the beautiful people's revulsion for suburbia. It's just decent people making a living for themselves, and maybe having a patch of grass to play touch football on. But many people do hate suburbia, the whole idea of it, and wish we were all living in concrete urban human dovecotes, where they can keep their eye on us. Me, I like looking out the window and seeing a little statue of St Francis, surrounded by ferns and flowers and squirrels; it's better than the fish store dumpster I used to look at when I lived in a more urban setting. But that's just me, perhaps.

The snout house gives these detractors the ammo they need to rename your home and its brethren "sprawl" and attempt to pass laws against it. And I don't want to help them.

Now let's look at the forces that gave birth to the snout house. Because you're just a crank, if you say: I don't like it, so there.

People's lives have changed in the last fifty years, and they don't rest on ceremony as much as they used to. And my very own business is based on a kind of informality of decoration that also applied to houses, snout houses too. We don't have two parlors anymore, with antimaccassars on the furniture, because we don't greet pedestrian callers that way any more. And the car must be acknowledged. The car is another one of those things people love to hate, that's useful beyond all reckoning. And people use it to go everywhere from their suburban nest. And you can put all the pedestrian amenities in the world in the average suburban neighborhood, it won't tempt  people to walk anywhere. There's no where to walk to.

And Americans have become extremely informal these days, in clothes, titles, homes, amusements, everything. Look at a picture of a baseball game from the 1940s. Every single man in the stands is wearing a suit and a fedora hat. And baseball wasn't a rich man's amusement then, these were regular Joes. People try to get in to see the Pope these days, in Vatican City, wearing halter tops and flip flops, and are offended when the Swiss Guards tell them to shove off and hie to a haberdasher.

And this informality, coupled with a kind of truthfulness, has made the snout house amenable to many folks. Because they feel no need to have a ceremonial front door on their house anymore, because no-one is ever going to walk to their house, ever, to see them. And they are going to enter their house through the garage, every time, because that's the way life is. And their kids might play in the street outside the house, but all our assorted playthings have always been in the garage, all the way back to when the garage was a stable, and modern people are just acknowledging that. So there's a sort of sense in the house turning its back on the street, because there's no people in the street any more, just cars. And the precious green space is in the back, and their house faces it, and many times their neighbor's green space, and they are secluded from the pavement in a very salubrious way.

And so I look at these houses, and like to think that what we're looking at, is a reversal, but a copy, if that's possible, of the urban alley. All the services happened in an alley, while the house faced the promenade of the streetscene on the other side. And so people buy their snout houses, not considering the streetscene, because in their uncritical look at it, they see it for what it is, which is the utility side of their house. And the house hunches its shoulders, and gathers the green plat if the yard in its arms, in the back, and people are content, which is Good.

But I know why they're really built this way, dear reader, and I don't like it. Builders decide what gets built these days, not the eventual owners, and they get their plans from the back of magazines, drawn by knuckleheads without any design smarts, almost like a comic book version of a house. It's not their fault, these designers, that Architects abandoned any idea of good design for domiciles and concentrated solely on making public buildings expensive and hideous, and left "designers" to design our houses in crayon.

The real reason the snout house swept the nation, dear reader, is because the driveway is shorter that way, and the builder saves a few bucks on concrete or asphalt. That's it. And he just buys a jet ski or a bass boat with the money, and we all get to look at garage doors all day.

6/17/05-Friday

Hello all. My mind started wandering far afield this morning, and I got to wunnering, as they say in the vernacular. I was wunnering about furniture, as I often do. And the thought struck me: I wunner what the most expensive piece of furniture in the world is?

Now, one of the reasons I make reproductions of antique styles of furniture for you lovely people is that there isn't anything close to an adequate supply of the real article available to the public. Furniture meets with an untimely demise... Wait, strike that thought, anything made of wood, that fires consume and beetles eat, really shouldn't be expected to last longer than your average empire in any great quantities. Michaelangelo's David is made from stone. That's pretty sturdy, even if carrerra marble is soft as stones go; it's still made of rock. But somewhere along the way, even something like that, which was pretty much considered a big deal on the day it was finished, and didn't need 250 years of fingerprints and household dust on it to seem valuable, once had its right  hand busted up when someone threw a big old bench out a third story window of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence during some disagreement over which set of Vandals was going to burn Florence to the ground that particular day. You can still see where they glued his fingers back on, if you look closely at his hand, instead of squinting to see his little winkie, and making jokes.

So the fact that any of this stuff is hanging around for a long period is a testament to our interest in it, and the labors of their makers.

Well, it wasn't hard to find out what the most expensive piece of furniture ever sold is. It's something called the "Badminton Cabinet" and looks like it should cost a pile:

You can click on the picture to read the Washington Post article about it. It sold last December for $36,700,000.00, just in time for Christmas, wrapping extra. Ha Ha.

Now, 36 million would keep my wife in shoes for decades, so we're talking real money here. The article goes to great pains to explain what an extravagance it is, and so forth.

But I got to thinkin' about it. $36 mil. Hmm.

The cabinet uses a technique called pietra dure, which is fancy english, or plain italian, for setting colored stones in a mosaic, generally on furniture. The article spells it "pietra dura." Believe who you want, but I have relatives in Florence, and they told me pietra dure is correct. They told me pietra dura refers to the stones they pave the roads with. You decide who knows what they're talking about. And don't bother looking it up in the dictionary. One way, it's "stone hard," and the other way, it's "hard stone."  At any rate, I've been to Florence, and there's a whole neighborhood there to this day, with guys making this stuff, usually very big, gaudy tabletops. And they've lost nothing off their fastball since the Third Duke of Beaufort breezed into town in 1726 and ordered this thing to put his underwear and socks in.

And forgive me, dear reader, I wunnered if he got his money's worth, and if the clown prince of Lichtenstein ( I may have misread his title, but got the reality of it, if you know what I mean) got his money's worth when he laid out over $36 mil for it last year. Let's do the math, something NO ONE in the newspaper business EVER does.

Now Henry Somerset, the 3rd Duke, kept good records, so we know what he paid for it: 500 Pounds, in 1726, plus 94 pounds in export duties. Now anyone that's paid a "Value Added Tax" in Europe lately knows the 94 pounds was a bargain, as the current rate of taxation in Europe would probably swap the numbers, and 1726 Pounds would be the tax on a 94 Pound purchase; but that's their problem.

We also know that it took 30 people 6 years to make the thing. Now, artisans in the 1700s aren't like lawyers are now. They didn't feel comfortable billing the customer for just thinking about their badiminton cabinet when they were in the privy, reading a vellum broadsheet about the soccer scores, because the penalty for overbilling a Duke in those days likely involved dungeons and racks and whatnot, with some distant cousin of the offended party as the judge, jury and executioner; so let's take them at their word. And remember, they didn't stop working after forty hours each week, either.

Get out the calculator. 30 people, 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, 50 weeks a year (vacations were in short supply back then, but let's assume the occasional bout of cholera or plague or rickets or something brought a welcome diversion and a few weeks off a year to our trusty artisans), for 6 years. What should we use for a wage? How about $50.00 an hour, in today's money? After all, these weren't guys they just grabbed off the street, just look at that cabinet. The pietra dure tabletops I saw in Florence weren't, ahem, how do I put this, in our price range, so I figure these guys make as much as a bad plumber here in the states.

That's $27,000,000.00

Now, you're looking at that number like a homeowner who just got a jaw dropping estimate to reface your kitchen cabinets, and the salesman, who hasn't yet picked up on his imminent ejection from your home, with a handful of the back of his collar in your fist, and his feet barely touching the ground, blithely says:

"Plus material"

Oh yes, we forgot. The thing is encrusted with all rare, some semiprecious, stones. And the cabinet itself ain't made of particle board. So I guess our Lichtensteinian friend who purchased the thing last year isn't a complete schmuck. At least on this score.

But what about our friend, the Duke? How'd he make out? I mean he's dead and all, that stinks, but he did keep his socks in it for a while, and I assume the assorted dukelets and dukesses through the ages got some use out of it.

The British are nothing if not polite, unless you're in the stands at their soccer match with the opposing team's jersey on, I mean. Quite. Anyway, those crumpet eating Irish annoyers have been keeping pretty good records of the worth of a Pound Sterling, since about 1750. That's close enough to the 1726 origin year to make a judgement. The graph they so politely supplied me on the internet makes interesting reading. The Pound was worth about the same for almost 200 years. By "the same," I mean "a lot." Then, 75 years ago or so, those Welsh worriers and Scots stabbers in London ran it right into the ground, and it was devalued to 1/700 of its value.

And in 2004 money the 594 pounds the Duke blew on this thing is about $133,650.00 in US dollars. So it sounds like it's the Duke that got the bargain. But as I said, the newspaper men never do the arithmetic, but we do.

Let's assume that the Duke wouldn't have buried the money in the yard in coffee cans if he didn't spend it on the furniture. The 1700's were not prehistory, after all, and you could invest money even then, and it would bring a return on your investment. What if he invested it?

So we go to our humble savings calculator, supplied  with our crummy Accounting software, which the Duke couldn't buy with all the money in christendom, and we got for forty bucks. Let's be conservative here, and figure the Duke, not having mutual fund brokers down the street, wouldn't have spectacular gains on the money. That is to say, he probably could have bought Canada with it, but nothing valuable. So let's give him a modest 3% return, after taxes. We'll leave inflation out of it, because we figured it in already in the money valuation.

So let's see, 133 large, for 278 years, at 3% per. Whoah. Criminey. Smoke is coming out of the back of my computer, trying to calculate it. Let's take off three zeroes, and add them back after, so the computer doesn't get a hernia.

$127,375,000.00

Now, the Duke might have to borrow money from a Powerball winner from time to time, but that 127 mil  would get  you by if you clipped coupons and turned off the lights in the rooms in the castle you weren't using.

Now where's the humor in this, you're asking?  When's he going to tell a joke? Well, I'm not sure it's funny, exactly, but when  I typed "the most "expensive piece of furniture in the world" into Google, the paid ads at the top of the page were:  "Cabinet Refacing from Home Depot" and "Affordable Furniture- Great Values on sofas, loveseats, dining tables, and more."

And more, indeed.

("What's New" will return on Monday. Try to muddle through. Happy Father's Day, if you're one, or have one. "Father" is the only title in the world I have, that's worth having.)

6/16/05-Thursday-

Nature gulled us by allowing the sun to shine for a few days, and it was actually hot for one day. And then, the roundhouse. We had a fire in the fireplace last night, and needed it. It's gloomy every day, and the forecast is: more gloom. But I went to Catholic School, dear reader, and the nuns instructed us to always be happy, and look on the bright side of life, or they'd whack you one. And so we soldier on, and marvel at what mid fifties temperatures and intermittent rain does for the hostas and ferns and pachysandra and begonias.

That's a cinammon fern, dear readers, an item you couldn't grow if you tried, but grows by the thousand on my swampy property. They look as though if you blinked, a stegosaur might appear and start munching on them. The trees you see on the right are fifty feet tall, not saplings.

We grow Hostas and Begonias a lot, because we labor in the shade almost exclusively. Gardening in the shade is a different sort of animal than gardening where the sun bestows its gift of blooms willy nilly to the horticulturalist. You end up growing stuff that wouldn't look out of place on the bottom six inches of a shower curtain in a summer rental, and have to content yourself with interesting foliage. But these hostas, in late June, will grow delicate stalks, tipped with little purple and white bell shaped flowers, and the hummingbirds will linger here, hovering at the window just above, and fascinate the Wee Child, and infuriate the cats. 

Well, she doesn't look that infuriated yet, I guess. The main road in Marion is behind that green, maybe three hundred feet, and you, Lewis, Clarke, Stanley, and Livingstone would be lost forever if you left the lawn and tried to reach it. You know, there might be stegosaurs in there, for all I know. Nature has mounted every defense for this area, including chemical and biological. The poison ivy and ticks alone would protect it from invasion.

Look at this. That lovely and delicate flower, on a vine depending from a sapling White Pine, is a pernicious weed. They call it wild strawberry around here, though it grows no fruit that I've ever seen. It  has nasty little needle-like thorns, and grows right under your feet if you stand still for a moment and mop your brow while trying to eradicate it. It climbed this tree to preen in the sun, and mock me, and illustrates the old adage that a weed is just a flower in the wrong place.

So we'll have our fires at night, and leave the weeds to bloom for a time, and picture living in London or Oregon, where it's like this all the time, and be content. For whatever nature takes, she gives something in return,  if you know where to look for it.

6/15/05- Wednesday-

Hello all. It's almost summer. And summer means baseball, I guess. Now I've already written about The Boy in this space, and you said you liked it. Because The Boy likes baseball.

Now when I was a kid, baseball was different. I'm not ancient, so you'll be relieved to know there'll be no talk of stickball in a Brooklyn street or Ty Cobb's sharpened spikes. The players we admired on our playing cards are coaches now, not dead. And the playing cards we had were worthless, and the gum was precious, thank God,  so we enjoyed them, and flipped them for Face up/Facedown on the bus seats on the way to school, or lined them up against the old brick wall in the playground and played Knockdown. And we gave shopping bags and shoe boxes filled with them to our cousins and younger brothers when we came of age, and laugh when we think of the fortune just one of those cards commands from  memorabilia freaks now.

We did not have uniforms. We played with baseballs that looked much older than us, and cracked wooden bats with electrical tape holding them together, and had to mow the field before we could play on it. There were never enough of us, so we pitched to our own team members, and right field was an out. Period. And more often than not, right field went unmowed, too. We played in jeans and canvas sneakers, and a hole in the knee of your pants wasn't yet stylish, it was a calamity when you had to face your mother, who knew what they cost. And we played until we heard our mothers yell our names for the second time, like a town crier, and hurried home to a scolding for tarrying, and dinner.

All of that is gone now, like so many things, changed by time, and prosperity, and other things. Our mothers thought nothing of turning us out of doors at daylight in the summer, though we were but small, because forty years ago, someone who would hurt a child would have more problems in this world than registering at the police station, and paying their lawyers. And we mowed the grass ourselves, with a mower that shot gravel out the unbaffled chute at our confederates, and we could barely reach up to the handle to push it, and we didn't maim ourselves, and sue anybody, that I recall. And we settled the rules first and our disputes later among ourselves without the guiding hand of our parents, except what little sense they had managed to get into our heads, and rarely resorted to knuckles. Funny that. We had it sorted out in 1965, when we were but children, but forty years later we assault the umpires at our children's games. Something was there, and has slipped away, I think.

I remember lots of things about that little diamond, carved out of the trees as an afterthought by the developer of our little neighborhood, long before the word "developer" became an epithet hurled at conservation committee meetings by people who live in houses made by a "builder." The builder and the developer look identical to the unaided eye, but people who already have a house have a different perspective, and thesaurus, than those that need one.

And I remember Cookie. Now, our children should be collecting Cookie's rookie trading cards, to put them through college when they sell them on ebay, and not community college either. But it was not to be. Because Cookie, although the greatest baseball player I ever saw, didn't want to be a professional ballplayer. He wanted to be a barber.

Now that last sentence clanged to the floor at your house, and you thought: He's kidding, or he's nuts. Well, I'm not kidding, anyhow. Cookie wouldn't have it if it was offered.

Now, Cookie was a little older than us, and that brought out the Paul Bunyan side of it a little I'm sure. Remember when you thought your father could lift a car, or paint the house by having you hold the brush while he moved the house up and down? Later you found out he was just another middle aged guy that emitted an audible gasp every time he sat down. Well, I'm sure that entered into it a little, that perspective from down where the little kids are, looking at big Cookie, but that wasn't all of it. He really was a wonder, I think.

Cookie would show up when we had been playing all day, and to this day I don't know his last name, or where he came from, or where he went to after he was done. But every time he came, we stopped whatever we were doing, and Cookie put on a Ruthian barnstorming exhibition. The biggest kid among us would pitch to Cookie, and the rest of us would scatter into the woods beyond the field, and wait for the balls to rain down on us. Because Cookie was a machine for hitting home runs. If  the pitcher would wince during his delivery, human nature being what it is, knowing the ball might be coming back those 60' 6" in a big hurry-  he'd maybe sail the ball wide and  three feet off the plate. It didn't matter. Cookie would step on the plate, and lean over, and flick his wrists, and it would rain down into the woods, every time.

 And with Cookie, left field was in play for once, after a fashion. We'd grow tired of fishing our precious baseballs out of the oaks and poison ivy in center field, and beseech Cookie for a real show, and he'd get up lefty, his switch hitting a revelation to us, and hit it out over the unmowed grass. Left field had no natural end, so the balls would roll when they hit, like cannonballs that had missed their fortress, but occasionally Cookie would clear the whole distance, and hit the pavement at the foot of the road that entered the field. And we'd ululate like madmen, and didn't care our precious baseball was no longer round. We adored him.

Cookie even sort of looked the part, if I recall correctly. The major leagues were filled with midwestern farmboy looking lummoxes like Mantle and Killebrew back then, and Cookie had the rangy frame, reddish blond stubble head, loping strides and laconic demeanor of our icons.

But with glasses. But not coke bottle glasses. Those wouldn't have brought a billboard into focus for Cookie. Cookie had the sort of glasses that seemed like the windows on a deep sea submarine. It was disorienting just to look at him, and if the barbering trade didn't fly, I imagine mesmerism would have been a cakewalk for him.

And perhaps Cookie knew what we, in our innocence, did not; that his eyesight would forever make him an also-ran, and it was best not to dream overmuch and better to make use of your gifts to amuse your neighbors and spice your life than to try to squeeze every drop of mammon from them. Maybe. But I really think that Cookie didn't care if he became what was to us an exalted thing: A big league ballplayer. He wasn't interested. He wanted to be a barber, and that was that.

I recall reading a story about Eisenhower when he was young and a cadet at West Point, and not yet the general who beat the Axis armies or the President who presided over my birth, though perhaps he did not notice it. He was no longer a "plebe" then, and was allowed to order the newcomers around, and haze them, as he had been hazed the year before. And for amusement, he picked out a goofy looking recruit, and made him stand at attention in front of his peers, and lambasted him, for no good reason, simply because it was expected of him. And he wrote in his memoirs, that he always remembered, to his shame, that as a capstone to his string of abuse, he asked the plebe what he did in his civilian life before he entered West Point, because he seemed such a numbskull that he couldn't be more than a barber. And the man, showing no emotion, but feeling some, no doubt, answered that he was indeed a barber in his short pre-military working life.

 Eisenhower wrote that he had never known real shame before that, and he remembered that moment for the rest of his life, when he had disparaged the honest toil and effort of his fellow man. And he said he owed that man a great debt, though he couldn't remember his name, and he never again wanted to look down his nose on any man.

Cookie, if you're listening. I'm sure you're a terrific barber.

6/13/05 - Monday-Greetings and Happy Monday to yeThe internet is a marvelous thing, is it not? It brought you here, one way or the other, and it substitutes, right here, right now, for a yellow pages, and a newpaper, and a guy sitting on the sidewalk with a blanket covered with trinkets, and a magazine, and a furniture showroom, and a coffee table book, and for me, a therapist.

And the reach of the thing, "the internets" as our president called it, in his innocence, grows everyday. I went on google the other day. You did too, probably. As a utility, google and its competitors like yahoo are becoming indispensable. google is now worth more than the largest media company in the world, if you can believe google news, and all it does is point you towards knuckleheads like me, and stories from the media companies it just passed on Wall Street. Anyway, I went to maps and directions at google, and ended up looking at a closeup satellite photo of my yard. Wow.

But what's it all for? If you rose every morning, and simply said hello to everyone in your town, the day would be over before before you were done, and you wouldn't try it the next day. You'd walk past everyone without making eye contact, just like Times Square before Guiliani, and continue on with your business. You'd greet the ones you love and maybe a few select strangers, and get on with your life. So the internet's just like that, just writ large; it can waste your time, or fill it with wonder.

Well, I'm here trying to fill your day with wonder, like, "I wonder what happened to that boat he was building?" But it's a very certain type of wonder I'm peddling here. If you want a baby blue suede polyester recliner, accompanied by advice on fantasy baseball statistics, you're in the wrong place. Or I am.

 And the beauty of the internet is, after you're done pawing through all the clutter, a willing buyer and a willing seller can find one another, and we can find information and commerce and amusement and still more information we might miss if we were waiting for someone to read it to us on the three channels on the black and white television, the way it was when I was a little boy.

Now if you go to google, and type in furniture, at the top of the list pile, is a company called furniture.com. Makes sense. Or does it? I make no judgements about my brethren at furniture.com, dear reader, because people need a place to buy that baby blue polyester recliner, and that seems to be it. As I understand it, the company itself is right up the highway here in Massachusetts. So hello neighbor. They are short on fantasy baseball stats, but let's assume they're working on that deficiency. Now let's do an experiment. Can I find anything I'd buy at this place? If page rank means anything, it's supposed to mean the most people would find it useful.

 I'll cut the suspense, and tell you right now, my answer is no.

Now don't misunderstand, my readers, I cast no aspersions. Perhaps your answer is maybe, or hell yeah! That's fine. It's a big world, and I'm content that the internet supermarket has more than just the aisle where I get my food.

But just because we have a "live and let live" attitude, doesn't mean "who cares"? I care. And because it matters to me that the world needs fewer blue recliners, and more Duncan Phyfe sofas, we keep trying to persuade, and lead, and cajole, and offer, to bring people around to our way of thinking about the domestic world. And so, here you go, dear reader, you decide:

Furniture.com

Or:

Sippican Cottage Furniture

6/10/05 Saturday-His face, what's left of it, is all over the news, every day. And I'm weary of it, and I don't share everyone's interest in him. If everything he's accused of is false, he's still a very scary human being. If ten percent is true, he's a monster besides being a weirdo. And since every news outlet, blog, talk show host, drive time morning zoo radio loser, and drunk in a bar is disgorging 24/7 about him, it's unlikely I'll be able to bring anything fresh to the table. Or is it? Let me give it a try.

Did you know that Michael Jackson could sing?

It's easy to forget that. He's been busy for the last 30 years or so, first being a celebrity, then a sort of royal weirdo, and then a kind of carnival freak, then an Elephant Man wannabe, and finally John Wayne Gacy Light, or so it appears. But I assure you, I've heard it. He could sing.

Now you're going to be angry with me dear reader, I'm sure of it.  Because I'm going to point out  that you're mistaken if you thought he could sing because you bought "Off The Wall" and then "Thriller." You loved his moonwalking, and overlooked his screeching falsetto, and Quincy Jones' audio spackle distracted you from noticing that he couldn't sing anymore. Not even a little.

Quincy Jones produced those records, and Quincy Jones is a very talented man. To a male kid growing up in the seventies, he was da man simply for marrying Peggy Lipton of the Mod Squad. Quincy warmed up by tinkering with Sinatra, after Sinatra had blown his voice out with poor method and booze and cigarettes and putting his head in ovens over Ava Gardener, and couldn't sing much anymore. Sinatra had gotten all the mileage he could from just sort of talking in a singsong way in a low register, with Nelson Riddle riding herd over the half a gross of  string players sawing away behind him. Quincy coaxed one last blast of Brooklyn funk from ol' Blue Eyes' leather lungs by putting Count Basie behind him, and perhaps reminding him of what he used to be.

But Quincy's magnum opus was fixing it so you didn't notice that the greatest child soul singer, ever, couldn't sing a lick anymore. Every bit of Quincy's talents were needed to foist this future circus freak on the public, when the freak had nothing left in the tank but a visually disorienting dance step.  And Quincy kept moving the musical cups around so you couldn't find the little ball under the one marked "He can't sing." Because poor old Michael couldn't sing a lick after his Adams Apple showed up.

Now lots of people are child singers and have long and prosperous careers after their voice drops an octave. Listen to Wayne Newton. You heard me. Wayne Newton. He sang Danke Shoen when he was a young teen, if that, and he sang it with the brio, and range, and emotive bluster of a world-weary and experienced Vegas singer. Which is exactly what he eventually became, god love 'em. And now, even as he becomes geriatric, he can still do it. And people still go see him, I guess, and he's turned his uncool persona into a cottage industry, like David Hasselhoff and William Shatner and a dozen others that learned to embrace the trajectory of their careers and find a way to keep the third wife in minks, even if it involves self parody.

But it was over for Michael when his voice changed, and he knew it. And it's probably what drove him crazy. And if Michael Jackson is anything, it's crazy.

Perhaps you'd go crazy too, if you were given that gift, and then it was taken away from you like that. And it is a gift. Michael's father Joe couldn't beat that sound out of Tito or Jermaine, after all, no matter how hard he tried. Michael had it, and out it came.

Michael Jackson was made for Motown, and especially Motown for him. The entire musical edifice was there when he arrived, and he just rode the elevator right to the top floor. Berry Gordy had honed the template to an iota, and assembled the most talented and innovative studio musicians and writers together in Detroit, and later Los Angeles, and could use every bit of what the Jackson Five could deliver.

I linked  to a Jackson Five compilation in the left margin. Purchase that item. If you do not , your life will be a meaningless and barren wasteland, populated only by the Court TV freakshows, and not the Jackson Five's freaky show. Because Michael was a freak. The good kind, I mean, before the bad kind. He could belt out a song or croon a ballad with the emotional intensity of an adult, the range of an opera singer, and the pure joy in life that a little boy knows. And at Motown, they knew what to do with it.

They don't always know what to do with these gifts, you know, neither the gift's  holders or the holder's discoverers. Ever hear Sam Cooke sing? He might be the greatest singer, of any kind, ever, and if you don't believe me, get the soundtrack from " The Ladykillers" and listen to him sing gospel, before he was "discovered" by Holywood. He was  transcendently talented and gifted, well before two strange Knights of Columbus looking guys that had no idea what to do with his gifts signed him to a six lifetime contract, and put some syrupy strings and a bunch of  people who sounded like the Ray Conniff Singers behind him. And still Sam managed to sound sublime singing pop songs like You Send Me over the noise, but just. He should have stayed in church, and he probably would have sung like that 'til this very day, instead of ending up with an underage girl for an unwilling companion, and drugged up, dead and pantsless in a cheap Motel from gunshot wounds and baseball bat contusions. Which is even worse than what they did to him on those records, but just barely. Which cautions us to keep in mind Michael Jackson didn't invent depravity either.

Where was I? Oh yes, the record. Put the needle on the vinyl, with a stack of pennies on the stylus so the dancing doesn't make the record skip, and let it rip. What's that? When? Oh, I see. OK, put it in the CD player.

I Want You Back. Glissando down to one bass note, courtesy of THE bass player, James Jamerson, the only genius ever in popular music. And then, it erupts a little more, then it it starts with a jerk like a motorcycle, and then hops around like a bunny, then down some steps, up a few like dancing on a staircase with Bojangles Robinson, and then the guitar, drums and every manjack in the studio joins in and the assorted Jacksons sing a nonsense riff. And then Michael chimes in, warming up like a jet on a runway, talking about schoolyard jealously, the words a trifle, not bothering to rhyme. And after the perfunctory verse, he lets it rip. He goes up to the ceiling and belts Oh! to kick off the refrain, and you realize, when you hear it in hindsight,  that he couldn't hit that note now if his life depended on it, and hasn't even tried to for thirty years. All those breathless sounding oohs and ahs and squeals and, pardon me for using the word, breathy ejaculations he's been using instead of singing, are the shadow of what he could do when he  was just a little boy, which was sing! And here it's just effortless, and fun, with the exclamation point at the beginning of the phrase, just to show the joy that's in it.

There's lots more of that ebullient and joyous singing on the compilation. Skip on down to Never Can Say Goodbye. The bass percolates all over, never really repeating itself, never really straying far either, and carrying the simple ballad on its back. And Michael swoops and soars, declaiming the lyrics perfectly, and always completely in control of the the song, and his singing. And there are those moments in the song, where you think he'll chicken out, and drop into another register, or bail out from a note he held too long for another singer, or break the reins and run all over the place, like a bad singer singing the national anthem, but he never misses. There's all sort of strings and flutes and aural wallpaper at the end, trying to keep up with him,  but they can't get a word in edgewise, not with that singing.

Now listen to I'll Be There. A bevy of slatternly pop stars covered this song with melisma slime recently, and every one of their singing lessons showed through their bustiers the whole time. With Michael, there's no heavy lifting. It's a simple, heartfelt ballad, and his brothers sing well in the background, where they mostly belong. Michael sings it throughout with grace and verve, and knows too how to build  the song, and not give away the musical store all at once. He parcels out the excitement throughout until the end, when he just launches himself into the stratosphere, and goes wherever he wants or needs to, and you know when to clap.

One of his older brothers sings counterpoint in the duet with him, bravely but insipidly, and his voice, lower and uninspired, warns us all, though we did not know it then: This is what happens, when you reach puberty. Time for plan B.

But Michael Jackson could sing. When Nixon was President.

6/09/05-Friday- It's Friday, and I think you know what that means. Yes, it's trash day. What's that? Wha? You don't care? Oh, I see. You don't currently have possession of a two year old, and you don't keep your trash in the basement for six days at a time, full of ... well, let me just remind you that he wears diapers, and he knows how to use them, as it were. And so we rejoice, dear reader, on Friday, when we bring the big black bags to the end of the driveway, and they are magically whisked away by the refuse elves. And we begin again, refreshed, and need not shun the basement steps or hurry past them like a peasant in the middle ages going by a plague city.

Feeling ebullient now, my mind wanders far afield, wondering what we should talk about today, besides bags loaded with... as I said, Friday's swell. Let's talk in superlatives again today.

I've seen the greatest view in the world.

Now there's a bold statement. But it's true, I think. I guess, how would I know if it wasn't? I am reminded of the question: "Where did you find the car keys?" The answer is always: "In the last place I looked," because of course, you stop looking when you find them, unless you're very strange. Well, I'm still looking around for a better view, but I've never seen its like.

Now I'm no globetrotter, but I've seen some things. I've stood in a gorge in Guatemala, at the base of a waterfall, as the torrents of water pound the rocks and jump up into rainbows that drift skyward, interrupted only by the darting trajectory of damselflies, and framed by verdant green fronds the size of tent flaps. I've stood at the top of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and gazed over the clay tiled Florence roofs, basking in the Tuscan sun. I wandered over to the Uffizi Gallery from there, past the statue of David in the square, and admired a painting by Da Vinci. I got so wrapped up in looking at it, I backed into some daub by Michaelangelo Buonnarotti on the opposite wall and got scolded in fast Italian. You begin your reply, in slow motion: "Io non parlo l'Italiano molto bene.. " like a dimwitted kindergartener, and the docent switches, quick as a wink, into English- "Get away from the painting, will ya?' I've stood on the verandah at Mount Vernon, the great green lawn rolling down to the mighty Potomac, while shaded by George Washington's own roof. That was nice. I've watched the water roar over the falls at Niagara by the hurricanefull, haunted only by the niggling feeling: "Well, what else would it do when it got to the edge of a cliff?" I've slept out in the Arizona desert, with the cobalt night sky spattered with all the stars of the galaxies. Yosemite? Check.

Then, ten years ago, I went to Marble House.

Marble House is what William K. Vanderbilt called a cottage. He built it in Newport, Rhode Island before  the turn of the 20th century, with the money his crotchety grandfather Cornelius  made in shipping and transportation. It's a pretty gaudy pile, I must warn you. It sits right on the rocky ocean shore, with the mighty Atlantic Ocean gaping at it all day. The grounds make a pretty walk, as apparently he had money left over for landscaping when he was finished, unlike every homeowner who builds a custom house nowadays, and furniture too. It's had what no man can buy, too, which is time; and time has bestowed on the visitor the spectacle of really enormous trees and shrubs, that  have reached their full potential, for us to walk under and around and look at and marvel over.

Go inside. The ceilings are up there, somewhere, like the top of an elevator shaft, and they're not painted flat white, neither. (Please do not send me an e-mail correcting that "neither". That's my best Jethro Bodine impression.) There's gilt by the ton, ormolu by the slab, fine fresco by the billboard lot; enormous paintings hang everywhere, of just the sort of people who get their portrait painted, and are exactly no-one to anyone but their distant relations now, just like your relatives are to you. And there are statues, real ones, and not just a little Saint Mary in an upturned bathtub, surrounded by pansies in the yard. . The dining room is fitted with chairs the poor old Bill V. must have mistakenly ordered by weight, so the greedy manufacturer made each so heavy that two footman were required to move it, just so you could sit down. And if you were paying attention to the name of the place, believe me when I tell you they didn't skimp on the marble

And when you're all done gaping and gawing at the piles of money transubstantiated into woodwork, you realize that ol' Bill V. ended up with a three bedroom, two bath house, and that's it, same as you.

Just because his architect, Richard Morris Hunt, lingered a little too long at lunch, and they opened the extra bottle of claret, and then returned to his office a little tipsy and mixed up the plans he  had going of the dirigible shed, the Doges palace, and  the seaside house, doesn't mean it's not fun to look at. And we are the descendants of  the people  from the stratum of society who used to have to stand in pairs, dressed like swiss guard fops, and move the chairs for the stringy old matrons dressed like Marie Antoinette, and then stand at attention, wordless, or else find yourself working in a rendering plant for a penny a day. Now the house is there to amuse us, not its builders, and such is the way of the world.

Oh yes, the view. None of that is it.

That's not a view dear reader. That's expensive stuff to look at. And you do, and it's interesting and all that. But then you go into the daughter's bedroom. I'm pretty sure she's the Vanderbilt that married Winston Churchill's uncle, or cousin or something, and became the Duchess of Marlborough, because what good is money if  you can't have a title too?  It's smaller than the caverns of the public rooms. Many McMansions have bigger bedrooms these days. Big bedrooms with high ceilings are dreadful to sleep in, and the architect knew it. So  he brought the ceiling down lower and cozied the room up with ornate but delicate coffering, and wall paneling, and fabric upholstery on the walls, until it looked like you could almost live in there. A big canopy bed, a dressing table, some assorted regal looking furniture to put your nighties in, and that's about it. It was pleasant, really. And it had two windows that overlooked the "back yard," if that's what you can call a couple of acres of grass sprinkled with 100 year old oaks, with a Japanese style teahouse at the edge of a granite cliff, and half the world's ocean stretching off to the horizon.

That day, one of the windows was open, which is a rare thing indeed  in the museum business. The heavy curtains were drawn back, along with the gossamer lace liner, and it made the most extraordinary frame around the most lovely scene of that lawn, and that teahouse, and that ocean, all resplendent in the summer sun. And you walked two more paces, and it was gone, and you're all of a sudden  looking at some stranger's ivory hair brush and pancake cosmetic puff on a gaudy  table that wouldn't look out of place in a Saudi sheik's powder room.

Now that architect knew his business. And the Vanderbilts didn't buy their house plans from the back of a magazine. But all the money in the world, which it seems like was spent on the place, didn't make that view. Someone understood that you must frame and define the world, and put it in perspective, and show it partially, and make it so you are made to feel inside, before showing you the outside, and knew to place the items in the landscape just so, to make a view like that. And that sort of view is what Mr Hunt's contemporary, Frederick Law Olmstead, was carving out all over Boston, which we brought to your attention a few days ago.(see sidebar for Mr Olmstead Book).

If a dotcom millionaire knucklehead bought that piece of land today, he'd build a house triple the size, and the back of it would have acres of sliding glass, the worst door and the second worst window design in the world, to gape at the ocean and make it so boring you'd watch reality TV rather than look out the window. Because we've lost the touch, I'm afraid.

But you saw that scene, as it should be shown, and you're in shock from that view, disoriented, and it's etched in your head, and you could paint it in oils, even though you can't paint a fence with whitewash, because you can still see every bit of it in your mind's eye, forever.

Which is good, because I've visited that place a half dozen times since then, and the windows are always shut, and the curtains always drawn, and the docent spies you sidling towards that corner, because you're desperate to see it again, that view, and he says:

"Get away from the window, will ya?"

The Marble House

6/08/05- Thursday-

Sorry about yesterday. There was an opening for poet laureate in New Bedford, and I needed something about nothing for my resume. I decided on June, because I figured if the competition got fierce, I could tell the town fathers they'd save ink by printing an ode to June, instead of any competitor's entries, likely to be a about consonant heavy November, or perhaps vowel laden  February, months that appeal to the sort of bleak  misanthropic inkstained windwhipped rainsoaked wretches that write real poetry. Not knowing anything about misery, and heartache, and unable to rhyme anything with "hegemony", I figured I'd better keep it simple.

And I do like June. But I don't think that would matter, to a real poet.

Now in a few weeks, it'll be summer. And we'll change our logo on the masthead to the summer version we have stored away. And I must confess, it makes me feel like a fraud to use it. Because on it, I have the loveliest picture of a blood red rose and its verdant sawtooth leaves ever. And I grew that rose for my beloved, and I took that picture, in high summer, and I made it into a masthead. And the fraud part is- I can't grow roses.

Can you? I didn't think so. It's easier to grow bamboo in Antarctica, I imagine, than to grow a rose in your garden with an IV drip of manure. And that picture is likely to give you the impression that I can grow a rose, and a beautiful one at that, and it's just not so.

Imagine you're a rookie ballplayer. You get up to pinch hit in your first game, bases loaded, two outs in the ninth, because everyone else on the bench has already been thrown out of the game, or is injured and can't crawl to the plate. Your father-in-law is the general manager, and he told the manager that he had to use you, his "worthless son-in-law," and not to forfeit the game instead of allowing you to bat to save us all the embarrassment,  no matter what you look like. And you go up to the plate, and close your eyes, and the pitcher considers your very existence an affront to the game, just look at you, so he throws at your head, to teach you a lesson, but you don't see it, because your eyes are closed too tightly for even your shaking knees to rattle open, and the ball goes behind your head, and hits your bat on your shoulder, where it would have stayed for three consecutive strikes, if he'd have thrown them, and the ball sails over the fence from behind your head, and you have a grand slam and win the game. And then you retire, never to bat again, with a better Batting Average, Slugging Percentage, RBI per AB ratio than anyone who had ever played the game.

And that's what I feel like, showing you that rose, because I deserve as much credit for it as that accidental Babe Ruth. Because I have no idea what I did, and I could never do it again. But the rose was lovely, just the same.

Now roses used to be common. People gardened a lot more than they do now, I think, or perhaps more seriously, and roses were considered the big thing in the garden. I'd overhear the matrons in the old neighborhood, discussing whether ashes from the fireplace should be mixed into the soil or sprinkled atop it. Every chimney had a trellis for the canes to climb. Horse manure, or cow manure disagreements would start a general melee at a garden party.

My mother grew roses when I was a kid, in an enormous hedge that snaked across our tract house yard, as out of place as Grace Kelly at a laundromat. And whatever devil worship or alchemy she used, she never clued me in. Not that I was interested. I was too busy playing baseball as poorly as that story, come to think of it.  I never figured I'd want to know how to grow something in a yard. And the one gardening chore that always fell to me, rosewise, was to take a coffee can filled with a few inches of used motor oil, and go up and down the hedge and knock the endless legions of Japanese Beetles off the petals and the leaves into the can, and to their deaths. Mom didn't believe in pesticides, but I think if you asked the beetles, they would have preferred poison, but we didn't ask. If the Hindus are right, I'll have some heavy dues to pay in my next life. I still get all misty eyed when I pass a Jiffy Lube, but roses remain mysterious.

I've tried to grow Roses many times since I became a homeowner, and I've killed more plants than beetles now, I think, but I keep trying, because every time you get one of those buds, and it pops into that sublime dish of crimson velvet petals, you'll do anything to repeat it. Anything, apparently, except what the plant wants you to do, which remains obscure.

Now I've explained my wife and the flower boxes already. So you know I'm on my own here. And I've explained to everyone that I worship and adore her, so nothing but a rose will do, if I come in from the garden with a posey for her. And I think I was so very surprised I could grow rhodies, and azaleas, and geraniums, and hostas, and barberries, and tall phlox, and impatiens, and begonias, and pachysandra, and astilbe, and lamb's ear, and euonymous, and maiden hair ferns, and basketfuls of others, because I figured they'd all die if I tried to grow them- all  the roses all did.

But to surrender is to die. There is a new rose in the garden, and it has two buds already. It's still in the plastic pot from the nursery, where it will remain until I coax the sublime, red petals from the buds at least once. And then I'll plant it where it stands, after consulting fourteen separate volumes about gardening. And it will perish dear reader, I know it will, but I must try.

And photograph it when it blooms.

6/08/05 Wednesday-

Ode to June:

June is the king of all months. Now I'm not qualified to offer an opinion on the king of all months in Calgary, or Phoenix, or Oklahoma, or the Seychelles, but I know June in New England as well as anyone, and let me tell you, it's sweet.

 June is the monthly dessert after eight months of eating your calendar vegetables. June is the coins rattling in the tray after you pulled the lever of life for all those bleak, grey days of early spring  without effect. June is the ball crossing the stripe and swishing into the twine at soccer. If you're the forward, I mean. If you're the goalie, the other eleven months are the ball crossing the line, and you, defeated, looking up from the mud as it sails past. June is the save.

And that magnificent long gentle slide from the longest day of the year (that's in June, of course) to Columbus  Day, is the payoff for having to scrape your windshield frost with an expired credit card, without gloves, in February.

June is the first month you look at the fireplace and try to recall  the last time you really needed it  to take the chill from your bones that the winter pounded into them. And you close the fireplace flue, in a ceremony like the immurement of a Pharoah in his pointy stone temple, to slumber for the ages that pass on the calendar until you resurrect it in October. 

The hummingbirds peer in your window, wondering when the delicate bell shaped flowers you put out for them each year might be ready, but too polite to knock. The finches sing outside the window, replacing the sound of the scraping of the snowplow on a distant road just before daybreak. The finch is preferable, I think.

That houseplant that you ministered to like a hemophiliac prince all winter, and looked each day like it would collapse in a pile of dust and corruption if you forgot to water it hourly, goes out on the porch in June, and untended, grows like a two year old child does, washed only by the warm gentle showers of June rain.

And in the evening, which seems to go on for days, the gloaming lowers itself gently on your head like a crown;  the bats begin their endless circles overhead, their leathery wings beating time to nature's tune, and whispering in your ear as you walk the yard  between the luminous Hostas and ferns; all the while illuminated only by the rich dregs of sunshine left in the June day's cup, and the fireflies.

And the ocean in June, dear reader, the ocean. Nature erases the line between earth and sky, and you feel as though you could sail right up the wall of the heavens if you could just get to the horizon, and trail your fingers through the firmament. And the clouds float by one by one, like lone teenagers at a mall, unable to coalesce into a gang, and so, without the others to goad them on, they smile and look almost cheery- and a little silly if they try to puff themselves up into something threatening.  

And when the thunderstorms come in late June, to settle the dispute between the earth and the sky, with the ocean third man in, the great anvil headed clouds rise up to the earth's ceiling and  break open like a pinata, bringing the great gift of a cleansing summer rain to cool the air and pop the humidity like a bubble in the bath. And then it's over, and the air is filled with bracing ionized air, as if you lived under a waterfall, and you walk shoeless in the grass outside the door and watch the birds gather themselves for another take at their improvised opera. And if the storm tales a pole, and the electricity with it, no matter, for the sun shines until you're done with it, and you wink off to sleep with it winking back at you on the horizon.

I like June.

6/07/05-Tuesday-

I'm so dreadfully sorry. Really, I am. I feel terrible about this, I really do. Forgive me, please.

I've been making, and selling, lots of things that haven't made their way to the website, and you've been going without. Egad, I feel just awful. Well, let's try to catch up, and start today.

Today's entry is just a trifle, really. It's not much, when you get right down to it. Just four boards, really. And it's only wonderful. And only the most prized possession of dozens of little children whose parents weren't cruelly denied the opportunity to purchase one, as you have been (I'm so, so sorry) by my fecklessness, and slow typing, and George Bush Senior Administration HTML skills.

So I'm going to try to make amends, by allowing you to buy it. All of you. Now, It won't expiate my guilt properly  if only a few of you purchase one. You all have to have one. And to make sure you all have one, I'm going to offer to send it to you for only $29.99, a trifle, really, and ten dollars off the regular price of $39.99. And I'm going to make this offer only until the end of June, with FREE SHIPPING too.

Now let's review: $10.00 off. Free shipping anywhere in the USA. That's worth another $10.00  easy. I must really feel bad about this. Because you people are stealing, really.

And what the "it" is, dear reader, is this:

Ten Fingers

6/06/05 Monday-

Top o' the morning to ye, whatsnewerite. Or whatsnewerette, as the case may be. If you use that third bathroom at the alternative bookstore, please write to me and tell me what suffix to use to greet you properly, too. We're nothing, if not mannerly around here.

It's a long road that has no turning, as they say, so let's turn the corner on this window box thingie, and get back to despoiling the internet landscape with our opinion on other matters, shall we?

Well. Well, well, well. Now you've had plenty of advice, up to now. What with me grinding away, your neighbor coming over to critique your sawhorses, and the helpful teenager at the Big Orange Place explaining to you politely that he doesn't think they sell four inch long,  galvanized screws that are already bent. Of course, if you like, he'll get on the intercom, and summon someone in charge to ask. You can always tell who's in charge down there, they're the only one amongst the clerks who can shave, either their chin or their legs, respectively.

You think you've gotten advice up to this point? Hold on, dear reader, for the onslaught of unsolicited opinion, for you are about to paint something.

Now people who are willing to help you paint something are a smaller proportion of the population than even the people who need that third bathroom I mentioned earlier. But everyone is ready to tell you how to do it. Actually, that's imprecise. They mostly, are prepared to tell you how you did it wrong, and " back in "______" we don't do it that way," after you're done. And you missed a spot.

Now I used to paint things for a living, mind you. Small, quotidian things at first. Big, elaborate things later.  And believe me, I've heard it all. I once painted a trompe l'oleil mural, in a mansion, and the roofer came in, filthy, unshaven, swearing, with a cigarette sporting  two inches of ash dangling in the corner of his mouth, and he offered me advice. Now I suspect that his experience with  two point perspective and faux marble might  have been, how do I put this politely, not absolutely top shelf. 

But shame on me. Perhaps I've got two many preconceived notions about folks who use @#$! as a verb, a noun, an adjective, an adverb, and the object of a prepositional phrase, all in the same sentence. Maybe I should have given him the benefit of the doubt.  I might have missed the day he was on the Today Show and  got his Lifetime Achievement Award for Decoration, along with his honorary degree from the Sorbonne.

"Why the #$%! is this like this?" He said . "I wouldn't do this in my #$%!-ing house."

Really, do tell. The one in the south of France, or the other one?

So take it from someone who's been paid to render an opinion on paint. Everyone's going to offer an opinion for free. And I doubt anyone is going to give you the counsel I'm about to.

Pick out a nice color in a water based, low lustre house paint. Open the can. Stir it until you get bored. Get a disposable 3 inch brush. Slap that paint right on the wood. Twice. you're done.

The horror! No primer! No sanding! No expensive flag tipped tynex/orel brushes! You visigoth you.

Now trust me, it doesn't matter. It won't peel. Let me take that back. It might peel, but if it's going to, because of the sun and rain and snow,  it will no matter how you finish it. and remember, it's supposed to look weathered, and simple, not fussy. So don't bring fussy into it. But now here's the hard part. Don't make a mess. Paint never really looks right if you make a mess. Being neat is not fussy. Leave the shrubs and the siding out of it. And don't paint it a color that competes with the flowers.

All paint brands are about the same, if you compare like for like, product-wise.  Gaudy claims from the manufacturers about this or that characteristic are generally true, but one is 99% something or other, and the others are 98%, and it's not worth worrying about.

Except one thing. Pigment cost money. Both the kind of pigment in the paint, and the very expensive pigment they use to print the sales brochures. And if there's any difference between the brands that matters, it's almost always the quality of the sales brochures, and sophistication of the colors. And getting rich, earthy sophisticated tones for paint requires a sophisticated approach to the pigments. Cheap paint makes grey by mixing lamp black with white. It wears well, and applies easily, but it's Just Grey.  Better paint has people educated in color, researching combinations, and using four pigments to achieve Grey. Rich Sophisticated Grey. And you can use their materials to find color combinations that don't look like they belong in a trailer park. Just stay away from the color chip displays that look bland overall from a distance. You'll be fine.

And now, lay a piece of widow screening in the bottom of the box, to keep the good soil from slowly sifting out through the neatly drilled holes you put there. Then put a thin layer of something that will keep the drainage good in the bottom so the roots don't rot. I use a couple of trowels of gravel from the driveway, but anything will do if it lets water drain free. They sell nifty styrofoam pellets now, of the sort that nurseries have been using for years to mix in their soil to keep it from caking. They work well, and don't weigh as much as gravel. Then the peat and the poop, mixed with good garden soil. And in go the geraniums, and the vinca vine. Or Boston Ivy. Put the vines nearer the front of the box, and it will droop nicely over the canted cap we put on the front of the box for just that purpose. Or you choose the flowers. Who am I to give you advice?

By the way, that's me behind the flash, mirrored in the darkened window. I think I look great in the photo, don't you? I should have my picture taken like that all the time. Now you know what I look like.

Now you're wondering how we chose our color. Well, we chose it because its name, and its delicate tone, conjured up images of ancient babylonian temples, washed by the biblical sun to a delicate ivory; or perhaps the color of the finest cheese, labored over by the flinty Vermont farmer, and seen in the rich, clear beams of the first sunshine of the farm workday, filtered through the mist in the meadow; or perhaps evoking a panorama of wheat, languidly waving in the gentle breeze, stretching to the  horizon on the rolling plains of Tuscany, and crowned by the regal Mediterranean sun.

Ben Moore named it "182." Get some. You'll love it.

6/05/05- Sunday-

Greetings and salutations. It's Sunday, and I love Sunday. Mow the lawn, with the Wee One in your lap. What an expression he has, the entire time. Beatific, true, but something of a game face too. Grim determination. He's only two years old, the Wee One is, but I imagine you have the same expression on your face if you've been following along with this window box business.  At this point, I'm like a Wallenda,- you're interested in what I'm doing, but you wouldn't be totally surprised or disappointed if I fell. Well let's see.

Now, I've got a table saw. Three, actually. I'm not sure if you do. Many people have one in their basement, gathering dust, if not sawdust. It makes it easier to trim this thing out, if you do, but it's not mandatory.

What I want you to do, is take a length of 2-1/2" wide pine, and rip it in half, sorta. Set the fence for 1-1/4", and the blade will take his vigorish, and  the waste side of the cut will be a little thinner. No matter. The 1-1/4" wide piece should be the same length as the battens you cut for the front and back of the box, in my case, 39". But I told you before, why measure? Lay the piece on the span, and mark the cut  right on it. You can't go wrong that way, and save walking over to the saw, mumbling to yourself: "38 inches, and one big line, and two sorta big lines, and two teeny hash marks" over and over, and mismeasuring. Take the waste cutoff from the 1-1/4" strip, and cut two pieces 7-3/4" long, and glue and nail them on both ends of the front panel, flush with the edges. The last picture shows it better than I can explain it.

Which reminds me. I've got lots of books about making things. Houses, boats, furniture, paintings, all  kinds of things. And I can tell you modern books about making things look so much better than old books. They have acres of pictures showing you precisely how to do what's being done. Even my modest little "What's New Page" can bring instant digital photos and accompanying text, with links to buy the things I'm using, and accompanied by the occasional pictures of dead actresses for good measure. Amazing, and good.

But I can tell you dear reader, that the books I treasure the most have few, or no illustrations in them. They're usually 50 plus years old, some much older, and they contain more information than modern books, which are loaded with space gobbling visual information. Since books were precious then, and rarer than they are now, the people who wrote and published them really seemed to be able to write well. The modern ease of photography and writing  has removed the heavy lifting of publishing, and we're all 90 lb weaklings compared to our immediate predecessors. There's a lot of information in a fifty year old textbook. There's a lot of pictures and white space in a new one. The modern how- to books are not even in the written tradition, I think, they're more like the experience of working along with someone, like a helper. It's an oral tradition they mimic, and they're not even trying to write, they're writing down what they would say, instead. Which is fine, and useful in its way, but...

I have a book reprinted in 1924, originally published in 1905, entitled "The Scientific American Boy." It's filled with a compendium of industrious activities for young men. The book itself is a wonder. It is sparsely populated with a few crude line drawings of the items being discussed, and tons of lapidary and useful text. And they expected you to make, and use, for amusement, the following items: a skating sailboat; snowshoes; a tent; a crossbow; surveying instruments; canvas canoes; rope ladders, a tree house; a derrick and windmill to pump water; a scow with a sail; a toboggan; a winter shelter; a small sailboat; a hammock; paper kites; a water wheel; a log cabin with a fireplace; a gravity railroad, which is essentially a handmade rollercoaster; a cantilever bridge that any modern civil engineer couldn't improve upon; and  dozens of other things to make and use, made  from readily available things using hardly any tools.

And the part that strikes me as most extraordinary about the whole thing is the fact that you could make this stuff with just a few crude drawings because the text is so well thought out, terse, and incisive. Now it's also neat to think of children making all that stuff  and, well,  playing outside, but let's leave the pontificating about "kids these days" out of it. Those kids nowadays have different skills, and  they're not necessarily inferior. The average teenager knows more about a computer that Bill Gates does, for instance.

And each and every one of those venerable books sits on the shelf and mocks me silently when I write, like I did two paragraphs ago: "The last picture shows it better than I can explain it." Oh well.

OK, back to business. Now you need 2" wide stock for the little frames on the sides. Rip it on the tablesaw, if you've got one, or make do with the 2-1/2" stuff. Because the front is canted forward, and the sides are vertical, the 2" side frames  will align themselves visually with the 2-1/2" frame on the front. Now if you inspect the last picture, you'll see we have covered up all the screw fasteners and the laminated edges of the plywood. And the 2" wide pieces align perfectly, cut square, to the little canted portion of the sides. The frames will add the play of light and shadow, and depth, to the whole enchilada, and a certain "whatsis," as Bertie Wooster would say.

In that last picture, I've also laid out what's coming next, in advance, just like you do when telling a bad joke, which I am also an expert at.

Glue and nail the 1-1/4" strip on top of the back. Cut 2 pieces from 2-1/2" wide stock, 7-7/8" long, to the long point, with a 15 degree bevel on the front edge- just like the battens we put under the bottom. There's that 15 degree thing again. It's kismet. Or destiny, Or schadenfreude. Or something. Glue and nail them atop the sides, as shown. Now measure the span from the outside to the outside edge. Better still, lay the 2-1/2" front nosing right on it, mark it, and cut, glue and nail it. Now we're done. Making the box, that is.

Now, a window box does best when it sits on a shelf or brackets, it's true, but we're going to hang this lickity split, and make our bets and take our chances, as they say at the track, and get to the grille earlier.

This next thing is complicated, I know. Gird your loins. Buck up. I have faith in you.

Get some galvanized screws. Long ones. Now I  prefer bent ones, because I'm strange, and cheap. You could use straight, brand new ones, but where's the challenge in that? Suit yourself. Get 4 of 'em at least, whatever you choose, a box of mud is heavy.

We've got to go through, let's see, 1/2" of MDO, a 3/4" cleat, +/- 1/2 " of shingles or clapboards or somesuch siding, and another 1/2" of sheathing, just to get to something substantial, framing wise, under the sill. What you're looking for is the framing subsill, usually a doubled 2 x 4 affair, buried in the wall under window opening. You need 3-1/2" to 4" screws, galvanized, to find it and grab it. Tuck the box up under the sill, so that rain from the window sill drips into the box. Predrill the four holes, evenly spaced, about 1-1/2" inches down inside the box, using the nifty bit you got at Amazon, that's putting my kids thorough school.

Now comes the really hard part. Drive those four screws, through all that stuff, and be sure to strip the heads just as the heads snug up to the MDO. Don't strip the heads too soon, or the screws will stick out into the box and annoy the ladybugs, and your window box will rattle around. But it is important that you strip the screws horribly, just like the professionals do. Otherwise, when the box is old and tattered, and the next occupants of your home want to remove it, and they  want to continue the ancient and time honored tradition of swearing and cursing the thoughtless Neanderthal person who installed the blasted thing in the first place, they will not be disappointed.  Of such traditions, civilization is built.

Tomorrow:  Paint and Flowers!

6/04/05- Saturday-

Good day sirs, or madams. I must make furniture today. I have a bunch of legs and aprons ready to be assembled into tables in the wood laboratory, and must get to them. Now I could spend the whole morning, staring at the computer screen until drops of blood appear on my forehead, trying to conjure up a joke about legs and aprons, and The Rockettes all getting married at the same time, but I can't spare the time, really. So we're going to put this window box to bed this weekend, and fill it with flowers by Monday. And that's that.

What the hell are those,? you just said. Never you mind. just make five of them and be still. They are 4-5/8" long to the long point, and are angled at 15 degrees like the mark says. They're made from leftover 2-1/2 inch stock. You have a lot of scraps left over, no doubt, because you didn't measure anything twice, and cut a bunch of stock too short, and wasted it. (whistles, walks away with hands in pockets)

Ahem. You will notice that you cut a strip 4-5/8" wide, an eternity and one internet post ago. Perhaps they are related somehow, ya think? We used to call a revelation like that "Light dawns over Marble Head" at work in these parts.

When you're new on the job, inevitably some old coot would send the "new guy" out to the truck to get a Board Stretcher, or a Johnson Rod, or a Gazinta, or a Left Handed Screwdriver, or some other imaginary tool, and the other old hands would have a snicker at the poor young lad as he nodded as if he understood, and went out to the truck on a fool's mission. Of course, the kid is never that dumb, he just plays along with the old knucklehead, because five minutes alone at the truck is five fewer minutes listening to the old buzzard flapping his gums. And he returns empty handed, feigning sheepishness, and the tired, disreputable, and infantile men would jape: "Light dawns over Marble Head!," and then talk about it and rehash it for a month.

Of course the kid is putting himself through college by working in construction, speaks three languages, and can figure differential equations by the hour, but to them, he's a dope. Eventually, they will all be working for this boy.

Anyhow, Marblehead is a lovely north shore town here in Massachusetts, but you people in flyover country can substitute "the bulkhead" for "Marblehead". When you're insulting people, it  really doesn't require that much precision.

Where were we? Oh yes. The mystery blocks. Do this with them:

One on each end of the bottom strip (the 4-5/8" wide piece), one in the middle, and split the difference with the other two. Ensure that all the beveled edges are all on one side, or it will be wrong, and you will be unhappy. Glue the blocks on, and pound some galvanized nails, less than 1-1/4" long, either through the MDO into the pine, or through the pine into the MDO. Or use screws, whatever. Get your drill motor. Did you know that's what it's actually called? The drill is actually the thing you call a drill bit. You can tell the old guys that at work, to impress them with your booklearnin,' when they call it "the drill," or "the screwgun," or the "hand me that thing right there," and point like an infant at what they want.

They may be impressed with your knowledge, but I doubt it.

They will most likely say: "Shut the !@#$ up and give me that @#$%ing thing there and put a sock in it."  Then they'll send you to the truck to get a Knot Burnisher or a Sledgeruler.

Oh yes, the drill. Drill some holes in the bottom. (yes, that's the bottom) I drilled twelve 1/4" holes. You can drill as many as you like, any old way. But somehow, you'll sleep better if every time you drill things, whether they show or not, you put them in rows, neatly. It shouldn't matter, they're just there to let the water out of the box. No one will ever see them, probably. It shouldn't matter, but somehow it does. Ask a Tibetan monk or a feng shui necromancer why, I don't know.

Right about now, you're asking yourself, is this thing ever going to be done? Well, to tell the truth, I finished it yesterday, three hours after I started it. Including painting it twice. But then again, I didn't have me waxing nostalgic and poetic about the darn thing the whole way through, like you do. I simply made it.

Glue the pine 1 by 3 strips to the front and back MDO pieces, (7-1/2" back, 7-3/4" front) like so, and nail, or screw them through the MDO into the pine, with fasteners less than 1-1/4" long.

Like dudes, you need two of these. They're totally gnarly endcaps for this bitchin' box, dudes. I like, drew all over it so you'll, like, know the score, but it's like, optional to do that, dude.

Sorry. Use the nine inch wide strip to make these, with lots left over. There's that 15 degree angle again. It appears from time to time, like channeling Spiccoli does. I nipped the top right corner off this piece after I took the picture. To do so, connect a line perpendicular from the right (angled) side to the top side, 1-1/4" long. That's where the MDO line I've drawn meets the top. That's hard to follow, but you'll see it in the next picture.

Assembly time. The pine battens are always facing out. Screw (or nail, if you prefer) through the end caps into the ends of the pine. Glue everything. Screw through the back batten into the bottom battens .The beveled ends of the bottom battens face front, to accept the angled front, if you hadn't picked up on that already. See Marblehead remark above.

I'm using aluminum screws, because they are cheap and don't rust away to nothing in a week. I countersink the heads using a reversible drill bit that makes a pilot hole, then you flip it around and it drives the screw, without removing the whole bit from the drill motor chuck. It's the greatest invention in the history of mankind, the wonder bra excepted. I put an Amazon link in the left column for the one I use. It costs less than the aircraft carrier I mentioned yesterday, so more of you will have to buy it if I'm going to retire this week. You're on you own as far as the wonder bra goes. Victoria's Secret sends two catalogs every day to every single address in the US, and hands them out to homeless people as well, I imagine, so it shouldn't be too difficult for you to lay your hands on one. A catalog, I mean. Oh, never mind.

Make it like that. I added two little 1 by 3 blocks to the front, to make a frame. Measure them to fit. ( In theory they're 2-3/4" long, but you measure them to fit because, well, we're slapping this together and who knows what you ended up with) Glue them and nail them. You can see why we nipped the corner off the end caps, to align with the angle of the front.

OK, that's a window box. But it's too darn plain. If we wanted a primitive, we would have just  faced nailed five roughsawn boards together. We're going to dress this up a little.

Tomorrow.

6/03/05-Friday

Hello again. You may have noticed, dear reader, that ingratitude is the signal characteristic of our times. Other behaviors come and go, faddishly; some good, some bad, some plain inexplicable, but being an ingrate is a constant in our culture. We are greedy and grasping and self-absorbed, and drop the gloves if someone looks at us funny, even if they just helped us carry something heavy. And I confess, I have perhaps succumbed to the ethos of the times.  Perhaps you noticed that I complained for each of the 189 straight days of rain we suffered through recently, and as histrionically as if I lived in a lean-to. And for two whole days, it's been pleasant, and did I give thanks? No. Acknowledge the improvement? Nope. Fall to my knees in ecstasy in the front yard? Hardly.

So belatedly, and contritely, here goes: It's not bad out today.

There, I feel better. Now back to that window box.

We need a plan, and the boat plan won't do. (How's that coming along? Found a machine shop yet? We'll get back to that) But it's going to take longer to draw a plan than to make the darn thing. Let's just let it rip, shall we?

Alrighty then. Here we are, ready for a sheet of  MDO. Now all those people who offered you all the advice about indestructible window box construction aren't going to like my sawhorses. Because, Ladies and Gentlemen, everyone has a different plan for sawhorses. It's like DNA. No one has your exact formula, unless of course you're OJ Simpson.  Now I admit, my sawhorses are  made from packing crate lumber and cobwebs. I've been given plenty of advice on how to improve them, all of it unsolicited. But then again, I made them shortly after Reagan had his first inauguration, and they've been stored outdoors for a good part of the interval between then and now, and used, abused, and knocked about considerably quite regularly, and I'm still using them. Many of the people who offered me critiques on them have passed to their reward, while my horses are still going strong. I endeavor to attend the funerals of these kind souls, who tried to save me from the shame of inferior sawbucks, without being asked. My wife always wears a red dress, and I whistle during the eulogy, generally.

I once visited The Orange Place, and saw to my consternation, pre-made sawhorses. The horror! I thought it was illegal to buy a sawhorse. At least from a zen point of view, if you don't make your own, how can anyone trust you to make anything atop them?

At any rate, the two by fours atop those horses  are cut from trees that weren't planted yet when I made them, and they still don't wiggle in the joints.  The two by fours keep the sheet we're about to cut from collapsing when you're 90% done crosscutting it, and drawing snickers from your neighbors.  They'll be over offering advice on sawhorse construction, if you falter, so use the studs. 

Right there is the the majority of the elaborate toolset you need to make this thing, dear reader. The saw goes back to John Kennedy's inauguration. A tape measure, a ruler, and forty year old circular saw. Okay, set the circ-saw depth to a little over 1/2" depth of cut, and cut the panel in half length wise. You'll be left with two four foot square pieces. They'll be easier to handle than the whole sheet.

Cut a 9" wide strip off the side of the half sheet. Save it for later, now cut single pieces 7-3/4" wide, 7-1/2" wide, and 4-5/8" wide, all 39" long. Like this:

Now, the piece might not be precisely 39inches long. Why? Because when you ripped the 9" off the sheet, the saw blade took a little for himself. It doesn't matter. Whenever possible, we're gonna use the articles themselves to measure, not a ruler, and save trouble. I've never understood this measure twice cut once business. I've heard it all over the place. Books, TV shows, radio, on t-shirts and mugs. But let me tell you friends, in the real construction world, things move fast. And in the real world, the real motto is: Measure twice... Hey! what's taking so long? Why didn't you measure correctly the first time? You're fired! Something like that.

Use one of the strips you just cut  for a ruler to measure four 1 by 3 pine strips like you see above (read yesterday's What's New to find out how big a 1 by 3 is.) I put the glue in that last picture for a reason. We're gonna use it, because it can't hurt. Make sure you get exterior glue, the interior stuff isn't water resistant. It's the nails and screws that hold this thing together, but let's give the adhesive a fighting chance, and get the right stuff.

(We'll continue this debacle tomorrow.)

6/02/05- Thursday

Whoah there. Sorry. I got distracted. Majorly distracted. That picture is from HedyLamarr.com, and majorly distracting it is, too. Yesterday, I offhandedly threw that quote in from ol' Hedy. I remembered that quote verbatim. It fit nicely into yesterday's narrative too. Only one problem. For the life of me, I couldn't remember who said it. Jayne Mansfield? Marilyn Monroe? Ava Gardner? I had to figure it out. And I stumbled upon the quote attributed to her on a Hollywood quotations page. And I was a little sketchy on Hedy. I remembered Harvey Korman was named Hedley Lamarr as a riff on her name in Blazing Saddles, but that was about it. So I Googled her. And then, forgive me, I ogled her. Let me tell you, dear reader, she puts all those other starlets in the shade, as they say. 

Just look at that woman. Just look at that hat. She's the second best looking woman to ever walk this earth. (Hi dear! What's that? Oh, nothing, Just typing a little.) And unlike today's starlets, those aren't tattoos on her arms. If Michael Jackson ever gets a load of her picture, he'll probably stop worshipping Elizabeth Taylor, and start having his remaining flesh pulled off and glued back on until he looks like Hedy instead. Sorta.

Now I know I should probably get back to the window box immediately, but you have to know about Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. She died four short years ago, in Orlando Florida. She was born at the start of WWI, 1914, in Austria. And in between, holy cow. When she was seventeen, they put her in the movies. She was kind of a free spirit. She apparently was the first actress to appear nude in a film. She married a scientist, who became a Nazi and started making munitions for them. She found Nazism repellent (that sounds obvious now, but it was courageous and prescient in interwar Europe) and divorced him, and lit out for the USA. Hollywood took half a look at her and dubbed her: "The Most Beautiful Woman in Films." which I think is the last understatement to come out of that publicist's paradise since then. She made a ton of movies, some of which I now recall. And believe me, I don't remember Sampson and Delilah because Victor Mature was wearing something diaphanous in it.

Now my friends, who have been following along closely here at the What's New page, may remember the article I wrote about the Discovery Channel's 100 Greatest Americans. Well, I say that we add Hedy to that list. Because somehow, along the way, she managed to invent, and patent, along with a composer she befriended in Hollywood, the technology necessary to avoid the jamming of torpedo guidance systems during WWII, and offered it to the US government to fight the Nazis. That technology was also the precursor of today's cell phone technology. It didn't become practical until the fifties, when transistors appeared, and by that time the patent had run out. It doesn't diminish the accomplishment. And on the side, she helped raise seven million dollars, in one night, selling war bonds. And that was back when a million dollars was a lot of money. It's barely enough to bribe a state senator now.

 What's happened to Hollywood? These people used to be glamorous. And witty. Way cool. And occasionally, like Hedy, patriotic and smart too. Movies were way better fifty years ago. Hedy made a motion picture based on a John Steinbeck novel. Nothing gets made nowadays unless it's about a wisecracking hitman with a heart of gold, or a comic book. And Hedy's brush with nudity in a European Art Film is worlds away from the gratuitous and desultory nudity in Hollywood nowadays. We can all draw everyone's breasts in Hollywood from memory at this point. They should all put on some clothes, get on a bus, and take that bus to an acting school. Come back when you can act like something other than stupid.

And somehow I can't picture, oh, let's say Angelina Jolie, partnering up with John Williams, and coming up with an innovative missile defense technology anytime soon, can you? And Angelina's pretty creepy. Hedy's a babe. Visit her site. Some of her cool might rub off on you.

Now back to that window box. Let's get the material selection out on the table, so you can get lots of good  and bad advice about it from everyone. You'll hear things like:

It's gotta be cypress, for rot resistance.

It's gotta be pressured treated wood, ditto.

It's gotta be cedar, ditto.

It's gotta be lined with copper, or it will rot.

Don't make it from metal, it cooks the plants.

Make it from pine, so it will paint up well.

It's gotta be marine plywood, assembled with epoxy, or it will delaminate.

And so forth.

Well, it could, but doesn't have to be any of those things dear reader. You're gonna get ten or fifteen years out of your window box, no matter how indestructible it is. Let's keep it simple, and well, picturesque.

We're gonna make the box out of MDO. Medium Density Overlay. Why? Because it's cheap, and easy to work with, and strong, and not too heavy, and it paints up well, and it holds a screw pretty good. MDO is the stuff that road signs are made from, if they're not made of steel. Like the "Entering Marion" sign. It is an exterior plywood, with waterproof glue, and a tough paper face on it, impregnated with waterproofing too. It's a light golden color when you buy it around these parts.

You can make two windowboxes out of half a sheet of  MDO.  A full sheet is 4' x 8.' You could get four out of that, easy. We'll also use some preprimed #2 pine, 3/4" thick, and 2-1/2" wide, for the bands around the box, to stiffen and adorn it. You'll need about 16 linear feet per box. They call that a 1 by 3. That's called its nominal size, and traces the measurement of the lumber back to before it is dried, and shrinks, and is dressed to its final dimensions. It does seem to the fledgling lumber purchaser that calling something 3/4" x 2-1/2"  a 1 by 3 is like calling the small coffee a medium, and figuring no-one will notice. But you are in the lumber yard now, dear reader, and they're not trying to pull a fast one; believe me, they don't feel the need to make any bones about taking the shirt off your back for a strip of wood a bird was chirping in a few weeks ago. It's just one of those interesting and time honored traditions that traces its roots back to Noah, and people who know that sort of thing, know that sort of thing.

Now if you go to the Big Orange Place, the pleasant teenage girl or boy with the orange smock and braces might mistake it for MDF, which is medium density fiberboard, and entirely the wrong article. MDF is brown talcum powder, mixed with nasty glue, pressed into big rectangles. It's what bad furniture is made from. It lasts approximately ten minutes outdoors, unless it rains, in which case it disintegrates immediately. And it weighs +/- 750 pounds per sheet, or so it seems to if you try to carry it.

 1/2" thick MDO is what you want.

Now we're gonna start measuring. You should too. How wide is the window you're adorning? No, no, not the window sash alone. You should include the casings that flank it too. I've got 40" here. That's about average, and not too long for one trough. Really long windowboxes are generally a more difficult proposition, they have a tendency to bow out in the middle of the span from the weight of the wet soil and plants, and require either many partitions along their length, or better yet, you can divide the window box into more than one box. I've made them 10-12 feet long on occasion, but there's a lot more structure in those than we need to deal with here. (The box is under the three windows ganged together on the right, waiting for spring planting. BTW, the entire "gingerbread" front of that house is MDO, with pine battens on it. It's great stuff.)

Anywho, we'll continue the box of geraniums symposium tomorrow.

You can take a chance on a Hedy Lamarr double feature in the left hand column for five lousy dollars. I'm going to. If only 60% of the population of New York City, give or take a few million people, does so through my link, I can retire. Or just one person can use the link to get to Amazon, buy the DVD plus one aircraft carrier. It makes no nevermind to me.

6/01/05- Wednesday

Picturesque, dear reader, is hard to do. Glamorous, for instance, is much easier According to renowned midcentury brassiere inhabitor and actress Hedy Lamarr, just stand still and look stupid. Picturesque is more subtle.

I have a neighbor. He does not understand picturesque. He toils in its vineyard all day, but he grows no grapes. He puchases gewgaws by the metric tonne, and places them in the landscape, and they achieve an effect that is not just non-picturesque, it surpasses that milestone and enters the realm of anti-picturesque. It actually removes quaintness from the universe, by attempting to draw it forth.

Picturesque is drawn from the word pittore, a painter. Italian, that one. From Merriam Webster:

Main Entry: pic·tur·esque
Pronunciation: "pik-ch&-'resk
Function: adjective
Etymology: French & Italian; French pittoresque, from Italian pittoresco, from pittore painter, from Latin pictor, from pingere
Date: 1703
1 a : resembling a picture : suggesting a painted scene b : charming or quaint in appearance

Now I have a hunch, that when they refer to a painter, they mean, like I do, a guy with an easel and a beret, and a smock spangled with daubs, trying to capture the light and color of the sunset as it dapples the trees, and crowns them with fire. I don't think, as perhaps my neighbor does, that they are referring to the fellows that park in the highway median, and sandblast the girders that support the overpass, and spray  it with rust resistant green from a gargantuan tank.

Because what we are NOT talking about here, is neatness.

Being picturesque is a subtle thing. And alas, you cannot achieve subtlety with vinyl siding.  And we will not, right out of the gate, allow any discussion of  maintenance free plastics, or superpolymers, or anything that will be used to make the window box indestructible and never need painting, and look exactly like pod people from alpha centauri left it here. We are going to make a box of mud, and let the flowers and vines take it over and make it look pretty as a picture.

Now the landscaping I admire most, and have probably seen as much of as anybody, is by Frederick Law Olmstead. And I'm going to have to point you back to Mr. Eyechart, yesterday's author, once again, because he and I seem to be the only ones interested in the guy. Look left and you'll see a link to Amazon, and A Clearing in the Distance.

My accountant is now having an aneurism. Another book that costs ten bucks. He should garden more, get outside.

At any rate, it's not a How-To book. It's about the life and times and work of the man who designed Central Park, which is fine, and the Emerald Necklace of parks, parkways and greenspace in and around Boston, which is much finer. Mr Olmstead was a very influential man. His method of sculpting the landscape, and creating views, and planting things in such a way as to make them seem as though they had always been there that way, is unsurpassed. I was born in the shadow of the stately oaks Mr Olmstead planted in Boston, and picnicked in Franklin Park, and went to the zoo, a real Victorian Zoo, with wrought iron bars tipped with a flourish separating us from the fauna, before they "fixed" it, and made it appear as if we are being displayed to the animals, who aren't interested.

And in that book dear reader, you will learn that there will come a time, weeks or months or years after your  window box is in place, where the combination of water and dirt, and plants and bugs and weather and whatnot is going to make that box look, well, no longer new. And that is where the road forks, and you must take the right path. You must not scrub the box with bleach, and paint it, and then, dissatisfied with its newness, find a plastic one, that never needs maintenance and looks like the highway overpass. Let the box get a smidgeon ramshackle, to add to the general effect, and try to achieve that balance that you're looking for between tending it, and making it look like you're tending it.

And so now we know what we're trying to do. Tomorrow, we'll begin trying to do it.

I almost forgot the boat plans. How's the can of worms and angel hair coming along?

(To be continued)

A gentle warning, dear reader. I went to the emporium of wood yesterday, for I have many orders to fill. And the tiger maple cost exactly TWICE what I paid for it last time. Now I assured the fellow at the woodyard that all I wanted was the wood itself, and we were all stocked up on caviar and Faberge eggs at our house, but he assured me that the number covered only the cost of the lumber. Yikes.

So if I were you, I would take advantage of my inherent laziness and lack of business acumen and order something from the catalog in tiger maple immediately. You know, before I get up early enough one day soon to both write this tripe AND change the prices on the webpages. I can assure you the prices won't be any lower when I change it. I can't tell tell my accountant about what I paid for the stuff, either, not on the same day as posting another ten dollar book. Poor fellow, his heart couldn't take it.

5-31-05- Monday

Greetings and salutations. The sun shone for a few minutes, and it was good. We added expensive weeds to the mud and moss  gardened yesterday. The Wee One merrily stomped Impatiens, The Boy waved fat toads at his mother, the police came when they heard father's knees going off like gunshots every time he knelt down, and it was a generally merry happening.  Please recall dear reader, that on May 2nd I warned you about putting out your geraniums early. Well May 30th ain't early, is it? And next weekend, tune in, as we put away the grill, and clean the gutters in preparation for winter..

No, no, it just seems that way.

I was struck, while annoying the earthworms yesterday, at how traditional the plants we use here at the Sippican Cottage have become. Well, many traditions arise because they make perfect sense to the most people, unlike the tradition of giving newlyweds candy dishes.

Hosta and pachysandra in the shade, with a begonia to poke you in the eye with a little color, tall phlox in the sun, lining the walk, to reach out and shake your hand after a long day, barberries and rhododendrons in the dappled sunshine at the edge of the glade, forming a phalanx against the creeping infestations of wild strawberry and brambles. And pots full of geraniums, because, well, that's how it's done. And as you run down that list, the reader will perhaps notice as I did, that not one of those plants is native to North America. Certainly not to New England. I spy Chinese, Japanese, Polynesian, and a phylum to be named later in a trade, as they say, softening the look of our yards. And the earthworms we're annoying while we're planting these foreigners aren't native to North America either. Consider that. They seem to have made themselves at home here though, since some guy in buckle shoes unleashed their ancestor from a potted plant on a new continent.

And we Americans owe much of this to our English forbears, who as Mark Twain put it, if damned for eternity, would try to garden the ash-pits of Hades. Just so. Sometimes I think that ragtag assortment of inbred germanic queens and kings sent all those British boats to scour the world, and occasionally get eaten by the locals as a change of pace from being drowned, just to fill up the maps and the flower beds. Their sacrifice, and the natives' indigestion, have not been in vain. The azaleas are lovely.

Now, I've got a project to do. It's not the regular thing around here, (some furniture) but I thought you might be interested. I have to make, and fill, a window box. Now we had a window box, and you can see it here and there in the pictures infesting this website, but sadly dear reader, it is no more.

Remember that winter we were commiserating about? It took the window box like the plague took Europe. That window box, filled with frozen mud, stood strong against the rain, and bugs, and ice and snow, and gales, and general misery, lo these seven years. Even when an enormous pine shrugged off a siamese bole 35 feet tall and two feet across, it glanced off the shed roof  like a raindrop, and the window box slumbered on, unimpressed.

But then this year the late winter blizzards came, and then the ice, and the sleet; and it all came off that roof overhead at once, and took that box clean off its moorings. And now we are bereft, and the geraniums we purchased from long habit for the box stand in their cardboard tray, waiting, and accusing me.

Now dear reader, a window box is a wonderful thing. My wife adores them. Well, she adores the Idea of them. The actual thing, in her hands, soon becomes a coffin for its inhabitants. And while a window box is glorious, a window box filled with dead things is something else. We argued a bit many years ago, she and I, over it. She wanted a window box, to lovingly kill the plants in it, but I didn't want to settle for the general effect of a ratty box of black stalks under the windows, and wanted to go the Full Monty and put an old car up on blocks in the yard, to get the general effect. And we compromised, that we would hang a basket next to one of the windows in question, right next to the water tap, and if she could keep it alive, I'd make the box.

She killed it. And the next one, and the next one. And the one after that. And then a few more. Sometimes it seemed to me , the plants committed suicide in the car on the way home, rather than face the horrors of her ministrations.

But if you don't know the power of a tear in the corner of your lover's eye, dear reader, then you have not lived.

And so I built the window box, and put it on the shed, where she was less likely to help it, and filled it with geraniums and vinca, and left it. Now I'm no gardener, but somehow, they grow magnificently there, year after year. And now the loss of that plebian box has left a hole in our hearts, and a scar on the landscape. And so I vow we shall rebuild it, and fill it with flowers, and we'll take you along with us, in this small thing. I'll post the plans, and instructions, right here as we go, for free, and show you how to do it, if you want to. Or you can just sit  in the stands, and watch, if you prefer, that's fine.

Flowers belong to all that pass by them, not the people who plant them.

Two more things. I've added Witold Rybczynski's book Home, to the left hand column, and I demand you read it. I don't have time to review it properly here right now, but I promise to wax poetic about it later. It's ten lousy bucks, brand new, but worth a fortune. It's not new, I read it a long time ago, but now, long after its contemporary domestic books from the eighties were discarded, (pastels and big hair, anyone?) this one shines on.

Now, my accountant says I have to stop recommending cheap books just because they're good, the commission Sippican receives from Amazon would be better if I hawked fifty dollar coffee table books like I was a salesman from Glengarry Glen Ross, but I can't help myself. I call the author Mr. Eyechart, and wish to apologize for that slur on his magnificent Polish name right here and now.

Think of it. The descendant of Poles, living in Canada, talking about Dutch people and other assorted Europeans inventing domesticity for an audience of Americans. My plants have nothing on that in the international department.

And I almost forgot our contest from last week. Someone needs to be awarded their FREE Crummy Birdhouse.

And our erudite and intelligent winner is: (the shameless praise is included in the prize, gratis)

Denise Molendyk, of Oregon who wrote and kinda asked, kinda wondered, kinda wished:

As you are a history buff, and we being so very out west:  this year we are celebrating the 200th anniversary of the end of Lewis & Clark’s expedition to the Pacific Northwest and their arrival at what is now Astoria, Oregon—Fort Clatsop at the mouth of the mighty Columbia River & the Pacific Ocean. Now, if only we had a piece of furniture from that journey for you to copy….! 

Well, Denise, I think we do. For we are indeed interested in things historical around here, and we've been haunting James Johnston at Johnston's Antiques at 789 West Central Street in  Franklin, Mass, to "steal with our eyes" as we used to call paying attention and mimicking our predecessors. And James had, among all his wondrous collection of antiques and objects, a fabulous little writing box that we're going to copy, and write a little story to go with it, about ol' Lewis and Clark, camped by the Columbia, with mosquitoes and Sacajawea buzzing in their ears, and getting carpal tunnel from their quill scratching on a box just like it.

I can't bring myself to send you a Crummy Birdhouse, though, since your entry strayed from questioning to consulting, I guess, and upped the ante. So we'll send you a Clockless Clockhouse instead, and you can take in a homeless Oregon bird. Enjoy!

Do you hear that sound Denise? That's all my other readers, and my wife, thinking about that Clockless Clockhouse, and what might have been. Disregard them, and pity them and forgive them;  it's envy, pure envy, and understandable.

5-28-05 Memorial Day Weekend

He gazes out of the photo, mute, enigmatic, not quite smiling, and speaks to me across the decades.

When I was a little boy, amusements were few and far between. Television was still in black and white for us, and after the reruns of Gilligan's Island and The Three Stooges, not much was on the idiot box, as my father called it.

I remember my father and me, trying to watch a hockey game broadcast from the west coast, featuring the California Golden Seals, who were setting a new low in sports sumptuary, and getting pasted by our Mighty Bruins, with Bobby Orr, and Phil Esposito, and Pie McKenzie, and... well I can still recite all their names down to the most obscure, even Garnet Bailey. (Ace to his friends) On a thirteen inch black and white TV with rabbit ears. We might as well have used the etch-a-sketch.

Eisenhower's X-Box, the etch-a-sketch was.

And so it always seemed  a real treat when we could wheedle our mother to drag out the elegant but battered silverware box, left from some set our family never owned, filled with the family photographs. The pictures were mostly black and white too, the current cutting edge of photography being Polaroid's prehistoric b&w instant photos, which would come out of the camera, and you'd count to a now forgotten tempo, and pray, and pull off the cover paper to expose the image and stop the developer, and smear your clothes, and hope the picture was vaguely done.

We'd see the usual babies on the shag carpet, buns up, and confirmation and communion suits that fit like either a tent or a rubber glove, never any degree in between, and little girls in their Easter jumpers and patent leather shoes, with their mothers wearing a hat, a real hat, ready for church. Father, grim, unsmiling, in his workday suit, a little shiny at the elbows and knees. Those photos were only the littlest bit interesting after a while, because they were for the most part, well, us. The exotic ones were always deeper in the pile, instantly recognizable as special by that magnificent sepia tone that photos used to have, and spalling and cracking like a fresco in damp cathedral.

There they'd be, the southern Italian or Irish immigrant faces, looking stoically at the camera, surrounded by extended family on a stoop in Cambridge or Dorchester or Roxbury Massachusetts, or perhaps Antigonish, Nova Scotia. They had their hard lives written all over their faces. But always calm looking. Serene, really; neither introspective or egoist. And they looked into the lens in a way that we never do. Not into it, but through it.

Our parents would strain to remember all the names, and who did what and from where, and why and when. And I figure, with the small wisdom that I've accumulated with age, that when we pestered them too much about someone obscure, they made stuff up.

And then his face would turn up. Handsome, mysterious, forever young. Forte.

Who's that?

That's my brother Bobby, my mother would answer. And that was that.

I was young, and still in the thrall of my parents, and sensed it. Here is a place you do not go.

And the years passed, and the TV was in color, and my wrists and ankles began to show from my hand-me-down cousins' clothes. And the box came out less often. But when it did, the tantalizing face, handsomer than all the others, undiminished by time or care, resplendent in a uniform, always caught your eye. He died before I was born, I learned, by osmosis I think, I don't remember ever having the nerve to ask, and I'm sure it wasn't offered.

In Korea.

And the earth spun, and the seasons changed, and then I was a man.

One day, my mother came to me. She had a picture. it had lain stored and untouched, for fifty years, coiled, and she couldn't unroll it without destroying it. We slowly, ever so carefully unrolled it, the flecks of black and white popping off, as I stared at the faces. Hundreds and hundreds of faces. Five rows, stretching right off the page, four feet long, all in identical infantry uniforms, except the six cooks dressed all in white. C Company 506- Infantry, 101st Airborne Division. Camp Breckinridge, KY. December 27, 1952.

And there was only four ways to stand out in that mob of faces. The cooks, of course. One man in the hundreds wears an officer's hat, and looks ten minutes older than the rest. One man is holding drumsticks over a military style snare drum. And in the very center, in the very front, one man holds the company colors on a lance. Two crossed muskets, a Capital "C" and a "506"

And he has the face that speaks to me.

Now when I was in college, on a lark, my friends and I went skydiving. We trained all day in a sweltering hangar, in Upstate New York, amongst the farms. They strapped army surplus gear on us, hung us on straps depending from the hangar roof, and  shook us around violently by our heels, until we demonstrated that we could unbuckle our main chute from the straps on our shoulders, and pull the cord on our belly chute. Fun.

We climbed into a Beechcraft Beaver, which now seems to me an odd name for a plane, and knelt in rows in the fuselage, and launched ourselves, some with difficulty, out the open hole in the side. A tether pulled our chute for us, and we drifted down, and found a place with a liquor license.

I called my father, and told him what I had done. Expecting praise, I guess, or some such. And he called me, gently, the fool I was.

I protested: but you were in a bomber plane. They must have made you jump. And he told me, son, if that plane was on fire, filled to the brim with rabid rats, and piloted by a dead man, I'd still take my chances in the plane. And to jump from a perfectly good one, he said, is foolish. Click.

My father was in the Army Air Force. Belly gunner in a B-24J, Les Miserables, over the Pacific. Air Medal. Distinguished Flying Cross. After I pestered him enough, he once told me an offhand sort of a story about the war. He reeled off the names, Tarawa. Pelelau, Kwajalein, Tinian. He said one day, after they had bombed an island flat, they later landed on it. It looked like the island had been picked up ten feet, he said, then dropped. His CO told them that another plane would land there. On this plane were some people. They were coming from somewhere. They were going somewhere else. When the plane landed, my father and his compatriots were instructed not to talk to these men; because if they said so much as hello to one of them, they would spend the remainder of the war in a military prison, incommunicado. My father lost his desire, if he had had any, to speak to these men. They flew a plane named the Enola Gay.

My Father seldom talked much about being in the military.

And my mother never talked about the brother in the photographs.

Now the picture, the coiled picture, was ruined. But then, we don't watch black and white TV any more, do we?  My mother took that picture, and a bankroll, and had a necromancer or an alchemist or something at a digital photography studio restore it, perfectly, and make copies for all of us nephews. Mine hangs today over my kitchen table.

He watches over me.

I was forty years old. My mother told me, Uncle Bobby hated his real name.

His real name?

Francis, she said.

My middle name is Francis. I never knew.

(We'll be back annoying you and the keyboard on Tuesday. Have a pleasant Memorial Day Weekend.)

5-27-05-Friday.

It's another grim and desolate day in the Southcoast. The sky is the color of dishwater, and occasionally sprinkles that dishwater on our heads. But no matter! The weatherman, whether from hard meteorological information, or  boredom, or plain spite, has posted a picture of the blessed sun peeking out from behind the clouds- for tomorrow.

And I am reminded of a disreputable tavern I used to eat in twenty years ago, in Natick, Mass, when I needed a quick lunch. The walls were adorned with the flotsam and jetsam of the type all chain restaurants use for adornment these days. But in this place, the stuff was real, the accumulation of the owner's and the regular patrons' mundane activities, screwed to the wall to gather dust and become visual non-sequiturs as time rolled by. And I distinctly remember two signs from that place. The first was a common sight outside roadside haunts, post WWII. It had that immediately recognizable font, with snow capped letters, and beckoned to the traveler: Cool Inside. It hearkened back to a time when air conditioning was a rarity in the US, and people would go to a movie theater or bowling alley displaying that sign on a sweltering July evening, just to escape the oppressive heat. When the sign became a faded anachronism, it made its way to the bric-a-brac on the wall, and stayed there until some wag painted the additional jape, in tiny letters beneath the original : in the winter. And so it was.

The other sign has become semi-common these days, but it got a smile from me the first time I saw it. It said: FREE BEER TOMORROW.

And there was something in the back of my mind, which was redolent of disappointment and caution, that brought the FREE BEER TOMORROW sign to mind after all these years, when I saw the weather page's picture of the sun, peeking out  from the clouds... tomorrow.

Let's move on. Many have asked me: how did you get interested in the furniture business? I set that question apart from interest in houses, and construction, and the embellishment of the domicile, that have haunted and interested me since I was a small child.

Furniture. Or as the French call it - the movables. I like that. But I had always been fascinated with the portion of the proceedings that didn't move. Dentil moulding and window seats, and architraves and raised panel wall treatments. Painted color, pattern, texture. 

But American style was changing. Houses got bigger, more attuned to spatiality than adornment,  more spare, and the attention began to focus on the movables. People decried the increase in house size, because they misunderstood its genesis. They assumed it is always ostentation. It is, sometimes, but more rarely than is acknowledged.  Remember,  people used to buy a house, get a job, raise a family, retire and garden, and die. Period. They'd tinker with their house their whole life, adding rooms as their family grew, and bequeathing really fantastic and enormous rhododendrons to the next owners. That world is gone. Prosperity, easy travel, and instant communication have scattered the population, and people pick up and move all the time. The one thing you can do to a house now to make it adaptable to the greatest variety of potential owners, is to make it bigger. Each occupant can find the space they need if the house is big enough. And builders, responding to the times, make it so. And families find a house that can hold them, and their things, and live there for a spell. And they make it home with the movables. The furniture is the constant now, not the domicile. And it's the furniture that will pass to the children (at least the kind that isn't made of particleboard), not the rhododendrons.

Consider the yacht. Ever go to the bathroom on a yacht? I mean a real wooden yacht. You know, with sails. And lots of ribbon stripe mahogany, and teak, and varnish. The head, as you should call it if you don't want to be branded a landlubber, is little bigger  than the size of your high school locker, and just as businesslike. Space on a boat is always at a premium, and not an inch is wasted here. Turn a few degrees, then a few degrees more, and you can perform every function and ablution necessary, with everything not just close, but directly at hand. Drains, handholds, knobs, levers, storage, plumbing,  all fitted and integrated and pared down to its elegant essential. And really elegant, too, if the cabinetmaker knows his job, and the owner can afford the varnish at the boatyard. Well, there have been a slew of books written lately, some that I admire, that say that your house is extravagant if it's not fitted to your daily routine like the head on a boat.

Easy for you to say. You're rich.

Because dear reader, if you can afford to build your house to conform to your minutest needs, with nary an inch left over, you must have bonfires of banknotes constantly burning to warm the fingers of the wood surgeons that will be required to make that little cottage for you. And you must never turn that place over to the next occupant unless he shares a good deal of your DNA, and was raised in that house too, because it will be useless to a stranger. And there is no bigger waste in this world than to make something extravagant, that is supposed to be nearly permanent, and is useless to everyone but you. You can build a McMansion for $125.00 per square foot, but that boat bathroom, (oops, head) costs $125.00 per square millimeter. And like the boat head, there's only one way to do the only thing you can do in your little, expensive house.

Now I live in what is by today's standards, a little house. I love it, because it suits me. But when I designed, it, and built it, I had the whisper  in the back of my mind, constantly, would someone else like this? And the furniture we make, and sell, (if you're buying,) is trying to achieve that same universality. Really good furniture is a conundrum. It needs to say simultaneously, I'm up to date, and I'm timeless. Alas, most furniture today tries to attract buyers with the same approach GM had in the fifties to attract car buyers. More chrome. We don't try to reinvent the wheel, design-wise, and mimic the marks of age and use on a lot of our furniture, to accentuate and accelerate this feeling: this has always been part of our lives, and other people's lives too.

Anyway, all that stuff was bouncing around in my head, when I discovered Wallace Nutting. People in furniture know Wallace Nutting, and you should too. He preceded all the doyennes of domesticity like Martha Stewart by three quarters of  a century, and launched an introspective and salutary examination of our American heritage. He was associated with the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities for a time when it was founded, until they kicked him to the curb because he was too commercial for them. I often refer to SPNEA materials for inspiration, but I couldn't help but notice that they too began selling reproduction furnishings recently, after all these years of looking down their noses at Nutting for doing it. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as they say.

Well, Nutting's reproductions from around WWI are nearly as valuable and collectible as the fine old colonial items he was copying. Because Nutting understood that extreme age, in and of itself shouldn't be enough to recommend something to you.

He wrote in Windsor Chairs- An Illustrated Handbook:

Unfortunately rarity gives a large market value to antique furniture. But the collector ought to discriminate and not be led astray by rarity, even by uniqueness, unless the piece in question has other obvious merits.

Amen, brother. Imagine if our civilization was wiped out, and all that was left for aliens to discover was a Britney Spears CD. Just because it  was all that was left, doesn't make it great.

And that's why Nutting didn't care if his old friends at the SPNEA sneered at his furniture, and muttered reproduction like a swear under their breath. Nutting was quick to spot the need for an informed and educated opinion about what's great in furniture, and he supplied it.  He coupled it with- how can we get what's great into the hands of the most people? And he made his copies and suffered his contemporaries' slings and arrows, and I  love his memory for it.

You can get Wallace Nutting's lapidary opinion about over 100 types of Windsor chairs in Windsor Chairs, An Illustrated Handbook. It's surprisingly fun to read for such a limited topic, and his pointed criticism occasionally reminds me a bit of a group of friends at a party looking at someone's second wife and tittering under their breath- "What does she think she looks like?" Cruel fun.

For more information about Nutting himself, I heartily recommend T.A. Denenberg's book- Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America. The writing is good and interesting, but even if it were written in sanskrit, it would still be worth the money for the illustrations alone. You can purchase a copy of either or both by clicking on the Amazon links in the left margin of the page, and Sippican will get a few pennies to offset the expense of bringing you the What's New page. So we all make out.

Have a pleasant Memorial Day weekend. I hope the sun shines on you, and makes the flowers bloom next to the veteran's headstones. The weather owes them that, surely. What we owe them defies calculation.

5-26-05- Thursday.

Brethren, I say unto thee that our God is not a vengeful God; He is a benificent God, who knows in our hearts we grow weary of incessant rain. And to break the monotony, He has given us in His mercy and wisdom, in addition to these infernal rains, gale force winds, so that the rain shall not fall directly from the sky to the ground, bouncing off only our pate on the way down;  nay, verily it can now come at us now from all angles and add the frisson of unpredictability to the ennui of endless drenching. Amen.

Does anyone know a good plasterer? No, no, I know plenty of plasterers, I need a good one. Because the Wee One, who is barely two, is tearing the gypsum off the walls inside our house, trying to get out. The insulation gets exposed, and while the pretty pink tone it imparts to the Living Areas has that certain jaunty look we like, it's itchy, and we should probably cover it up.

It's pretty much rained every day since Mother's Day. And Mother's patience is running out. She's considering novel pacification techniques for the Wee One, including many that involve duct tape, and I'm concerned. I need that duct tape to hold all my equipment together.

Now dear reader, we've got a lot of irons in the fire right now, you and I. We've gotten some interesting queries for the FAQ page, but not nearly enough to suit me. And remember, the best question submitted by Sunday of this week will get a FREE crummy birdhouse. And as you can see by reading the FAQ page as it stands, the bar is set pretty low right now. You could triumph easy.

We've got a FREE shipping offer on Longbaugh Benches going. Wow, don't we charge anything for anything around here? And don't forget the new color we have available, South Portland Straw, which is available for viewing by scrolling down to the 5-20-05 entry.

We've introduced Clockless Clockhouses this week. Just $29.99. I've still got three left, in verdigris, Hallowe'en Black, and Bog Red. Order as many as you like; if I run out, I'll make more in a jiffy. The birds need a roof over their head these days.

I'm off to the wood laboratory. Buy something. Plastering is expensive.

5-25-05- Wednesday.

Now for Today's Weather Report: Cue Sonny and Cher singing "I Got You Babe" Ahem: Around-the-clock, ceaseless and incessant, continuous, endless and eternal, interminable, perpetual, relentless, steady and unbroken, unchanging, never-ending, unflagging,  uninterrupted and unremitting, persistent, everlasting, unvarying RAIN.  Ibid. Ditto. More of same.

My mildew has mold on it. The peepers inherit the earth.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is why you need our furniture. You're occasionally trapped in your house, with nothing to look at but your possessions. They better be interesting. That's where we come in.

Now, on to the news. I found this story interesting:

Radio DJ wins $10.6 million in stink over perfume

Now, just like you, I like a good laugh. I occasionally pop on over to The Onion, a satiric and ribald spoof of a newspaper, who make up outrageous, occasionally obscene, and hyperbolic nonsense that mimics today's news stories. And I went back to the website where I found this perfume item, just to make sure this wasn't a spoof itself. Because when foolishness like this is worth $10.6 million to any twelve people in the United States, reality has overtaken satire, and lapped it on the track of life for good measure.

There are many mysteries in this article, despite all the information. And not easy mysteries to unravel, like crop circles or virgin births. I'm talkin' about some real posers, as they say. A country music radio station, in Detroit, for instance. Who knew?

Now, occasionally dear reader, you  can find me in a reverie, transported by the rich boozy voice of George Jones, while his plaintive notes soar over a small orchestra and an  imaginary music hall, enriched only by the vacuum tube microphone and a simple plate echo-  ..she thinks I still care.. Magnificent. And never, ever to be found on any "Country" music station. I'm forced to listen to it on the Swingers soundtrack, or I'm not gonna hear it. The stuff that  currently passes for  country music? Now there's a  mystery. And  in Detroit? In Motor City, Michigan?  Mo-Town?  Home of Marvin Gaye's singing and James Jamerson's  basslines, and Iggy Pop's snarl and Mitch Ryder's rollicking tunes? That's an impenetrable mystery.

And when did S.C. Johnson, perhaps the most bedrock of midwestern companies, patrons of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the makers of that fine product, Glade, become Merchants of Death? Last I heard, they were manufacturing a can of stuff with a sorta garden smell with a substantial dash of deadheaded flowers from the mulch pile. You never appreciated Glade until you had to follow certain coworkers into the bathroom after their "morning constitutional." It was only then you appreciated it fully, like water in the desert, or a gas mask in a World War I trench. But according to our heroine, whose picture with the smug expression mysteriously annoys the hell out of the reader, S.C.Johnson has apparently been purchased by the disciples of Dr. Mengele, picked up the patent for Zyklon B from I.G.Farben, and is now trying to turn every workplace in America into an abattoir. Who knew? Mysteries abound.

How's this for a mystery? According to the article, a group of people thought it would entertaining to perform manicures on the radio. Let that sink in for a moment. Why not opera arias by semaphore? How about ballet over the telegraph? Perhaps a cooking show by smoke signal. The possibilities seem endless here for new approaches to entertainment. And the protagonist of the lawsuit has just the face for radio, and telegraph, and semaphore.

There's no mystery to the acetone in the nail polish remover. Dimethyl Ketone. I've been around hundreds of gallons of it. It's common in fiberglass construction and cabinet finishing. It's not pleasant, and can be a fire hazard. But its effect on the human body is not mysterious. The mystery is, why was this woman drinking it, when everyone else was putting minute amounts of it on their fingernails? I assume she drank it, and a lot of it, if we go by the note she apparently got from Doctor Nick Riviera about its effects on her.

Mysteries everywhere. Now I've been on the radio. I'm familiar with the surroundings. How did they ever fit this woman's fainting couch in her studio?

An even bigger mystery is wondering what day next week her coworker, of the department store perfume fame, will sue her selfsame employer for $10.6 million, for infringing on her civil right to wear perfume. And win.

Now, there's plenty of bosh  and cringe-inducing grammar and syntax from the plaintiff  to go around in the article, but the acme of nonsense has got to be this:

5-24-05- Tuesday. Please click on the link I posted yesterday for Marion Yahoo Weather. I'm too depressed to post another one. I thought Yahoo had gotten all Renaissance on us and substituted an oil painting. It looks precisely the same as yesterday. Groundhog Day with rain substituted for snow, and me substituted for Bill Murray. "It's gonna be cold. It's gonna be (wet). And it's gonna last you the rest of your life." Something like that.

I read in the news yesterday that everything that everybody has been telling us about being out in the sun is completely and utterly wrong, and we're all dying from lack of sun exposure, not skin cancer.

Some Researchers Say Hold the Sunscreen

And they tell us this when the hope of ever seeing the sun again is negligible. Thanks for nothing.

Google had 2430 versions of this identical story to choose from, but I chose this version from WILX in whatever godforsaken place they haunt, for a couple of  reasons. First, I was transfixed by their animated masthead. We must acknowledge greatness when we happen upon it, dear reader, and WILX has achieved a kind of Nirvana of homeliness. That is unquestionably the ugliest bunch of people who were ever hired to be on Television News. Look at that header where, in their childlike innocence, they place those likenesses, thinking they'll draw viewers. It's like the Mount Rushmore of Unattractiveness, with extra heads.  You could slip Quasimodo or Medusa in between the Weather Dork and the Sports Doofus and nobody would notice. Second, like most news outlets, they can't write. Forget the half formed story, with little information. They used lather, when they meant slather.

From Merriam Webster:

lather
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): lath·ered; lath·er·ing /-th(&-)ri[ng]/
Date: before 12th century
transitive senses
1 : to spread lather over
2 : to beat severely : FLOG
intransitive senses
: to form a lather or a froth like lather
 

Now I can't recall every getting Ban du Soleil to foam up enough to use as shaving cream, but perhaps that's just me. However, definition number two sounds promising. The editor at WILX could use a beating. But let's not be harsh. If the editor is also the person that hired those people to be on television, he's probably blind. Let's cut him some slack.

Here's the word they were looking for:

slather
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): slath·ered; slath·er·ing /'sla-th&-ri[ng], 'slath-ri[ng]/
Date: 1866
1 : to use or spend in a wasteful or lavish manner : SQUANDER
2 a : to spread thickly or lavishly b : to spread something thickly or lavishly on

Now on to business- You asked for it, you've got it. You wanted a version of the Wren Clockhouse without the clock, to use as a real birdhouse. Well, we're nothing if not accomodating here at Sippican Cottage, so here you go. We call it: The Clockless Clockhouse.

Sippican Cottage's Clockless Clockhouse

And we pass the savings on the timepiece on to you, dear reader. It's just $29.99. Enjoy.

Don't forget our FREE shipping offer on Harry Longbaugh benches. Don't delay and miss out.

And go out in the sun. If it shows its face again.

I almost forgot! The boat plans! (To be continued)

5-23-05- Monday. And here's the weather for our fair burg:

Marion Yahoo Weather

First winter lasted forever, and now April showers last until June. I'd better get back to the boat story, and quick. We might need a boat to escape. Okay, follow along closely here. We're going to need plans to make this boat. I've got plans, already, but you can make your own. First, get a tin can. A big one, like cling peaches or tomatoes. Do NOT buy cans of cling peaches and tomatoes and eat them just to make the plan. There are no good recipes for cling peaches and tomatoes that I know of, unless they're in the "All Scottish Cooking Encyclopedia."  I stopped reading that one when I got to "Haggis" and found out what it's made from.

Now go out in the garden and dig up earthworms, lots of earthworms. Fill the can 3/4 full with the worms. Now overcook 1/2 pound of angel hair pasta. Fill the can the rest of the way with the pasta, and mix it all up. Now put the can with the worms and the pasta in the freezer for a couple of days. Take it out, and go to a machine shop. Have the foreman slice through the can and the rock- hard frozen contents at an oblique angle lengthwise. You can always spot the foreman  at the machine shop, he has the greatest number of  remaining fingers, that's why he's in charge. Now lay the two halves, worm and angel hair side up, on your  workbench.

Well, you might as well use that for plans as the plans they give you, they make as much sense. Think I'm kidding? Try this:

I trust you got all that.

Anyway, my boat's done, so this isn't my problem any more. You get to it! I've gotta make some furniture. Check in tomorrow and I'll tell you where you can get black locust for the stem.

Remember to send in your questions for the FAQ page, and maybe win a crummy birdhouse! The best question submitted this week wins. Type faster!

And don't miss out on the FREE shipping offer on Longbaugh Benches this week. FREE shipping, this week only!  It's likely that shipping may never be cheaper.

5/22/05- It's Sunday. I love Sunday. It's gloomy today, but so what. It's a lazy kind of a day, and not so full of chores as Saturday. So I've decided to take today off. As a matter of fact, I'm not writing this. I'm really not. Well, I shouldn't be, anyhow.

I've updated the Catalog Page, to include Cole Porter and Caleb's Coins. If you haven't been following along closely, or you spilled a Frappacino on you keyboard last week and missed them, you can get to them now without being subjected to my What's New ramblings. Enjoy!

And Enjoy Sunday too. Because Monday looks bad for you. Mr. Smithers wants to see you in his office first thing, and that's never good...

The Catalog Page

5-21-05- We delivered a batch of Ancient Mariner Tables to Wrentham Antiques Marketplace yesterday. You should go there today and buy one or two. The lovely Jayne, who always seems to be on duty there behind the counter, immediately tagged two with SOLD signs, so I'd hurry up if I were you. Ah, we can afford to eat twice today, and once tomorrow!

Now before we get back to the boat thing,  (To be continued)  I figured we'd add a Frequently Asked Questions Page. All the best people seem to have one, and I must remain on the cutting edge or perish. Now, I admit, the first edition is populated mostly with rhetorical questions right now, and the form of the questions and the similarity to the form of the answers makes me wonder if perhaps they were mostly mostly written by the same person. Ahem.

Here it is:

Sippican Cottage Furniture Company of Massachusetts-FAQ

Now in order to bring some immediate fresh blood to the proceedings, we're gonna have a little contest. Once a week, for a little while, and monthly afterwards, I'll choose the best question sent in by you, our readers and furniture connoisseurs. And I'll answer that question, and defend that answer and your honor to the death, against all comers. And despite the gnashing of teeth and lamentations of our accounting department, we're gonna give that lucky and inquisitive person a FREE, crummy little birdhouse. And we'll ship it FREE to your home. But I'm warning you, it's crummy. Well, not really crummy, but small and kind of plain. Well, it is made of solid pine and cedar. Well proportioned, if small. Nicely and attractively painted, when you get right down to it. You  know, it's not half bad. Anyway, it's FREE, what did you expect?

So get those keyboards clicking. And remember, if you send me a question, and your name, that means you want and expect to see that question and that name on the website. If you're a secretive hermit, with paranoid delusions and xenophobia, maybe you should skip this one.

Remember, it's

sippicancottage@aol.com

5-20-05- Whoah. Sorry, I got distracted.

Now, a few years ago, I coached my son's T-Ball team, and the li'l chilluns used to wander around the diamond, looking at clouds and butterflies, their cuticles, and in a desultory fashion, each other, but never at the batter. It didn't  matter, there were times I feared that T-Ball stand was going to "pitch" a no-hitter. Well, for getting distracted, they've got nothing on me. I mean, I started telling you the story about the blasted boat, got you all interested in it and everything, counseled patience on your part, promising new and fabulous insights into...Um, what was I talking about? My attention was diverted momentarily elsewhere, and I ..Oh yes.

Late, late last night, I was working in the furniture laboratory, and got distracted and...

No, I didn't maim myself, what's wrong with you people? I came up with a new color for the Longbaugh Benches, to add the already outstanding lineup of Clapboard White, Bog Red, Delft Blue, and Hallowe'en Black. It's a jolly pale yellow, with a hint of green. And here's a picture of it:

And to honor  this new color,  I'll extend our Free Shipping offer from yesterday 'til Sunday, May 29th, an entire full week more of Free Shipping goodness.

Now I didn't mean to come up with this new and wonderful color. I did it "on accident" as The Boy used to say, before he began speaking like a diplomat at the age of four. No, I did it, because after these many years, I am still trying to impress my wife.

Now ladies, (men, back me up on this) you should be flattered that we males lie to you to impress you, when we first meet and try to wheedle a date from you. And we keep up this incredible string of nonsense for months, sometimes years, and we fool you into marrying us.

And then you discover we're slobs. And we're lazy. We're broke. Few prospects. Hair grows from our face daily, sometimes faster, and without a date looming on the horizon, we sometimes leave it there for a short spell. Oftentimes, we smell bad. But while we were dating, we were a cross between an Antarctic explorer, the college quarterback, and a screen star, with a deeply sensitive and introspective side. All bosh.

And why should you be flattered we acted like that, instead of speed dialing a lawyer? Because we told you those fibs (alright, not fibs, balderdash lies) because that was the image of the man we wished we were, to make us worthy of your attentions. We figured you, who were pure, and good, and fine, and noble, and babelicious, deserved no less than the imaginary person we invented to court you. We wouldn't do. But you can't expect us to keep that up indefinitely, can you?

Well, fool that I am, I'm still trying to impress my wife. And her eye had wandered to that pile of Longbaugh Benches, longingly, and she hinted that if one of them appeared in her living room, she would not be indisposed to it. She's already got a Bog Red number, but like a martyr, she gave it up so that the Wee One can pound plastic pegs with Fisher Price hammers and do puzzles on it in his room. And so, I tried mightily, one last time, perhaps, to impress my wife.

And I fiddled and considered, and fiddled some more, and tried a few things, and jiggered and futzed, and so forth, for a good long while, and finally arrived at something worthy of her attentions, unlike me. And so, henceforth, it shall be called:

South Portland Straw.

Because that's where I told her all those lies, to get her to run off to Massachusetts with me.

Now about that boat:

(To be continued)

5-19-05- Thanks for your feedback on yesterday's "What's New" entry. But you know, whenever I mention that @#$% boat, or this @#$% house, nobody wants to hear about anything else. I'm in the furniture business here people, and today I'll try to prove it. I'll get back to the boat story, I promise, I will. But first- shameless commerce!

As you have gathered if you're an old hand at the What's New Page hereabouts, we're making a pile of furniture especially for a big splash for June at the Wrentham Antiques Marketplace on Rt 1A in Wrentham, Mass. Well, the pile is beginning to overrun the shop. Let's get rid of a little of it, to make room for some more, if that makes any sense.

I've got a dozen or so Harry Longbaugh's benches I'm forced to ballroom dance with, every time I turn around in the ol' Furniture Laboratory, and they're ready for finishing. If you order one before midnight this coming Sunday, We'll pay the shipping anywhere in the lower forty-eight states. You pick the color- Clapboard White, (my favorite) Bog Red, (oh, we like that too) Hallowe'en Black (can I change my mind about the white?) or Delft Blue (no really, that's the one, that's it. Give me blue. Can I see the white again?)

That's correct, FREE SHIPPING. I'll even put in a box with tape and ghost poo and stuff, not just lick numerous 37 cent stamps and paste them on the bench like last time. I'll send you, FREE  (see, I'm gettin' the hang of this Madison Avenue approach) along with the finest bench your money can buy, your own "Certificate of Inauthenticity," so you can prove to your friends that the bench is brand new, not some rare and valuable antique. If you live in the Wrentham area, I'll deliver  it there for FREE, (my accountant is having a fit, but my advertising consultant is ebullient) where Chuck and Kathy will defend it from all buyers until you can come and get it.

How do I redeem this FREE SHIPPING offer, you ask? Just go to the Harry Longbaugh page, and click on the "Buy Now" button. I changed the price to Folger's Crystals FREE SHIPPING without telling anyone. I figure there has to be some value to reading the What's New page, besides boat stories.

Oh yes, the boat...

(To be continued)

Did I forget to mention that shipping for Longbaugh's Bench was FREE?

5-18-05- When I was a lad, and Johnson was president,  most middle class basements were identical. The concrete was left exposed, the washer and dryer stood guard, one bare bulb illuminated the whole affair. Most men had a workshop of some sort down there. A venerable cast iron Craftsman table saw. Peg board, of course; pegboard was the ne plus ultra of the handy set. Kids, you're officially old when you  remember when pegboard was state of the art. A few dull hand planes, perhaps a drill press, a circular saw with the original blade, a jig saw about as sturdy looking as an electric carving knife. Screwdrivers, lots and lots of screwdrivers. And baby food jars filled with wood screws, all still there unused, because the drywall screw came like a horde out of the east and swept the landscape bare of flat headed screws.

And what was that basement shop for? Why, to build a boat of course.

The plans were everywhere in the fifties and sixties. Popular Mechanics, Outdoor Life, National Fisherman, Green Stamp Catalogs. You do remember Green Stamps, don't you? You bought stuff, they gave you little stamps, you pasted them in their book, and redeemed them for worthless household stuff. It was the voluntary American version of the chit system that had its compulsory version in the USSR, with Russians standing in line for days to get a block of suet to eat.

The stories of the boat made in the basement, too big to get it out through the bulkhead,  probably became cliche because because they  were so true and so numerous. And many people succumbed to the siren song of the boatbuilding urge, only to founder on the Scylla of the lack of spare time and the Charybdis of lack of talent.

And why should I be any different? When I went to college for Architecture, on the first day of our design class, our teachers demanded: design your dream house. Right now. Before the end of  the class. Now I thought I was there to learn how to design my dream house, with the help of these gentlemen, and then perhaps try my hand at it. But these fellows had other ideas. They seemed to have the same approach to teaching that modern singers have singing the National Anthem- I don't know the words, the song is about me, and I'm starting on the last note and going up in volume and histrionics from there.

Anyway, I sketched what is essentially an accurate representation of the home I live in now, with a little handmade boat in the yard.  The ocean in the drawing  was a little closer then than it is in reality now, because each eighth of a mile towards the water adds another zero to the vapor trail of zeros houses cost anyway. But in all major respects, it was spot on, two decades in advance. And they said:

Philistine.

Only they weren't that pleasant about it. My little dream was too, well, normal for the two men in clogs, and they told me so. With force.

As my classmates, who were wiser than me, scribbled furiously, designing concrete and steel and chain link and glass and stone monstrosities, with hot and cold running potato chips, I pondered my dilemma. What would make these guys happy? And I hit on it.

Thirty minutes later, I showed them my new castle. I was half a geodesic sphere, plopped down bizarrely in the mountains. It was the human equivalent of a fishbowl. There were no interior partitions. Anyone inside would be roasted like an ant with magnifying glass held over them.

They loved it. They showed it to everybody else in the class. How forward looking. How brave.

 On the way out of the class, the light began to dawn on one of the teachers. He asked me, where's the bathroom?  It seemed to be the first time he had considered the second most fundamental human need.

I had my "A" in hand already. I could, and did, tell him: "There's a hole in the floor in the middle" and left.

Anyway, like the Philistine I am, I wanted that little handmade boat I drew in next to the cottage, back when Carter was President.

So I bought some plans. 15 years ago or so. I unrolled them and discovered: There are no straight lines on these plans. Yikes.

(To be continued)

5-17-05- Hello all. We've decided, since as you can tell, we're a little bit interested in American History around the Sippican Cottage, to weigh in on the Discovery Channel's "100 Greatest Americans" You can find our worthless opinion here:

100 Greatest Americans, Sort Of

Remember the list is for amusement only; please, no wagering.

5-16-05-I know what you're thinking- what about Rochester? It's been keeping you up nights, worrying about when I might get around to our neighbor to the north, or egads! what if Sippican Cottage forgets Rochester altogether? Fear not intrepid What's New reader, I shall not overlook another town formerly known as Sippican.

Now mind you, I own the dotted line between Rochester and Marion. Doggett's Brook meanders along that dotted line, all along the northern boundary of the Sippican Cottage. Our deed actually specifies that by ancient covenant I am allowed to cross into my neighbors property if I wish, to "drive my livestock to the river". The cats are rarely thirsty, so this potential bone of contention hasn't poisoned the relations with the neighbors...yet.  And I only consider the bloodthirsty mosquitoes livestock at tax time.

On to Rochester

5-15-05- It's Sunday. Nothing's new. Thank goodness. The Queen, the Wee One, The Boy and I will go into the surrounding countryside in search of amusements today. It's approaching June, and we've still got cabin fever. When will the sun shine?

I f you haven't seen it, check out Bridget Sullivan's Sofa Table. There's one just like the picture for sale at Wrentham Antiques Marketplace; you should go there and buy it today. (Sorry to sully Sunday with that shameless plug, but Commerce never sleeps, I guess, and the Wee One's shoes are getting tight.)

Bridget is a name that is beginning to have a certain cachet in these parts again. (Tom Brady, I'm looking at you) 150 years ago, it was mostly synonymous with scrubwoman. Well, we Irish have earned the right to have every Sunday off, own the houses we used to scrub, and name our children Bridget with impunity.

When reading about ol' Bridget Sullivan, it is illuminating to consider that OJ wasn't the first celebrity to, ahem, be *cough* exonerated *cough* of a heinous crime. If you're interested, check out some more local Lizzie flavor at:

Lizzie Borden Photo Tour

It's interesting to see what towns like Fall River looked like before Satan, in partnership with Hitler and Ghengis Khan, invented aluminum siding. Enjoy!

5-14-05-"I was working in the lab, late one night..."

I use a lot of wood, as you can imagine. Many varieties are commonly available to the artisan locally, and if you wander into my furniture laboratory right now, you'd find quartersawn white oak, as hard as algebra, (Morris Chair, coming up) Cherry, Tiger Maple, Quilted Maple (someone lucky purchased the last remaining Cottage Console from Wrentham Antiques Marketplace, I'll have to make more) regular old Hard Maple, Birch, lots and lots of Poplar, (I like to call it Tulipwood) Mahogany, a substantial pile of Sycamore, (wait 'til you see what I make from that, besides this) and as always, an enormous pile of Pinus Strobus. Eastern White Pine.

Now, where I'm from, 75 foot tall pines are essentially garden weeds. Phalanxes of 15 foot tall, 5 year old pine saplings advance toward my house from every point of the compass. They are the progeny of towering parents who surround us, and break the North wind in the Winter, and shade us in the  summer, and fill my gutters to overflowing with acidic mush twice yearly.

When we cleared our little patch for the homestead, the sawyer cut down the trees for free, to get his hands on the wood. He was a polite and deferential man, and dirty from work, and toothless from sugar and tavern disagreements. And he ran his tough, calloused hands over the boles of the ramrod straight pines as he carted them away, like a lover, as indeed he is. And I love this wood too.

Lightweight, strong, easily worked, least resinous of pines, dimensionally stable, remarkably durable in use, it grows to 60 feet in 40 years, and grows eventually to well over 100 foot tall. And two thirds of that height is clear of branches. And it's beautiful. Creamy pink, with or without interesting and sound knots, it mellows over time to the beautiful tone everyone calls pumpkin. It's not fancy, but then again, neither are you and I.

And I was cutting a lot of that Pine, late last night, as I said, because we need to restock the Wrentham Antique Marketplace, and our catalog offerings, when I got the dreamiest blast of that sugary pine aroma from the cut. And I was in  heaven. I hope I can pass a smidgeon of the respect, admiration, dare I call it "love" that  I have for this wood, and its brethren, and these everyday objects we make from it, for you, that inhabit and embellish our lives.

Ow! I got a splinter. Darn and Blast, sometimes I hate this wood...

Here's a link to what I was making:

Harry Longbaugh's Bench Page

5-13-05- Every year we say the same thing- It's the middle of May, we can plant the geraniums now, can't we? Nature has gulled us with a few sunny days. The gale force winds caused by the warming land hard by the cool ocean water begin to abate. And you think: if we fill the pots now, think how good they'll look by the end of June.

31.6 degrees last night.

Every year the same thing. Look at the internet weather at bedtime. (You don't still watch the hair helmets on TV waving their arms at an imaginary screen incorrectly predicting someone else's weather, do you? I didn't think so) And then, dressed for bed, you open the doors to a blast of arctic wind and yank the dirty pots inside, and confuse the cats. (See confused cat picture to left. That's MoMo. He'll make a great story for another day.) Never again, you mutter sotto voce, and mention various deities and saints when you stub your toe on the step. But you said that last year.

All that notwithstanding, we're currently making a big batch of furniture, as I said earlier, with many new items and replenishing older designs too. Patience.

5-12-05- Well, I'm too busy making furniture to post pictures of it here today. You're gonna have to settle for me maundering on about the Large Child, of Admiring Shelf fame. Here's the story:

Joy in Mudville

5/11/05- 65 degrees. 10mph winds. Sunny. Yes! Yesterday it looked like Spring. Today it feels like Spring. These days are few and precious. The grass is greening. The mosquitoes are still insects, not having evolved into the enormous bloodthirsty birds of prey they will become in June. The wee one will tumble through the yard today, oh yes indeed.

Someone e-mailed me asking about the vintage of the house in the picture to the left. Ahem, that's the Sippican Cottage, not clip art. Anyway, they astutely identified several visual clues to guess the age of the house. Battered Pine plank floors, transom over door, Standing moulding around doorframe. Late 1800s was the conclusion.

Sorry, 1994.

At any rate, we're making furniture today as fast as we can, many new items coming soon. In the interim, here's some more "local flavah," this time from the neighboring town of Fairhaven. Imagine telling someone you live in Fairhaven. Who wouldn't want to live in a town called Fairhaven? The name itself conjures up images of tranquility after travel, does it not? It's where the large child goes to school, and where the boat lives, and it's lovely.

All About Fairhaven

5/10/05- Well, it looks like spring today. Finally. The dandelions are already going to seed, and the oaks still don't have leaves on them. For all you inlanders, spring at the shore is cool, overcast, gray. Then one day, a switch is thrown in the heavens, and pow! it's too hot.

And that day is the first of many days where you are way too busy to go sailing.

Well, let's add a primitive to the proceedings here:

Caleb's Coins

5/9/05- Why do we call it Mother's Day? It's the one day of the year when she doesn't act like a mother. She didn't have to get her own coffee in the morning, and mine too. She didn't cook. We even changed the wee one's diaper for her. We were all deferential and pleasant to her all day. She left the house, unaccompanied by children, and went shopping for clothes for, well, herself.

I hereby propose that we rename this holiday Anti- Mother's Day, and call the other 364- Mother's Days. Strike a blow for truth! Let's go to Hallmark headquarters with pitchforks and torches!

Many people find us on the internet, and wonder, what's a Sippican, and where's Marion? For all you inquisitive folks, here's a link that explains it all:

Marion

In Massachusetts, we call that: "Local Flavah"

5/7/05- Sippican Cottage adds an art deco touch to the catalog with "Cole Porter's Clock" Wait until noon to read the story, so you can have a martini in one hand. And remember, vermouth only needs to be, well, in the same room where you mix a dry martini, not necessarily open. Cheers!

Cole Porter's Clock

5/6/05- Sinead O'Leary's Settee joins the Sippican Lineup. Drop us an e-mail and let us know if you liked the story. Or drop us a check and let us know you REALLY liked the story. See it here:

Sinead O'Leary's Settee

And be sure to visit Owen O'Leary's restaurant on Rt 9 in Southborough, Massachusetts. The food's great, the pints are poured, and they have TWO Sinead's Settees to rest your bones.

 5/5/05- Sippican Cottage is pleased to announce our new association with Wrentham Antiques Marketplace,513 South Street ( Rt 1A) Wrentham, MA. (508-384-2811) Charles and Cathy McStay have assembled a wonderful selection of antiques and reproductions, all  tastefully displayed. The selection is made all the better by the addition of Sippican Cottage Furniture. There's a limited selection of our "Instant Antique Furniture" there right now, with much more to come in June 2005. Drop by there soon, and tell them Sippican sent you. And visit them online at:

Wrentham Antiques Marketplace

5/02/05-Well, we've broken out the Spring Logo for our masthead. Jaunty, isn't it?  Of course, if you put the geraniums out in your terra cotta pots because you saw our Spring Logo, we can accept no liability for the inevitable May frost you'll get the next day. Our legal department has advised us to advise you to only put out your annuals when you see our Summer Logo. Maybe.

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