Tuesday June 23, 2026
Forty-Three Still At The Ball
In the World Cup we have made it through two of the three sets of group matches — already five of the forty-eight teams have been eliminated from advancing to the knockout stages of the tournament. I will reevaluate whether the expansion to forty-eight teams has been a positive change after it all concludes. The success of the wee island nation-state of Cape Verde (two draws against much stronger teams) has been a delight for all; on the other side of the coin today we got to witness Portugal thrashing Uzbekistan who, like Cape Verde, is also a World Cup debutante. Meanwhile England reverted to form and played to a 0-0 draw today. They are the record holder in 0-0 draws in World Cup matches, with 13.
I would really like to see a team win the World Cup who is not one of the eight who have won it previously. Of the strong candidates under this criterion I am pulling for Japan or Norway. Because the knockout phase starts this time with a round of 32, whoever wins the final will have to win five matches in a row. Chance may play a large factor, especially with the deviltry of penalty shootouts.
Monday June 22, 2026
Graphite
There was a massive thunderstorm in Philadelphia today, which delayed the start of the second half of the France-Iraq match. We decided to walk downtown to the local art store and buy some graphite pencils.
I haven’t spent too much time with graphite, being a damn-the-torpedoes-and-just-draw-it-in-ink kind of gal, but I’ve signed up for a graphite hatching workshop next Saturday. I looked through my supply of pencils and it was pretty paltry: plenty of colored pencils and even watercolor graphite pencils, but few pencils in the graphite ranges on the materials list.
Testing out these Faber-Castells with a quick drawing of my left hand, I realize I have learned something from my colored pencil work — you have to build an image up with layers. Start soft (or hard, in terms of lead) and darken as needed.
This drawing is nowhere near done but I would do shading all over the hand to indicate the contours and light source. I’m looking forward to this workshop.
Sunday June 21, 2026
The Day In Its Color
While browsing in the public library several days ago I ran across a photography book from 2012 entitled The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman’s Photographic Journey Through a Vanishing America by Eric Sandweiss, a historian at Indiana University. This book describes a remarkable collection of photographs taken between 1938 and 1969 by an amateur photographer named Charles Cushman. The title of the book comes from a line in a poem by Wallace Stevens; the collection consists of 14,500 Kodachrome slides of Cushman’s travels across the United States and a bit abroad. Cushman was a businessman with a lot of opportunity to travel, and he meticulously documented his journeys with his Contax II A rangefinder camera loaded with Kodachrome. This was a time period when most professional and much amateur photography was done in black and white, and color documentary photography was pretty rare then. As such, the collection provides an unusual glimpse in full color of the vernacular landscape of the United States at mid-century. Cushman showed little or no interest in fine art photography, but he had a good eye for composition.
Charles Cushman was an alum of Indiana University, and several years before he died in 1972 he arranged to have his photography collection together with his thorough notes (he recorded the subject and exposure details for every slide he took) donated to the archives at the university. There they sat until 1999 when an archivist unearthed them and realized their value to documentary history. The library got funding to digitize the collection, and all 14,500 slides are available to browse online. Cushman moved to San Francisco in 1953, and I have found it fun to search in the collection for slides of places I know in California.
Saturday June 20, 2026
Volunteers
I somehow have encouraged potatoes to grow in two separate plots, and they keep coming. These were pulled today from a bed I thought was now empty except for the tomatoes. Sigh. It’s likely there are some lurkers that will turn into more plants. Don’t get me wrong, I like potatoes (and we steamed a few to put in a salad yesterday); it’s just that I’d like to observe a bit of rotation so we don’t have nightshades in every bed (I have chiles growing in the other bed where several potato plants are now putting in an appearance).
Friday June 19, 2026
Out of Gamut
Today Ryan Moulton posted a good article about the colors your screen cannot show you and where to find them in the real world. Computer screens mix colors from red, green, and blue primaries but there are many colors the eye can discern on the color chromaticity diagram that fall outside the triangle defined by the three primaries. Mostly these are greens and cyans.
Moulton provides a guide to where to find these colors in the outdoors. Looking up at the leaves in a deciduous forest glowing in sunlight is one place. The light passing repeatedly through the leaves has the red and blue wavelengths filtered out leaving a pure spectral green at a wavelength of around 550 nm.
Another place is sunlight through depths of pure water. Water rapidly absorbs reds, and if sunlight passes through a few meters of water the color shifts outside of any screen gamut. These colors can be seen from shore when the light reflects off of light sand on the bottom, or from underwater.
Birds and butterflies famously can have intense iridescent colors thanks to the structure of their feathers and wing scales which can have elements that have the same length scale as wavelengths of visible light. Examples of these include peacock tail feathers and butterflies in the genus Morpho.
One needn’t visit nature to find colors that cannot be displayed on a screen. Green traffic lights have a color that falls mostly outside of displayable gamuts. This color has been chosen so as to provide the biggest discernment from red for viewers who are red-green colorblind. Traffic lights nowadays use LEDs which can have quite pure spectral colors.
(Thanks to MetaFilter for the link to the article.)
Thursday June 18, 2026
Shadow Learning
For over three years now I’ve been volunteering to coach an Iranian woman with her English through International House Davis. We have established a deep connection in our weekly sessions. (I have a deep love and respect for Iranian culture and was saddened to hear of Marjane Satrapi’s recent death not to mention the horrific violence inflicted on the country by the U.S.)
I have no ESL training and mostly my Iranian friend and I chat about whatever is going on, which sadly includes politics. But I recently learned about a technique for helping students improve their pronunciation called Shadowing. It goes like this: I read a paragraph in English, then I read the first sentence of the paragraph, which the student then repeats. When we get to the end of the paragraph, she re-reads the whole paragraph.
We are working our way through Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman, a children’s novella about the immigrant experience in a depressed midwest inner-city area where people of different cultures are brought together to transform a vacant lot into a garden. Each chapter is written from a different point of view, and they are short enough that we can cover the chapter in the hour or so.
What is especially useful for language learners is that consistent trip-ups become very obvious with this method. English pronunciation of “th”, voiced and unvoiced(/θ/ and /ð/); /w/; and initial s+consonant are all difficult for speakers of Farsi (and Spanish, of course). More subtle are the vowels. I never actually thought about it but I pronounce the “e” in “the” differently whether it precedes a vowel or a consonant, and have been able to detect these minor hiccups and convey them to my friend. Of course my own pronunciation is different from that of native English speakers who have spent all their lives in the United States, so my “little” pronounces the “t’s” as “t’s,” not “d’s.” I hope my friend can live with that. She is delighted with this method, nonetheless, and we are making good progress.
Wednesday June 17, 2026
Seeing in Black and White
Every now and then I get inspired to take photos in monochrome with my everyday carry camera. This makes me view the world in a different way, looking for strong contrasts in value and interesting patterns. Black and white photography can point on one hand towards the visually more abstract and on the other hand towards capturing the essence of interactions.
This image from my recent spell of monochrome photography shows the wall of a nearby church building. It is an example of a black and white photograph that does not work at all if it was in color. What one would see in color is a literal wall of red, overwhelming the image’s patterns.
Tuesday June 16, 2026
Nervous Energy
I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD, but wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn it’s something I’ve lived with all my life. In some ways, it’s been something of a superpower. But it means that concentrating on just one thing seems impossible. And when it comes to listening or watching football, I have GOT to be doing something with my hands.
I have just entered the sweater pictured at right into our county fair, which takes place every August. I am planning to line it with silk, which will hide a lot of the mess caused by stranded colorwork (and make it much more pleasant to wear). There are now long sections that don’t require much concentration, making it the perfect World Cup knitalong.
Lionel Messi, nearly 39, just scored a hat-trick for Argentina, a massive feat for any player. I am not qualified to judge who the Greatest Player of All Time might be, but a lot of people who are think he’s it. That we have been alive to witness him AND Cristiano Ronaldo playing, egging each other on, is a privilege. (The game has changed a lot since Maradona and beyond him Pelé were in their prime, and such comparisons are sort of fruitless if entertaining.)
Lots more to go on this sweater but there’s a lot more football to follow over the next few weeks.
Monday June 15, 2026
Drawing Signs
One of my favorite photographers is Walker Evans, who was a master at photographing the American vernacular landscape. We were fortunate enough to see an exhibition of his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art eight-and-a-half years ago. There is a collection of his work published in 1998 that is entitled simply Signs and consists of 50 photographs he took of signage across America.
Signs are important in forming the character of an urban landscape. I was reminded of that a couple days ago when I read through The American Dream? and enjoyed all the illustrations of signage along Route 66 sketched in pen and wash. I decided I needed to sketch more signs, so yesterday I drew the building shown here at left. This hair salon is on G Street in Davis, on the opposite side of the street from the Davis Food Co-op.
Sunday June 14, 2026
Mundial
I know I said I was going to boycott the World Cup. I’m not, it turns out.
ETA That means many hours per day at the moment. It’s not sustainable. But Spain is playing this morning….