Past experiments

I'm trapped in a waiting room with a screen that cannot be turned off, and it's playing a Hallmark Xmas movie. I am beyond annoyed. I hate this stuff with a fiery passion, and I cannot escape it, and it's October, so it's not even time to have this crud.

This morning I met up with friends M and K to visit the MIT Museum, which has a couple of new exhibits we particularly wanted to see.

Due to the layout, we first explored Sensing Oceans, which had a lot of information about different types of undersea imaging and the devices used to get that data. There was also an installation piece, Plankton Temple a tiny light at the center of a large cluster of individually hung pieces of different shapes of clear glass that made interesting shadows as the light moved through the center of them. The most compelling display was another art piece, Seeing Echoes in the Mind of the Whale we sat down to appreciate: two huge screens showing an 18 minute video loop showing a sort of not-quite-pointillated sort of whale's-eye view, integrated with whale sounds for the audio (the top image at the link shows a still that doesn't show anything of the glory of it). I can totally imagine going there to sit and meditate in the dark its installed in. (Both of these pieces were created by the experiential artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast. More about the whale-inspired piece, including some shorter video clips, available at their site.)

Next was the crocheted coral reef exhibit. The biggest piece covers an entire wall, which is a lot, but closer up, I could see that a lot of the components were pieces I could have crocheted. As I looked at some of the smaller pieces, I felt the same, if I'd explored with having a central structure to put the pieces on, pieces of various geometries, colors, sizes. They're having workshops for folks to crochet pieces to potentially add to their own coral reef piece.

The third thing we wanted to see was the original Starship Enterprise model from the original Star Trek show. They have a video looping with more info about the making of the model and its history, but we mostly didn't watch that, because there was a guy there in full Star Trek uniform, who had a communicator with some preset messages from the original cast, a phaser, and a scanner devices (the one that looks like a man purse), all fan-made models this enthusiast had bought and was very happy to show off. The official staff person in that exhibit said that he didn't have much to do when this fan came :-).

• 2 pounds of carrots
  
• 2 pounds of beets
  
• 2 pounds of purple-skinned (but white inside) potatoes
  
• 2 pounds of purple-topped turnips
  
• 4 small heads of garlic
  
• 2 medium butternut squash
  
• 1.5 pounds of spinach
  
• 1 pound of mixed salad greens
  
• 8 cauliflower/broccoli (small heads for the former, small stalks for the latter; I went all cauliflower)
  
• take-what-you-want hot peppers (I took some habaneros to start another batch of hot honey) and herbs (sage, parsley, holy basil, thyme, oregano, rosemary, etc.; I took none)

First thoughts: saute all the spinach with garlic. Roasted cauliflower. Pizza-like object with butternut squash (or soup, but I'm running out of freezer space).