Just Another Morning Around 60 Meters

I’ve been doing a fair bit of shortwave listening these days. I enjoy the randomness of what one finds there. For example, the following is from between 1607 and 1708 UTC on Saturday:

• miscellaneous voices in Spanish talking to each other on 4888 kHz USB, one of them using a call tone like those irritating ones on FRS radios.

• air traffic using HF, including an Alaska flight out of San Francisco on 5574 kHz.

• two RTTY-like digital signal stations (5306 and 5403 kHz). I try to decode these, and without any surprise fail; all I know is they have an 850 Hz tone shift.

• a shortwave broadcast from Sarawak (5030 kHz). No confirmatory ID on it, but it matches the published schedules.

• on 5810 kHz I heard Radio Free Asia being jammed. What I heard was voices on a news broadcast fighting it out for the frequency against orchestral music. Radio Free Asia is a US-funded set of propaganda stations broadcasting to various undemocratic regimes in East Asia.

• and best of all, a numbers station, at 4724 kHz (1607 UTC)! It was saying “Charlie Charlie Charlie Zulu Romeo…Bravo Two Three X-Ray Seven Tango….” Numbers stations are generally believed to be communications to spies over shortwave radio, and are the subject of much amateur sleuthing.

Throw in the religious broadcasters, and we have quite the microcosm here

On Sunday’s sketchcrawl, I got to see Pete Scully’s sketchbook for his project of drawing fire hydrants. This gives me an idea for an infrastructure-related drawing project: how about a sketchbook of antennas!

Davis Sketchcrawl

Davis sketcher Pete Scully organized a Davis sketchcrawl today. We started out at the Amtrak station and over the course of three hours moved about two blocks.

Five of us spread out and drew what we could see. After the torrential rain of last night, the sun was very welcome.

Pete would like to get a Davis Sketchbook project underway which I think is a great idea and I might do a birdy take on that subject.

I heard birds all day but didn’t see them so I haven’t got a bird by bird entry, but hoping to make up for that.

Des Reliques

My father was an avid photographer. His favorite thing to do during camping trips in Spain was to fetch out his Minolta FX with multiple lenses and take close-ups of wildflowers. His attempts at landscapes were less successful and of wildlife even less so, but this didn’t alter the fact that during my adolescence the fridge was always full of beer—and film.

Dad died in 1999. Film was still in the fridge, now on the Northern California coast. We brought it back with us to Davis because you can’t waste film.

I just checked the dairy section of the fridge. It contains two rolls of Kodak Gold 400 (undoubtedly for my mother, who still shoots in film/ it will be on its way to her shortly), one roll of Kodachrome 64, and one roll of Kodachrome 25.

We’d better shoot this final roll of 25 because after December, there won’t be anyone left who will develop it professionally. I don’t know what we’ll shoot. Probably a lot of morning glory, which is improbably in flower and which my Dad took in spades.

A Week Behind The Typecase

I just spent the past five days taking the letterpress intensive course at the San Francisco Center for the Book. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my new-found printing skills, but it was a lot of fun. We worked with the four Vandercook presses the center has, and produced personal stationery, a broadside of a quote our choice, and at the end of the week we reprinted the text from our broadsides to make up the parts for a pamphlet-bound book. At left is my broadside — two quotes on cats — printed in a rather beat-up 18 point Caslon font. Composing type a pretty intense process, but metal type is beautiful to work with. It’s quite neat to see one’s text laid out in shiny gray metal in the bed of the press, reading backwards of course!

Back from Pennsylvania

Spending a week just outside Gettysburg, studying 9th-century European lettering: bliss. Bliss was the long table with papers and ink and writing easels. Bliss was the conversation with other letterform devotees, sharing table and morning coffee (well, tea in my case) outside in the warm humid dawn. Bliss was rising on the solstice before the sun and greeting it accompanied by a gold flute echoing back the mourning dove’s soft song. Bliss was the delight of learning how to grind stick ink.

Bliss, too, the discovery of voices that haunt this landscape and seem to want to find their way onto paper. I will try and do this as soon as I can before the memory of the lush green rotting landscape evaporates in the Central Valley heat.

I sketched at Little Round Top and from Cemetery Ridge, looking down on the field with fences faced by Pickett’s division, marching double time up into Union canister. Ghosts.

Drawing Day At The Zoo

Today is the worldwide Drawing Day 2010: we participated by going sketching at the Sacramento Zoo. Pica drew mostly birds; I drew a mix of birds and ungulates. At left is a sketch I made of an Amazon parrot, at right are a couple of giraffes. I need to submit my giraffe drawings to the one million giraffes project — the creator of this project has as of today collected 839,661 drawings of giraffes and has only 208 days left to reach his goal of one million giraffe drawings!

Up Early, Even For Me

Today is the Davis Double Century. It’s too early here even for kingbirds. I must leave the house in an hour, having drunk enough tea to keep me going on a 200-mile course with many zigzags back and forth between rest stops (I’m driving, providing radio support, not cycling, but still). It looks like it won’t be too hot, meaning fewer heat exhaustion cases, but there’s always something, and it’s best to be prepared. Hope I am.

Today is also the 27th Worldwide Sketchcrawl. Can’t believe there have been that many. I won’t have much chance to sketch today but will try at a couple of the rest stops: cyclists are good drawing subjects, plenty of muscle definition to be had. And they all line up in exactly the same way for water and Gatorade and peanut butter sandwiches and bananas and potatoes and soup and coffee and muffins, staggering around on cleats, wondering how the hell they’re going to get up Resurrection and wondering whether this was really such a good idea. They’re a cheerful bunch, though, and this is such a well supported ride that it’s a good one for the “maybe I can make its.” Unfortunately for the support people, sometimes those ones maybe can’t, and need shuttling around. And their bikes… but then I get to meet really interesting folks and chat on the way to the next rest stop.

I’d like to put in a word here for an artist I admire greatly and whose work I’ve followed for some time now. Debby Kaspari of Drawing the Motmot lost her house and her studio on Monday in a tornado. She, her husband Mike, and cat Gizmo are all fine, but they have lost all their possessions. (I just saw in an update that after sifting through the rubble they were able to find Debby’s banjo and Mike’s guitar intact; I burst into tears when I saw this.)

There’s an art supply whip-round going on through Facebook through friends. If you have paper or paints or pencils or anything you think she could use, please check it out. There’s a paypal link too.

Right. Off to don the Second Ugliest Tshirt In The World and check in with Net Control. KI6IMU, Sag 10, reporting for duty…

Pondering on a Podcast

I spoke with my friend Dave Bonta on the phone yesterday. He was recording. Click here
for the results…

25th Sketchcrawl

In honor of the fifth anniversary of the Worldwide Sketchcrawl movement, we headed out on Saturday morning at 9:30 to the California Raptor Center where they were holding an Open House, moved on to Mishka’s Cafe, on to lunch at Cafe Bernardo, out to the Yolo Bypass for a blackbird study, ending up at the Davis Library and a warm house where I drew Charlie. We had hoped to run into Pete Scully of Urban Sketchers fame but missed him.

More sketches can be found here. Unfortunately Numenius seems to have caught a cold from one of the kids we were sitting next to in the Raptor Center classroom during the presentation….

Bird sketches can be seen on Bird by Bird.

Don't Send Me Your Heirloom Bibles

This would make a good phrase for a bookbinder’s t-shirt, my instructor informed us at at a course I took on everyday book repair today at the San Francisco Center for The Book. The operative word for what we were learning to do was repair, not restoration, hence no heirlooms. For practice I arrived with several not-so-valuable books and sketchbook journals which we proceeded to operate on using wheat paste and PVA glue, Japanese tissue paper, and book cloth. (There was a time when I was doing a lot of notetaking on these hardbound artists’ journals commonly found in the art department of campus bookstores. What I’ve learned over the years is that although the textblock paper is quite good, the case binding falls apart quite readily with moderate use, hence the need for repairs.) I rebacked two of these journals, and reglued the cover of an ancient copy of the National Geographic bird guide. It was a successful day, and I’m now not afraid of diving into repair projects on ordinary, well-used books that are simply starting to fall apart. But first I need some Japanese tissue!