Uncommon Places

…even when it’s dark and foggy. I’m having a great time exploring the grounds on the Dalkeith Estate.

I’ve continued to enjoy the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and I’m pretty sad that it’s all coming to an end. The best street performance by far, Choi Sori & Arirang’s fusion of riveting Korean percussion and “extreme martial arts” provided some great opportunities for photographs.

They began with traditional dances, the men wearing masks and the women swirling beautiful fans:

Then things got a little edgy. The lead dancers performed a sword dance, beginning with a salutation, as the blindfolded man rested his sword on the train of the woman’s gown. She placed a flower stem in her mouth and dangled a flower from each outstretched hand.

Dancing around the woman with his flashing sword, the blindfolded swordsman quickly “deflowered” two of the carnations and was soon ready for the last set of intricate steps before his final cut. The crowd was very still.

[I like the way the severed blossom lies there at his feet.]

After all that drama and tension, we needed a few laughs. The swordsman obliged, taking off his shirt and pretending to terrorize a tourist with his martial arts.

I’m in Edinburgh, where I’ve managed (despite sleep deprivation and jet lag) to enjoy the Edinburgh Fringe Festival: acapella groups, cathedral choral music, a Jekyll and Hyde play at the Scottish Storytelling Center, and a bit of street theater.

    That unicycle is three meters high.

Over at TED.com (where all kinds of videos can be found) engineer Robert Lang talks origami. Not just paper insects and Black Forest Cuckoo Clocks and snakes with a thousand scales, but solar panels, air bags, and heart stents, all made from mathematically-enhanced origami. Robert Lang believes in having dead people solve his problems for him—applying the algorithms of generations of scientists and mathematicians to make spectacular origami. It often happens, he says, that when you get math involved, “problems that you solve for aesthetic value only [making nifty insects, for example]…turn out to have an application in the real world.” Hence the airbags and heart stents.

Lang’s 16 minute talk will definitely give you a whole new view of origami.

So will Google designer Bruno Bowden’s blindfolded origami feat: folding a Lang design in 2 minutes, accompanied by the electric cello artistry of Rufus Cappadocia.

I’m leaving in a few days for Scotland, where I’ll spend four months at Dalkeith House, teaching courses in Creative Writing, Modern British Literature, and Science Fiction & Fantasy.

Unfortunately, I must leave the Feline Muses here in Wisconsin. (But how will I write without them? What will I write without them?)

Here’s a final glimpse of my kitties, who will soon be in the caring hands of my capable Feline Guardian.

Mithril is being stoical about my departure:

One of Gabriel’s eyes has become a most peculiar shade of green:

Snowmane, who might actually miss me a little, has turned into an Unidentified Feline Object.