21 October 04
In the Zone
I’ve written earlier about a project my Wildlife Health Center colleagues have been undertaking to try and catch corvids, take samples, and radio collar them to track the spread of West Nile Virus in the Central Valley. This is easier said than done: crows, magpies and jays have resisted repeated attempts at capture by a net gun, by large traps, by small traps, and anything in between.
Yesterday, though, was different. They caught three crows.
I watched as these women worked almost silently, dancing around each other with a calm and clear purpose. Their confidence quieted the crows they were handling. It was like watching a rite, a ritual: the tone was reverential.
This was, in essence, women doing science. I’ve never seen anything like it.
8 October 04
Senza Cuore
The second presidential debate, which I didn’t listen to, is over. The Red Sox clinched their way to the American League championship. Numenius is in Ventura at a conference. I had planned to do a piece on a book I once made about Martha Stewart but I don’t have the heart to do this, not tonight.
My mother’s cracked her pelvis. It’s not a bad fracture, but she fell while walking on Bodega Head which makes me hyperventilate. She didn’t ask for help and she didn’t even tell any of us until a week later, at which time we all offered that she might like to consider perhaps going to see a doctor. (Well, my physical-therapist sister-in-law practically screamed, which turned out to do the trick.)
My mum’s an independent gal who doesn’t ever want to leave the ocean again. Since my father died she’s made a life for herself in the town where they spent ten years together, from my perspective their best ten years. But she lives 45 minutes from a hospital, and all of her friends—the ones that are still left—are older than she is; she spends a good deal of time taking care of them. I’m two hours away, which is too far to just drop everything and head over there for this or that purpose… There are some tough choices ahead. My brother and sister and I want them to be made by her, not by us under a time gun.
This all weighs a bit. Sorry if I sound morose. There was a beautiful sunset this evening which I could see because the corn’s been cut down and the stalks turned under, attracting a huge flock of geese (at least fifty, all Canadas).
6 October 04
Three Things
1) I’m very tired, because last night I was in an automotive maintenance class until 11:15 pm (you may wonder what there is to maintain in a brand new car, and you’re right—I should have taken this class with my beat-up old Subaru).
2) I’m wondering whether to recommend that we at least consider Persepolis (thanks K.) for next year’s Campus Community Book Project (really, really important not to set off a new iteration of Iran-bashing), and will they go for a graphic novel?
3) I’m really disturbed by a new trend which says we have to vote online in as many places as possible to say that OUR candidate won a debate we believe was a tie (if we even watched it, which I didn’t, since I was learning to tell a distributor cap from a radiator). This place is getting weirder and weirder, like we’re being told to applaud on cue.
2 October 04
Gog and Magog
This is the feast of Sukkot in the Jewish calendar—a time to celebrate that the harvest is in, and to remind ourselves of the ephemeral nature of all things by building a rickety structure outside and sitting in it for a bit. (And eating, always eating.)
I’m not Jewish, and Numenius and I rarely go to services, but the local congregation has just moved into a new and wonderful space from intimate but somewhat cramped quarters. This whole weekend is full of events celebrating this move, which started before the high holidays. We chose to go this morning on what we thought would be the lowest-key event of the weekend.
It WAS low-key, if three hours of hebrew (gosh I’m rusty) can be so described. Lots of things happened that made me wish we went more often. In no particular order:
The Brooklyn accents; the beauty of Virginia’s voice; the feeling of rassling with a language that goes back farther than anything else I know, to the dawn of what makes us a people; our invitation to display and bind the Torah, even though the rabbi and cantor both knew I wasn’t Jewish; the tears shed by those called in aliyah to the Torah, many of whom have waited for years to be in a space like this; the fact that there were no guitars (I have a horror of guitar music mixed with religion), that all the singing (and there was a lot of it) was a capella; a pleasant surprise at how many of the melodies and words I remembered; the conversation afterwards with someone who describes himself as Buddhist and realizing that his own tradition really is all about love after all, if you just READ the stuff; the reminder that much of Catholic (and Christian) ritual comes directly from Judaism, proof of how connected we really are; the awareness that the transcendant really IS here, nearby, and that it just takes ears to hear; hearing the story of Gog and Magog in hebrew, chanted, and realizing that “protection” is both more of a metaphor and a reality than George W. Bush would have us believe; the reminder that in Jewish tradition the WORD has its own mysticism and power, something we’d do well to remember outside; and, well, that life is ephemeral and best to live it well and to the full.
Numenius’ last name is the same as that of a rabbi here in Davis in the 1950s, and it prompted a heartfelt recollection by one of the old timers of those days, when he was cynically against religion in all its forms. Look where we are now, he said.
Amen, say I. Look.
19 September 04
Xocolatl
This week I tried some exquisite dark chocolate stocked at the Davis Food Coop, made by Dagoba Organic Chocolate of Oregon. This bar, xocolatl, has chilis in it, making for a bit of an afterkick! The darker the chocolate the better, as far as I’m concerned, and this bar is very dark with a 74% cacao content. The label is attractive, too.
17 September 04
Delicious
Once again, I fall behind the times. It is only this week that I discovered the site del.icio.us. The author of the site describes as a social bookmarks manager. Basically, it’s a website where you can store your webpage bookmarks. This is definitely useful if you use multiple computers since you can have access to your bookmarks from any computer online.
But what makes the approach of the site novel is that you also have access to everybody else’s bookmarks. On the front page, there is a list of the most recently added bookmarks to the system by anybody, and on the side there is a list of the popular topics by keywords. When you post a bookmark, you may enter a list of your own keywords to describe it. It’s intriguing how the whole community starts to converge on using the same keywords for common topics.
It’s a great way to find new webpages on themes you’re interested in, as well as folks who track the same topics you do.
16 September 04
Mojo Crow
My colleagues at the Wildlife Health Center have yet to catch their first crow—a live one, that is. (There have been plenty of dead ones brought in testing positive for West Nile Virus.) Crows are highly intelligent and not easily duped into captivity. So today Yvette set up Mojo Crow in one of the straw bales outside my window.
Mojo Crow is a plastic, life-size battery-operated crow whose wings rotate manically like those plastic flamingoes you see on people’s lawns.
Within five minutes of Mojo’s epileptic frenzy, there were over 200 crows circling high and cawing. They continued to caw as they landed in the eucalyptus trees nearby. But they didn’t come anywhere near, figuring that whatever had gotten to poor Mojo was probably going to do them in too. Mojo might have to be retired and something else will have to be tried. I’m glad I’m not the one having to catch them: this is really tough.
In other wacky news today, a Dodger baseball fan spent $25,000 buying out all the seats in a section of Dodger stadium beyond right field on the off chance that slugger Barry Bonds might hit his 700th home run there later this month (in which case the ball would be worth a great deal more than the $25,000). Well, Barry’s likely to get there well before then, so our enterprising fan has been selling the tickets for well over three times what he paid for them.
13 September 04
Neurodiversity
According to Word Spy, neurodiversity is defined as the variety of non-debilitating neurological behaviors and abilities exhibited by the human race. The earliest citation for this word is by Judy Singer in 1999:
For me, the key significance of the ‘autistic spectrum’ lies in its call for and anticipation of a politics of neurological diversity, or neurodiversity. The ‘neurologically different’ represent a new addition to the familiar political categories of class/gender/race and will augment the insights of the social model of disability. The rise of neurodiversity takes postmodern fragmentation one step further. Just as the postmodern era sees every once too solid belief melt into air, even our most taken-for-granted assumptions that we all more or less see, feel, touch, hear, smell, and sort information, in more or less the same way (unless visibly disabled) are being dissolved.
Here is a wonderfully comprehensive site on neurodiversity. (From Metafilter.)
10 September 04
Cataloging Images
As Numenius mentioned recently, we’re starting to get overwhelmed with electronic clutter, especially digital images.
I installed a copy of iView Media Pro at work on Tuesday—in order to start sorting through the Wildlife Health Center’s thousands of images that I need to use in my work every day. They’re on my hard drive, they’re on CD’s, they’re everywhere. I rarely get enthusiastic about software: it’s there to do a job, and if it doesn’t do it well I get irritated (if it’s Microsoft Word I get riproaring furious), but mostly I just get on with my tasks.
iView gets my enthusiastic vote for most labor-saving device I’m likely to come across this year. If you’ve got pictures coming out your USB lugholes, this might be something to try.
4 September 04
Such … A Deal!
Today we drove to El Cerrito, just north of Berkeley, and hopped on BART to get into San Francisco (called “The City” in Northern California). Our first stop was the California Academy of Sciences temporarily housed south of Market street while their new facility, a grand and expensive proposition designed by Renzo Piano, is built over at Golden Gate Park. We had a fine time drawing the skull of a wild boar and this axolotl that put me in mind of Jenny’s daughter’s Pablo.
Next we headed over to Stacey’s to meet up with Siona. Every experience I’ve had of meeting a blogger in person has been a wonderful combination of the expected—we know each other’s writing well—and the unpredictable. This was no exception. We spent a pleasant time in Stacey’s, found bargains in philosophy (see left), and ended up with a tea a block up Market.
The drive to the Bay Area these days seems to take half an hour longer than it used to. The traffic we hit near Pinole that stayed till after the tolls and then regrouped before Fairfield made us decide to make the next trip by train.
When we got home, we discovered the kittens had made off with an avocado the size of a small melon, seconded it in the bedroom, and eaten a good chunk. I have no idea how you clicker-train a kitten to leave an avocado in the fruitbowl…