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):
3 December 05
Champagne Valley
I’m finding discussion of the housing bubble to be quite entertaining. While practically everybody on two feet in California and many other parts of the country has been scheming to get rich through buying a house (or two or three…), we’re happily renting contrarians who think these boom times will not last. A favorite blog of mine nowadays is The Housing Bubble 2, full of housing bear talk.
Nowadays I’ve been looking at housing prices more systematically. A good data source is the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight House Price Index. Above is a graph I made showing the value of this index for the Sacramento metropolitan area. Note how things were comfortably trundling along at a 5% growth rate until the year 2000, at which point house prices take off in this area at about a 15% appreciation rate. To my eye, this looks completely unsustainable and likely to fall back to the historical line of increase.
It is interesting to compare appreciation rates over the past 30 years to recent growth rates, say since 1999. At right is a map I made that depicts this. What is plotted is the growth rate since 1999 divided by the historical growth rate (since 1975). Red is high, a ratio of 3 or above, bright green is a low ratio (between 0 and 1). What was a bit surprising is that the frothiest region in California (by this definition of froth) is not the Bay Area, is not Los Angeles or San Diego, but is in fact the Central Valley. Welcome to my home.
2 December 05
Blog Against Racism Day
... was yesterday, but it wasn’t my turn to blog.
Thanks to Chris Clarke of Creek Running North for getting us going on this. I haven’t had a chance to read the 100 or so blog posts linked to on his entry and comments so far; I hope this is not merely duplicating what twenty other people have already said, but if it is, it means it’s a common experience.
Through an accident of history my skin is white. (Well, okay, pink.) People who share my skin color have a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth and power. This is partly an accident of history and partly of our own making. In the United States, being white means having privilege that is CONTINGENT on others not having it. Not having had it historically, not having it now. The rise of this economic superpower would simply not have been possible without slavery.
This is not to say that there are not an awful lot of white people here who are poor and miserable and who will die this winter from cold and malnutrition and a lot of other things that shouldn’t exist in a land with this many resources, but on the whole, being white in the United States means having privilege. Unearned. Unbought. Unperceived.
So: Being white means I can drive a car and not be worried that I’ll be pulled over just because of the color of my skin. I can go in a store and not worry that I’ll be arousing suspicions of security guards. I can apply for a mortgage and be sure that the only thing that might get in my way would be an apparent inability to pay it (though with the housing craziness of the past few years that wouldn’t be much of a barrier either). Being white means I can go where I want and if I get lost I can ask a cop to help without fear. I can do a thousand things I and people who look like me take for granted, every day.
White privilege means I can say things like “anyone can make it in this country” and “why don’t you want to come and live in my nice, white, neighborhood, so we can have a little more diversity” and be completely oblivious to the fact that for people who are not white, just getting out of bed in the morning is a huge ordeal. Dealing with us. With our white world. White privilege is about having the right to continue to be clueless, because after all it’s no skin off our nose.
White privilege is about not noticing that even when well-intentioned, our efforts to help people of other races are patronizing and will not lead to change.
White privilege is about expecting our brothers and sisters of color to explain to us, one more time, the millionth time, why they don’t want our pity or our affirmative action programs or our welfare or our charity. They just want to be treated like people. And the most we can do, the most and the least we can do, is have this conversation.
Not with them. They are sick to death of it, are tired of our good intentions that always somehow leave them where they were. No, with other people who look like us.
Thanks, Chris.
Postscript, Saturday, December 3: It’s not the most we can do, it’s just the least. The most we can do is give up our unearned privilege. We can also speak up when we see a racial slight, a racial injustice, hear a racial joke in a cab. We can demand that our employers treat everyone fairly, even if it’s really hard and costs them money, money that might otherwise make its way into pay raises for us. We can demand a real level playing field, not a cosmetic one.
Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Gandhi’s Way, has said that the way to level the playing field here in the U.S. would be to have 100% inheritance tax.
Now THAT would be giving up some of our privilege. Not all, but it would be a good start…
1 December 05
More Plant Maps
I’m keeping my computer at work well-employed by cranking out maps of California plant species. This is a species richness map showing the number of native species. In the color scheme, red is high (about 750 species), yellow is intermediate, and blue is low numbers of species. My next challenge is going to be figuring out how to put some 7800 of these maps up on the web.
30 November 05
Made Up Recipe
Steam or bake equal numbers of beets and yams. Peel and cube.
Chop large handfuls of basil, tarragon, and parsely; add to bowl with vegetables.
Make a garlic vinaigrette by crushing one clove, mixing it in with a teaspoon of dijon mustard, 2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar, 2 teaspoons tablespoons (or more) of extra virgin olive oil, and salt or tamari to taste.
Toss.