Snake in the Bucket

Welcome today's guest, Camille Minichino, a retired physicist turned writer. As Camille Minichino, she's the author of the Periodic Table Mysteries. As Margaret Grace, she writes the Miniature Mysteries, based on her lifelong hobby. As Ada Madison, she writes the academic mysteries featuring Professor Sophie Knowles, college math teacher. The Probability of Murder will be released March 6. Soon, every aspect of her life will be a mystery series. 


I don't trust anything that can't be described by an equation and/or plugged into 120 VAC. So you can imagine my delight when Gigi told me that the Pens, my bookmarked, read-daily blog, would be talking about SNAKES!

An equation-based theme; what a dream!

The snake curve is one of my favorites. Also called active contours, snake curves are the wave (so to speak) of the future. They're able to track motion in a way that holds great promise for cool apps, like tracing the history of a person's smile, or the action of a heart valve. The full progress of the smile in the picture, as well as other apps that are sure to revolutionize medical image processing, are given in this report from the International Journal of Computer Vision.


OK, I know for some people the snake curve may not be the first thing that comes to mind for this topic. More often, the word SNAKE evokes an image of a scaly reptile, or a plumber's tool, or an ex-husband. 

Thinking about this blog has made me realize how much snakes have to do with my life. Many items on my Anti-Bucket List (things I hope never to have to do before I die) have to do with snakes, including but not limited to

1. Visit a zoo (the only place where snakes should exist)
2. Hike (where there might be snakes);
3. Garden  (where there surely are snakes)
4. Eat outside (where the risk of snakes is great)
5. Sleep outside (see 4, only more so)
6. Bring a plant into my home (thus, a possible snake embryo)
7. Enter a pet store (where all species thrive, indiscriminately)

I could save a lot of time by simply putting NATURE on my Anti-Bucket List.

But NATURE includes  technology, which I love and want more of. Unlike snakes, technology is an extension of ourselves, from scissors as an extension of our fingers (not just for Johnny Depp!) to printers and books as an extension of our thoughts, to cars as an extension of our legs, and so on.

Snakes do nothing to extend our abilities. Not even Juliet Blackwell's earlier post, with its symbolic pokes in that regard changed my mind.

I get really tense if I inadvertently walk down the pet food aisle in the supermarket, where they sell 25-pound bags of snake food. In fact, I'm getting tense writing this blog.

Excuse me while I plug up all the vent holes in my house.

I Get a Kick Out of . . . ?

I get no kick from champagne

Mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all . . .

So sang Frank Sinatra, though there were rumors to the contrary about the lifestyle of Old Blue Eyes.

It's definitely true for me, however. I've been a teetotaler since I took a sip of the nasty wine our landlord made in the cellar when I was a kid. They say there's some good stuff out there now, but it's just as well I don't taste it. What if I end up liking it and consuming alcohol the way I do Sees scotchmallows (why doesn't Sees have tasting rooms?) or hazelnut gelato? You'd be holding my hair back every night while I … never mind.

What does thrill me, besides my hubby, The Cable Guy?

Sometimes just a little arithmetic will do it. Like when my table companions let me calculate the tip or someone asks me to multiply 36 x 11. (There's a trick for multiplying quickly by 11 at the end of The Square Root of Murder. I'll bet you can hardly wait!)

I knew that the life of my new college math teacher protagonist, Professor Sophie Knowles, might not seem as exciting as that of skillet-wielding Stella Hardesty, for example, so I gave her a medevac pilot, ice-climbing boyfriend. Bruce sleeps in his EMS jumpsuit and answers to the call of the Batphone night after night. For some people, that's more thrilling than advanced calculus. Go figure.

I slipped out of ThrillerFest in New York earlier this month and visited the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbus Circle. Walked right into a thrilling exhibit of dioramas like this wrecked 1950s beauty parlor. Dystopias thrill me, especially in miniature form—the perfect combination of dark reality and a little bit of distance since nothing's big enough to hurt you.
I try to have four thrilling moments before lunch.

Here's what happened today:

1. I solved this exciting riddle: Tom's mother has three children. One is named April, one is named May. What is the third one named?

2. I read this thrilling quote from Alexander Calder, whose birthday is today, July 22: "I paint with shapes." It makes me think I can paint with words. Wow! Big thrill.

3. I got a kick out of these lyrics, rendered by Johnny Cash on the XM country channel in my car: "I've been flushed from the bathroom of your heart; up the elevator of your future I've been shafted."

4. I read the thrilling opening line of "Hexes and Hemlines," by Juliet Blackwell: "It didn't take a witch to figure out something was very, very wrong on the thirteenth floor of the Doppler Building."

I'm done for the day and it's only 10 in the morning! What's my biggest kick overall? Those wonderful readers, women and men we meet at conferences or book signings or on Facebook. Especially the followers of Pens Fatales: I get a kick out of you!

Camille Minichino is the author of three mystery series, beginning with her Periodic Table Mysteries. Her akas are Margaret Grace (The Miniature Mysteries) and Ada Madison (The Professor Sophie Knowles Mysteries). The first chapter of "The Square Root of Murder," (a July 2011 release) is on her website: http://www.minichino.com.

Serene is Clean

Camille Minichino, aka Margaret Grace, aka Ada Madison, is a woman of many talents: She's a brilliant scientist, talented author, generous teacher....

She's also that oh-so-rare creature in the Bay Area, a woman who is not afraid to say, right out loud, in front of anyone who cares to listen: "I hate the outdoors. Mountains, oceans, the wide open: blech....Give me Manhattan any day!"

Around these parts, that's pretty close to sedition, if not blasphemy. At the very least, they're fighting words. Is Camille/Margaret/Ada daunted? No, she is not. As far as I can tell, she's not afraid of much...except maybe dirt. And worms. And birds.

So naturally, when the topic of "gardening" came up, I just had to ask for her take on the subject.

Camille:

I've never understood the concept of playing in the dirt.

Dirt is, well, dirty. And gardens are nothing if not dirty.
Aren't we always trying to remove dirt from our lives?

We bathe, wash our hair and our clothes, and in some cases even our kitchen floors. We suck up dirt with vacuum cleaners, flush it out of our eyes immediately upon contact, scrape it from under our fingernails, and hope the kids don't drag in too much of it.

When you say, "I've got some dirt on her," you don't usually mean you've heard she's won an Edgar or that she's asked you to be her maid of honor.

And consider dirt's synonyms: crud, dreck, dregs, filth, gook, gunk, mire, muck, scuz, sleaze, slime, smudge, smut. "Serenity" and "soothing" are not among them. You see my point.

All this is why I never step into a garden on purpose.

Then there are weeds. How can you tell a weed from a plant? Darned if I know, except gardeners have it in for weeds. They're like serial killers of any green things they didn't plant themselves. We have weed killer, but not fern killer or boxwood killer. What's up with that?

I've seen my neighbor pull up one perfectly good-looking green thing and plant another that looks pretty darn close. I don't get it.

You'll never catch me weeding. Live and let live, I say.

Friends of mine garden (v. trans.) food. They spend hours and get dirty planting fruit and vegetables. Hello! There are people who do this for us. I think they live in Nebraska. Anyway, somehow, they deliver clean, dirt-free, bug-free berries and tomatoes.

I'll admit my brother-in-law's tomatoes taste better than the ones from the truck that comes from Nebraska, or maybe it's Iowa, but my brother-in-law's tomatoes are dirty. I won't touch one until someone else scrubs it clean and cuts it open, lest I find, eeek! a worm.

Worms are even worse than dirt because they can follow you around if they choose, like a wormy guy.

And don't get me started on the birds, often found in gardens, with their high-pitched voices and lack of potty training. Geesh.

There's one garden that I do like. My miniature version. Notice I've labeled the sack, "soil," which is cleaner than dirt. The whole scene is pretty clean, in fact, except for the bloody boots. They probably belong to a gardener who just murdered a weed.


















In case you're wondering if I'm really serious about all this anti-gardening stuff, here's a photo of my back yard.

Since I don't like to go outdoors when it's sunny, my husband took it for me. He says the green things are weeds and I believe him.

The other things that are growing there are an FM antenna and a satellite dish.
Garden-wise, I call this serene!

Thanks, Pens Fatales, for letting me play in your garden today!

Camille Minichino is a retired physicist turned writer.

As Camille Minichino she's published eight novels and a short story in the periodic table mystery series, featuring GLORIA LAMERINO.

As Margaret Grace, she's published five novels in the miniature mystery series, featuring GERALDINE PORTER.

As Ada Madison, she's poised to release a new series, academic mysteries featuring SOPHIE KNOWLES.

Visit them all at www.minichino.com