My old college friend Marty Isenberg is the person who turned me on to the Marx Brothers many years ago. I knew a little bit of Groucho from reruns of “You Bet Your Life”, but I wasn’t really familiar with their movies as a kid. That was rectified, and I also read pretty much every book I could find about them or by them (a brief aside to mention that Harpo’s memoir, “Harpo Speaks!”, is a wonderful book). So I enjoyed this recent Neatorama post detailing some of Groucho’s assorted dietary habits and peccadilloes. Groucho was a complicated individual, and his tastes and habits reflect that.

This good-looking fellow is none other than Almanzo Wilder, Laura Ingalls’ husband. He is 28 years old in this photo, the same age as when they were married. Wilder was 10 years older than his bride. This website has an undated picture of the two of them together that looks like its from just a few years later. He lived to the ripe old age of 92. The photo above isn’t new or anything, but it made an appearance the other day on a somewhat whimsical tumblr site called “My Daguerrotype Boyfriend”, which is chock-full of 19th Century hottie boys like Manly Wilder.

Check out this Popular Science article about a guy who built a 20-foot flying radio-controlled model of the U.S.S. Macon, one of a pair of zeppelins built by the U.S. Navy in the 1930s. The Macon and her sister ship, the Akron, were both destroyed in accidents, which convinced the Navy to abandon the use of airships. The model builder is planning to donate his project to a museum being built at Moffett Field in California, which was the airship’s original home.

That’s none other than American industrial icon Henry Ford receiving a big ol’ medal from the Nazis back in the 1930s. The Wehrmacht overran Europe in Ford trucks, built with slave labor, but even before the war, Henry Ford was one of Hitler’s biggest international supporters. American businesses LOVED Hitler and most did business with the Nazi regime right up until war was declared. The role played by IBM in providing tabulation machines to the Nazis to make the Final Solution become reality has been well-documented. This top-ten post from Cracked Magazine lists some of the other companies still in business today who were big Hitler supporters. Guess how many of them are Republican Party donors today.

I got some chuckles out of this Futility Closet post about some of the deliberately silly scientific names given to various species by fun-loving scientists. My favorite: a species of wasp named Lalapa lusa.

Not only does this help me with my inner woman, it also helps me with my inner geek. This post at a crafters’ forum features a cross-stitch sampler anyone can make that includes a bit of modernity that actually can come in handy: displaying your home wireless network’s SSID and WEP encryption key. Now your houseguests who arrive with their laptops will feel right at home logging onto your network. This is actually useful enough that I would consider suggesting it to some of my LOL’s as a way to help them keep this information at hand. Just one carp, dearie: everybody should be using WPA2 instad of WEP for their encryption.

Tina Fey’s new book, Bossypants, is out and getting good reviews. Blogger Melody Godfred took a few minutes to transcribe part of the book, “A Mother’s Prayer For Her Child”, which speaks to the existential dread felt by mothers (and fathers) about their daughters’ futures:

May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.

While we’re talking books, Salon’s Laura Miller reviewed a new book by author Wendy McClure called “The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of ‘Little House on the Prairie’”. McClure set out to “let her calico sunbonnet freak flag fly” by visiting some of the real-life places where Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family lived. As you know, we hold Laura close to our hearts in this home, so I can empathize with her fandom, even if I was not a sunbonnet-wearing little girl in the 1970s. The book sounds like fun for anyone who is a “Little House” aficionado.

This video of comedian Julia Sweeney telling the tale of finding herself unexpectedly having to explain sex to her eight-year-old daughter made the rounds online a couple of weeks ago. It’s longish (about 10 minutes), but sweet and funny and exactly as uncomfortable as one might expect:

This is a conversation that won’t have to happen this way for us, because Bridget and I have always been pretty straight with Charlotte about the anatomical elements of her own body. She’s known about her own uterus and eggs and stuff like that for a long time. She’s also had at least a vague idea of “sex” (in the sense of “this is how two people make a baby”) for several years, though without some of the embellishments. And a steady diet of tween TV has given her enough of the boyfriend-girlfriend story. Now that the three of us stand on the cliff’s edge of beginning puberty, there will be the need to expand the conversation a little, but it shouldn’t ever have to play out like Julia Sweeney and the frogs.

Even though I like to think of myself as being far less unwilling to engage with aspects of femininity than most of the men I know, the hard reality for me is that this next phase of Charlotte’s growing up involves a cleaving between us as father and daughter. I can sympathize but I don’t have any real insight or perspective into the details of becoming a woman. It is simply part of her life I cannot share. I very sincerely wish that the trust and openness we’ve always had about everything else will help to minimize the separation, but it will always be there. The Tina Fey poem wishes for “a rough patch between twelve and seventeen” for a daughter to find that path deliberately but slowly, instead of the torment of teenager-hood; I can’t even begin to guess at the depth of the angst that those years might deliver upon a girl child, I can only start trying to find a way to watch from a distance.

However, if you’re a fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, there’s still plenty of time to register for LauraPalooza 2010, being held in July in Mankato, Minnesota. The final details for the conference schedule will be announced over the weekend, but you can already make your reservations for lodging at the university which is hosting the conference. You don’t have to run 26.2 miles, either…although they may be arranging for a plague of locusts, a blizzard, or some other “Little House”-style entertainment.

Yes, badgers do have vanilla creme filling, but who could resist these delightful chocolate hedgehogs!

Ooh, I hate it when that happens: How To Fall 35,000 Feet And Survive Protip: Carry an ACME Brand parasol at all times!

With the solstice only a couple of days away, we are just now getting our first taste of winter. The ice storm last week that knocked out power all over some parts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine was only just rain for us, albeit enough rain that the sump pump had to be put into action. We got probably two inches of snow on Wednesday, which might be a disaster in Dallas or Las Vegas, but isn’t even worth calling snow in my vocabulary. Today, however, the panic-mongering TV weather guys have promised us six to ten inches of snow…I’m guessing that’s about the closest to six-to-ten-inches these guys ever get, if you take my meaning (nudge nudge).

Because everybody had a good day or more to think about it, there was a calmness to things this morning. The grocery stores had already been pillaged for every last loaf of bread or quart of milk, the gas stations’ tanks drained dry. It was an automatic excuse to blow off work the Friday before Christmas, getting an early jump on the two least productive weeks in America. Our school department pre-emptively decided to release kids at lunchtime, but when I dropped off Charlotte at school there were a ton of people calling in to say their kids were just plain getting a hookey day. By the time I went back to pick her up, the anticipation of the storm was palpable.

Six to ten inches of snow in a single storm is a decent amount, but it is by no means what I would consider a big deal. We’ll all get up in the morning, plow out our driveways, and get on with things. The people who still don’t have their power back from last week’s storm are probably going to have a sucktastic weekend, and I’m glad I’m not among them, but otherwise it’s a yawner. In the years when it seems like we get a six-to-ten-inch storm once a week, the cumulative result certainly does wear on one’s patience, but even that is not out of the ordinary in this quadrant of the country.

The likelihood of a white Christmas has increased substantially, although last year we had a snowstorm of this caliber in the first half of December and still managed to have completely bare ground on Christmas morning. It was, after all, 60 degrees out just four days ago. Six inches of snow melts pretty quick when the temperature bounces up by thirty degrees overnight.

Charlotte and I just finished reading yet another one of the books in the “Little House” series, “The Long Winter”. The title gives away the premise. It’s about the first winter the Ingalls family spent in the Dakota territory — seven solid months of nearly continuous blizzard conditions buried the little town that had popped up near the new railroad, preventing supply trains from delivering any food or fuel to the few dozen settlers, who had not had time yet to grow and put up food crops and were completely reliant on the trains. The Ingalls wintered in a single room, forced after a while to resort to burning bundles of hay for heat when the coal and kersoene ran out, and limited to a diet of coarse bread made by grinding wheat in a coffee mill. Compared to the other books we’ve read so far, most of which are full of depictions of the unspoiled prairie, descriptions of the many skills pioneer families had to have to live away from civilization, and the occasional setback or unexpected scare, this book was just one bleak episode after another. Even though the books are mostly true, I found myself at the point of thinking that there was no way things could be that bad only to have them get worse in the next chapter. I can’t recall any other book that I have read that really drove home the utter despair of winter. So, even though we’ve been enjoying what has really amounted to a very full-length autumn, every night for the last several weeks Charlotte and I have spent a half an hour or so struggling with survival in our imaginations.

Looking out my window, all wrapped up in my cozy slanket, and knowing that all I have to do in the morning is spend an hour with the snowblower clearing out my driveway, winter’s not looking all that fierce at the moment.

Have you heard that Melissa Gilbert is starring in a musical production of “Little House On The Prairie”? It’s true! The renowned Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis-St. Paul is the site of the world-premiere of this show. Gilbert, who is now 44 years old, plays Caroline Ingalls…yep, she’s “Ma”.

This article in today’s New York Times theater section is a little more detailed than that wire story linked above and has a couple of pictures, too. From this article, it sounds like the playwrights borrowed as much from the TV show as from the books. I imagine it must be difficult to deal with the expectations of an audience who are more likely to have childhood memories of the television show, and asking Melissa Gilbert to play Ma is nothing short of brilliant on the part of the producers. It guaranteed the success of the show and creates the possibility of a Broadway run — although it might be a limited run if the only appeal to a bigger audience is her.

Charlotte and I are reading “Little House On The Prairie” as her bedtime story these days, and we’re almost done with the book. We’re actually working our way through the whole set of Little House books, and “LHOP” is Book #3, after “Little House In The Big Woods” and “Farmer Boy” (which is the one about her husband Almanzo’s childhood in upstate New York). If you’ve never read “Little House On The Prairie” itself, it is not the story you know from TV. The Ingalls family uprooted from their home in Wisconsin and travelled to Kansas to homestead in newly-opened Indian territory. It’s a story about a little family on a wide-open frontier, 50 miles from the nearest town, surrounded by unhappy Indians who have been displaced by settlers, and almost totally dependent on their own ability and luck. No Nellie Oleson, no happy little town of pioneers, no heart-warming endings. They almost died of malaria, barely escaped being massacred, and almost drowned just getting there. Then, after just a couple of years, they gave up and moved back to Wisconsin!

Why do I mention Patty Duke? Well, Patty Duke was another child star who managed to continue her career into adulthood, and the role which brought her to prominance as a child was playing Helen Keller in “The Miracle Worker”. Years later, long after her heyday as those wacky “identical cousins”, she starred in a critically-acclaimed TV movie version of “The Miracle Worker” in the other starring role, Helen’s teacher Anne Sullivan. And guess who played Helen in that movie…

Oh, yes. It’s Melissa Gilbert.

And I hear you asking whatever became of the original “Ma”, Karen Grassle. This webpage seems to have the most recent information about her, although even this info is several years old now. She did a lot of theatrical work while she lived in the Louisville, KY area, and made a bunch of TV appearances on game shows several years ago. She still performs on stage, most recently in a Canadian production of “Driving Miss Daisy”. If the new LHOP show goes to Broadway, maybe they could find a role for her as Mrs. Oleson or something.