Magnets, Burgers, Revisions and Other Stuff

Spent a few hours at the Menil Collection here in Houston yesterday. An amazing museum complex that is totally free and has a phenomenal permanent exhibit of surrealism (including paintings by Magritte and Picasso) and this really creepy/cool room of items that the various surrealists collected (or facsimiles thereof). So you see their private stashes of feathers and masks and weird statues and those things people used to use to make postcards look 3-D. Okay hang on. I've got to look that up. I know there's word. Ah! It's stereoscope. (the more modern version for kids was called a Viewmaster, but the concept has been around a long while) One of the temporary exhibits was from this Greek artist, Takis (the man, not the shockingly orange snack food) who does all these pieces with magnets that make you go hmm, how the heck did he do that. Like this:

It's magnets behind the canvas that hold those things totally still in the air. Crazy.

Anyway, it's this amazing museum and the full complex includes the Rothko Chapel and the Cy Twombly Gallery. And if you're in Houston, you should really go.

Then because I had some things to drop off at Writespace, where I teach now and then, we had burgers at Stanton City Bites, where you can get the Truckstopper, which looks like this:

Yeah, those are onion rings on my burger. And cheese. And bacon. And ooh look, it's tomato and lettuce so it's healthy!

Then back to revisions for IT WASN'T ALWAYS LIKE THIS (coming May '16 from Soho Press) and some really cool research on hawks and falconry and did you know hawks mate while flying then free-fall while, um, together. And somehow don't manage to slam into the ground. I don't think this factoid will make it into the book, but you get what you get when you sink into those inter webs.

And now it's Thursday and season finale for both Scandal and Blacklist tonight and so it goes her in the Bayou City where it has been raining on and off for weeks, nay, months. We're out of drought conditions, and my tomato plants are thriving, but oh the endless Seattle-esque gloom…