jwg

The City Museum is a playhouse museum in St Louis, made with repurposed archtectural and industrial objects. It has caves, passages for kids to crawl around in, reconstructed refreshment stands, a litle railroad, and lots and lots of objects to gaze at. It is the brainchild of artist and entrepreneur Bob Cassilly and opened in 1997. It was full of people wndering around and lots of fun to visit.

We were there as part of our trip to Carbondale, Illinois to view the eclipse - all 2 minutes and 40 seconds of it.

Click here to see pictures

(The Humpty Dumpty was in the Art Museum - but seemed appropriate here.)

In the Dec 19 NewYorker there was an article by Alec Wilkinson about Ashrita Furman, the person who has the record for the most Guinness records. Furman, who is fifty-seven and the part owner of a health-food store in Queens, is the world’s leading practitioner of a pursuit that is known as Guinnessport—the undertaking of challenges designed to get a person into an edition of Guinness World Records.

He currently (or at the time of the article) holds 131 and has had 367. Making these records involved learning 70 discrete skills that he has learned - an example is slicing apples with a samurai sword.

Some examples:

- His first record: 27,000 jumping jacks in 6:45 was his first record.

- A mile on a hop ball on the Great Wall of China in 15 ins and 3 secs.

- Jumped underwater on a pogo stick in the Amazon for 3:40

He failed to climb Cerro Machu Picchu on stilts - at 10,009 feet would have been the highest mountain climbed that way but he was turned away by security.

At Thanksgiving we went to Distrito, a Mexican tapas restaurant in Philadelphia (which was quite good) and had margaritas. We decided we should try making them. rsc bought some Tequila the other day and tonight was the night. I looked up recipes and found several - tequila, lime juice, and Triple Sec -- even parts of each or various combinations of 3-2-1. Cointreau was a documented substitute.

I had gotten some limes and we had some old ones so I squeezed them and a new one which had decidedly more juice into the little citrus squeezer that isn't calibrated. So I poured what I got into a small liqueur shot-like glass. Not knowing how big it was I took another one and filled with the same amount of water and poured it into a 1/4 cup measuring cup. It was full and since rsc said that 1/4 cup was two ounces that seemed like the right amount.

Not having a cocktail shaker I decided to use a jam jar as the cocktail shaker (it was clean). Robert added the tequila from our brand new bottle of José Cuervo, struggling a bit to open it - a little more than 2 ounces.

We had no Triple Sec, nor Cointreau but did have some Grand Marnier. It was quite old. I noticed a piece of cork in the bottle but there was an intact replacement cork in the bottle. That is it was intact until I tried to get it out. It broke at the bottle top. I tried a corkscrew but the cork was so dried out that the the corkscrew pulled out with a few pieces of cork. More attempts with the corkscrew and a knife finally made it's way through but there were lots of cork bits floating in the Grand Marnier as well as some stuck to the inside of the bottle neck. I poured the Grand Marnier through a fairly fine strainer into a measuring cup which was almost large enough. The strainer took out most of the cork bits but there was a little bits left. I then strained into another measuring cup using a paper towel as a sieve which worked pretty well except for the Grand Marnier that spilled on the bread cutting board. I used a spoon to remove the last bits of cork from the measuring cup. I poured some into the shot glass and then poured that into the jam jar. The leftover Grand Marnier was placed in an empty Wheat Germ Jar (a small one that was large enough in spite of a certain person claiming that it was too small). During this whole process there was a fair amount of ambient noise with questions such as "why are there paper towels in the sink?"

I put the jam jar (with lid) in a measuring cup with some water and ice cubes to cool down while hors d'œuvres were made. Robert did that while I cleaned up a bit of spilled Grand Marnier from the counter and the floor.

We didn't use salt on the rims of the glasses. This is probably just as well since there would probably be salt everywhere including spilled into the drinks. I did notice a margarita salt kit in the store the other day along with margarita mix that had no lime juice but did have citrus flavoring in it; I bought neither of these.

The margaritas were quite good. And next time it will be much easier.

Once in a while I get a copy of Funny Times in the mail - attempting to sell me a subscription. It has lots of cartoons and some odd articles. In the News of the Weird section I ran into this which put me into infinite giggles. I tried about three times to read it to Robert but couldn't get past the first couple of words.

... An unfortunate burst of wind disrupted an outside art installation at the Paul Klee center in Bern, Switzerland, ripping an inflatable exhibit from its moorings and carrying it away. The exhibit, by American Paul McCarthy, was a sculpture entitled "Complex Shit", and the inflatable item was supposed to be a dog dropping the size of a house. Explained the Klee center's website (challengingly), the show features "interweaving, diverse, not to say conflictive emphases and a broad spectrum of items to form a dynamic exchange of parallel and self-eclipsing spatial and temporal zones." ) Or wrote London's Daily Telegraph in broken French, it is "what happens when la merde hits le ventilateur") ...