26 January 06
Modeled City
“It’s often hard to convince people that Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs are real.” How one photographer’s experiments in tilt-shift aerial photography make Las Vegas “an avatar of itself”.
From The Map Room.
25 January 06
Bagali Polo and Guinness Truffles
Ron and Joe came up looking for mountain plovers but got skunked, so we met them at Bogey’s and then went to Ali Baba for dinner. Dessert was at Ciocolat, where Ron cut three truffles into four pieces with her trusty swiss army knife and we each tried a piece of cinammon, triple sec, and guinness truffle. Much jollity ensued. Because we could talk about depressing things too, but tended not to.
24 January 06
Joy and Death
It turns out they are frequent coauthors. I am sitting in on a seminar this quarter and one of the recommended papers for tomorrow’s session has the following citation:
Joy, Michael K. and Russell G. Death, 2004. Predictive modelling and spatial mapping of freshwater fish and decapod assemblages using GIS and neural networks. Freshwater Biology 49:1036-1052.
23 January 06
Monday, Monday
The first almond blossom of
the first tree that blossoms here:
doomed to sterility
The white of egrets
fussing in receding floodwaters
bright white on mud
The Canada geese
watching the egrets
cryptic on cryptic
The mallards
ignoring them all
sexsexsexsexsex
The blue, blue sky
no hint of clouds
with this north wind
I ride into it.
The north wind.
The day.
22 January 06
Dream Birds
No, I don’t mean the objects of a long-sought birding expedition—that Steller’s Sea Eagle on the shores of Kamchatka, for instance. I mean birds seen in dreams. This morning I saw a Yellow Sandpiper on the patio just outside our bedroom back window. This bird is about the size of a Stilt Sandpiper, buffy above, but with yellow on its breast and under the wings. Pica keeps her own dream list; maybe I should start one.
21 January 06
Cat Show
I had never been to a cat show before today. We volunteered, though, to help staff it for Feline Lifeline, who were provided space if they provided enough volunteers. We like this organization a lot—Debbie helped us out when we were overrun by feral kittens last year—and were glad to give a little time today.
Our jobs as ring stewards were to spray each cage with disinfectant and wipe it with a paper towel after every cat. There were hundreds of cats there, and each ring had cats all day. So each cage needed cleaning loads of times.
It was interesting, though. I had never heard of Sphinx or Singapura breeds; I was amazed at how many Persians there were (I still think they’re ugly and very ill-adapted for life as a cat, but they are apparently the most popular breed in the United States).
Numenius’ ring had a “housecat” class, with your ordinary overfed moggies well in evidence. I wish I’d been able to see more of it.
This is a subculture I knew absolutely nothing about. There was one man who looked exactly like his Persian; a woman who seemed anxious to the point of danger all day. But mostly they were an affable, chummy bunch…
20 January 06
Cat Blogging Illustrated
Today’s Illustration Friday theme is cats. Diego and Charlie insisted I participate.
19 January 06
A Swearing-In
I went because I hadn’t been before. I went because she didn’t have anyone going with her. I went because I was curious. I went because of my ambivalence about my own American citizenship. I went to stand in line and stand in line again and watch Bureaucracy in Action.
What I saw was this: generations. I saw the generations of people, alive and present and dead and gone, who waited for this moment. My forebears (well, some of them). Numenius’ forebears. Generations from around the globe. Diversity is what makes us be our very best, said the judge swearing everyone in. It’s what Dr. King taught us.
The oath they swore is one I wouldn’t take: but my privilege is having been born here. So I needn’t worry about oaths. It was something, seeing 400 people suddenly becoming American, laboring through the difficult consonants. It was something, this evidence always around me, suddenly concentrated, of how this is a culture of immigrants.
We had lunch, I the English/American designer and she the Russian soil scientist, at an Afghan restaurant, representing a culture none of the three of ours has ever managed to subdue. It seemed like an appropriate thing to do.
Today, as I went to lunch at the Iranian restaurant just up the street, I saw the man we had been standing behind in line. He became a citizen yesterday also. I crossed the street to shake his hand, congratulate him. He looked like a French lefty from the 80s, which probably makes him a Bulgarian economist from the 00s. His name, he said, was David. He was very touched I had bothered…
18 January 06
Ivory-Billed Tale
We just got from the presentation at this month’s meeting of the Yolo Audubon Society. John Trochet, a Sacramento area birder and a meticulous field surveyor, gave a riveting account of how he came to see the recently rediscovered Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. He has been a long-time explorer of the swamps of the Southeast and an occasional ivory-billed searcher. Last April, he went on his own little expedition into the Arkansas swamps with another ivory-billed seeker. After running into the official Cornell Lab and Nature Conservancy search teams and dancing around the question of what they were both doing in the woods, they were invited to the private home of one of the researchers, made to sign non-disclosure agreements (this was before the public announcement of the resighting), and were told the whole tale. Two days later, John and his two companions, now coordinating with the Cornell/TNC folks, had the great good fortune to get a three-second glimpse of an ivory-billed, not far from where they put in with the canoe that day.
