Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Toads-in-the-Hole to the foldedspace.org family of weblogs. Joel and Aimee will be writing a joint weblog, aimed at keeping in touch with family and friends after they make their trek to South Dakota.

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Kris and I went antique shopping on Saturday (which was, by the way, my surgiversary). We like to hunt for treasures from time-to-time, but we rarely buy much. Antiques are just too expensive. Now that we'll be living in an old house, though, we're both excited about the possibility of stocking it with period furniture and sundries. (Dave and Karen have done this, to an extent, and we're quite impressed with the effect.)

I remembered from a previous excursion that a store in Lafayette had a large selection of antique telephones, all of which have been rewired for modern phone systems. On Saturday, I spent half an hour hefting these beauties, admiring the chrome, trying to decide which would look best in the phone corner of the new house: a wall-mounted phone or a desk phone.

While we were in Lafayette, we made a quick stop at the school house — the largest single antique mall in the area — so that I could buy a book I've been coveting for over a year. The last time we were there, I found a slim volume from the late twenties entitled The Story of the Airship. I love airships — dirigibles and the like. The book was expensive, though, and I couldn't justify it. After waiting for a year, and craving the book the entire time, I decided that I could afford the extravagance. To my surprise, the book had been reduced in price. Expect an airship-oriented weblog entry soon.

I also found a great volume from 1920 entitled Collier's Wonder Book. (You'll be seeing lots from this book, too.) Collier's Wonder Book is filled with articles imagining life in the future. For example, there are articles on:

• Hurling a Man to the Moon
• Keeping Meat Fresh a Hundred Years
• Rubber on Its Way from Tree to Tire
• Is It Possible for the Railway Train to Have Airplane Speed?
• How to Get More Out of Your Car

Collier's Wonder Book contains three hundred heavily illustrated pages filled with all sorts of terrific visions of the future. It's fantastic.

On page 304 is an enormous photograph of Albert Einstein, seated at a paper-strewn table. He's staring intently at the camera. The headline reads "Once They Would Have Burned Him at the Stake". Amazingly, the seven brief paragraphs provide a better explanation of his "idea-upsetter" theory of relativity than I've read or heard from any other source.

[The consequences of the theory of relativity] seem like sheer nonsense. And yet, Einstein's statements have been proved to be true by experiments! You have been living in a dream world. Your conception of time and space are true only within limits. "Wake up," says Einstein, "and acquaint yourself with the real world."

This reminded me of Alan Lightman's slim novel from the early nineties, Einstein's Dreams. In Einstein's Dreams, Lightman imagines what Einstein's dreams might have been like during the last few months during which he was developing his theory of relativity. Each dream lasts only a few pages. They're strange and wonderful visions of the world as it may be.

Here's one of my favorite of Einstein's dreams:

24 April 1905

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. the second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.

Many are convinced that mechanical time does not exist. When they pass the giant clock on the Kramgasse they go not see it; nor do they hear its chimes while sending packages on Postgasse or strolling between flowers in the Rosengarten. They wear watches on their wrists, but only as ornaments or as courtesies to those who would give timepieces as gifts. They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires. Such people eat when they are hungry, go to their jobs at the millinery or the chemist's when they wake from their sleep, make love all hours of the day. Such people laugh at the thought of mechanical time. They know that time moves in fits and starts. They know that time struggles forward with a weight on its back when they are rushing an injured child to the hospital or bearing the gaze of a neighbor wronged. And they know too that time darts across the field of vision when they are eating well with friends or receiving praise or lying in the arms of a secret lover.

Then there are those who think their bodies don't exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o'clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock. They make love between eight and ten at night. They work forty hours a week, read the Sunday paper on Sunday, play chess on Tuesday nights. When their stomach growls, they look at their watch to see if it is time to eat. When they begin to lose themselves in a concert, they look at the clock above the stage to see when it will be time to go home. They know that the body is not a thing of wild magic, but a collection of chemicals, tissues, and nerve impulses. Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock. As such, the body must be addressed in the language of physics. And if the body speaks, it is the speaking only of so many levers and forces. The body is a thing to be ordered, not obeyed.

Taking the night air along the river Aare, one sees evidence for the two worlds in one. A boatman guages his position in the dark by counting seconds drifted in the water's current. "One, three meters. Two, six meters. Three nine meters." His voice cuts through the black in clean and certain syllables. Beneath a lamppost on the Nydegg Bridge, two brothers who have not seen each other for a year stand and drink and laugh. The bell of St. Vincent's Cathedral sings ten times. In seconds, lights in the apartments lining Schifflaube wink out, in a perfect mechanized response, like the deductions of Euclid's geometry. Lying on the riverbank, two lovers look up lazily, awakened from a timeless sleep by the distant church bells, surprised to find that night has come.

Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the two times go their separate ways, contentment. For, miraculously, a barrister, a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times. Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

Speaking of Einstein's dreams, check out Toads-in-the-Hole, the new weblog from Joel and Aimee! (And look for more new weblogs from the foldedspace.org crew in coming weeks, with redesigns for others, especially those who have bribed the AWL with PCCC.)

On this day at foldedspace.org

2005 — Getting Things Done   I spent the weekend implementing the system found in David Allen's Getting Things Done.

2003 — Cryocuff   We didn't pay much attention to the cryocuff for the first 24 hours I was home; we discovered it this afternoon, and it makes a significant difference in how I feel.

2002 — Spring Photos   I haven't been taken many photographs lately which is probably just as well since most of my pictures suck. Nevertheless, over the past few months I've accumulated a handful of pictures that I'm willing to share for various reasons...

2001 — Fairy Tales and Fantasies   We just saw Shrek, which isn't bad, at a Regal Cinemas theater, which IS bad. Also, Pam made an interesting point about the nature of science fiction last week, and I've been thinking about it quite a bit.

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