Scanner art by Craig Cramer, gardening & more
Q: What’s the best thing I can do to improve my soil in spring?
A: Wear shoes that you don’t want to get muddy. If you can’t do it in Hank Heatly’s loafers, you shoudn’t be doing it.
That said, the soil here is ominously dry. The usual mini-volcanoes that we normally have popping up in the lawn? Well we have next to none this year.
One of the rites of early spring here is Dragon Day on the Cornell Campus. Every year, on the Friday before spring break, first year architecture students create and parade a dragon across campus, to be met by a phoenix constructed by engineering students.
In the past, the dragon was ceremoniously burned on the Arts Quad. This year, in order to comply with environmental regulations limiting open burning to wood and agricultural wastes — the dragon was spared the pyre. Instead a wood and straw nest was offered up to the gods.
I’m fond of Dragon Day not just because it’s a harbinger of spring, but because it gives the students a bit of a creative outlet mid-semester: According to the Cornell Chronicle, “Dozens of costumed student revelers — in outfits including orange highway cones, the bunny from “Donnie Darko,” and a lithe reptilian figure in head-to-toe green Spandex” joined the parade.
Wikiepedia has some great images of Dragon Days past, going back to the ’20s. University Photo pulled together a video montage that captures the spirit of this year’s event. Below are some screen captures from the Cornell.edu website celebrating recent Dragon Days.
Hat tip to Saxton for encouraging me to get down on my knees, if not my belly.
The prize this year goes to a couple patches of Eranthis, which beat out the snowdrops this year.
Willows count as flowers in my book, too.
No flowers on the cyclamen yet, surprisingly.
Some alternate takes …
On the NYTimes Measure for Measure blog, Suzanne Vega explains What’s a Melody For? I won’t say she buried the lede, but the post ends with Tom Chapin singing his testimony in Albany to protest cuts in state funding for the arts:
Vega concludes:
The right combination of words and, yes, melody at the right moment can have a powerful effect. The latest news is that $50 million has been allocated to the N.E.A. as part of the recovery package, in part because of the organized lobbying efforts of arts advocates across the country.
Just think of a world without art, without song — how would we celebrate? What would we dream of? What would set our imaginations free? How could we express our emotions for our husbands and wives and children? Celebrate a birthday? A melody is for expressing emotions: delight, passion, sadness. It reminds us of what we have felt and experienced before, in our own personal code of emotion and history. Priceless!
Keith Obermann last night on Countdown defended his degree from Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. We’ve spent months pulling together these videos to get prospective students to come study Plant Sciences at Cornell. But Keith makes the case much more succinctly — and energetically.
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The best pranks are ones where the ‘victim’ is completely drawn in, thousands of people are in on the prank, and no one is hurt. Add a basketball theme and you’ve got the best prank ever.
Watch Prank War 7: The Half Million Dollar Shot on CollegeHumor
And of course there’s the sleepwalking dog from the FailBlog.