15 March 05
Randomnesses
The following are strings that have led people through search engines to Feathers of Hope, in no particular order. (Tom of The Middlewesterner is keeping a list of the best ones, World Champion Search Strings. Be sure to send him yours.)
somerville gates
sangreal
girls of starbucks / girls of dunkin donuts
countin crows
buying a goat
mystery babylon united states
pink saucepans
venezuela snakes
emily dickinson leaving cert
opposite of ghandi (sic)
achilles tendon pop alternative
squat formica
name of a pop group with a name of a California city
cultural differences us britain pregnancy misunderstanding world war ii marriage
portuguese government and feathers
how to take a good shower
jean cocteau fresco de lady of paris in london priory
how many pens are in a pica
kryptonite biro
worst powerpoint
men who are hollow from within
church of satan robby rust evangelist
dichotomous key for ducks
plagues and pleasures on the salton sea
In other news: I am very proud to live in a state where a Catholic Republican judge deems it unconstitutional to deny full rights to marry to all its citizens. Yes, we, a straight couple, did get married. But we had no intention of ever having children. Does this render our marriage invalid, according to the religious right, as invalid as it thinks gay marriage should be? Probably. I know several gay couples who have children and they are MUCH better parents than I could ever aspire to be. We’re watching this one…
2 March 05
GeoURL Returns
If you scroll down and look on the bottom of the left-hand column of the main page here, you will notice a GeoURL tag. This links to a site where there is a database of the geographical locations of websites.
For a long time the GeoURL database has not functioned, it being neglected as the original developer, Joshua Schachter, moved on to greater things (he is the creator of del.icio.us). The database has found a new maintainer, and as of last week, it is online again!
For those of you who want to add their own website to this database, the instructions are here. Basically, you add a meta tag giving your site’s latitude and longitude to your web page, and then ping the GeoURL site with your site’s URL.
1 March 05
Things Japanese
Three things to report today:
1) I’m going to be leading a delegation of Japanese oiled wildlife experts around the Yolo Bypass tomorrow. I’m hoping for a good selection of ducks and a few early shorebirds. Yes, folks, I’m getting PAID to do this, to go birding.
2) My brother’s jewelry was recently featured in the Capital City Weekly of Juneau in addition to Juneau This Week. His style has been described as a western intrepretation of Japanese wabi-sabi; finding beauty in the imperfect—simple, irregular, earthy. (To me his stuff always looks Anglo-Saxon or Viking, and draws also on his eye for shrapnel, honed while he played as a kid on Spanish Civil-War battlegrounds with his pal Barry, but what do I know.) Check out his work if you happen to find yourself in Juneau at the Juneau Artists Gallery: his name’s Rowan Law.
3) I drew a flowering quince for Susurra yesterday and the combination of birds (three white-crowned sparrows, an orange-crowned warbler, and an Anna’s hummingbird were all in this shrub while I sat on the pavement drawing), flowers, arriving spring, and seeing old friends walk by put me in a contemplative haibun-type mood. More to come, perhaps. (Along with a sillier one about all the eggs that must have fallen off the back of someone’s pickup by the creek here—the crows have been having a field day.)
21 February 05
Jaunt to the Peninsula
Going south on I-80 there’s good light on those hills but the poor almond blossoms are getting massacred by wind and rain and the road surface needs fixing throughout the East Bay and over the Dunbarton Bridge we go and head north but need to go south and we meet Rachel for lunch and talk about Dante I’m sick of allegory she said ten years ago and again today and we laughed over eggs and then headed to the art store across the street and I made the sweet discovery of the shared guilty pleasures of finding hidden inks and brushes and paints with Numenius and then on we went to Kepler’s oh my and then headed north again through a huge pounding thunderstorm beyond Vallejo the kind that makes even SUV’s slow down and there were small funnels maybe starting but sun shone into the valley beyond though and we get home and the road’s not wet here.
(I did just read Eats, Shoots and Leaves and am normally a huge fan of punctuation, I promise.)
20 February 05
The Five-Star McDonald’s
For a brief while last week, the McDonald’s in Times Square in New York went upscale.
11 February 05
Proving You’re Alive
Is what I took my mother to San Francisco today to do.
She could have done this herself, of course: she is, or at least she was at 2:30 this afternoon, alive. But the Spanish government in the person of a woman named Mara Josefa needed to see her, in person, along with a passport and a driver’s license, to put a bureaucratic stamp on the whole thing in person, called a fe de vida. Spanish bureaucracy terrified my mother for 25 years and still does, so I went along too. (It is, admittedly, pretty terrifying.)
When my father died in ‘99 we had to sort through pensions from employers in three countries along with the social security systems of each. It was a long, slow, tedious process. But I’m glad we persevered with the Spanish one, even though it took three years to sort out, because it’s a steady source of income that makes Mum less freaked out about the world in general.
We celebrated our success-and her newly-certified life-by having an early lunch together and then heading our separate ways before the Bay Area Friday exodus could give either one of us ulcers. This evening’s rainbow has reminded me once again how great it is to be alive.
1 February 05
Ten Things I Did Today
1. Paid the rent.
2. Edited a map of California showing incidence of Toxoplasma gondii in sea otters. This is transmitted to sea otters from cat feces.
3. Updated the media file for the Ventura oil spill.
4. Updated the web site for the Ventura oil spill.
5. Got an oil change (first one) for the car. The connection between this and items 3 and 4 did not go unnoticed.
6. Waited at home for delivery of a new washing machine, the pump on our old one having finally given up.
7. Went out to see if the almond blossoms were ready to paint yet (not quite).
8. Helped the landlord put the washing machine together at 4:45 pm. Had I known this is when the washing machine would get here, I’d have gone to work all afternoon. We chuckled about ineffective box cutters.
9. Wrote three letters in support of a Tibetan prisoner in Szechuan at an Amnesty International Meeting.
10. Wondered how it can possibly be that the United States can still countenance the death penalty. It’s assumed to be normal, like having university students parade around in military gear on Wednesday afternoons. (It’s not normal.)
18 January 05
Dunkin’ Donuts girls
One of the added bonuses of spending so much of last weekend travelling by car was that I learned, via my math teacher birding friend, what is considered cool among teenagers in Massachusetts these days.
There are the obvious things—iPods, for instance, the newer and snazzier the better. He’s given up trying to regulate cellphone use in last period (it’s illegal to use your cellphone in class) and instead starts off telling everyone to check their messages now before the end of school so they can get the scoop on what’s happening afterwards—which siblings to pick up, where their parents are going to be. (They all have cars and they all drive them to work, which makes for interesting town hall meetings when a new $300,000 parking lot for the high school is being discussed; riding the bus is, you guessed, not cool.)
And then: there’s the distinction between Starbucks girls and Dunkin’ Donuts girls.
Teenage girls apparently all show up to school looking like their mothers these days, which is to say they’re holding the obligatory cup of coffee complete with handprotector and plastic lid. Coffee at Dunkin Donuts makes sense: it’s good, it’s cheap, it’s easy to park, and there’s no line.
But of course it’s not cool.
So the girls aspiring to coolness at Andover High have to get up earlier in order to park, stand in line for ages, and get their exorbitant latte, so that when the question gets asked “is she a Starbucks girl or a Dunkin Donuts girl?”, they will come out on the right side of a divide whose significance is known only to their peers and that will one day, soon if they’re lucky and way longer if they’re not, come to seem as absurd as it does to old farts like me who don’t like coffee, least of all the overpriced gunk that pours forth from Starbucks.
9 January 05
Abraham’s Tribes
A year ago September, we went to the first community Celebration of Abraham, an interfaith gathering among the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities here. Today there was the second such gathering, this time held in St. James Catholic Church in Davis (oddly, both St. James’ auditorium and the one in the Catholic Church in Woodland where we met for the first event do double duty as basketball gyms).
Again the event was packed. This time the organizers took up the theme of the Messiah among the three traditions, perhaps a little more divisive than last year’s focus on Abraham himself. It’s interesting that even in an event as innocuous as a good loaf of whole wheat bread as this one was cultural differences still come through. When Rabbi Wolfe spoke he told several stories that seemed prototypically Jewish, and I felt most at home there.
At the end we wrote down an action we’d do to help bring forth the messianic era. Mine was to look up and meditate upon the skies and heavens above at least twice a day. We’ve been having interesting skies lately, and there was a fine sunset after we got out of the event.
6 January 05
Getting Technical
Faithful readers might notice that there are almost no posts on Feathers of Hope about technical geeky things. This is because I have neither the knowledge nor the inclination to indulge in them, and Numenius, though he has plenty of knowledge, spends his days immersed in them and would rather post here about other things. Suffice to know that ours is a Microsoft-free household: I’m a Mac person, Numenius is a Unix/Linuxhead whose favorite editor is the command-line vi (which he tells me is not quite true, there are different editors for different tasks; none of them is made by Microsoft, though).
This may be about to change, as I gear up for some Linux lessons this weekend. Although I don’t strictly need it for my work or my play, there’s enough good stuff available in the way of open source software that I’m willing to dabble. In particular I want to get more proficient in Fontforge, a type design program.
For now, here’s a Microsoft columnists/gmsv/10581891.htm”>story that I’ll gleefully pass along: Bill Gates was addressing a crowd of thousands when the blue screen of death appeared behind him. Get a Mac, Bill.