9 September 07
Paths Marked In Green
I rode into town via campus this afternoon, eventually headed to Community Park to see the San Francisco Mime Troupe perform here on their annual visit to Davis (especially noteworthy this time were the portrayals of Dick Cheney and Condelezza Rice), and saw markings on the campus paths that were definitely not here on Friday. A green stripe, the words “Davis Bike Loop”, and another green stripe. I didn’t follow them — I am too immersed in a book on Faerie to trust where such signposts might lead.
5 September 07
Fantasizing
Neil Gaiman has got me very much in a fantasy-reading mode, having recently finished his books American Gods, Stardust, and Neverwhere. So I’ve been compiling a reading list, and raids on the local libraries and bookstores are imminent. Some of the works on the list include:
Neil Gaiman: Anansi Boys, the Sandman series. The Sandman books may take a while to get a hold of from the public library.
Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
Guy Gavriel Kay: A Song for Arbonne. I’ve never read any Kay; this one seems like an ideal one given its setting based on medieval Provence.
China Miéville: Perdido Street Station. Urban fantasy a little in the vein of Neverwhere.
Naomi Novik: Throne of Jade. Think Patrick O’Brian with dragons. I just finished reading her first novel in the series, His Majesty’s Dragon, which was quite fun.
Tim Powers: Declare, The Anubis Gates.
Terry Pratchett: Reaper Man, Making Money. I don’t know how I missed reading Reaper Man. Making Money is about to be published in a couple of weeks.
Mervyn Peake: Gormenghast books. Classics, never read them.
Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials series. With the movie version of the first book in the trilogy coming out in December I’d better get a head start. Intriguingly, it is seen by some critics as being an anti-Narnia series.
This should keep me busy for a week or two.
If there’s a focus to this list it’s mythic fiction, and I probably couldn’t go too far wrong with the Endicott Studio folks’ recommendations, for instance this list here.
4 September 07
Pondering Optics
Birders are a generous, affable bunch. So are bird artists. As I head into my second week of Bird by Bird, I’ve been wondering what equipment bird artists used. So, instead of just pondering, I called Keith Hansen.
Keith’s working on a huge project — birds of the Sierra Nevada — and while we spoke he was applying watercolor to the throat of an immature barn swallow. He likes to use a scope when he sketches because it leaves your hands free. I’ve been thinking about a small scope, concretely the Nikon 50 mm ED, but asked him about a monocular — he thought it wouldn’t be great for him because he has very large hands and at that point might as well use binoculars. (I did take a very small, light pair of Olympus binoculars to the zoo yesterday, and they worked very well.)
Keith did tell me that he liked to sketch from bird video he had taken and told me about a crazy double-rigged tripod (scope and video camera, “kind of heavy,” he said). You can wait for the perfect magic pose and pause it. I like sketching from DVD though tape in the old days was better, because it shuddered on pause and gave you the illusion the bird was moving.
Anyway, we chatted about Dave Sibley and Lars Jonsson and Gambell and king eiders and Danny Gregory and it was so very, very pleasant of him to take the time to talk with me, he having just had the first or thereabouts Marin county record of a calliope hummingbird and then a ruby-throat too. Take a stroll through his gallery if you find yourself in Bolinas. Take a stroll through his gallery even if you need to make Bolinas a destination, because it’s well worth your detour…
Um. I’ll be in New York on Friday, meeting friends. I’ll be heading to B&H to look at optics on my way to lunch…
3 September 07
Change Of Mode
The weekly Yolo Amateur Radio Society net tonight went quite well, all things considered. We ran this without the help of a repeater for the first time in quite a while. This wasn’t by choice — most of the repeaters on the 440 mHz band in the Sacramento area have been taken off the air by request of the US Air Force, who are concerned about interference with their PAVE PAWS radar site at Beale Air Force Base near Marysville. Why the repeaters have just now become a problem for the Air Force after many years of coexistence is a question nobody is at liberty to answer for us, and it is also slightly disturbing to think that the missile warning radar system could be so easily perturbed by just a handful of 50-watt transmitters nearby.
Ham radio operators are nothing if not adaptable, and we operated simplex tonight. I wasn’t worried about our setup here — we have a nice portable Yagi antenna for such purposes which I can get up to about 20’ above ground on its current mast. The only stations we nor most of the participants were not able to hear were the two folks in Woodland who were trying to call in using only a handitalkie. That works fine if it is a repeater-based net, but handitalkie signals don’t propagate very far otherwise. 13 checkins total this evening, which may have been a YARS record.
2 September 07
Rock-Flip Bust
A visit from Numenius’ sister and her boyfriend was wonderful — we unloaded about a kilo of beans, two butternut squashes, a slew of tomatoes, and untold herbs, not to mention what we fed them at lunch — and got in a showing of Ratatouille up in Woodland. None of which took us anywhere near a rock to turn over. Sorry Dave.
The evening was complicated by finding a black kitten under a car which refused, quite sensibly, to come out and wound itself around the wheel of a Mercedes. I’m going to try and trap it tomorrow — we don’t need any more cats in the Arboretum.
1 September 07
Moss Graffiti
Offering new possibilities in organic letterforms. I had no idea one could make such a slurry.
30 August 07
Bound
The white-coated man
threads a needle
— black silk —
and trusses a quadrant
neat and tight, like a turkey.
I feel only dark shadows,
the thread on my lip,
to and fro, fro and to.
Cranberry hypnosis,
Narcotics: then sleep.
I truss up white pages
with cranberry linen
black words of pain,
fear, love, mangled awe.
I tug, with no mercy, through
voids I have drilled,
make a suture-knot,
Tie off. Conceal the ends.
A brilliant shroud
on a journey, beyond.
29 August 07
Eclipse
I need to find a good astronomical event RSS feed and stop relying upon my officemate to give me notice of such things — what if I were to miss an intragalactic supernova (the last such one was in 1604) or something like that? He did however let me know about yesterday morning’s total lunar eclipse, and thanks to Charlie-cat wanting his breakfast as usual at 3:10 in the morning, we were able to see it. Pica and I went out on the tarmac in front and had a brief gaze; I reminded her that the last lunar eclipse we saw was on October 27, 2004, the night the Red Sox won the World Series.
It looks like the next exciting astronomical event will be the Aurigid meteor shower, coming up on September 1st. This is predicted to be an especially strong outburst, due to the Earth passing right through the dust cloud of the long-period comet C/1911 N1 (Kiess). It is estimated that the peak of the shower will occur at 11:36 UTC plus or minus 20 minutes (this is 4:36 AM PDT).
28 August 07
Fossil-free Big Year
No sooner had I determined to spend less in the way of fossil fuels chasing birds than I hear about a wonderful project: a big year by bicycle. Malkolm, Ken, and Wendy Boothroyd started from Whitehorse in the Yukon and are heading to Florida via California and Texas. On their bikes. They’re in Crescent City, now, heading south, trying to pick up a hermit warbler on the way…
They are raising money for several important environmental causes and, more important, awareness. The home page is here; the blog is here.
The family is also encouraging all birders to plan a fossil-free birding day in 2008, and would love to hear from you if you participate! Raise money for local causes, or for theirs.
Great idea, great project. Tailwinds, dear Boothroyds…
26 August 07
Down On The Farm
We got four free tickets this evening for the River Cats’ game, courtesy of our friend Susan, who is convalescing from surgery on a broken clavicle. The River Cats were playing the Fresno Grizzlies, who are the Triple-A team for the San Francisco Giants. It’s quite interesting to watch the Grizzlies, since we get to see players who will figure in the Giants’ future, the Giants being a team seriously in need of rebuilding.
The starting pitcher for the Grizzlies was 24-year-old Jonathan Sanchez, who has been pitching middle relief for the Giants much of this season. He was decent though erratic this evening, with 7 strikeouts and 4 walks, getting a bit wild in the third, and giving up three runs total. It was also nice seeing 23-year-old Nate Schierholtz, playing in right field this evening for the Grizzlies. He went 3 for 3 with a walk and a home run. He’s played in a few games with the Giants this season and has done well there, hitting .325. I’d love to see him up with the Giants outfield for good.
The River Cats broke away with the game in the 8th inning — the three errors committed by the Grizzlies didn’t help things — and the River Cats ended up winning 6-3. A very enjoyable game. We also had good company. We never found anybody to accompany us to the game, so we were under instruction to try to give the extra tickets away to somebody with a kid, and we did just that. Pica found an eight or thereabouts year-old lad attending the game with his grandma in line to get tickets, and gave the extras to them. We think it was his first triple-A game. He had a great time, and enjoyed the action on and off the field, soaking up the minor league between-inning entertainment, and even getting his picture taken with the River Cats’ mascot Dinger!