27 April 07
Which Side Of The Road?
A third of the world’s population drives on the left, according to this definitive reference. A map and list of countries is here.
29 March 07
Alternate Career Universes
I just finished Remember Me by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, a sort of update on Jessica Mitford’s American Way of Death, not so acerbically anti-funeral industry but with lots of interesting titbits.
I’d make a good funeral director, I realize. These people are now called upon to be events planners as baby boomers age and want personalized sendoffs, not the wake-funeral-interment patterns of the past. Families don’t want ashen-faced purveyors of small kindnesses, they want some creativity to come alive while they are in a state of numbed shock. They want someone to take charge, make something happen that will be a gift to the living and a heartfelt tribute to the dead. They don’t want expensive going-through-the-motions (and the latter can, my friends, be REALLY expensive).
As a former denizen of Mount Auburn Cemetery, I warmed to this project. It’s silly, of course. I will never be a funeral director. But I could: I have the right combination of empathy, organizational skills, zest for throwing parties in other people’s houses, and fascination with, let’s face it, death. There are now death midwives and once-in-a-lifetime marriers (we had one for our own wedding, the Reverend Doctor Nicole Honey). If you need a once-only funeral director, send me an email…
26 March 07
A Love Affair with Gloves
I’ve been shoveling a lot of manure over the past two weeks; if I didn’t wear gloves, I’d have some serious blisters. My gardening gloves are alternately sopping wet or crusty-dry. I wear gloves to drive, to bike (let’s hear it for terrycloth), to walk; to do calligraphy (a jerryrigged military dress glove with the thumb, forefinger and middle fingers cut out — the idea is to avoid putting grease from your hands onto the paper); I have gloves in the pockets of all my jackets. I have lots of leather gloves mostly bought in Spain (a pair my father brought me back from his last trip there, for instance). When Numenius isn’t looking, I use them to clean my binoculars on rainy days. There’s a box of vinyl gloves under the bathroom sink. (These come in handy for when you have to move a dead magpie to the freezer in the women’s room at work.)
I don’t think there’s an oven mitt in the house, so I burn my hands on the few occasions I fetch something out of the oven; and even though I own a pair of rubber gloves, I rarely use them.
The best gloves I’ve ever worn, though, are temporary: paraffin dip. Heat, moisture, perfect fit…
15 March 07
Olive Oil Party-Oh
The new crop of UC Davis Olive Oil has arrived. We popped over yesterday afternoon to taste the three varieties, all blends, of Extra Virgin (Wolfskill, Silo, and Gunrock); bought some at a discounted rate; and ran into all kinds of friends, people involved with ecology and agriculture and horticulture and wine and radio and bikes and design and books.
The line to buy oil was long. I found myself standing next to an East-Coast transplant who was enjoying the weather (it was about 80 degrees) but tapping her foot at how slow the line was moving, then berating herself, jokingly, for doing so. Turns out she’s the new humanities and social sciences librarian at the university library. She had previously worked at Northeastern and at Harvard. She told me Widener has been refurbished considerably since I was last there, with the crucial addition of air conditioning (sort of important if you’re housing books that are hundreds of years old.)
We bought oil. We found we had eaten dinner by the end of it all. And we’re glad that UC Davis has found something to do with the olives that used to provide lubrication for bike paths!
More photos of yesterday’s event can be found here.
7 March 07
I Remember the Fog
I remember. I was in a daze, weeks of it. The world seemed to move on by without me. I remember the daze, yet I remember also super-heightened awareness of the world, the air, the color of a flower, the smell of the mist over damp earth. The rainbows I saw everywhere.
Recently several friends have lost relatives or close friends. Two people I know have just lost their father. Ron has just lost her sister.
My head remembers the fog, the daze. My heart tells me to remind them to stay in this place, to live it, not to rush.
Ron, Christina, Susan, Barbara: I love you all. I wish the hurt would go away, but I know it’s best to let it weave its way through your souls. I know it.
14 February 07
Reclaiming Your Inner Autist
We heard Dr. Temple Grandin today give two talks on campus sponsored by the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute (Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders). The two talks overlapped much in content, the first entitled Exploring the mind of a visual thinker, and the second entitled My experience with autism. My favorite work of hers is her book Animals In Translation in which she uses her experience of being autistic to better understand what animal consciousness is all about. She is a photorealistic visual thinker, and believes that many animals function the same way. Thought without language happens. It’s not a mode common in humans, but such a pattern gets developed under certain circumstances.
She identified three specializations of autistic thought — visual thinkers, music and math dominance, and verbal thinkers. The first, the photorealists like her, are those who function like having a movie projector in the brain, or in a contemporary analogy, a Google Images-like search engine. The second type are those who are good at patterns — much more abstract than the visual thinkers. She illustrated this with a slide of a praying mantis made in origami overlaid on top of the quite complex folding pattern of its square of paper. Some very pattern-oriented mind came up with that folding sequence. Finally, the verbally-oriented folks are those who are good at facts — the history buffs, the sports trivia buffs.
It seems autism isn’t one single thing or syndrome, rather it’s a manifestation of how different brains can specialize. Obviously it is important to work on making autistic individuals functioning members of society, but as Temple Grandin puts it, we don’t want to cure Einstein (non-verbal at age three). What we see in extreme in autistic individuals are unusual combinations of the intellectual potentials we all have.
29 January 07
Davis Food Bloggers
Spending the day with Sid, Rick, and Carol yesterday going for the smew meant we didn’t pick up the paper until quite late on in the afternoon. There was an article in there about Davis bloggers, specifically the subset of Davis food bloggers.
Our friend Fernanda has been blogging continuously since 2000. She’s one of the first wave of Brazilian bloggers and is well-known in the Brazilian blogging community. Her main blog is the Chatterbox, but she shares a blog about film, and about a year ago started a blog about food, Chucrute Com Salsicha.
And there she was, in the paper, shopping at the Farmers’ Market! It was a great piece about this subset community of bloggers, who love to cook, share food, photograph it, eat it, and write about it.
The article is unfortunately not online. But unlike most print articles about blogging that still just don’t get it, this one was sensitively written (and researched: Claire St. John visited Fernanda at her home and was fed lunch by her, f’rinstance).
Other Davis food blogs covered in the article were Crumpet Attack, Something in Season, Vanilla Garlic, and What Did You Eat?
This is an exceptional part of the world in which to grow good food. Fun to see people enjoying it on a new level.
25 January 07
What to Write About?
This morning I took a survey about blogging (thanks, Beth). One of the reasons I didn’t give was “it’s my turn.”
When it’s “my turn,” the day unfolds as a series of opportunties. Last night, for instance: the cat throws up on the bed. I get up and deal with it. I finally after much tossing and turning get to sleep, only to dream about a man knocking on the door in the dark, wanting me to call for an ambulance. Where are you from? I said, instead of calling the police (hey, it was a dream). Over there, he said, pointing toward the railroad tracks. Not sure whether he wanted an ambulance for himself or someone else, and profoundly suspicious, I vacillated until he showed every sign of dying on the spot whereupon I dialled 911 asking for an ambulance. “We don’t do ambulances,” came the reply. Then I woke up to the sound of a puking cat.
Or, I could write about my profound depression (and it’s at this point, I should probably admit to myself, medicatable) about the state of the world.
Or I could write about my new and exciting dalliance with Akim Cursive, a modern calligraphic hand I knew nothing about just two days ago, but which seems very suited to writing poetry. I was practicing this evening, drawing the vomitatious cat (he moved off), working working fast to try and push it hard. It’s fun when one of these things can be semi-mastered in a matter of hours rather than years.
21 January 07
Quote Of The Day
They are a handful of miserable resuscitators of a degenerate dead religion who wish to return to the monstrous dark delusions of the past.
— Father Efstathios Kollas, the President of Greek Clergymen, referring to the the first officially sanctioned ceremony held recently at the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens by hundreds of followers of the 12 major Greek Gods.
20 January 07
Day in San Diego
I’m just back from a quick day in San Diego, visiting my cousin Gainor who was at a board meeting for her work with the Episcopalian drug and alcohol recovery program. I’ll post a bit more about this tomorrow but we quickly took in the San Diego Museum of Art then after lunch went to Point Loma, where I sketched and she explored the lighthouse with her friend Kit.
It’s a good-scale city, I think. We had a wonderful day.