The main difference from my other old film cameras is that these are all rangefinders, meaning that you focus them by turning a dial or ring to make two superimposed images in the viewfinder line up. This is a step up from the distance-scale focusing of my Silette and Brillant, where you either guess at (“estimate”) the distance to the subject and dial it in, or carry a tape measure.

In recent weeks, I’ve run film through all four of the working ones, and a clear favourite has emerged. So, in the words of Al Pacino in Scarface (which I cheerfully admit I’ve never seen):  let me introduce you to my little friend – the Voigtländer VF-101.

What a pretty little thing.

If you’ve read older posts here, you might remember another Voigtländer, the 1937 version of the Brillant V6. This VF-101 is a lot younger, dating from somewhere between 1972 and 1976, and was made not in Braunschweig, but Singapore. It’s from a time when Voigtländer was no longer an independent company, having passed through Carl Zeiss (those makers of fine microscopes) and into the hands of photographic heavyweight Rollei. To add further confusion, the camera is badged on the bottom as a Rollei, and is cosmetically nearly identical to the contemporary Zeiss Ikon Contessa S 312. It also came in a very attractive all-black version.

The camera is a lovely little thing – compact, seeming hardly big enough to accept a roll of 35mm film, but reassuringly solid. It has a built-in light meter that couples to the exposure settings, and miraculously uses regular 1.5-volt batteries, rather than the impossible-to-find and environmentally unfriendly 1.35-volt mercury cells of older cameras. It’s dead simple to use, too – a meter needle in the viewfinder tells you if you’re in the right exposure range, and a single dial on the lens barrel chooses an aperture, with the camera selecting a shutter speed to go with it. Focusing is by the old rangefinder technique of twisting a dial around the lens barrel, and lining up two images in the viewfinder – the “real” scene, and a ghost image from the little, round rangefinder window next to it. Easy.

Everything about this little charmer works exactly as I’d want it to, and it seems to take rather nice photographs.

Not too bad indoors with 400 speed colour film – Totem Pole, Royal Ontario Museum

Black and white film – St. James Cemetery, Toronto

That 40mm Color-Skopar lens is wickedly sharp at narrow apertures – St. James Cemetery, Toronto

Colour film again – St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, in the long-lost hamlet of Eversley

I’ve taken a break from the VF-101 recently in order to try out some of its cousins (that Taron Promaster was a pleasant surprise, in case you were wondering). But I’ll come back to it, with some slower colour film, because it really is a joy to use, and it tucks away nicely into a pocket. I have a few new locations in mind where it might do well. In the meantime, stay tuned for examples from the others.

A selection of photographs from this camera is here. If you want spoilers, the other cameras appear in this Flickr collection.

Yes, that’s a perfectly ordinary Earthworm, wriggling into the earth under a border stone in the back yard. Having run out of other things to occupy my time (ok, I confess – that should probably also read “except for things I didn’t really feel like doing”), I decided to finally give the reversing ring I’d bought for the fabulous sum of a couple of dollars from some Hong Kong-based Ebay vendor a whirl. This lets me mount a lens backwards on my camera, which sounds all wrong, but through some optical magic results in the lens focusing at much closer working distances than it usually does. I’m probably about four or five inches from the worm here, using my good old 50mm f/1.8 (not too different from the one you can see in this useful article about reverse-mounting).

While I was turning over stones, I came across all kinds of interesting things. A lot of the creatures I found were just too quick to run away while I was juggling my camera and a flash mounted on a tripod. With the reversed-lens setup, there’s no way to use autofocus – in fact, manual focusing is pretty hopeless too, so the only real option is to move the camera back and forth until the subject is in the rather narrow focal plane. Fine for earthworms, as long as they’re not moving too fast, but far too slow for speedsters like spiders. The net results from an hour or so of poking around were:

• Earthworms – lots. Some good photos.
• Pillbugs – lots. A few ok photos, but I need to try again. A bit wiggly and not very interesting when rolled up into a ball.
• Pillbug relatives (Sowbugs and the like) – probably lots but I can’t tell these things apart. If they don’t roll up like Pillbugs, they simply run away.
• Centipedes – several attractive bright red and orange ones. Very wriggly and demonically speedy. No good photos.
• Millipedes – only teeny-tiny ones, that insisted on holding still for just slightly less time than it took me to focus on them. No good photos.
• Slugs – several. I don’t find these characters terribly photogenic, to be honest.
• Spiders – one. It ran away.
• Ants – a bunch. Completely hopeless. Tiny and ridiculously active.
• Wasps – entirely too quick.
• Other things – some weird-looking caterpillar or grub or larva of some kind.

All of this makes me think I should be participating in something like the Great Garden Worm Count, and I can’t help but think that it might be fun to attempt species identification on some of these – along with the attractive pink one up top, I also came across ones that were brown, bright red, pale yellow, and even a murky green colour.

Of course, I also took a photograph of a Mourning Dove, since they are (a) frequent visitors, and (b) fearless, at least of dolts with cameras. This, as you might imagine, was taken with an ordinary telephoto lens.

There’s a whole lot more miniature wildlife out there, and I think this will be a lot of fun once I build up some more experience and as a result spend less time fumbling around. Which I can get a start on, given the ongoing plumbing problems here (minor, but annoying). In the meantime, you know where to find me.

Episcopal Old Methodist cemetery, Kinghorn.

Some early cemeteries, like the one pictured above, are remarkably easy to miss, consisting of just a few stones tucked away behind some bushes and a small marker sign. Kinghorn was an important place once, with a large tannery, an important school, and an Episcopal Old Methodist church founded in 1848 that finally closed its doors in 1890 and is now nowhere to be seen. Only the cemetery remains, the schoolhouse having been relocated a short distance away on the grounds of the King Township Museum, and everything else gone.

A few pieces of Strange, by contrast, can still be found, although there’s not much of it. Named after Dr. Frederick William Strange as thanks for his securing a post office, its church is extant, although converted into a private dwelling – still with the graveyard attached. A short distance away is another, this time of the Wesleyan Old Methodist flavour. There were plenty of others:  Hammertown, Linton, Temperanceville, Eversley.

Wesleyan Old Methodist cemetery, Strange.

Many of these monuments have decayed over time, either due to the elements, or through vandalism, to the point at which King Township has put up signs warning any sporadic visitors to take care that their children don’t climb on them.

Some have had their gravestones compiled into cairns, and others are just long gone, despite appearing on the occasional map.

A cross-shaped cairn – Hope Primitive Methodist Church cemetery, now in Maple, Ontario.

For these recent visits I’ve taken advantage of the snow, which has added some pretty sculpting to the landscape, set off by long shadows from the late-afternoon, wintry sun. While a few storms we’ve had recently have snarled traffic and cancelled flights, we’ve gotten off pretty lightly compared with other parts of the continent. That hasn’t stopped a certain degree of grumbling about late commuter trains and driveway shoveling, though.

It may be de rigueur to complain about the weather, but these expeditions are a reminder that even as little as a century and a half ago, life in this part of Canada was much harder. Some of the headstones tell heartbreaking stories of lives cut very short indeed. There were plenty of documented fires in these early settlements, and diseases and farming accidents would have taken their toll. But doubtless many deaths were simply due to winter. All of these towns, now easily accessed by highway, concession line or sideroad, would have been hours apart, even in good weather. In winter they would frequently have been completely isolated. That, along with mid-19th century medicine, would likely have turned infections that are innocuous by modern standards into killers.

In Strange, I came across this headstone:

The inscription reads:

Emma, dau.[ghter] of Joseph and Catharine Wood
Died Mar. 15, 1852
Ae. [aged] 8 Ys. 6 Mos.
Also Evanjaline
dau. of the same
Died Mar. 2, 185[2]
Ae. 13 das. [days]

What must this have felt like? Two daughters dead within weeks, one a newborn. The stone is footnoted with the beautifully poignant epitaph:

These loving buds, to us a while were given
Transported now they brightly bloom in Heaven.

All of these cemeteries contain similarly young victims. In Strange, we also find Edith, who died at 4 months, and Hellen, just short of her twenty-third birthday. In Kinghorn, Sarah, Ellen and Mary Ann, ranging from 10 to 26. In Llloydtown there is Susan, 20, and little Edwin, recorded to the exact day at only 1 year, 9 months, and 14 days. Although there are plenty of citizens who lived to (reasonably) ripe old ages, the message is carved in stone, quite literally – times were tough in mid-1800′s rural Ontario, even here in the comparatively mild south.

But nine years old when he died. Strange, Ontario.

There is a lot more of this history to explore, and my hat is off to the local historical societies, and the Ontario Genealogical Society, who have collectively done much to preserve and catalogue these sites. I’ve recently managed a visit to the much larger cemetery in Lloydtown, a place infamous for being one of the hotspots during the Upper Canada Rebellion. That story, and those photographs, can wait. In the meantime, the weather here’s lifted above freezing, and spring’s crocuses can’t be far off. Time to remember the sisters Emma and Evanjaline, and be thankful for easier days than theirs.

Further information:

• The Bone Yard Blogger – A wonderful resource for anyone digging around the old cemeteries of Halton, Peel, York, and Simcoe.
• Cemeteries of King – Useful, if low-resolution, reference map (PDF).
• King Township Museum – Full of interesting history, and the site of several buildings including the old Kinghorn schoolhouse.
• King Township Public Library – A nice summary of the history of several local villages. See also the heritage page, and in particular the wonderful Early Settlements of King Township, Ontario, by Elizabeth McClure Gillham (freely available online).
• Kinghorn School Days – A gallery of photographs curated by the King Township Museum.
• Camera on King – Not strictly about cemeteries, but Barry Wallace’s blog is a nice, visual documentary of things both old and modern in King Township.

PopPhoto’s “Your Best Shot Gallery: January 2013″

Oddly enough, both gallery selections have been film, rather than digital photographs, taken with the same 1958 point and shoot camera. This example is on black and white Arista Premium 400, a rather more modern, sophisticated and predictable beast than the ancient film stock I wrote about recently. The previous one was in colour. It’s enough to make me begin to wonder why exactly it is that I own two digital SLRs and a bagful of lenses.

I’m not sure what it is about this photograph that seems to have struck a chord with viewers, and presumably one or other of the editorial staff at PopPhoto. It was featured in Explore, a collection of photographs selected each day by photo sharing site Flickr’s magic interestingness algorithm. It’s been marked as a favourite more than fifty times, far more than any other image I’ve posted. It certainly feels nice to be Explored, although photos do drop in and out, since each one’s rating can change from day to day. To date, 33 of mine have been featured at one point or another; this one is the second-latest, preceded by an ice-skating one you can see at the top of my Happy Holidays post, and followed most recently by a barrel. But Explore isn’t really an indicator of what makes a good photo, nor necessarily of which ones will be generally popular. I’m beginning to think that perhaps the film itself is adding some magic quality, although I wouldn’t rule out that using the old camera is forcing me to visualize and photograph in a more creative way than I do with my digital beasts.

The picture has human interest, which is unusual for me, and the reflections in the glass make it a little more visually interesting. But overall, I’m not convinced this is composed or cropped particularly well – that panel of building stones to the right hand side seems a little awkward now that I’ve lived with the photo for a while, for example. But the most obvious feature, I guess, is the words “Open Dumpling?”, which although they make no sense, seem to have caught a lot of people’s attention. I cheerfully confess that I had no idea I’d captured them like this, especially since “Dumpling?” is a fragment of the phrase “Got Dumpling?” in the right-hand window, and the “Open” sign is just that. The words don’t even go together, for goodness’ sake, which you can verify for yourself on Google Street View.

Those misgivings aside, I’m actually quite pleased with how this turned out, since it was just a grab shot on a quick jaunt through Toronto’s Chinatown. Spadina Avenue is the heart of this neighbourhood, and is bustling most of the time, becoming jammed in summertime with shoppers frequenting its street-side markets. It’s been an interesting place for a lot of years, and older heads than mine remember it as previously being a vibrant Jewish neighbourhood. Look hard, and vestiges of that history can still be found, in an old theatre building, and some of the storefronts. But nowadays, from College Street down to the theatre district, it’s an unruly conglomeration, its southern reaches even including a block or two of leftovers from the fur fashion industry, all dominated by a delicious mix of Asian food markets, specialty stores and restaurants. In late December, it’s still busy enough to provide plenty of street shooting opportunities.

Spadina Avenue, just before Christmas 2012.

A winking noodle bowl statue.

Although I’ve spent most of my weekdays over the last 25 years downtown, and I’ve walked Spadina and its side streets many times, I’ve never photographed here very much, so shooting off a roll of black and white film was good fun. I even made a detour across parts of the University of Toronto campus, pausing for the alchemical symbols on the side of the chemistry building.

I tried to find out which elements these are, and got hopelessly confused. Maybe there’s a legend in the lobby.

All in all, I’m rather pleased with this low-cost black and white film, and might run another roll through the Silette, which is currently loaded with generic, drugstore-brand colour film. In the meantime, my urban exploring has largely given way to the pursuit of pioneer-era cemeteries and other buildings in rural York Region, dating from roughly the same period as the lime kiln I’ve written about before – which I’ll tell you about another time.

Steve Caplan, recently.

Also on the topic of cheerful news, Frank recently posted about a favourite shiny metal of his, Palladium, whose worth in this case far exceeds its monetary value. If you go and read his post, you’ll understand why, and learn a little organometallic chemistry as a bonus. I haven’t studied such things for, oh, twenty-five years or so, and I enjoyed his discussion of Ferrocene, which reminded me in turn of my favourite class of compounds from second-year organic chemistry, the Grignard reagents.

A generic Grignard Reaction. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Backing up a bit to the end of the holidays, after a slightly nervous drive home in what can best be described as a blizzard, I was able to sit down an look through some precious metals of my own – in particular, the silver grains on some old black and white film negatives that my father rescued from a drawer in the downstairs bathroom, which once upon a time doubled as his darkroom.

The drive home along Highway 401. “Reduced visibility” was an understatement.

Long ago, like many others of roughly my age, I used Kodak Instamatic cameras, loaded with cartidges of either 126 or 110 format film. The cameras were, in a word, dreadful, but cheap. Neither 126 nor the teeny-tiny 110 version still exist. But I took enough photographs at the time to have an album full of the products of these old plastic boxes, some of which you can see on Flickr (126, 110).

Somewhere along the way, I ordered an even worse camera, from some box-top-collecting, mail-in scheme. This thing, which is sadly long gone, really was awful: all-plastic, tiny, and as I recall, sporting bright yellow panels on its front face. I really wish I still had it now. Fortunately a single roll of negatives still exists, perhaps the only one I ever put through it. What the film was, I can’t say – some kind of unperforated 35mm bulk stock, probably manually spooled. From the negatives, it seems I took it to school and to the cottage, as well as using it around the house.

And what a collection of delightfully crappy pictures I took. The dodgy film, home processing by my father, truly awful, light-leaking, plastic-lensed, zero-technology camera, and almost complete lack of photographic skill, combined with storage for more than three decades before scannning, have all combined to create some photos that can, at best, be described as “vintage”. But there is some gold in those silver crystals, like this wonderful, if off-centre and light-contaminated portrait of my mother on the front steps:

My mother, circa 1978.

There are others – some blurry shots of a caterpillar, some double-exposed photographs of trees and houses, and a couple of boys and girls I knew at school. But the real surprise for me was a pair of photographs I don’t remember taking, documenting a long-standing piece of Wintle family lore: the day Uncle Mike fished a large and very disgruntled Northern Pike out of the lake at the cottage using, I kid you not in the slightest, a Ronco Pocket Fisherman.

Mike Howard, a predatory fish, and Desert Lake, Ontario.

A former Royal Marine deployed in the 1950′s in Southeast Asia, achieving the rank of Major, Mike later became an Officer Commanding his local Marine Cadet detachment. He was also involved with the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award program for youth, smoked a pipe, and sported an excellent, military-issue handlebar moustache. Originally from northern England, his accent was thick enough to puzzle my friends. He died in 2009 after a protracted battle with Motor Neuron Disease, several years after Mary passed. Mike was six and a half feet tall and burly, so that fish is a lot bigger than it looks!

Mike and Mary Howard were not biological relatives – Mary was a schoolfriend of my mother’s, and she and Mike were my Uncle and Aunt for as long as I can remember. Living in Crawley, just south of London and convenient to Gatwick Airport, we’d see them on every visit to the U.K. No strangers to the outdoors, they visited us in Canada several times, and joined us on camping trips to northern Ontario, and on one occasion all the way to Nova Scotia. They’d come up to the cottage every time they visited, too.

The day in question, as I recall, was dull and overcast, with choppy waves. Mike had already taken some good-natured ribbing over his fold-out fishing rod, remarkably similar to the modern version, although I recall the handle of his being an unpleasant brown. Casting from the shore, where I’d never caught anything bigger than a rather undersized Largemouth Bass, on about his third cast Mike begain jerking the rod as though he’d caught something. I thought he was just joking around – until he hauled that Pike out of the lake, bludgeoning it into submission with a handy piece of driftwood before putting his fingers anywhere near its toothy mouth. In due course, the pike was cooked and eaten, and a bland and bony meal it made.

Awful though that photograph is, it and another adjacent to it on the roll are, as far as I know, the only visual record of this memorable episode from my childhood. I had no idea these were hiding in my parents’ basement. The grains on the film may be made of silver, but to me this find is pure gold.

More photographs from this roll can be found here.

I’ll be heading out tomorrow to where my relatives live, to join the rest of the family who are already there. I’m allegedly cleaning the house and doing a few other associated chores, although it should be pretty obvious that what I’m really doing is writing a blog post.

I’ll leave you with a few photographs:

1. Beautiful downtown Toronto – the always popular skating rink at Nathan Phillips Square, in front of Old City Hall. Not long after sunset on my way to the train home.

2. A festive holiday (OK, “Christmas”) tree. Slightly let down by a distinct lack of snow.

3. A gentleman talking on the phone, silhouetted in front of some pretty decorations in one of the big bank buildings of Toronto’s financial district.

4. And last, some ornaments, as seen through an ancient camera.

And finally, my best wishes to all of you for an enjoyable holiday season, and a healthy, happy, safe and enjoyable 2013. Me? I’ll be writing another grant. The Perils Of The Season, indeed.

Lazily flipping through the content on the website of Popular Photography, my new favourite magazine, I was tickled pink to come across this:

The two or three of you who read this blog regularly might recognize that photograph. Yes, it’s one of mine, and if you think back you might remember it from a post about an old film camera, from early this year. So what’s it doing on PopPhoto’s site?

The camera again – an Afga Silette LK, a 1958 point-n-shoot.

Most of us with school-age children, I imagine, have experienced the dreaded School Fundraising Scheme. It takes many forms, from bake sales and to book fairs, to barbeques and dance-a-thons. Things offered for sale range from T-shirts to badges and buttons, and occasionally, even magazine subscriptions.

So, not too long ago, I was faced with a brochure including an absolutely enormous list of potential mags and rags. Happy to do my part, I settled on two:  Inside Track Motorsport News, a magazine that I like to support since it sponsors events that I enjoy watching, and Popular Photography. PopPhoto hits a nice point for me – aimed at the serious enthusiast, it is distinctly lacking in the pretension of higher-end, glossy photography publications.

One nice aspect of PopPhoto is that it runs monthly challenges, typically tying in with an article running in the current issue. For November, the theme was “interior photographs with available light”, meaning without flash or other additional lighting. Game for anything, I submitted that photograph, it being a better example than anything I’ve taken on any of my digital cameras.

Now, lest you think that my claim of “flipping through” the website sounds a bit disingenuous – well, it is. The fact is, I was looking to see if I’d made the list, since as far as I know, nobody is explicitly informed when they’ve been featured. What’s more fun is that this might mean I’m in the running for a prize, but we’ll see – that gallery has nineteen other photographs in it (although one of them looks to be an outdoor scene) and frankly, a lot of them look better to me than mine does. But we’ll see.

The photograph was taken in the lobby of Knox College, on the University of Toronto’s downtown St. George Campus. This handsome, Perpendicular Gothic stone pile was opened in 1915. Its lobby is filled with very pretty stonework, lovely fluted arches, and is lit with rich, warm lights.

More of that gorgeous stonework – a bit underexposed, this time.

Despite having had a relationship with the U of T campus since 1986, I don’t think I’d ever been through Knox College until a walk back across campus in late 2011, and I immediately knew I wanted to come back and shoot there. When January rolled around and I stuck the first roll of colour film in the then-new Silette, Knox was an immediate destination. Although I didn’t record all the details, I’m pretty sure I must have been holding my breath and shooting a very slow shutter speed to get enough light in, even with the lens wide open at f/2.8. But I’m glad I did, because the greeny-tan stone and the glorious gold of the lights married up nicely. The final result required very little post-processing – just a minor crop and straightening, a touch of lightening of the shadows, and a mild vibrance boost to make the golds pop a bit more.

When it came time to dig through my back catalogue of photos for a few to enter, that one was an easy choice. I also entered the one of the stone railings shown above, and one of my father-in-law engaged in a ferocious chess match with my son, this time taken with a modern DSLR.

David. He’s played some chess in his time.

So there you go. Three photographs submitted, and one in the running. I’m pleased as punch, and gratified that I made the first cut in the face of nearly 600 other entries. Now, we’ll just have to wait for a bit and see which photo wins overall – although I imagine a leading candidate would be the one used for the splash for the gallery on the PopPhoto homepage, a very fine photo of a stairwell at the Royal Ontario Museum – coincidentally located just a few minutes across campus from Knox.

The book in question.

Among the ever-lengthening series of interviews of authors of pieces in this year’s edition of the OpenLab series, The Best Science Writing Online 2012, is this contribution, my interview with pharmacist and author Cindy M. Doran. Cindy’s guest post at the Scientific American blogs, entitled Tinea Speaks Up – A Fairy Tale,  is unique among the fifty-one pieces in the book, in being set as a fairy tale – an approach that is charming, clever, and engaging. I wanted to find out more about her inspiration for the story, and how she went about making characters out of a diverse set of fungi.

Richard Wintle: You have a background in clinical pharmacy and infectious diseases – and clearly quite a knowledge of the “tiny fungus” featured in your piece, as well as a lot of other species that you feature. Did you have to do a lot of background research when writing it?

Cindy Doran: There is always more to learn, but being a clinical pharmacist (Pharm. D) with infectious disease fellowship training and experience teaching infectious diseases to pharmacy students certainly helped support the infectious disease material of the story. I did read and check over the science, such as the characterization of the large and tiny fungi in this piece, to make sure I wasn’t about to pass on bogus information. For me, however, the true challenge in this piece was learning how to find and reference specific fairy tales.

I knew of some tales I wanted to use, ones I found in Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales. But Jack Zipes (author of The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales) pointed me (after I had asked) to Uther’s The Types of International Folktales. In addition, the proofreaders/copy editors and other editorial staff at Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux were amazing. I learned a great detail about the origins of various fairy tales from them too.

Richard: I hadn’t realized the extent to which you had to research fairy tales to make this piece work. Did you find out anything particularly unusual in the origins?

Cindy: Fairy tales have types ascribed to them, and within these types, various topics are cataloged. Uther’s reference I mentioned earlier led me to specific stories. Within these stories are numerous variations; ascertaining who was the true author of each variation was a little tricky, as each time they are told, they change a bit. I learned that a particular retelling of a fairy tale may be ascribed to a particular author, but not be particularly true to the original wording of that tale by that author.

We think of science as being exact, but the humanities are as ever bit rigorous in citations. I loved discovering this.

Richard: Anything that surprised you, or that screamed out “I must include this!” ?

Cindy: It was probably when I read the notes on Italo Calvino’s “The Ship with Three Decks.” I don’t have his notes handy right now, but in one of his notations to his three stories that I included in the piece, he gives a brief history of scald head in folktales. I was sitting on the beach at the time I read it and bolted forward in my seat thinking I need to use this somehow. It literally was plopped in front of me, something to run with. Then I had to figure out how.

Richard: You chose to write your piece as a fairy tale, which is a different approach from your other posts at The Febrile Muse. How did that choice come about, and was this something you’ve been wanting to do for a while?

Cindy: Once upon a time my parents read me fairy tales, in different voices. Now, as a parent, I read them aloud to our kids. I love them. It is true that much of the material on The Febrile Muse is more straight nonfiction, discussion of how infectious diseases are portrayed in literature and the arts. And when I started the website, I had never thought of writing a story like this one. But when it got started, it felt natural. The joy I had in writing it was like the joy I feel while reading folktale picture books and fairy tale collections (dramatically, of course).

Let’s call the path to this story serendipity… and curiosity. In the summer before last, Italo Calvino’s stories led me to scalp disease, scald head and the mange (the idea of using in a story, not the disease itself, on my head). I came home from vacation and Googled “fungi and fairy tales” and found Frank Dugan’s Fungi, Folkways and Fairy Tales: Mushrooms and Mildews in Stories, Remedies, and Rituals, from Oberon to the Internet. I had no idea that fungi played such a huge role in storytelling, and the thought excited me.  I couldn’t help but pitch my fairy tale to Bora, the blog editor at Scientific American. I have other story ideas, some fairy tales, but I plan on continuing with Inflammatory Language and other nonfiction pieces too.

Richard: I could envision a whole book of “scientific fairy tales” – any chance you will write enough of them to fill a book? What about other styles? OpenLab has traditionally included a poem in each edition, for example.

Cindy: The thought of a book makes me giddy—and terrifies me. But the desire to tell stories is very strong. I’m not sure, however, that I am the best judge of my own work. Would anyone want to read them? I have a couple stories in editors’ hands at the moment, and I have over 30 ideas for stories (not all are fairy tales). Perhaps these stories will continue to add to my rejection pile, but I am lucky that this particular piece has escaped it.

I don’t know if I could write poetry. I enjoy reading it, and it inspires me, but I think I would get too caught up in form. But music lyrics? Hmm. I’ve tried to figure out how I could set a story of TB to the Raindrop Prelude (Chopin). [laughs] Sometimes a crazy idea turns into something.

Richard: In your mind, is there any tension between the more whimsical writings like your OpenLab/TBSWO piece, and the more serious nonfiction writing you do? Do you ever feel like you should be doing more of one than the other, or fall into the mindset of “needing to write serious stuff”? This is something, I think, that plagues many authors. What’s your view, and what has your experience been?

Cindy: No, I don’t feel any tension. Perhaps this is because I am no longer in a tenured type of position. I like writing both styles, but stories are a bit more natural – to find a voice, that is. I like to mix it up –whimsy with straight science–like in a recent post I did that mixes monocyte outer membrane structure with fashion. I like to find ways to teach inflammation and infectious disease science that are different from academic writing. Journals don’t usually accept research papers with dialogue or colorful descriptions within the methods section.

Richard: Well, I can think of one example that used O’Darby’s Irish Cream Liqueur as part of a reagent cocktail in a molecular biology experiment. That might actually have been serious, although I prefer to think it was a joke that got past the editors.

Cindy: The writing has to be fun and not overly pedantic. Although I can write strict academia style, I don’t have the same passion for doing it that I did with writing Tinea. One of the great things about having a website is writing whatever I want, but I try to have a mix of straight nonfiction and fun story pieces. It’s a work in progress.

Richard: “Not overly pedantic.” That’s something good for me to remember. Thanks. Your bio says that you review books for the New York Journal of Books. Has reviewing books helped you with your own writing, for example in determining what makes a good story, and what doesn’t? Care to share any you’ve reviewed that really inspired you?

Cindy: I wouldn’t say that being a reviewer has made me a better writer or storyteller, but I read things a bit differently now. I’m also more critical, which is not always good for a writer – for the first draft anyway. I think what helps me determine best what makes a good story is reading – a lot. No one type of story works. Just thumb through the anthology. The different paths that the authors, such as yourself, take through science amazes me as to all the possibilities for writers.

Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker was my first review for NYJB, and I learned a lot from reading the book and from writing the review. I’m very glad I had an editor. She helped me identify the points I wished to make about this fantastic story of early blood transfusion science. The Picture of Health: Medical Ethics and the Movies edited by Colt, Quadrelli, and Lester is a book I reviewed that I continuously go back to. It is a collection of essays depicting how different films can be used to teach medical ethics. As you can imagine, there are a lot of genetics references in it. But this book helped reignite for me that art/science/teaching excitement that had led me to start The Febrile Muse in the first place.

Richard: Last question: what’s next? Any big projects underway that you’d care to share? Is writing going to become an increasing part of your career?

Cindy: My collection of stories, of course! [arms up, laughing]

I’ll have to play it all by ear… see where it all goes. Really, my family is the biggest thing going right now – my husband and I have five kids spread over nine years. I’ll continue to write away, amongst family life (school, sports, and Drivers Education), reading, and my clinical pharmacy work with fantastic people at a rural hospital in Wisconsin.

Richard: Well, that sounds like plenty to keep you busy. Thanks for speaking with me, and good luck with your future writing, work and, of course, your very busy-sounding family.

If you’d like to read the other half, Cindy’s interview of me, why not head on over to her blog, The Febrile Muse?

I’ve occasionally written about getting out and about and exploring local history, here in the southeastern part of the Province of Ontario. This is something I should probably be doing more of – along with writing about it here. But with the riotous colours of the fall trees already a memory, and bleak and bleary early-winter weather settling in, it’s getting a little harder to find the motivation.

Fortunately, I can turn my memory back to a trip to the Mountsberg Conservation Area on labour day weekend, which yielded yet another unexpected excursion into Ontario’s not-so-recent past. Along with the excellent Raptor Centre, which I’ve mentioned before, this sprawling site includes 16 kilometres of trails, just perfect for a hike in the crisp fall air. One of them, the Pioneer Creek Trail, turned out to include that tumble-down ring of rocks in the photograph above. Although it may look like a stone-age hut circle, it’s actually the remains of a lime kiln, designed for baking limestone into quicklime. In the 1800′s, cooking up limestone was apparently a fairly common local industry.

According to Natural Resources Canada, limestone is still mined and processed today in 119 locations across the country, by 86 companies, although some of these are related to each other. The vast majority are in the central provinces of Ontario and Quebec, although there is a scattering in other places, from the west coast of British Columbia all the way to Newfoundland and Labrador on the east. Almost all are conventional quarries, with a couple of open-pit mines thrown in, although I confess I’m not sure quite what the difference is.

Limestone is a fascinating substance. It’s sedimentary, easily fragmenting into layers. If you’ve ever driven through a highway cutting in limestone bedrock, you’ll have seen these layers easily. In this part of the world, it’s a result of deposition from an ancient, shallow tropical sea from early Paleozoic times, mainly of Middle Ordovician age, meaning something like 450 million years ago. It in turn covers a much older, and harder formation called the Frontenac Arch, which is Precambrian. There’s an extensive discussion of this geological history here, for those interested.

Limestone is made mainly of calcium carbonate, in the forms of calcite and aragonite, and is often almost completely comprised of fossilized skeletons of tiny organisms – corals, and foraminifera, which are tiny creatures usually found in the ocean. There’s so much of it about that my home town of Kingston, nestled at the beginning of the Saint Lawrence River at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, is known as the Limestone City. There, it was used extensively for building; in other parts of the Ottawa Valley, its derivative, quicklime, was used in mortar, plaster, and whitewash. I’m presuming that its uses here, a little bit farther west, were similar.

Which brings us back to that lime kiln. The chemical process of calcination – from the latin Calcinare, “burning of lime” – is pretty straightforward. Calcium carbonate breaks down to calcium oxide, better known as quicklime, and gives off carbon dioxide. The amount of heat required is fairly extreme – more than 825 Celsius. That’s hot enough to melt aluminum (660 Celsius) and nearly hot enough to melt brass (930) or silver (961). By comparison, a candle flame is about 1,000 Celsius; a blowtorch might be 1,300. A hot restaurant pizza oven might be only 350 or so.

That’s a lot of heat, so I suspect these things needed tending round-the-clock to keep them stoked up and cooking hot enough. I can imagine diligent workers gathered night-long, an additional fire going to keep them warm and dissuade the inevitable legions of mosquitoes. It evokes memories of the charcoal burners that I recall from the Arthur Ransome book, Swallowdale, which I read years ago. And it makes me remember picking up flakes of mica from the remains of open pit mines near my parents’ cottage, another of southeastern Ontario’s long-gone industries. Perhaps that’s worthy of another investigation, once winter gets out of the way.

Want to know more? The Canadian Lime Institute would doubtless be the place to start.

Bangkok – the Grand Palace.

I’ve been back from my trip to Bangkok for a week now, and I still don’t think that all of my experiences in this city have quite sunk in. The week went from me not thinking I’d have much time to look around, to a series of trips hosted by Thai friends old and new, to my current state of still being overwhelmed by everything I saw.

As I sort through my photos, they’re helping me to recall just what I did, and organize my thoughts. I’ll write more about specific days later, but right now, the impression I have of this enormous, fabulous city is one of intensity. It’s crowded, hot, and confusing for a newcomer, but Bangkok never seemed really to be in my face – just quietly packed with people, with cars, with heat, and with incredible visuals.

Early morning, my first day – view from the 19th floor.

The weather, at the tail end of the rainy season and with tropical storm Gaemi bearing down on the Viet Nam coast, provided some poundingly heavy rain on Tuesday, punctuating, but not relieving, the incredible heat and humidity.

Torrential rain on Tuesday, at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi.

Like the rain, Bangkok’s traffic is intense, but differs in being relentless, in a quietly, almost calmly, Thai way. Floods of cars, motorcycles weaving in and out, and in the tourist areas the omnipresent tuk-tuks, three-wheeled taxis that sound like buzzsaws afflicted with a bad cough, occasionally backfiring for added impact. But surprisingly few horns – somehow, drivers just flow together and the whole mass of vehicles plows ahead to where it’s going, liberally interpreting the lane markings.

Phahon Yothin road, near my hotel. Regular traffic, not rush hour.

I found the city full of astonishing sights, from stacked shopping malls to splendid temples to packed residential districts leaning over its canals. In some places, the density of residences seemed to be matched only by the density of the air, and around some of the smaller canals, another kind of intensity – a smell that I’d describe as breath-taking, if I’d dared to take a deep breath.

The Bang Sue canal. Beautifully tranquil next to busy Phahon Yothin road, but not for the faint of nose.

And what about the temples, the Grand Palace, the Chao Phraya river, the parks and government buildings and skyscrapers? Everywhere I turned I found something else to arrest me – from the canal, side streets, and a temple on Wednesday, to markets, street vendors, and beautifully lit buildings on Thursday night, to Saturday’s trip to the Grand Palace, a long-tail boat tour, the famous Wat Pho temple, and points in, around, and beyond. In this city, the visuals are often stunningly over-the-top, at least to these inexperienced western eyes.

Wat Pho, in some of its jaw-dropping splendour – there’s a whole lot more of it than this.

So here I am, a week later and still getting to grips with Bangkok. I’ve made new friends, some Thai, some not. I’ve been shown things I knew about, and many I didn’t. And I know that if I’m invited again, I’ll go back like a shot. In the meantime, I’ve plenty more to sort out and write down, so stay tuned.

Photos, as usual, are in a set on Flickr – incomplete as of now, but expanding daily.

I am highly grateful to my friend and host, Dr. Jonathan Chan, for arranging several excursions around Bangkok, and for donating the services of his two students Gab and Som for Saturday’s trip. More on all of these will follow.