13 December 05
Kiwi Cat
Today we learned that Charlie has a liking for kiwifruit. What will be next, fancying red peppers?
At least he turns up his nose at citrus fruit, like any proper cat should.
12 December 05
Cruel and Unusual Punishment
There are more prisoners on death row in California—specifically, in San Quentin, just down the freeway from here—than in any other state. Tookie Williams is scheduled to be executed in three-and-a-half hours, Schwarzenegger having rejected his appeal for clemency.
Granting clemency wouldn’t have meant overturning Williams’ verdict, or letting him go free, or anything like that: it would simply have sent him to a different prison to serve out a life sentence.
Apart from the terrible chance that this man may not have committed the crimes of which he’s accused—and remember, he wasn’t accused of co-founding the Crips, he was accused of murdering four people—I just have to wonder what good executing him will do. It won’t bring back the dead. It won’t make anybody safer. It has cost the California taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars to have kept him for 25 years in a maximum security prison designed to hold one-third of its current capacity. The average length of time a death-row inmate has to wait for a lawyer is fifteen years. AVERAGE. I have no idea what that could possibly feel like.
I despair of this, of a culture that can read of this upcoming execution over cornflakes and think nothing of it. It’s a bad night.
11 December 05
Sketchcrawl Sunday
We had good weather today for our first group SketchCrawl—it wasn’t as sunny as yesterday, but no threat of rain. Alas, the day started out with a bit of a calamity. Poor Diego fell out of a tree he had just bounded up during his morning walk! He hurt his rear leg, not very seriously though. (Happily, Pica’s vet coworker Deana very kindly stopped by and checked him out before she settled into a day of office work just up the road from us.) But he doesn’t get to go outside for a little while.
While I was home waiting for Deana, Pica met the sketchcrawlers, about 10 in total, at Mishka’s Café in town and sketched there for a while. She returned home, and after we concluded Diego would be fine we headed out and met up with the sketchcrawlers in the Arboretum. A few had already dispersed, and we ended strolling through campus with just two others, Mike who had come up from Walnut Creek, and Emma who had organized this Davis event.
I did about a dozen sketches total, ranging from one of the egghead sculptures to the impossible angles of the Death Star. Above is a sketch of an acacia in the Arboretum, as well as a bridge over the Arboretum waterway.
Thanks to Emma for organizing this—it was great fun and I’m glad the sketchcrawls are turning into something of a bimonthly event!
10 December 05
Birding and a Potluck
Richard of A Brit Abroad is coming to the end of his two-year postdoc here at UC Davis, and decided to organize a birding trip followed by a potluck at his house. He is unquestionably the person who has seen most birds in Yolo County in the space of two years without knowing how to drive a car, and managed to hit 250 such species this morning with an Eastern Phoebe we all saw along Putah Creek. (Later in the day he finally caught up with a swamp sparrow, but by that point we had come home to make couscous for the potluck.)
Richard then shared some slides of birds he’d seen this year, which ran like some kind of advertisement for the airline industry: UK to Davis to British Columbia to Texas to Australia to Ontario to UK to Oregon to Arizona, etc. (I’m sure I have these in the wrong order but you get the idea.)
He’s been wonderful to have around these past two years. The first bird we shared was the scissor-tailed flycatcher, seen within a week or two of his arrival in Davis; the commotion around that bird slotted him straight into the birding zeitgeist here and it’s going to be tough when he finally heads off to Paris later this month…
9 December 05
Feline Goaltending
It’s cat-blogging Friday! Diego here is demonstrating a favorite game he loves to play with us. He gets up on the bed and waits while we toss one of his toy mice towards him. If it’s within range, he’ll leap and catch it as best as he can.
8 December 05
Citrus Cheat-Sheet
It’s tangerine/mandarine/clementine time, and this means a lot of hassle for the checkers at the Davis Food Coop. They sell five different kinds, three of which are organic.
Our checker tonight had five small orange citrus fruits on top of his cash register. “Satsuma,” he said to us, when we plonked our five or so onto the belt.
Tomorrow I’m getting ten pounds of these things from someone who has them growing in her yard…
7 December 05
Rooster At Large
At the beginning of last summer, a rooster showed up mysteriously at our house. Just an update—he’s still around, and has pretty much been adopted by our landlord. Or perhaps it’s the other way around—in the morning the rooster will come around to their front door, cluck and crow, and get rewarded with a handout of several walnuts!
6 December 05
Davis SketchCrawl: This Sunday!
Looks like we may be able to catch an official sketchcrawl outing this weekend. Other venues include Vancouver, Sapporo, Chicago, Brussels, Corvallis. The New York group is meeting at the Natural History Museum, lucky things…
The Davis group will meet at Mishka’s on 2nd at around 9:30-10 10-10:30 am. Full details are posted on the Daviswiki.
If you’ve considered doing this but are not sure about your sketching abilities or whether you want to give this a try, please do! It’s a wonderful way to get to know our town, who’s in it, what’s going on, and so forth.
And if you can’t make it to the Davis one, why not start one where you live? Just go out. And sketch.
5 December 05
Remapping The Tube
The London Underground Map is a justly famous piece of design and a challenge to improve upon. Oskar Karlin, a design student and geographer, took up this task and reworked it so that it measured time from a particular station rather than distance.
On a lighter note, people have found all sorts of interesting animals on the Underground Map. I particularly like the dog and the pig.
4 December 05
Many superb posts in response to Blog Against Racism Day. If you haven’t had a chance to blog about this yet, it’s not too late.
Here’s the most helpful thing I’ve found so far, by Ampersand in Alas (A Blog):