I haven’t heard any comments from the Juxtaexposed peanut gallery in awhile, due to all my slow, apparently boring August-style posts of bike racks and gates, so I thought I’d do a little ruminating on this Tuesday and see if the commentariat is just away on vacation?

What is it about ideas that, sometimes, all it takes is an overnight waiting period for them to incubate into something brilliant? This has happened to me many times lately, it seems. I rack (or is it wrack?) my brain late at night and hit so many mental blocks that I feel like screaming. I’m not even necessarily talking about ideas of great importance. Sometimes it’s grad school work, other times it’s just the letters in my many ongoing Scrabble games that just won’t arrange themselves into something intelligent and, more importantly, high-scoring. But then the following morning brings me simple ideas and solutions and I drop an 80-point word bomb on my opponent. Is it the physical act of sleep itself that clears our minds and allows us to begin thinking clearly again? Is it the prospect of the morning and a fresh new day that makes us feel inspired again? Why can’t I just take a little cat nap and wake up 20 minutes later and have the same brainstorming sessions that a new day usually brings? Maybe there is something in our dreams that subconsciously allows us to look at our problems from a different perspective. I think sometimes we come up with better ideas just by shuffling around the letter tiles until we see something we never thought of before. In this case, brainstorming isn’t necessarily about coming up with the single greatest new idea in the world, it’s really just rearranging information we already have and seeing what different combinations of ideas and answers are possible.

Every now and then I like to post a picture from Silver Spring, friendly neighbor to the north of DC. This particular one is a real oldie, taken in, whoa!, 2006. It’s the sculpture in front of NOAA’s building on East-West Highway. “The Hand of Noah” was sculpted by Raymond Kaskey in 1991, and is supposed to represent NOAA’s stewardship of the environment.

Here’s another image of the sculpture and a link to Kaskey’s Studio.

A flying geese sculpture in the Dupont Circle area… I guess this is what the view looks like if you are the goose at the back of the V.

meee-YOWWW. Happy Friday!