10 June 05
Migrations
For several months now we’ve planning to move Feathers of Hope off of Movable Type, mostly because of the plague of comment spam, which finally exceeded our system’s capabilities last week, but also because Movable Type isn’t scaling well for us after two plus years worth of posts. Tomorrow I’m going to finally hole up in the office (the land of broadband) and do the migration to Textpattern. There may be a fair bit of sawdust around so please bear with us as I bring the site back into order.
9 June 05
Cars and More
Last fall I took a class through Davis Adult Education on basic auto mechanics. I was driving a new Honda Element that didn’t need an oil change yet or a whole lot else but I spent many evenings hunkered over other people’s engines, holding flashlights while they changed THEIR oil, adjusted timers, and so on.
Our instructor was Dave Egolf, a slight bearded man in a T-shirt whose attitude toward cars was more zen than not. He taught us to keep a car journal, where to buy quality filters for cheap, why you should buy good quality gas, and what an alternator does.
Dave is on the front cover of today’s Davis Enterprise (no online photo available). He’s the principal of the King High School here in Davis. The photo shows him in a suit, handing a white carnation to a graduating senior: sometimes Davis still behaves like a small town.
8 June 05
Umami
During our visit to North Carolina, Nicole taught us about umami. I had no idea that there is now considered to be a fifth primary taste sensation, in addition to the familiar ones of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. This is umami (sometimes spelled umame.) This taste sensation is sometimes described as “savory” and is found particularly in soy sauce, fish sauce, walnuts, mushrooms, and meats.
This fifth taste sensation was first studied nearly 100 years ago by the Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda who isolated the flavor from kombu seaweed. What he isolated turned out to be the amino acid glutamate, and this lead him to develop the seasoning agent monosodium glutamate. It wasn’t until the 1980s before the discovery of umami was generally accepted, and in the year 2000 scientists identified umami receptors on the tongue that responded specifically to glutamate.
So that’s why I enjoyed my lunchtime mushroom quiche today!
24 May 05
Heading East, Again
We’re off on a trip to the southeast, to see Nicole and Mike and birds and Fred. Blogging will be sporadic. The cats will be left in the wonderful care of Becky, of crow fame, who will now be able to stumble out of bed in her jammies, head over to the roost at 5 am, check on the radiocrows, and stumble back into bed, instead of heading to Davis from Sacramento having at least made coffee and put her contact lenses in.
I don’t know what the cats will make of this routine.
22 May 05
Another Blogger Meetup
Today was one of those perfect San Francisco days: warm, sunny, nothing more than a light breeze. We drove to Vallejo and took the ferry over. It is such a peaceful way to enter a city, by boat. And affords me lots more opportunities to sketch than sitting clenching my teeth behind the wheel on I-80.
We met Siona and Maria at the Ferry Building; sat outside and talked for some time about a different blogger meetup in Boston just two weeks ago (the narrative was illustrated with sketches); moved out of the shade and into the sun where we sat under a statue of Gandhi and talked about books, authenticity, the French, and cheese. It was a wonderful day and we decided that next time we’ll actually EAT some cheese instead of just talking about it…
21 May 05
Gremlins
You know you got ‘em when the electrical igniter for the gas stove top starts clicking away every couple of seconds of its own accord with nobody around to have influenced things. Helpless renters that we are (there’s a reason why we should never own a house), we summoned the landlord, who waved his arms over the exposed stove top, whereupon the stove was back to normal. I’ve seen sysadmins do that trick before many a computer, too.
26 April 05
Enthusiasm
Today, I was enthused—
By the California poppies blooming like mad
By a cat that purred while I woke and another that hid under the sheets while we changed the bed
By a new black horse, sleek and shiny, in a paddock on my way to work
By the singing blue grosbeak
By the displaying Swainson’s hawk
By the hot tofu at the Coffee House
By the hot, sweaty sex scent emanating from a flower whose name I don’t know
By the pair of Western bluebirds and the pair of Western kingbirds outside my window at work and by the brush rabbits and jackrabbits jumping vertically in lagomorph ecstasy
By the prospect of a load of paper being shipped my way from John Neal Books in North Carolina
By my new Enthusiasm Tshirt designed by the fabulous Natalie
And
In spite of the fact that my bike chain needs oil and the fridge is still not clean.
23 April 05
Our Dinner With The Katzes
Our friend Virginia invited us over this evening to the seder she and her partner Ben were hosting for his family this year. The Katz clan is large — almost thirty people were at the seder — the patriarch being ninety-year-old Joseph, seated across the table and several seats down from me, with a wonderful portrait of him hanging from the dining room wall.
It was probably the rowdiest seder I’ve ever been to: the centerpoint of it was the family taking turns telling the story of the Exodus all from memory. And we were delighted to find that Virginia was using the Velveteen Rabbi’s haggadah for the service!
No sign of Elijah this evening. But Virginia’s kitty Eloise made fleeting appearances throughout, wondering why in a tale that began with seven years of famine and diminishing grain stores, cats have gotten left out of the telling.
21 April 05
Stalino-Papism
Marc Cooper’s take on Pope Rottweiler.
20 April 05
God’s Rottweiler
“Insofar as Vorbis got any pleasure in life, at least in any way that could be recognized by a normal human being, it was in seeing the faces of humble members of the clergy as they rounded a corner and found themselves face-to-chin with Deacon Vorbis of the Quisition. There was always that little intake of breath that indicated a guilty conscience. Vorbis liked to see properly guilty consciences. That was what consciences were for. Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of authority turned.”—Terry Pratchett, Small Gods“It’s Ratzinger. Be Jewish.”—My Friend Barbara, minutes after the Habemus Papam announcement
Here we go. Why do I feel like I’m back in the sixteenth century?
Here comes a guy who declares relativism the greatest threat to the Catholic Church (and, by extension, to the World As We Know It). No compromises, everyone. No compromises on the role of women in the church, no compromises on married priests, no compromises of course on homosexuality or abortion or contraception (including condoms, in an age when AIDS is pandemic), no compromises on anything, especially not on any kind of silly Marxist preoccupation with poverty. Vatican II was an embarrassing aberration, a blip, an Error. We are in the land of No Compromise. This sounds awfully like last November. When people are so certain they’re right, compromise is unnecessary. (They don’t care that history has shown these people to be tyrants.)
John Paul II was a skilled communicator, a politically savvy actor (and, I believe, a profoundly devout man) who was able to navigate turbulent waters with finesse and diplomacy.
He left the details of dogma to his buddy Ratzinger, is why.
This is why I’m especially grateful for a welcome to a friend’s Seder this Saturday. We are all invited to bring a visual representation of freedom from something that enslaves us. Since I seem to be unable to wrench myself entirely from the clutches of the Catholic Church, I might ponder something along those lines.
Does God really need a rottweiler?