On Halloween

I am kind of disappointed - so far - that I haven’t seen anyone dressed up as me this Halloween.^* You know: blue jeans, t-shirt under a zip-up hooded sweater, black beard, black hair poking out from under a red baseball cap. Given all that, all you would need to really make the costume is the lone wolf antisocial attitude, the painfully shy demeanor, and the low, hardly audible, mumbled speech pattern.

It isn’t too late to impress your friends!

^* In fact, I am truly disappointed that no one is dressed-up as me, how’s that for unfounded narcissism. If anyone spit coffee all over their computer after reading the first line, I am truly sorry.

So Long…

I came into some news recently. I think my reaction was interesting, first, some background:

I’ve mentioned before about time I spent in the Chilean town of La Serena, where I did research at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). My advisor was Hugo Schwarz, we worked together on an object paper and threw around a few other ideas about planetary nebulae. I’ve often cited Hugo’s zeal as the source of my own passionate interest in planetary nebulae. During my stay at CTIO, I often found myself in Hugo’s office discussing grand ideas that had no hopes of resolution at the then current level of technology. We would find ourselves at odds on some calculation we each performed and we would spend an entire afternoon trying to figure out the problem. I still have a handful of notes from Hugo’s collection that I refer to.

Lately, as part of a class project on light pollution and vision, I’d been reading some of Hugo’s papers on light pollution and the efforts taken in Chile to curb light pollution and keep the CTIO observing sight as dark as it can be. So when people began googling his name and winding up on older websites of mine, I was intrigued. I speculated that maybe he had given some mind-numbing, matter-of-fact, public lecture about light pollution that spurred a handful of people to wonder exactly who this Hugo Schwarz is. But then I noticed that the hits were from all over the world, I mean all over the world, countries I’d never seen on my statcounter. I’ve since lost the information about the hits, so I can’t reproduce the map that showed the location of the hits (I only have the capacity to view the last 100 hits), but suffice it to say, this widespread range could not be due to a lecture given in one location. So then I looked in Google News for him, thinking that maybe he found something really cool and newsworthy. Nothing came up, I was preplexed and started composing an email in my head to him. The gist of it would be to ask, why everyone suddenly had Hugo-mania?

I had last seen Hugo two years ago at the Aspherical Planetary Nebulae III meeting held in the foot hills of Mt. Rainier. So there was much to say in my email, particularly, I wanted to give him the scoup on a paper I am currently working on. It features an object he is particularly fond of. I never got around to sending that message, because about four days after the hits to my websites started, I walked into my current advisor’s office and he told me the news. Hugo had died in a motorcycle accident in Chile. My first reaction was to the solution to my conundrum. I stood in front of my advisor exclaiming about how weird it is that I was just thinking about him because of all these hits to my older websites. This is embarrassing, but it is the truth. It took a while to absorb his death, I think this is largely due to the periodic nature of our relationship. We seemed to only see each other once every two or three years. Sadly, the next time we would probably have seen each other is January in Seattle at the American Astronomical Society meeting. His presence will be missed by everyone at the next Aspherical Planetary Nebulae conference at the Canary Islands.

The links below provide testament to just one void Hugo’s death has caused, I am sure his family feels an even bigger one:

• A Subjective Lens’ Memorial to Hugo
• NOAO’s Tribute

Some Stuff

For instance, I made this decoration; a nose - a rather large nose - whose purpose is two-fold:

1. a utilitarian purpose, to cover the protruding beam used to hang my four compartment organizer
2. a witty end, to always provide the answer to the following questions:
   • Where are the keys?
   • Where did I put the electric bill?
   • Where are my freaking shoes!?!
   • Where is… [insert anything whose location is often forgotten, because there are four compartments for all these things]

   and for these questions the answer will always be the same, “It/they is/are under my nose!”

Surely, you can appreciate the humour in this decoration:

Some more stuff:

(Left: with winter settling in, the massive tasks associated with spring and summer loom and the smoke billows out of the noisy leaf factory’s chimney. Middle: my new scarf, affectionately and wistfully called Gustaf, my swedish friend. Right: the gist of the text message from my sister was “go check your email”, the result was the cutest, most heart-wrenching, bunch of pictures of my nephew in a pumpkin patch, I was moved to tears. His shirt says, “I am a cool dude.” Indeed, in-deed!)

My Cafe Would Be Rad

There is a certain spirit to things I do for pleasure that I seldom see shared by others - maybe this is just due to the others I see. Anyway, although I am not opening a cafe in my apartment - that would be in clear violation of my lease agreement along with a whole bunch of other logistical problems arising from such an endeavor - I, nevertheless, find myself becoming more and more equiped as if I were doing just that:

On the left: my new-ish burr coffee grinder, for the most even grind. My sister did not understand why I was so excited to see this at Costco at a very low price. She was more perplexed when I began a detailed explanation about surface area, contact time, and so forth. On the right: first-time use of my Bodum coffee maker, an espresso-style maker powered by electricity (this might go to my office - still debating), my sister was even more confused when I forked over fifty dollars for this machine at an outlet store. Not pictured, but often used: french press, tea balls, make-shift coffee roaster, and freshly baked vegan apple-carrot-oatmeal scones with almonds.

Belle Absentia

Before we die, it would be very nice to be able to chew the fat, maybe over Zhufeng tea expertly prepared in that pot you gave me, with calm jazz playing on that day made for Holiday and a kitten purring at a barely noticeable level on the window ledge; imagine you and I in my little machined quandary. I can imagine it clearly, since I look forward to realizing my quandary; I’ve even prepared my dress: witty black socks (pulled up over my calves, of course), green cargo pants (one cuff rolled up, in a joking manner), a navy blue tee (pocket-less and covered in small pieces of felt from some mysterious orange rug I found myself drawn towards), and maybe a foxy knit cap. The tight knit will get to me so I’ll remove it before our drink, some questions we won’t feel like discussing will crop up so we’ll utter, “it is fine”, to usher on to the next subject, but our minds begin to look for the glowing red exit to the zephyr we left outside. I’d produce transcripts of our conversation, with comments, queer doodles, and dried tears circled in blue — more for me, so that I don’t forget the careful examination that helped me realize that I was the virulent cause of the abrupt end, and that this fact had been jutting out all along for me to see, and how I should have seen it before we lost countless trips around the sun, before the once kindling reconciliation expired, and regardless…