Dancing sheep

Well, after our disappointment at the not so wholesome Strawberry Fair, we were delighted about 2 weekends ago to go to the Cambridge Town and Country Show, which was a new fair held in the middle of the city on Parker's Piece, a huge grassy lawn a short walk from our place. Now that was a true fair. It had fresh strawberries, the ubiquitous beer tent, inflatable slides, clowns, a puppet show, fudge, incredibly good cheese from Wales, a medieval village with swordplay lessons, train and tractor rides AND sheep! Yes, the star attraction was an Australian (pic above) describing the various strains of sheep used around the world, including one that looks like it is wearing wool dreadlocks that hang over its eyes. The host could have been a stand-up comic--he actually shaved a sheep on stage. I was impressed that the wool coal ended up as one large piece. The finale of the show was having the sheep "dance". Each one had a signature move when the music came on. The dreadlocks sheep, for example, shook its woolly hair from side to side. Good stuff! --jt

Stickey Wickets

Rain delayed it 24 hours but I finally had my first cricket practice. And I wasn't half-bad!

In a few weeks, the folks from our rival publication Nature will train up to Cambridge for the annual match with Science. My office head wanted me to get in some hitting, fielding and pitching (known as bowling) practice before we lost yet again (Nature has a much bigger staff to draw on in the UK than Science does). So he, his son, another father-son, and about 3 more kids taught me how to play. It's a bit like baseball but the rules and terminology take some time to master--after about an hour or so, I largely had the basics down. My colleague's teeange son got me out on my first pitch (I swung and missed and the ball knocked over the wickets behind me). But they took pity and gave me another chance--I then scored about 30 runs before they declared me out so others could bat. I still don't have the hang up bowling. One whips the ball overhand but can't bend the arm to throw--plus one usually bounces the ball into the batting box, because a ball that doesn't bounce is easy to hit.

Stay tuned for futher exciting cricket updates--jt

Proud to be a Merkin?

[[This post should probably be rated PG-13 if there were such ratings for blogs, so be warned this topic may not be for dinner time reading with the kids--or grandparents! And yes, I've deliberately not posted pictures, though some simple Googling will find what you want.--jt]]

Given the unpredictableness of my schedule working with folks back in Washington DC on Friday nights, we usually don't plan much for those evenings--it's often movie night or channel surfing on the TV. One show we're amused by, and that I doubt would make primetime in the U.S., is BBC Two's Balderdash & Piffle, in which a host and her "wordhunters" try to determine the earliest usages of words and then submit their results to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, who judge whether to revise the OED's entries for the words. For example, one night we watched the show tackled the origins of "loo" and when "domestic" first became a police term for a fight among a couple at home (Show's website is here)

Now last night's show was rather...hmm,x-rated. In fact, that was the title of the episode. (Easily offended blog readers might want to stop now! This is your second warning) The theme was sex-related phrases and the first one was "marital aids". If you don't know what that refers to, I'm not telling you here! The word hunters initially traced its use to advertisements in the first Playboy-like mens magazines in the 1960s and then back a bit further.

They also tried to chase down when "kinky" began to mean sexually perverted and not simply curly. But the star word of the show was "merkin", whose story was told by the appropriately named burlesque star Immodesty Blaise. Neither Katie or I had ever heard it, so here's the short OED entry, via wikipedia:

merkin (first use, according to the OED, 1617) is reported to be a pubic wig, worn by prostitutes after shaving their genitalia to eliminate lice or to disguise the marks of syphilis. A similar, though anachronistic, claim not made in OED is that merkins were worn for nude stage appearances. ...

The story cites various origins for the word, including an old term, "malkin", for prostitutes. There's not a big market for merkins today. The OED, however, claims merkins are essential gear for drag queens, although the Guardian newspaper quotes a celebrity fashion designer challenging that in a 2003 article.

"I know a bit about merkins, but I don't know anyone who wears one and won't be designing one myself," says Red or Dead founder Wayne Hemingway. "I can't see them making a comeback, but it is a bloody good word."

Among other details on merkin's lurid history, the show noted that Cole Porter had rhymed the word with Sarah Perkin in a tune. Blaise also amusingly claimed that the word has now become slang for folks from the United States. Putting on a bad Texas accent, she slyly cited George Bush as saying "I'm proud to be a merkin". Ha! Who says reading the dictionary can't be fun.

-jt

P.S. In one of the odder Google search finds I've made, Texas Longhorn fans have accused ESPN college football commentator Lee Corso of wearing a merkin. See this link where I found the picture below. KT says the insult stems from a feud a Dallas radio station has with Corso.

Will's new house--just like the old house

Minstrels playing before the show starts

Reading that DC's Shakespeare Theater is about to open its new home downtown reminded me we haven't blogged about our trip a few weekends ago to see Othello at the Globe theatre in London (A belated public thanks to KT for such a cool birthday present!). The Globe is a recreation of the one where Shakespeare acted and his plays were first performed--the original one burned down in 1613.

It was a chilly day of near-constant rain so I was very happy that KT had splurged on great center-stage, third level, front row tickets (and that we rented cushions for the wooden benches). The Globe has an open roof so the folks standing in front of the stage--the groundlings, as they were known in the Bard's day--got soaked, while we were safely protected by the thatched roof. The groundlings have to stand the entire play in the elements but they do get the best seat (so to speak) in the house for a mere $10. The actors frequently came through the audience to reach the stage.

As for the play itself, I would give it a solid B. For those who don't recall, it tells the tale of a famous black warrior in a white society who dares to marry a white woman--and of how he is tricked into killing her (Desdemona) in a jealous rage by his evil "friend" Iago. I've seen the play a few times-- once with Star Trek's Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) playing Othello as a white man in a black society!--and it usually hinges on whether Iago is believably villainous. In this production, Desdemona and Iago were well-acted, but Othello needed more volume--I don't think the actor was used to working without a microphone and he needed to project to make his words better heard. Still, the tragic ending was very powerful.

(On an amusing aside, I came home from the play recalling the song "Desdemona" from the "Fame" TV series and spent far too much time the next day watching video clips of that show on YouTube. I even watched the anniversary show where they gathered Debbie Allen and rest of the cast after 10 years. I used to love "Fame" and it was apparently an even bigger hit in Europe than in the U.S. Odd fact: The hour-long Fame episodes were stripped of all the musical numbers and also shown in syndication as a half-hour school drama. What was the point of that?!)

Outside the Globe

Sunday Roast

In the U.K., the big Sunday meal isn't brunch, it's Sunday Roast. Most of the pubs serve it, and a couple of the cooking magazines offer recipes and ideas for your Sunday Roast at home. What's served? Well, roast. Roast beef, pork, lamb, or chicken. Add some roasted potatoes, a Yorkshire pudding, and some boiled vegetables, and you have yourself a Sunday Roast. According to the Wikipedia entry on it, Sunday Roast came about because it was a meal you could put in the oven before you headed off to church, and it'd be ready when you got home around lunchtime.

For various and assorted reasons, we hadn't yet had a proper Sunday Roast. So, this past Sunday, we decided to steal an idea mentioned by our neighbor -- ride our bikes out to a village for Sunday Roast. The village we picked was Grantchester, just three miles south of us. The ride took us along the river and through Grantchester Meadows (Pink Floyd fans know the song based on this place?). It was a pretty ride on a gorgeous day -- which means a lot of people had the same idea. No worries, though -- nothing wrong with a slow pace on a Sunday afternoon.

We should have ridden around Grantchester a bit more. Near as I can tell, it consists of three pubs and a post office. We chose a pub called Rupert Brooke, which we had heard good things about. There was plenty of outdoor seating, which was great since I'm allergic to the indoors on 70-degree, sunny days. We got one beef and one pork roast dinner. Here's what we got:

Oh, I forgot to mention that it's smothered in gravy. The burnt looking thing in the upper left is Yorkshire pudding, a savory pastry sort of thing meant for soaking up roast drippings and gravy. I'm not yet sold on it, but that one was particularly overcooked so I shouldn't judge based on that one.

This was also served with boiled broccoli, carrots, and leeks. Add a pint of beer, some coffee, and three Sunday newspapers, and you too will fall in love with Sunday roast. No chasing people out to turn over the tables here -- you can stay as long as you like. Like to try this at home? Here's some Sunday roast ideas here, here, here, here, here, and here.

What topped off the afternoon was that we meandered back home clockwise, as opposed to the more direct anti-clockwise, as they say here. This took us up around Jesus Green, where we happened upon a little jazz in the park.

We had our picnic blanket packed on the bike, so we rode over, spread the blanket out, and spent another hour or so soaking in the beautiful weather and joyous mood that can only come from being surrounded by happy, relaxed, content people.

Now this is a recipe for a Sunday afternoon.

A Strawberry Fair

I was really excited. A Strawberry Fair! It's been on our events calendar for months, and has been hyped locally. It *is* strawberry season, after all. It's been promoted as Music! Crafts! Games! Fun for the whole family! And, I thought, surely there must be tons of strawberries!



Well, there was tons of something.

It was quite a site, and definitely good people-watching. It was much more like Woodstock than your average weekend fair in the park. It was made more rowdy by the fact that the kids (all kids -- primary, secondary, college, university) were all off for midterm break this past week and have to go back on Monday, so this was the last hurrah for the older ones before they go back to school. I haven't seen so much Smirnoff Ice since ... well, for a while.


The main attraction is the music -- there are several music tents that have different themes. We stopped and listened in the acoustic tent, then in another tent that had a good band -- until they started singing. Our favorite was probably an almost-ska band that rapped. They had a sense of humor despite it being 100 million degrees in their tent. However, since we don't know any small bands, we didn't bother getting a program (had to pay for it). We probably should have just picked a tent and sat in it for a while.

Here are a few girls dressed as strawberries. Them and one vendor selling little plastic cups of strawberries represented the extent of the strawberry presence at the fair.

But one whole corner of the common was devoted to alternative healing. Didgeridoo massage, anyone?

Random Sightings II

As if flaming batons amidst cows and daredevil cheese-rolling wasn't enough, we have death-defying musicians (ok, so he's only a few feet above the ground) here in Cambridge. We snapped this a while ago while walking through Cambridge but I forgot to post it. As someone who has no musical talent and precious little athletic grace, I think this is impressive AND hilarious. What came first for this guy--playing the violin or walking the rope? --JT