11 April 04
Birthday With Foal And Puppy
Today was my birthday, and we spent the day with family in Berkeley. My uncle has been visiting my dad, and we took the occasion to reminisce and go over family history. But there’s a new member of the family, pictured at left. Little Max (as he’s called now, which will probably be short for Maxwell), is a Bichon Fris puppy somewhere around 12 weeks old that came home to stay with my dad and stepmom a week ago. His older half-brother Mischa is a little miffed that’s he’s no longer the center of attention but the two are playing together well, if a bit fiercely.
Yesterday we met a one-week-old foal named Chloe. Foals and puppies make for a good birthday weekend.
23 March 04
The Not Day
One of the drawbacks-outweighed by the many advantages-of doing a blog written by two people on alternate days is when something happens on your “not” day. Yesterday, for example, I saw four wild turkeys on the levee, an extraordinary thing by any standards, and I even managed to photograph them. So poor Numenius had to put aside baseball or politics or something arcane and write about my turkeys.
So I’ve decided to even it up a bit. Numenius is, at the moment, in Spanish class, something he’s been doing twice a week since January. Although the UC Davis students are on Spring Break, getting drunk in the Sierra or in Baja or in Hawaii, the continuing education folks are hard at it, deep in syntax and tenses. Good for them, say I.
I don’t hear much about Spanish class other than that the teacher was so pleased last time they all passed their exam—for the first time ever, in her experience—that she brought in a cake. Tonight, more exam results are being delivered. I wonder if there’s another cake? Doesn’t matter, I brought home some Double Rainbow Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream from my foray to the Davis Food Coop.
20 March 04
Wedding On The Equinox
Our friends Nicole and Mike got married today, in a wedding that started off this afternoon at St. James, the Catholic church in Davis, and then moved to the International House just north of campus for the reception.
Nicole officiated at our wedding back in August. At left we see Pica and Nicole today dancing a reprise to the jig at our wedding that resulted in Pica’s ruptured Achilles’ tendon. Even the musicians playing are the same. Happily, no injuries happened this time, and we’ve been at a fine party this afternoon and evening.
14 February 04
Metamorph
According to Justin Pope, there are many different Jesus figures in American history. There’s Jesus the distant symbol, and Jesus the gentle friend. There’s Jesus the pacifist and caregiver, and Jesus the gruff, muscular warrior. There’s black Jesus, and white Jesus. Homely and handsome, capitalist and socialist, stern and hippie. Hard-working social reformer, mystical comforter. (He omits the “Buddy Jesus,” a winking, good-natured fellow from the irreverent but deeply religious film Dogma.)
Pope has been looking at two new books: “Jesus in America: A History,” by Richard Wightman Fox, and “American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon.” This is all of great interest to me as I continue my Religion and Non-violence class here at UC Davis.
Gandhi is one of the most interesting historical figures of all time: weaving together life experience (especially colonialism) and Hindu, Christian, Enlightenment, and other traditions and texts, he developed a unique way of changing the world. His political and spiritual beliefs were inseparable; his body became the locus of conflict as he fasted, declared lifelong celibacy, pared down to essentials (gradually shifting down into a loincloth; his body became a national obsession in India particularly during his fasts-unto-death). One of the most interesting things to me about Gandhi, though, is his fascination with Jesus, whom he saw as the best example of a non-violent fighter.
“I kept running into Jesus when I was trying to study Hindus and Buddhists,” says Prothero quoted by Justin Pope. Indeed one of the most interesting things I learned from our Muslim brothers and sisters following September 11, 2001, was the reverence in which they hold Jesus (the word is always followed by “may his name be blessed” in Islam).
As the release date for Mel Gibson’s “Passion of Christ” looms, and Jews in the United States and elsewhere brace themselves for a wave of anti-semitism, we might do well to explore a little further what our own image is of Jesus.
12 January 04
Prayer And Printer Cartridges
For those who are in a titanic struggle with their recalcitrant printer, or at least need some more ink or toner, there is a group of Cistercian monks in Wisconsin, who are raising money for their abbey by selling printer cartridges. Their business, entitled LaserMonks, is two years old and growing rapidly, and their prices are excellent. (From Slashdot).
9 January 04
Macked(Mac’d?)-out
I went to Mac World today with a colleague, our systems administrator, who is fated to run an office full of PCs but loves the great design and good ideas put out by Apple. It was raining and we took the train and bus, arriving fairly late—around noon. We went into the conference hall and gasped, a couple of gals in a thoroughly guy world.
I’m so tired I can hardly type, but the image of two grown men wearing mini-Pods (the new, colorful miniPod, not yet for sale but part of the Apple employees’ uniform for this week) and wondering why we could imagine that an Apple version of the Tablet PC might be worth making (so very coy, they were) will stay with me for some time.
6 January 04
The Future Of Search
I’ve finally found a web search engine that can give results that are much more useful than Google’s. This is Vivsimo, and its innovation that it can organize search results into useful categories on the fly. These clusters appear on the left-hand side of the search page in a tree that you can click on to expose deeper levels of the hierarchy. For work I have been doing lately a fair number of searches trying to catalog resources on California invasive species, so I know the useful resources on the web pretty well now. After playing around a bit with Vivsimo, I think its ability to categorize results (e.g. search on “yellow star thistle” and have it return a clustered set of results on yellow star thistle control) is going to be very handy.
For a quite an informative set of pieces on search technology, see Tim Bray’s blog here.
5 January 04
Vatican II and the Equalization of the Liturgy
Back in the days when I still attended Mass more or less regularly I always sought out the ones with no music. Not because I have no musical ear and hate singing-quite the contrary, actually-but because the music we are now forced to endure is so saccharine as to render the whole ceremony vacuous (or worse). This is a purely personal position, you understand. But Vatican II, with its well-meaning (and no doubt long overdue) proletarianization of the Mass, happened at a time when the worst excesses of pop culture could (and did) destroy Catholic liturgical music. When they aren’t trying to sound like Hollywood scores, contemporary American Catholic hymns sing about love and peace and soaring like eagles and guitars (which should never be brought within 100 yards of any sacred place, in my humble opinion).
This is not the Catholicism I left the Anglican church for so long ago: I wanted the beauty, the guts, the blood, the tangible fusing with the ineffable. It was a strange journey and has marked me, probably more than I’ll ever know. But if they keep making us sing that stuff, I’ll keep staying away. (Signs are that it is indeed compulsory: musicless Sunday masses are no longer permitted by the California bishops.)
Mel Gibson is now famous for his adherence to a Tridentine sect for whom the Latin Mass is the only acceptable medium for approaching the divine. I would never go to one of these ceremonies, but more for political than religious reasons. I have no argument with these people when they say that the Mass as currently served up in parishes across the continent, two, three, four times a Sunday is like eating porridge with treacle. (I don’t know if they DO say this, but someone should.)
Going back to St. George’s in Madrid in December with the beautiful singing of old, beautiful hymns, took me by surprise. I’d forgotten about the pleasure of beauty mixed with the divine. I would love to hear what Beth’s choir sounds like. And I wish someone could write contemporary holy music that didn’t sound like John Denver overdosing on aspartame.
3 January 04
Buying a Goat
Since I mentioned it on our Christmas card this year, several people have asked about the goat I said we bought. We did buy a goat, but it will go to people we’ve never met. This is done through Heifer International, a charitable organization for sustainable development. The goat we paid for is given to a family in a developing country; if it bears any offspring, that family’s obligation is to give the kid to another family in need, and so on. So there’s milk all round. You can also buy a cow, a sheep, a pair of chickens, rabbits, and even a hive of bees, but we like the sassiness of goats. See Numenius’ sketch of one we met last March up in the Capay Valley.
Other organizations I think are worth supporting: Doctors Without Borders, an excellent French organization specializing in critical medical relief; Oxfam; Planned Parenthood; and the Point Reyes Bird Observatory.
2 January 04
Hermione Gets A New Cat
Several days ago I installed Mac OS 10.3 (“Panther”) on our iBook laptop named Hermione. We’re quite pleased with this update of the operating system. Our favorite features include the fast user switching (Pica doesn’t have to log out completely if Numenius want to switch to his desktop for a bit), the more tightly integrated look and feel, and the already quite good email application, complete with a trainable spam filter and a nice interface for sorting mail into different mailboxes according to rules that one defines. A little clunkier than we hoped is the new font manager: I doubt it’s up to handling thousands of fonts, but that’s hardly needed for what we do with the laptop. Now it’s the time to reinstall software: I just put on software for connecting to our GPS unit—what every geographer needs!