Dec. 11th, 2007

05:28 am - QotD

More surprising still, Ekirch reports that for many
centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in
two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the
night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus
night -- divided into a "first sleep" and "second sleep" -- also
included a curious intermission. "There was an extraordinary
level of activity," Ekirch told me. People got up and tended to
their animals or did housekeeping. Others had sex or just lay in
bed thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with bedfellows.
[...]

Our conception of sleep as an unbroken block is so innate
that it can seem inconceivable that people only two centuries
ago should have experienced it so differently. Yet in an
experiment at the National Institutes of Health a decade ago,
men kept on a schedule of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of
darkness -- mimicking the duration of day and night during
winter -- fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began
sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one
to three hours of somnolence -- just calmly lying there -- in
between. Some sleep disorders, namely waking up in the middle of
the night and not being able to fall asleep again, "may simply
be this traditional pattern, this normal pattern, reasserting
itself," Ekirch told me. "It's the seamless sleep that we aspire
to that's the anomaly, the creation of the modern
world."

In fact, many contemporary, nonindustrialized cultures
contentedly pass portions of the night in the same state of
somnolence, says Carol Worthman, an anthropologist at Emory
University who is one of the first to look at how other
societies sleep. [...] Among the Efe in Zaire, and the
!Kung in Botswana, for example, someone who wakes up in the
middle of the night and cannot sleep "may begin to hum, or go
out and play the thumb piano," Worthman and a colleague have
written. Others might wake up and join in. "Music or even a
dance may get going."

02:07 pm - Retail

I walked out to the grocery store and drug store this afternoon,
which may have been a mistake, but by the time I decided that my back
really didn't feel right I was most of the way there so I decided to
grit my teeth and push on -- anyhow, I was out of some stuff I didn't
want to run out of...

So I was in two different canned-Christmas-music environments,
one of which was in a Bing Crosby era mode (I'm glad I'm getting
exposed in small doses, unlike the store employees, so I don't run
so high a risk of coming to hate and dread what would otherwise be
either pleasant or inoccuous music) and by the time I got home,
the last song I'd heard in the drug store was mutating as it looped
in my brain. (Go figure.)

Have yourself a mercenary Christmas,
Make the yuletide pay ...

Not as catchy as what Tom Lehrer did to Christmas carols, but
given the context it seemed to fit.

05:13 pm - Whoops

I figured that, though tired, I should try to get more windows
covered in plastic, so as to be a little more prepared when our
current kindasortaalmostwarm snap ends. I've been using gaffer's
tape, in the hope that it won't take the paint with it when I
remove it from the windows I want to be able to open, come spring.
(Though some rooms were painted poorly and/or with the wrong kind
of paint, and the paint is all too happy to leave the wall
regardless of whether the proper adhesive is used, other rooms
will actually benefit from the right kind of tape. On walls where
there's bare plaster or paint so old that it needs to be repainted
anyhow, I just use clear packing tape.)

But I just ran out of gaffer's tape -- I didn't have as much
as I thought I did. Gonna need to get out to Service Photo
sooner rather than later, I guess. Unless Bill's Music sells
gaffer's tape.