I know you're waiting for me in secret places
For the hundred and thirteenth birthday of Alan Turing, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I drove to Gloucester to watch the sunset on the water, so, queer joy?
I have worn this T-shirt since his centenary in 2012: it is a word cloud derived from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950). The tide filled in around the barnacle-colored, seal-colored boulders we had climbed out onto, swirling the olivine shag of the rockweed in the late mirror of the sea. I had not been to Gloucester since before the last glaciation, in a warm autumn that was still cooler than this heat dome settled over Massachusetts like a fitted block of Death Valley. We saw the red-and-white blinks of buoys, the oil-slick necks of cormorants. We checked in on the ghost sign for Moxie at the top of Tablet Rock in Stage Fort Park. From our vantage point of one of the granite horns of Half Moon Beach, we saw three crewed boats practicing for what we realized later would be the races for St. Peter's Fiesta, the blessing of the fleet which had hung the streets with tricolor bunting and Italian flags and set up the Ferris wheel and concessions of a carnival as well as an open-air altar brilliantly painted with a seascape of Ten Pound Light, its foreground wheeling with gulls with their own successful fisher's catch in their beaks. The fisherman in his sunken-green bronze oilskins still holds the wheel against more than four centuries of the remembered drowned. Our designated clam shack had closed an hour before we expected it, so we drove down Route 1 in a sailor's delight of clouds like an electric fire and came to a bewildered halt in a retina-searing splatter of blue lights, because it turned out that half of Revere Beach was closed to traffic thanks to a hit-and-run on a state trooper. We managed nonetheless to salvage roast beef and fried clams from Kelly's at the cost of several miles' walk in the gelatinous night, which compensated at least with the white noise of waves at high tide. The cable-stays of the Christina and John Markey Memorial Pedestrian Bridge were lit up in rainbow neon. I admire Aimee Ogden's "Because I Held His Name Like a Key" (2025) for not being any of the things expected of a Turing fairy story. I look forward to whatever comes of these unshredded papers. We drove home covered in sea-salt and sweat-salt and an unavoidable admixture of strangers' weed smoke and I had a really nice time.
If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up.
—Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950)
spatch and I drove to Gloucester to watch the sunset on the water, so, queer joy?
I have worn this T-shirt since his centenary in 2012: it is a word cloud derived from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950). The tide filled in around the barnacle-colored, seal-colored boulders we had climbed out onto, swirling the olivine shag of the rockweed in the late mirror of the sea. I had not been to Gloucester since before the last glaciation, in a warm autumn that was still cooler than this heat dome settled over Massachusetts like a fitted block of Death Valley. We saw the red-and-white blinks of buoys, the oil-slick necks of cormorants. We checked in on the ghost sign for Moxie at the top of Tablet Rock in Stage Fort Park. From our vantage point of one of the granite horns of Half Moon Beach, we saw three crewed boats practicing for what we realized later would be the races for St. Peter's Fiesta, the blessing of the fleet which had hung the streets with tricolor bunting and Italian flags and set up the Ferris wheel and concessions of a carnival as well as an open-air altar brilliantly painted with a seascape of Ten Pound Light, its foreground wheeling with gulls with their own successful fisher's catch in their beaks. The fisherman in his sunken-green bronze oilskins still holds the wheel against more than four centuries of the remembered drowned. Our designated clam shack had closed an hour before we expected it, so we drove down Route 1 in a sailor's delight of clouds like an electric fire and came to a bewildered halt in a retina-searing splatter of blue lights, because it turned out that half of Revere Beach was closed to traffic thanks to a hit-and-run on a state trooper. We managed nonetheless to salvage roast beef and fried clams from Kelly's at the cost of several miles' walk in the gelatinous night, which compensated at least with the white noise of waves at high tide. The cable-stays of the Christina and John Markey Memorial Pedestrian Bridge were lit up in rainbow neon. I admire Aimee Ogden's "Because I Held His Name Like a Key" (2025) for not being any of the things expected of a Turing fairy story. I look forward to whatever comes of these unshredded papers. We drove home covered in sea-salt and sweat-salt and an unavoidable admixture of strangers' weed smoke and I had a really nice time.
If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up.
—Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950)
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😂 omg I'm dying. that's such an intense image, i can feel it! were we reading each other when i visited Death Valley two years ago with Leslie, camping? the heat is astonishing. but so is the profound, soul sucking *dry.* like it turns out that your soul is housed not just in your body but in the water of that body, and the dryness threatens to remove every drop of water from you. i was prepared to stick out the two nights camping (overnight low, 87°) but Leslie, who has spent their life in more moderate climes, found it terrifying, and we changed plans and bounced out the next day.
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Yes! We live by the ocean at 42° N! We are not supposed to be in danger of baking out if we leave the house! Geographically, it can't be as bad as a real desert, but it feels way too close!
(I am glad you bounced out without injury to Leslie. My parents are similar: my mother is a dragon who soaks up dry heat and my father got out of the car in the Painted Desert and fell over.)
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to some extent, it's a matter of adaptation - i have never not lived in the desert, i would certainly have been uncomfortable but fine for the two days of exploring we had initially planned to do. but Leslie is not adapted to dry heat even now, and were less so then, one year into living in Albuquerque. (tho they're getting better. they are no longer keeping their house at a frigid and expensive 72 degrees all summer. still, these things take time.)
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I am utterly unsurprised. Today, fortunately, was cooler.
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I hadn't seen that it broke the 1911 104 °F record, just that it felt like it, which was bad enough.
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Thank you! I like it.
We had not planned on quite so much walking for our dinner, but there were so many cops. Rob's simile of a kicked hornets' nest was apropos. Fortunately, there were also so many clams.
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*hugs*
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Thank you! I hope yours was good, too.
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It was! Even the heat and walking was worth it, if a little superfluous. There were clams.
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And I laughed at retina-searing splatter of blue lights, because I know that's exactly what it was. A splatter. And retina-searing!
But best I loved the gelatinous night. Like the night was a jellyfish and you were picking your way across it.
I'm glad you got roast beef and fried clams, and I'm glad for the rainbow neon bridge illumination.
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I love them! I think of them, like gulls, as indispensable elements of a harbor.
But best I loved the gelatinous night. Like the night was a jellyfish and you were picking your way across it.
That is a marvelous extension of the image and particularly topical.
I'm glad you got roast beef and fried clams, and I'm glad for the rainbow neon bridge illumination.
Thank you! The neon was lagniappe. I like cable-stayed bridges even when they aren't lit up like the Zakim.
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Plus, so funny human names: lion's mane jellyfish, and this past weekend at the farmers market I saw lions's mane mushrooms.
I like cable-stayed bridges even when they aren't lit up like the Zakim. --SAME! Was admiring one in a Brazilian Netflix drama the other night.
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Nice! Where in Brazil was it?
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Thank you! It looked like itself to me.
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Sounds like the right guy.
(One of Turing's letters to Routledge is actually one of the famous, often-quoted ones, so I am sincerely curious about the others.)
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I love those photos of you. And I am insanely fond of cormorants. They come to Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge northwest of the Cities for their summer sojourn, and there is one particular shallow pool full of snags that they festoon around sunset, sailing the water with wings spread or standing on branches spreading their wings to dry like vampires with capes. If we're lucky some of them will still be diving for a bedtime snack.
P.
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I hope you, too, were able to find substitute clams!
I love those photos of you.
Thank you!
And I am insanely fond of cormorants. They come to Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge northwest of the Cities for their summer sojourn, and there is one particular shallow pool full of snags that they festoon around sunset, sailing the water with wings spread or standing on branches spreading their wings to dry like vampires with capes. If we're lucky some of them will still be diving for a bedtime snack.
I am so glad you have a regular season of them.
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Heee. Thank you!
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It was such good sea!
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I've seen cormorants twice now, both by pools in the heart of England. Perhaps they'd been mazed inland by storms.
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*hugs*
Thank you. They make me so happy.
I've seen cormorants twice now, both by pools in the heart of England. Perhaps they'd been mazed inland by storms.
I wonder what they make of inland. Maybe they follow rivers home.
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*hugs*
May the sea soon give you as much to delight in.
What lovely photos!
I envy you your clam supper.
I have no childhood memory of visiting Gloucester, compared with thick, sandy tomes devoted to Duxbury. In search of the "ghost Moxie sign" I discovered that Gloucester and Plymouth have been battling "first settlement" rights for 400 years! (Didn't find the sign, though, unless it's the Battery K).
Thank you!
One of the essential summer foods.
I have no childhood memory of visiting Gloucester, compared with thick, sandy tomes devoted to Duxbury. In search of the "ghost Moxie sign" I discovered that Gloucester and Plymouth have been battling "first settlement" rights for 400 years! (Didn't find the sign, though, unless it's the Battery K).
No! We had no idea that carving was there, if it still is. The ghost sign for Moxie is atop the rock, not far from the geodetic survey marker.
I am glad you have wave-worths of Duxbury.