Recirculating Cheese

The mascot of UC Santa Cruz is the Banana Slug.

Before the memorial service, my mother's cousin Cal (a large animal veterinarian), my cousin Geoffrey, and I were compelled to seek out the UCSC bookstore to get groovy slug crapola. Besides the t-shirts and socks and mugs, I picked up a booklet entitled simply The Banana Slug (also available at Powell's if you prefer that).

Anyway, I have to share this bit of mating info from the booklet:

When they are ready to separate, difficulties often occur. Because columbianus, dolichophallus, and californicus speices have evolved such huge male organs, as well as other enlarged internal genital structures, they regularly become stuck and cannot separate. The male organ is often longer than the slug's body. After long hours of premating and mating, more hours are often spent pulling and twisting into incredible positions as they try to pull apart.

After some point the animals finally give up trying to disengage and take turns gnawing off the stuck organ or organs. This paradoxical act of gnawing off the penis is a unique phenomenon known as apophallation. Noted malacologists, H. A. Pilsbry and A. R. Mead, stated that the severed male organ possibly regenerates.

There are pictures of premating, mating, and (yes) apophallation.

Here's another page (also at UCSC, coincidentally) with mating pictures and apophallation movies.

Hokay. We were in Wisconsin for a week, back almost two weeks, and I'm finally posting about it.

It was a family reunion, on my mother's side. Her parents both grew up in Wisconsin, though the only close family living there now are my mother's cousin (from Ohio), and my brother (from Massachusetts).

First, let's set the scene. We had two lake-side cottages (I-90 is on the other side of the lake, and it's not a big lake, but at least the highway is out of sight), sleeping between 19 and 25 people, depending on the day. We're in Wisconsin Dells, a gaudy tourist trap of theme parks, water parks, Adventure Golf™, and other tourist crap. However, we're ½ mile off the strip, which means we're deep in the woods.

My mother has two sisters, and between them they have 10 sons, 9 of whom came for at least part of the week. We're not a terrribly close family (I haven't seen some of the cousins for 25 years), but we've all grown up to be fabulous people, and we all got along fabulously. Really.

Wisconsin Dells has its attractions (most of which we avoided), but we took two notable day trips. One was back down to Madison, to go shopping at Penzeys Spices (they're closed on Sunday, the day we arrived, and the day we'd be leaving). Those of you who care already know (and those of you who don't know, don't care), but we were excited to find out that Boston is going to get the next Penzeys store (little dance of joy).

The other day trip was to The House on the Rock, which defies description. Here's how it's described in the Fodor's guide: Another curious architectural monument of the Wyoming Valley is the House on the Rock, one of Wisconsin's top tourist attractions through no fault of the original owner, Alex Jordan, an artist with a penchant for collecting junk. The House on the Rock is balanced on a dolomite outcropping overlooking the Wyoming Valley, and is designed in a Japanese sytle, with Asian artifacts and furniture throughout its tiny upper level. As you descend into the bowels of the house, your feeling of claustrophobia will become ever more pronounced. You pass enormous wooden clocks from Germany, huge diesel engines that once powered ocean freighters, eerie orchestras (powered by hydraulic lines) playing classical music badly, and replicas of Main Street that have been abandoned by their inhabitants. The tour descends through a maze of rooms in warehouse after warehouse, until you reach the basement, where a gigantic merry-go-round is careening almost out of control, its ceiling filled with hundreds of wooden maidens, their breast pointing accusingly at the visitors, who hope that the next corner will produce an exit and fresh air. The tour is expensive and long, with no turning back once the hordes are funnelled down the chute. How could you not want to go there?

A less hyperbolic description is that it's a collection of collections. Jordan's original collections were of glass paperweights and antique firearms. But he also collected stained-glass lamps, religious statuary, dolls and dollhouses, miniature circuses, and all kinds of moving things, from steam tractors to metal banks to turn-of-the-century jewelry store animatronic displays. But he had a special thing for music boxes, player pianos, and mechanical orchestras. They're literally all over the place. Pictures behind the cut.

This was in the same town as Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin architecture school, but we missed the last tour. Oh well.

The last outing was just down the road from the Dells, to the International Crane Foundation, which has all 15 crane species on exhibit. The two that are native to North America are the sandhill crane (the most numerous) and the whooping crane (the most endangered). Most of the cranes are kept from human contact, so that they can be re-introduced to the wild, but a few are on exhibit. They had a yound couple of whooping cranes, who had not laid an egg this year, but who had been given a sandhill crane egg to see how they might make out as parents (doting, as it turns out).

( Lots of pictures, mostly of House on the Rock )