14 November 05
Tired but Home
I got back from the East Coast today. I’m tired. And I got to see Mars below a nearly-full moon before I collapse into bed…
13 November 05
Multivariate Fun
Every several years the Pew Research Center publishes a political typology study in which they divide up the American electorate into nine different groups based on values, political beliefs, and party affiliation. I like these sorts of cluster analyses. It’s even better if you get to play with the original data. The Pew folks are very good about releasing the original datasets: you just have wait six months after the report was published. The typology dataset came out last Thursday, and I’ve been having fun today going through their analyses. I’ve reached no conclusions yet, though.
12 November 05
Horses! Horses! Horses!
Today my niece (7) and nephew (5, just) both participated in a horse show involving equitation, pleasure, games (egg-and-spoon, the equestrian equivalent of musical chairs, and other fun delights, culminating in the fancy dress show, horse and rider both).
Simon was done after his morning stint; Tesla carried on throughout the day. So did her dogged aunt. It was FREEZING, though not as bad as yesteray.
It’s a very long time since I’ve spent an entire day around horses, though I used to do it a lot. Through the energy and giggles of preadolescent girls I got some hardwiring back to days spent around jukeboxes in jodphurs. The smell of a stable/barn: it throws me back to a time when I wasn’t remotely concerned about who I was, but was desperate to know what a horse was thinking. The stable was a place where I really felt in control; I saw that countless times today.
There were lots of ragged lives around this show. A girl whose father was killed in a car crash two years ago in front of her, whose mother just remarried two weeks ago; a triad of sisters who are all homeschooled, impeccably mannered, with almost no money for clothes; the horse who can’t move for arthritis and other ailments but who seems too happy to put down. The woman who runs the whole show, Beth, has lost in the last three months three relatives including her mother, a cat, a dog, two horses, and almost her sanity. This is a partial list.
It was like witnessing a communal healing-gymkhana. Such a notion shouldn’t surprise me…
11 November 05
Cali Fuschia
Pica is away in Maine visiting her sister this long weekend. I did a few sketches in the Arboretum today after going to hear a morning talk on campus despite the holiday by Bruce Babbitt. The California fuschias (Epilobum canum) were very much in bloom.
10 November 05
A Cartographic Font
Since I am both a map geek and a font geek, I am glad to learn about Cisalpin, which is a font recently designed by Swiss typographer Felix Arnold specifically for use in cartography. It is a linear sans serif face that is intended to be extremely legible at small sizes and also runs slightly narrow to avoid long line lengths.
9 November 05
Radio Ratings
We’ve both been participating in radio ratings testing for the past week. We listen to very little radio outside of baseball season… but it’s been fun to document just what snippets we do listen to in the car on the way from A to B. There was an interesting piece on the local independent station last night covering the elections.
What’s been almost staggering is that we’ve received numerous reminders in writing and by phone to complete the survey and mail it in, including a total of $4 in “incentives,” spread out over the course of a few days, to get us to do this.
I’m off to Maine tomorrow, leaving the cats in the care of Numenius. Blogging on my part may be sporadic for a few days…
8 November 05
Election Tidings
It’s a windy night; the storm that went through yesterday left 0.62” of rain and took the power down across the street. I’ve been following the election results all evening—the polls here closed at 8 PM. Measure X, the Covell Village development issue, looks like it’s headed to a fairly decisive defeat. At this moment, all of the propositions in the California election are losing as well, though a couple of them are still close. Since this was a special election only called because Governor Arnold wanted several of these propositions to go through, this is going to turn into a significant political defeat for him.
7 November 05
Rainy Evening
Just the time to settle in with a sudoku or two.
I’ve actually been working on some calligraphy this evening for the first time in a while. I got a commission to do some wedding vows for a couple whose table place holders I did over the summer. I haven’t seen the text yet but have been working on loosening up, which is going to need to happen a lot before I even start on this. There are a couple of challenges: the vows are of quite different lengths, and how do I render them without making the longer one seem more important?
The cats have responded to the change in weather in opposite ways. Charlie’s hunkering, Diego’s running around. Maybe I should take some calligraphic cues from this.
6 November 05
Winter Begins
It looks like the first big rain of the season is coming tomorrow! Here is a view of the sky this afternoon looking south over Putah Creek.
5 November 05
Impromptu SketchCrawl, Davis Style
We seem unable to coincide with any official SketchCrawl outings. For instance, next weekend there’s one to Alcatraz, which sounds like a wonderful idea, but I’ll be in Maine. So today we decided to do our own.
The car was due for its 10,000-mile maintenance, so we left it at the Honda dealership and walked across to Mocha Joe’s, one of the better cafes in town even though like Common Grounds it’s in a mall [cue scary music]. On the walk there, on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, a headline blared out: the Provost of the University of California had abruptly resigned yesterday for promoting friends and relatives.
Normally these kinds of things are par for the course, except this Provost used to be the Dean of Graduate Studies here at UC Davis, where I used to work. It was before my time but a strong and brilliant personality like this leaves its mark long after any kind of physical departure. (Given that Greenwood had taken a leave of absence to go to Washington to work for Clinton and set her sights on a Chancellorship when she returned, which she in fact nailed at Santa Cruz in short order, this mark has to be interpreted at best as “mixed.”)
She’ll be returning, the Chronicle assures us, to her “first love teaching.” Probably here, in Davis. This is a universal euphemism in academia. It means “he or she got canned.” Only Greenwood didn’t; she resigned first. If only Rove could be so honorable…
Our sketching took us to the Yolo Bypass where the sharp-tailed sandpiper was seen earlier this week. There was no sharp-tailed that we could see, and after sketching resting dowitchers and dunlin we were about to move on when two American bitterns flew in and landed within a few feet of us.
There is no benediction like that of a bittern. University politics, governmental politics, the whole hoo-ha over Covell Village—all of it melts away; to be in the company of this spirit-presence is like nothing I can describe. I tried, miserably, with a sketch, two, three, but mostly it’s just reverential whispering and holding your breath.
The birds finally moved on and so did we, sketching frolicking at the dog park, the salsa bar at El Mariachi where we had lunch, then patrons at the Yolo County Library (where I finally read Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit; a philosophical treatise that has me puzzled in certain respects—I think his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remark to a post-operative friend is off-base, but on the whole it was very provocative, especially the examination of how bullshit is different in so many ways to lying).
Sketching your way around your environment: it’s a way to see things. Fresh. Cutting through the bullshit.