We Apologize for the Inconvenience

I'm going crazy packing to go live in Croatia for five months, so I apologize for the sparseness and the delays! I should have some time in the next week to write about some interesting things which have been piling up.

If anyone has interesting information about Dalmatia, let me know. I will be living in the city of Split, and am eager for information.

Wish me luck...

Pataphysics and Fictive Art

Or: How to Escape Into A Dream


I looked at Chris Palmer's cool blog, KineticWorld, today (thanks Ranjit) and was intrigued with the entry on the Museé Patamécanique: a place, a website, an ideology of, as curator Neil Salley, puts it, "the science of imaginary solutions. It is the underpinnings of our entire society. All words being equal, you can come up with any definition of it you like." The term was coined by the brilliant 19th-century French writer Alfred Jarry (author of the play Ubu Roi), in his fictional Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, describes "the exploits and teachings of a sort of antiphilosopher who, born at age 63, travels through a hallucinatory Paris in a sieve and subscribes to the tenets of 'pataphysics. 'Pataphysics deals with "the laws which govern exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one". In 'pataphysics, every event in the universe is accepted as an extraordinary event." [wiki]

As Ranjit points out, the Boston Globe did an article on the Musée Patamécanique which they visited, describing the place thusly:

The "Patamechanics Hall, a dark gallery of mechanical oddities designed to spark pataphysical thinking that seem teleported straight from the 19th century. The "Pharus Foetidus Viscera," or "Olfactory Lighthouse," is a cylindrical pedestal topped by a bell jar and surrounded by metal octopus arms. Inside the jar, something Salley describes as a unicorn horn slowly rotates, causing it to secrete green goop that resembles shampoo gel...

"The more you listen to Salley and experience his wondrous contraptions, the more you lose your bearings between reality and fantasy. The Musée Patamécanique turns out to be an intellectual hall of mirrors. It is a museum for questioning museums, and art, and science, and officialdom, and facts, and the world."

Hooray for that! It is always refreshing to hear about people playing around with more magical (or even downright fun and silly) interpretations of reality:

"The Musée Patamécanique is part of a growing body of art that adopts the language and trappings of officialdom. Examples include Los Angeles's Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Center for Tactical Magic from Oakland, Calif., and, locally, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, the National Bitter Melon Council, and the Institute for Applied Autonomy. In the world of pop culture, such adoption of fake authority can be found in parodies such as "The Daily Show" and "The Onion."

"For artists, adopting official-sounding names -- along with convincing-looking websites and other packaging and marketing -- can be a way to question authority, frequently humorously, while often doing what the organization's names say they do."


This kind of art isn't that new. Marcel Broodthaers created, the Museum of Modern Art's "Department of Eagles": an elusive exhibition from 1968 to 1971 of found objects with eagles on them and eagle-related art that he made, though the exhibition was really about appropriating the language and structures of museums and authorities, using the eagle, a symbol of power, as a metaphor. The cool thing about this was that he created an institution with many wings, for example, the Finance Section, which tried to sell the museum "on account of bankruptcy."


Packard Jennings, someone I met while on a residency at Djerassi Residence Artist's Program, is also one of these people. He made the most hilarious video I've ever seen about a Mussolini action figure he created and put on the shelf (shopdropped) in WalMart, where someone is trying to actually buy the figure, and the store clerks are completely flummoxed, except they know who Mussolini is! (Watch to the end, that's the best part.)

Antoinette LaFarge, at UC Irvine, has created a whole site, unfinished as of yet, on the idea of Fictive Arts, "...a term I started using in 2001 to describe a particular form of aesthetic production that doesn't belong to any one field. Fictive artworks have clearly fictional elements but extend outside the realm of the purely fictive in various ways, principally through the creation of realia. A working definition of the term might be: credible fictions created through production of real-world objects, events, and entities."

The thing I find fascinating about the whole Fictive Art movement, and its bevy of predecessors and spin-offs, is the combination of dreamlike logic and official phraseology, as if some half-remembered story has come true and is being promulgated by Those In Charge. The sales clerk in WalMart is surprised and pleased to see they are selling Mussolini action figures. Wandering through the Museum of Jerassic Technology - one of my favorite places, and an inspiration for the Museé Patamécanique - one finds oneself surrendering, dreamily, to the dim and scholarly exhibits which carry that slight air of delapidation and poor construction one finds in so many small, old museums. One begins to believe what one is told, only to emerge, blinking, onto the bright and unforgiving streets of Los Angeles, wondering which reality is preferable.


Links:

- The Centennial Society, which seems to be associated with Packard Jennings in some way (but clearly not with WalMart).

- The Museum of Jurassic Technology, which I hope someday to write about in further depth. Its owner, David Wilson, is the subject of Lawrence Weschler's Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder.

- Fodor's reviews the Museum of Jurassic Technology!

The Shapes of Things We See

"Look, Mama! The Dragon Tree! Hi, Dragon Tree!"

I heard this about fifteen times in varying degrees of attention, going round a certain curve, before I saw it: a tree shaped exactly like a smiling dragon, with ear, tooth, and everything. And once it was there, I could never un-see it: it was only that, being children, they looked in directions that I had ceased to gaze.

So, the day I finally saw the dragon, I showed them my own favorite tree: the Witch Tree, which looks like a distant witch caught in the throes of dancing crazily. The Witch Tree, as you approach it, executes a quick and impossibly subtle metamorphosis into a boring old tree, like any other. I look and look, as much as I can when I am driving, but I can never catch the moment when it ceases being a witch. On this day they saw it immediately, to my satisfaction - there is nothing worse than someone saying, "Where? I can't see it; you mean that thing?" And not getting it at all. And of course, if you are looking at clouds, they change while you're watching, so even while you're pointing it out, it ceases to be itself and becomes something else entirely.


Trees do this, too, but much more slowly. I finally had my camera in the car one day and pulled over to get a shot, but on examination I find that the dragon is past his prime: he is literally getting long in the tooth, and his ear is changing shape. Still, he greets us every day on the way to town.

When I was a kid, there was a little man who lived in the plaster texture they put on the drywall (plasterboard) next to my bed. Every morning when I woke up he was there, just at eye level. I remember finding him comforting, though I didn't like the vaguely triangular patch on the ceiling in the corner; it looked like some kind of carnivorous squid, waiting to swoop down.

As it turns out, I'm not alone. Seeing faces and shapes in organic or random things is extremely common -- is, in fact, part of human nature. Although the idea that face recognition is hardwired into us is under great controversy in the scientific world at the moment, everyone agrees that recognition of objects and faces is one of human perception's strongest points.

Pareidolia means the perception of vague and random stimuli as significant. In other words, our tendency to perceive faces in the clouds, the man in the moon, the dragon tree, and of course messages in records played backwards. Or people seeing Elvis in the mold on their refrigerator.

Wikipedia has a page on "Perceptions of Religious Imagery in Natural Phenomenon," which is fascinating to read, not because of the explanation but because the list of examples go on and on and on. People seeing the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich, for example:


"On November 23, 2004, a grilled cheese sandwich that contained the likeness of the Virgin Mary was sold for $28,000 in an eBay auction by Diana Duyser from Hollywood, Florida. Duyser explained, 'I made this sandwich 10 years ago. When I took a bite out of it, I saw a face looking up at me - it was Virgin Mary staring back at me. I was in total shock.' She kept the toast surrounded by cotton wool, in a plastic container on a stand. Duyser claimed that although a decade old, the toast has not shown any sign of mold or crumbling, which she considered as 'a miracle'."

The shelf-life of Wonder Bread and American cheese aside, it astonishes me the lengths people go to preserve the things they see. The NunBun, a cinnamon bun in which a worker saw the face of Mother Theresa, stayed on display in the bakery where it was made for over nine years:


"The face of Mother Teresa was seen in a cinnamon bun at Bongo Java in Nashville, Tennessee. It was first discovered on 15 October 1996 by employee Ryan Finney and was turned into an enterprise by the company, selling T-shirts and mugs. Mother Teresa contacted the company and asked them to stop these sales. Discussions between the cafe owner and Mother Teresa's attorney brought about a compromise. The cafe agreed to only sell a limited amount NunBun merchandise and sell it only at their store and not license the images. The bun remained as an attraction at Bongo Java. On 25 December 2005 the bun was stolen during a break-in at the coffee house.

The owner of Bongo Java have offered a $5,000 reward for the return of the NunBun. Recently, photographs of the pastry have been sent to the Nashville, TN newspaper The Tennessean from a person identifying themselves as "Hu Dunet." It shows the NunBun near a statue of a woman, a picture showing it being held by two men, their faces obscured by alterations to the photograph, and a picture of a man lying on a beach holding the bun in his left hand."

It is interesting how this phenomenon can give such comfort, while in other areas it creates such fear. Take, for example, the creeping horrors of seeing a snake in the folds of your pillowcase in the moonlight. Or the awful way that your inflatable pterodactyl's hanging shadow looks like a giant spider on the wall. Or what about the horrible hand-like branches that scrape at your windows in a wind-storm?


Worse, apparently, is the inability to make sense of one's world. Oliver Sacks' interesting story "To See And Not See", from An Anthropologist on Mars, tells the story of "Virgil", a man who hadn't been able to see since he was a young infant, more than forty years previously. An operation was conducted on the man, which in some senses ruined his life -- making him more helpless than he had been when he was blind, because he had to deal constantly with a new sense that he had had no time to make sense of, after living in a world of felt shapes and imagined distances all his life.

"The rest of us, born sighted, can scarcely imagine such confusion. For we, born with a full complement of senses, and correlating these, one with the other, create a sight world from the start, a world of visual objects and concepts and meanings. When we open our eyes each morning, it is upon a world we have spent a lifetime learning to see. We are not given the world: we make our world through incessant experience, categorization, memory, reconnection. But when Virgil opened his eye, after being blind for forty-five years—having had little more than an infant’s visual experience, and this long forgotten—there were no visual memories to support a perception; there was no world of experience and meaning awaiting him. He saw, but what he saw had no coherence. His retina and optic nerve were active, transmitting impulses, but his brain could make no sense of them; he was, as neurologists say, agnosic.

"...Further problems became apparent as we spent the day with Virgil. He would pick up details incessantly—an angle, an edge, a color, a movement—but would not be able to synthe size them, to form a complex perception at a glance. This was one reason the cat, visually, was so puzzling: he would see a paw, the nose, the tail, an ear, but could not see all of them together, see the cat as a whole."

Later, Sacks tells us of Virgil's ultimate fate: "...He found himself between two worlds, at home in neither—a torment from which no escape seemed possible. But then, paradoxically, a release was given, in the form of a second and now final blindness—a blindness he received as a gift. Now, at last, Virgil is allowed to not see, allowed to escape from the glaring, confusing world of sight and space, and to return to his own true being, the intimate, concentrated world of the other senses that had been his home for almost fifty years."

The proponents of the hardwired-newborns view of how we organize recognition tend to point to the inferior temporal gyrus and the fusiform gyrus (also active in grapheme/color synesthesia!), a "small patch of right-brain tissue just behind the ear", as the place that holds the key to our ability to recognize things. The non-hardwired contingent hold that "the behind-the-ear brain area...actually coordinates all sorts of expert visual judgments. It's just as crucial for making deft distinctions among classic cars, bird species, and imaginary creatures with no faces as it is for recognizing pictures of one's high school classmates. Damage to this part of the brain hinders object recognition to a lesser extent than it does face recognition, but the effect is still noticeable" - which basically means, whichever camp you're in, that this area of the brain is crucial to our ability to weave the world together. [link]

So in a way, the way we make sense of the world of vision is based in our ability to find order where there might otherwise be none. It's in our nature to create order out of what our senses give us; without it, the world would be a meaningless jumble of pieces and parts, and love, religion, and art would not be able to exist as we know them. Neither would night-fears, or metaphor, or leaf-patterns on the wall. Or the little man who still sits, probably, on the wall of the room I had in the house where I grew up.




Links

- Wikipedia's article on prosopagnosia, or "face blindness" (the inability to recognize faces)
- Wiki article on face perception, with all the attendant theories

Wunderkammern vs. Cabinets of Curiosity

I happened across an interesting article in Cabinet Magazine by Celeste Olalquiaga about, among other things, the difference between Wunderkammern, which were early expressions of wonder and awe at the world and what it could produce, and curiosity cabinets, which came later and were really about early scientific efforts to master and control nature by creating strict taxonomies - by, essentially, demarcating the natural world in a "divide and conquer" flurry of examination, collection, and cataloguing.

Ms. Olalquiaga makes an interesting point about the change from collection-as-expression-of-wonder to collection-as-analytical-vehicle. She claims that with the paradigm shift from the theologically-driven 1500s to the analytically-driven 1700s, Wunderkammern underwent a demotion from the grand and exquisite collections of kings to the literal cabinets of the bourgeoise. The Wunderkammern of royalty was literally disassembled, separated into collections of man-made things, which were housed in Kunstkammern (art galleries), and natural things, which were put in curiosity cabinets and designated with the new, "scientific" categorizations.

"Unlike the Wunderkammern, where the elements of what we now call natural history were mainly objects of puzzlement and awe...the curiosity cabinets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mark the onset of a desire to grasp and control the mystery which made of nature such an enthralling realm. Once Wunderkammern began to lose their allure in the face of, among other things, a colonial expansion that made their treasures far more familiar and available than befits a bona fide object of wonder, the curiosity cabinet became the privileged form of exhibiting such goods."

To those of us in the modern world, this era's idea of "scientific" seems quaint, even ignorant, based as it was on similarities that were at times nearly arbitrary - but nonetheless, it was the seeds of science today, with its emphasis on why and how, its need to separate things into groups, segments, divisions.

Bonnier de la Mosson's Second Cabinet of Natural History, of which Ms. Olalquiaga speaks at length, as it stands today. Courtesy Bibliotèque centrale du Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris.

This change in our view of nature was revolutionary, as people began to discover that they could actually figure things out by observation and deduction. That, and the colonization of the globe, meant that from an ever-present environment that was unpredictable and dangerous, nature began to be understandable and even tameable. The old adage that "education defeats fear" means that what was once the arena of God, unknowable and all-powerful, now becomes knowable, conquerable: each window of understanding becomes a view into the possibilities of what can be learned, what can be known. And therefore, being known, it ceases to hold power over us.

I've been having a number of conversations with my friend Gwyan over at Salt in the Code about The Sublime recently. The sublime is a concept that was first imagined in the first century AD by Longinus (but not really rediscovered until the sixteenth century), for whom the sublime was about greatness, loftiness, and elevation, inspiring awe and veneration.


However, in the early 18th century, three Englishmen - Anthony Ashley Cooper (third earl of Shaftesbury), John Dennis, and Joseph Addison - made separate journeys across the Alps to visit Italy, and were struck by the experience. They wrote about the mountains, and the conflicting emotions the landscape raised, in terms of the sublime - but with a new twist: the sense of loftiness, yes, and veneration, but also a sense of terror at the way the mountains made them feel small and insignificant. The landscape could be so vast and twisted, so gnawed by the elements, that it evoked both asthetic fascination and a sort of horror. There is power, and even beauty, within the sublime, but beauty, in the discussions of asthetics of the day, was a calm emotion, whereas the sublime brought on a sense of agitation and awe.

"John Dennis was the first to publish his comments in a journal letter published as Miscellanies in 1693, giving an account of crossing the Alps where, contrary to his prior feelings for the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason", the experience of the journey was at once a pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear, but "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair." [wiki]

Kant wrote a whole treatise on the subject, called Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime:

"There are two kinds of finer feeling: the feeling of the sublime and the feeling of the beautiful. Kant gives examples of these pleasant feelings. Some of his examples of feelings of the beautiful are the sight of flower beds, grazing flocks, and daylight. Feelings of the sublime are the result of seeing mountain peaks, raging storms, and night." [wiki]

"...the word naturally expressed high admiration, and usually implied a strong emotional effect, which, in the latter years of the century, frequently turned on terror" Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime

Previous to this, mountains had been seen as blemishes, even warts, defacing the beauty of the earth, and there had been great theological controversy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries about whether mountains and other natural formations came as a result of the earth being a ruin of man's fall from grace. One man, Thomas Burnet, even claimed in 1681 that the earth before the Deluge had been smooth and perfect.

This coincides almost exactly with the same time period that Ms. Olalquiaga describes, where Wunderkammern transformed into Cabinets of Curiosity. As the wonders in people's hands and shelves began to diminish in wonder-power, the urge to turn to larger, grander themes began to appear, and the writings of people like John Dennis became a subject of fascination: the more explored the world became, the more people sought to find that sense of wonder through travel and grandiose art, until The Picturesque, a product of the Romantic movement's mashup of Beauty and the Sublime, made its way into the limelight.


At which point it might be said that the search for wonder was brought, so to speak, into our own backyards. Twisted trees, dark grottos, and strange pseudo-ruins became all the rage, for example, in English landscape design by the end of the eighteenth century, and English people began to travel, not to Europe for the Grand Tour, but at home around the British Isles, looking for wild landscapes and broken remnants. Instead of awe, the search was on to capture Wild Nature and contain it:

"The irregular, anti-classical, ruins and even ruined people - the ragged poor (viewed from a safe distance of course) - became sought after themes. Picturesque-hunters began crowding the Lake District to make sketches..As Malcolm Andrews remarks, there is 'something of the big-game hunter in these tourists, boasting of their encounters with savage landscapes, "capturing" wild scenes, and "fixing" them as pictorial trophies in order to sell them or hang them up in frames on their drawing room walls.'" [wiki]

Thus, as the grandeur of the mountains was reduced and carried into the drawing-rooms of the middle class, so the effects of the Wunderkammern were being divided up and handed out into those same kinds of drawing-rooms, as objects of curiosity and conversation, symbols of our coming ascendency over Nature and the World: little windows into our eventual conquest of things both wondrous and frightening.

Gecko Feet: Natural Marvel

Thanks to the National Science Foundation for the picture

Traveling in Southeast Asia, geckos on the ceiling were a common occurrence. They would stake out territory, chasing each other away with vehemently waving tails, as if they did not notice they were in the middle of a rough, lumpy, peeling ceiling, hanging upside-down.

I would lay in my bed and watch them fight, wondering why one of them did not fall on my face. As it turns out, no one else knew either until relatively recently. Discussion of their toes as if they were suction cups were fairly common among us plebs, and even the scientific community assumed there was some capillary action at work, keeping them stuck by the moisture in the surface they were walking on. But in the past few years they have actually tested gecko feet and found that they work even in super-dry environments.

If you look at a gecko's foot, they have these weird flaps on them that look suspiciously like long, narrow suction cups. They spread when they walk in a soft, mushy way that is utterly fascinating, and if you've ever held a gecko you will understanding my saying that their amazing toes are almost velvety (in a rubbery sort of way) to the touch. And, if you did agree, you would be right. The bottoms of a gecko's feet are, in fact covered with millions of tiny foot-hairs on each toe, called setae, each about as long as the width of two human hairs (about 100 millionths of a meter). Each seta, in turn, is divided at the end into approximately a thousand tiny spatulae (yes, you guessed why they are called that), which are about 200 billlionths of a meter wide, which is smaller than the wavelength of visible light.

It seems the geckos' toes create so much surface area in this way, with such tiny endings, that they are able to make use of Van der Waal's force - a weak attractive force which is present between molecules - to stick themselves to the ceiling.

Geckos' feet are naturally ultrahydrophobic - in this case, hydrophobic referring to a molecule which is repelled by water - and have been tested by sticking them to a GaAs semiconductor, which is also hydrophobic. The only thing known to make two hydrophobic surfaces adhere in air is Van der Waal's force, so the old question of capillary action has been disproved.

Universität des Saarlandes

Kellar Autumn, probably the leading researcher on gecko's feet, says they are strong, as well:

"We took a single gecko foot hair (seta) and made the first direct measurement of its adhesive function...We used a microscopic force sensor designed by Tom Kenny at Stanford to measure the tiny forces of adhesion of the gecko seta.

We discovered that the seta is 10 times more adhesive than predicted from prior measurement on whole animals. The adhesive is so strong that a single seta can lift the weight of an ant 200 µN = 20 mg. A million setae could lift the weight of a child (20kg, 45lbs). A million setae could easily fit onto the area of a dime [$0.10 coin]. The combined attraction of a billion spatulae is a thousand times more than a gecko needs to hang from the ceiling. Maximum potential force of 2,000,000 setae on 4 feet of a gecko = 2,000,000 x 200 micronewton = 400 newton = 40788 grams force, or about 90 lbs! This is 600 times greater sticking power than friction alone can account for...

Our discovery explains how it is that any gecko can hold up its entire body weight with only a single finger. If the adhesive is so strong, how do they get their feet off? ...We found that if we increased the angle the seta makes to the surface, it just pops off" [source]

This is helped, of course, by the fact that geckos' toes are backwards-jointed, meaning that when they flex their toes they curl upward rather than downward, allowing them to peel their toes from the surface to which they are stuck.

Gecko feet are self- cleaning as well. Because the same force applies between dirt particles and the surfaces the geckos walk on, the dirt prefers to stick to the relatively large and attractive surface rather than the tiny spatulae on the gecko's feet. So when a gecko's feet get dirty, all they have to do is walk a few steps and they are clean again.

"Geckos' adhesive microstructure requires minimal attachment force, leaves no residue, is directional, detaches without measurable forces, is self-cleaning, and works underwater, in a vacuum, and on nearly every surface material and profile."

Perfect, in other words, for synthesis.

Synthetic setae have been in the works for several years now, with ideas like micro-robots that could climb walls or be sent to places like Mars, where self-cleaning sticky feet might be greatly useful; or setae-covered clothing, which would allow people to literally crawl about on the walls and ceiling. And most adhesives don't work in the vaccuum of space, while Van der Waal's forces work everywhere. But keratin, the hydrophobic protein that gecko's setae are made of, is hard to reproduce: hydrophobic substances, such as silicone and polyester, are harder to mold into setae-like shapes than other substances - and the hydrophobic qualities are key to the reproduction of the setae's effect, or water molecules stick to it as well, making it soggy and eventually destroying its sticking power.


But in June of last year, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Akron came up with a flexible "gecko tape" that they claim has four times the sticking power of the real thing. This tape is made by covering polymer surfaces with carbon nanotube hairs, which use a Van der Waal's effect to adhere. The tape is designed to be as easily-removed as a gecko's foot, so the tape does not get damaged and can be used over and over. They even have pictures, which show that on a microscopic scale they are admittedly much less attractive than the original.

And now, "at Stanford University have created a robot which uses synthetic setae in order to scale even extremely smooth vertical surfaces just as a gecko would." [wiki] So here we are.

I am curious, with all the hype around this technology, to see if it is indeed self-cleaning, as the original idea went. If it is, then we have once again successfully learned from nature, and created a whole new era of fun things to play around with. But if not, then it's not much different than any other tape, because it'll get dirty and stop working.

And part of me is really excited that we, too, could crawl around like geckos someday. Rock-climbing will take on a whole new meaning; skyscraper-climbing could become a new sport; or hanging onto the bottoms of airplanes - the extreme sport possibilities are endless. My travels in Southeast Asia would have been much different if I had been able to put on my special gloves and socks and join the geckos on the ceiling ("break it up, you guys!").

But part of me will regret the loss of one more part of the unknown. In the not-too-distant future, you can imagine the Southeast Asian traveler exclaiming to his or her travel partner, "Hey, look at that lizard! It looks just like you when you're in your ceiling suit!"


Somehow it loses some of the quiet magic of lying there, and watching them, and wondering.


Links:
- Paper on the gecko tape

- How geckos' feet stay clean

- Geckel, a super-sticky adhesive combining the setae concept with the "glue" used by mussels

- The Global Gecko Association, dedicated to gecko enthusiasts world-wide.

- Pictures of a Western Banded Gecko cleaning his eye, which has no moveable lids (this genus has no setae).

American Roadside Attraction Map

From Ms. Bonanza's Flickr pix of the Johnston Stables in Las Vegas, NV

Quickie-quick, before the generator runs out:

Mr. Kimberly, of Neon Poisoning, has sent me this awesome-looking Google map of Roadside Attractions, American Car Culture, Eccentric Museums and More. Quick perusal tells me it's worth checking out.

Onward with the power outage!

Emergency Services

Just got word that the power outage here, which started Friday morning, will go on until Thursday, likely. Pardon if I'm off-line! The storm on Friday was wild: it picked up our greenhouse and threw it against the side of the house, among other things.

See you next weekend.