Hypnotic

Look into my tie, look into my tie, the tie, the tie, not around the tie, don't look around my tie, look into my tie, you're under. You will marvel at this black-and-white op-art vintage polyester necktie from Pauline Trigere and admire its wearer for his keen fashion sense. Three, two, one... You're back in the room. (Or, as our three-year-old says, "What you want... you're back in the room.")

(Patter lifted from Kenny Craig, Matt Lucas's stage hypnotist character from Little Britain. A new Little Britain series is in development for HBO's fall season! Yippee! I might have to get HBO for that.)

Over the weekend we took the new Veneer family minivan (a Nissan Quest, surely the most stylish of all minivans and a vast improvement over our lumbering old Plymouth Grand Voyager) to Corning for a visit to the Corning Museum of Glass. What a fascinating array of historical glass, art glass, and practical glass exhibits! The paperweight exhibit includes Josh Simpson's record-setting hundred-pound Megaplanet. (An eighty-pound Megaplanet is available for purchase in the museum store for $44,000.) The intensity of color and sinuous shapes that can be achieved in glass are remarkable, but I think I will leave the crafts that involve melting glass to the pros.