18 May 04
Good Tidings From Massachusetts
We learned today that my stepsister Jennifer and her partner Amy who live near Boston applied for their marriage license and will be having a marriage ceremony in their backyard this upcoming Friday. I’m thrilled to hear this and by the fact that Massachusetts has leapt onwards to legalize same-sex marriage. Jennifer and Amy’s commitment ceremony was 11 years ago this summer, on a narrow spit of sand near Woods Hole, though it doesn’t seem very long ago!
Here’s a link to a Massachusetts wedding album slideshow that a friend just sent to us.
25 April 04
Sunday Potterings
We had a mellow day today following yesterday’s jaunt up to Shasta County. There was not a cloud in the sky and it’s gotten very warm — it reached 90 today — so we decided it was time for the solar cooker. This is a contraption that we got from Solar Cookers International where you place a black-painted aluminum cooking pot inside a oven roasting bag, and rest this outside in the sun on top of an aluminized cardboard half-box. A picture of the setup is at right. We cooked beans and rice today, ready by the time we got home after an excursion into town on our bikes this afternoon.
I also went through my bike basket, in the spirit of Pica’s archeology of the car. Items therein:
- 1 clear plastic bag
- 1 bike lock
- a scrunched up paper napkin
- a paper on the economic geography of talent, author Richard Florida
- the roster and program for the UC Davis vs. Cal State San Bernardino baseball game on Picnic Day
- the Picnic Day program from the Cal Aggie paper
- a clothes label saying “I am reversible”
- a printout from March 8 of books on loan from the Davis Public Library, namely The Boy’s Crusade, by Paul Fussell, Monsoon Diary, by Shoba Narayan, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Worms, by Amy Stewart, The Book of Wi-Fi, by John Ross, and Voices from the Pagan Census, by Helen Berger
- a couple of printouts of local geocaches
- 5 pencils in various states of unsharpenedness
- 1 Pilot pen
- 1 empty fountain pen ink cartridge
- and a type specimen sheet for the typeface Gentium
17 April 04
UC Davis Dog Day
Actually it was the 90th edition of Picnic Day today at UC Davis, but don’t tell Hooper that. My sister Judy, her boyfriend Brian, and Hooper their dog all came up for this event, reputedly the largest student-run event in the country, and from Hooper’s perspective, the largest gathering of canines he’s been with.
After watching the parade, the highlight of it being the passage of the visiting Budweiser Clydesdales — the most massive horses I recall seeing, and followed by three big eighteen-wheeler trucks to hold two Clydesdales each — we wandered west towards the dog events. Halfway there, a sheep ran across a parking lot and crossed the street, with four folks in pursuit — an escapee from the sheepdog trials down the way. Brian and Hooper decided to help, so they crossed the street and joined in the chase. The sheep was corralled after a bit, but not before it knocked down a woman in its way. Hooper followed his introduction to sheep-herding with observational studies of the experts, the border collies doing the trials.
We watched a bit of baseball — the UCD Aggies were playing the Cal State San Bernardino Coyotes — and did some sketching at the game, discovering that baseball is a great sport for practicing sketching since the players hold great poses repeatedly. We then saw some of the frisbee dogs chase and leap, and went to the field where the various dog adoption groups were set up. Pica was quite tempted by a soft and cuddly black lab puppy. Alas, no dogs allowed where we live.
And Hooper left with some new career possibilities. He still needs a bit of practice before he masters the border collie stoop-and-glare technique, but then fame is his.
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.