26 August 08
Lunchtime, Yesterday
My sketching buddy Claire’s partner’s had the twins so no Raptor Center for us today at lunch so I went home to load the solar cooker having run out of time before work but there in the field were about 200 white-faced ibis so I sat on the kitchen stool and peered through the scope and these outlandish schnozzes and wild colors pink green copper red blue and drew and drew and then it was time to leave so I got on my bike and heading north under the walnut tree a refuge from the heat for panting crows a plonk onto my helmet that oozed through the vents warm and slightly sticky and I said to the gals as I hosed myself and my helmet down back at work it could have been worse at least it wasn’t a condor — that could have killed me.
24 August 08
Take Me Out To The Wedding
Back just now from Karen and Chris’s wedding, a wonderful event ending a long day — Pica’s birthday — which we celebrated by going to San Francisco to take a course at the San Francisco Center for the Book on making the ideal sketchbook (patterned after a creation of Dorothy Wordsworth) taught by master bookbinder Dominic Riley. The drive back from SF took longer than usual because we got stuck in traffic from the Giants’ game but that was in keeping with there turning out to be a baseball motif in the wedding, the ceremony ending with a chorus of “Take me out to the ballgame”.
Congratulations, Chris and Karen!
18 August 08
11 August 08
How to Cover the Olympics on Television
Yesterday as we congregated at 7 am for our birding outing the mother of one of our younger participants said, bleary-eyed, how hard it was for her to get up because she was hooked on the Olympics. “But it would go much faster if they cut out the advertising,” she said in her sleepy Kiwi accent.
Well, yes, it would. Numenius and I don’t have a TV and regularly deplore American coverage of, say, soccer events where the actual match is interrupted for ads. I don’t think this happens as much as it used to but it’s irritating to the point of madness and we watch Univisión, in Spanish, for soccer, at one of the local Mexican restaurants. (I notice ESPN has at least hired British commentators for soccer, who discuss the match and not which high school the striker’s grandmother attended, a clear improvement.)
Our dinner at Fuzio’s last night was outdoors, but the TV was on inside and featured nonstop non-coverage of the Olympics. This is more or less how it goes:
a) Only ever show events in which Americans are predicted to win a medal. (You don’t want to embarrass those predicted to do less well by showing their failure on primetime. The thought that people might be interested in the sport inherently—gasp—never occurs to the programmers, apparently.)
b) Only ever show the performances of these predicted American medal winners and at most their two closest rivals (you want to be “fair and balanced,” after all). The exception to this is when more than one American is predicted to win a medal, in which case you show their “interaction,” taking pains to elaborate on their team spirit or their rivalry, depending.
c) Only ever allow 15 seconds out of every 15 minutes to show an actual “event” (well, the tiny piece of it featuring the performances as outlined in [b], above). The remainder of the 15-minute chunk is broken down as follows:
- Advertising.
- Fancy Olympics swirling golden graphics that wrap around before and after anything else, such as advertising.
- A talking head, either in the studio (male, in a somber suit) surrounded by golden swirling graphics, or in the sweltering Beijing smog (female, in a pretty printed suit), giving their no doubt finest insights into the event that has just been or is just about to be shown for 15 seconds.
- The sob story. The athlete, the athlete’s grandmother’s corns that prevented her from getting gold in 1948, the fact that the athlete was dropped on the head as a small child. The sob story can last way beyond 15 seconds: some last even 5 minutes, an apparent lifetime in TV. The sob story can be repeated many times over the course of a day’s Olympic “coverage.” It is of far greater importance than the event itself, even when the gold medal is won by an American, who is then shown welling up as the stars and stripes are raised (with the voiceover repeating the sob story). (The sob story can be extended to any athlete of any nationality who doesn’t win his or her event and can be captured on camera crying, whether or not they had a difficult childhood. Since most athletes don’t, in fact, win, the number of sob stories available increases exponentially over the course of two weeks, leading to a scheduling crisis and the emergency hiring of a sob-story über-editor who overdoses on pizza and Red Bull and who needs, and gets, some quiet time at the end of August.)
- The raising of the aforementioned stars and stripes.
- More advertising, bracketed by golden swirling graphics. The advertising can and frequently does pick up on a sob story or on a pseudo-sob-story, the raising of the stars and stripes, and the teared-up athlete on the podium. (It never focuses on the losing kind of sob story, however.)
- Irrelevant local color, such as footage of the Great Wall, zooming in on white people buying, you guessed it, Coca Cola: see, they’re capitalists like us really.
I am at an absolute loss to see how people who are avid Olympics followers—and it seems there are a lot of them—can keep their sanity or even their dinner when pelted with this insulting cack. Even more mystifying is how the athletes themselves can tolerate the inane interview questions or the fact that they don’t stage a massive Free-Tibet-Style Protest against NBC (or CBS or ABC in other years; let’s be fair and balanced, here). The athletes love their sports — revere them, respect their rivals, have trained their entire lives for this moment — and it must be infuriating to watch their work being trivialized so moronically, or even worse, to be forced to participate in the trivialization. I’d go nuts.
The sad thing, folks, is this: there are some really superb sports commentators in the United States. Some of them are even still alive. They must watch this dreck and weep, providing yet more material for the ravenous sob-story writers. You can just see it now: “Jon Miller, forced to watch twenty minutes of Olympics coverage, collapsed in a tearful heap and required sedation. He used to be a much-admired baseball commentator…”
11 August 08
Anniversary
Our fifth wedding anniversary was today! We celebrated by cycling into town for pasta and salad dinner at the Fuzio bistro, followed by ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s. I had mint chocolate chunk, Pica had coffee chunk.
2 August 08
1 August 08
28 July 08
Summer Doesn't Wait
The beans the earwigs the ground squirrels the almonds the squashed plums the parched lilies the flooded field the half-drowned gophers the bunnies the mockingbird the Swainson’s hawks the moon the swallow brood the laundry the clutter the cooking the pickling the biking the daydreams the not enough sketching.
The nearly August. Gulp.
15 July 08
Three Weddings and a Baby Shower
Three invitations arrived last Friday. One, the wedding of some friends for whom I had designed the invitations, so not unexpected, but fun to receive all the same. The second, two dear friends will wed ten years to the day after they met. Thanks to California’s recent supreme court ruling, they can, legally, get married now. The third was to a baby shower, a couple expecting twins. They will get married the following day: the first lesbian shotgun wedding I’ve been invited to… Busy August, folks.
1 July 08
Hands Free?
Today the hand-held cellphone while driving ban takes effect in California. The law was poorly worded — text messaging, for instance, which is obviously much more dangerous than merely talking, is not mentioned — but this is a welcome start. (I’m of the opinion that talking on the phone, hands free or not, should be forbidden while driving, because the lapse of concentration is analogous to having had between one and two drinks regardless, but nobody asked me.)
While cycling to work this morning I saw a cyclist pedalling in the other direction, holding her cellphone and talking into it. I guess the ban doesn’t affect bikes, then.