hudebnik

Yesterday I had an interesting medical test: a "capsule endoscopy". You fast for a day (like for a colonoscopy, but not quite as stringent -- you don't have to drink a gallon of laxative), then swallow what looks like a vitamin capsule, but actually contains a battery, an LED, and a Bluetooth-enabled 360-degree camera. It takes two photos per second as it goes through your stomach, small intestine, and large intestine, until either (a) it comes out the other end, or (b) the hospital staff decide it's gathered as much useful information as it's going to, and take off the Bluetooth receiver and monitor you've been wearing all day. It was pretty cool watching nearly-real-time video of my intestinal tract, particularly since all of this would have been the stuff of science fiction a few decades ago.

Of course, I spent most of the day sitting in a hospital waiting room, with the capsule making its way through my gut. I had my laptop, so I could write programs to run over terabytes of data on a thousand computers in Iowa, and I could live-text-chat with a colleague in Tokyo -- the usual stuff. But some things never change: the A/C in the waiting room was set to about 60F, and I was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt because it's August, and the hospital staff (all cleverly wearing sweaters themselves) didn't have a blanket to lend me, so I also spent most of the day shivering.

Tom Zajac, a mainstay of the U.S. medieval-music community, succumbed to a brain tumor a day or two ago, at the age of ... I don't know, mid-fifties? He was not only an excellent musician and teacher, but one of the warmest, most welcoming and encouraging people I know.

Back to Notre Dame to climb the towers and see the St. Louis shirt.  The upper towers were closed, but the lower tower was quite sufficient both to give us a view and to tire our legs.  The Treasury of the Cathedral really doesn't contain much of pre-18th-c. interest, except the shirt.  We spent at least ten minutes in front of it, measuring, sketching, and photographing.  The arm-holes are quite large and (if I followed grain lines correctly) fairly steeply sloped: the bottom of the armscye is 4-6" out from the top!  The bottom of the shirt is only another 4" out from there.  The one remaining arm is quite short -- elbow or mid-forearm, at most -- and has a narrow opening at the end, as though St. Louis had spindly arms.  The neck and bottom hems looked rolled to me -- smooth on one side, protruding on the other -- although I'm not sure how to reconcile a rolled neck hem with the continuous reinforcing tapes that go an inch past the point of the V.  The armscye seam looked flat-felled to me -- again, smooth on one side, protruding on the other.

Anyway, we left Notre Dame for lunch in the Latin Quarter, thinking to go on to the Museé d'Orsay and/or the Sewer Museum, but changed out minds and returned to the Cathedral for the 15:00 Veneration of the Relics -- a fragment of the True Cross, a nail from the True Cross, and (most special of all) the Crown of Thorns.  It was a surprisingly moving experience: as shalmestere said later, "I have never felt so close to my persona."  Anyway, we each bowed and got within an inch or two of what could be the Crown of Thorns, and is certainly a bunch of twisted woody spiny stuff dating back at least 800 years.

I finally made my phone call to MCU and was told that no, our ATM cards would not work in France, but that we could take them to a bank, ask for a cash advance, and it would be treated the same way.  So I did that, sorta: the two banks where I asked said they don't do cash advances, and both recommended a Bureau de Change, which took out 6% + 1€ as a fee. But that's better than the last place I cashed a traveller's check, which took out 9,8% + 6€ as a fee. So we have cash now.

After dinner shalmestere came up to where I sat on the bed, waved a pack of cards, and made playful-puppy noises. In reply, I did my famous imitation of a goofy greyhound, playbowing, spinning around in a circle -- and colliding with the corner of the open casement window. I washed the wound in the sink, dabbed up some more blood with paper napkins, and had shalmestere apply antibiotic cream and press the flap of skin back into place. I think it's stopped bleeding now... not that it was ever bleeding very hard...

Tomorrow, Chartres.