23 September 05
Collaboration
Qarrtsiluni just started. Head on over and have a look, and if you’d like to contribute a piece (this month’s topic is “Something About to Burst”), please do! Instructions are on the site.
23 September 05
Alfalfa It Is
They harvested the wheat field outside our house at the beginning of July, and since then they have gone over the barren field many times with the plow. Most recently they plowed it into 15-meter wide rows separated by dirt berms, and then a day or two later flood irrigated the rows. This evening our landlord told me there’d be alfalfa next year, which is what I had figured.
Alfalfa seems like a pretty easy crop to grow. The field right to the south of us has been planted in alfalfa all year. The procedure there is to mow the field and bale the hay, which takes a day, then irrigate the fields, and then several weeks later it has grown back and you have another crop. I’m sure the enterprise uses more than its fair share of water, though.
An alfalfa field in bloom smells very nice, as does the mown hay. The crop supports lots of butterflies: both the orange sulfurs (which are native and a big pest of the crop) and the painted ladies.
21 September 05
An Evening With Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett was speaking tonight at Cody’s in Berkeley, part of his Thud! book tour (he found out just before his appearance that it was #4 on the NYT bestseller list; this was someone who could hardly get his books published in the US in the 90s).
It’s bad when there’s no standing room.
He was funny, even hilarious, throughout. He’s much shorter than you’d think from his author photo. The line to get books signed snaked through Cody’s, but if you didn’t want a signature (I didn’t), there was a nice space off to the side for furtive sketching.
21 September 05
Rita Moves West
At the rate this season is progressing, we are going to run out of hurricane names before it is over. After Katrina, I’ve paid a good bit more attention to Atlantic storms, being the latent weather hound that I am. After passing just south of the Florida Keys, Hurricane Rita is tracking westward, is at Category 3 now and soon to strengthen to Category 4, and is expected to make landfall somewhere on the coast of Texas by the end of this week.
California isn’t a great place for exciting weather. We get heavy winter rainstorms, Santa Ana winds, and that’s about it, except for the minor tornado. Here is a list of California’s top 10 weather disasters.
19 September 05
Orange Substrate
Pop artist Wayne Thiebaud, who taught for a long time here at UC Davis and whose paintings of cakes grace student dorm walls all these years later in print form, is probably responsible for the current wave of Central Valley landscape artists insisting on an orange edge to everything.
Part of this is in the landscape, of course: this is land-of-orange, orange dirt, orange dust, orange buckwheat drying to rust, orange sunsets that turn to deep purple with the dust in the air after the sun goes down.
It’s like a signature, this line. It says I’ve looked at Thiebaud’s landscapes. I’ve seen the orange. And now I’m going to teach you to see it too.
Whether this orange line is enough to constitute a school is not for me to say, but as I sit here looking at the kitchen window (it’s dark out) and see the marigolds, dried and hanging, from our wedding two years ago, I’m willing to see orange in things around here. I even bought some orange block printing ink over the weekend to experiment with some monoprints. I’ll let you know how I get on.
18 September 05
Not Supposed To Happen
I pay scant attention to college football, but yesterday the UC Davis Aggies managed to beat Stanford in the closing seconds 20-17. This was a long-anticipated matchup. Several years ago, the UCD student body voted to move the student athletics programs from NCAA Division II to Division I, joining the big leagues as it were. I wasn’t very excited by this move, expecting a decade or so of mediocrity to follow, but the choice wasn’t up to me. Anyway, Stanford is the first major Division I foe the football team has faced, and they’re my alma mater Berkeley’s great rival as well. I just became a little bit more of a believer in the Aggie football team!
17 September 05
On Class Warfare
These are words that most Americans don’t want to hear. If they’re Republicans, they don’t want to hear them because they’re doing very well out of class warfare, thank you; if they’re Democrats, they are too, though some of them might feel a teeny bit guilty about it. The kinds of people who talk about it or even think about it are regarded as crackpots, holdovers from the sixties, or outright pinko commie bastards.
We were musing this morning on why Marxist rhetoric gets people so uncomfortable here, when the rhetoric of fundamentalist crackpot capitalists is hardly noticed. I think George Lakoff would argue that it’s because the Republicans have done a good job with their framing, but I think there’s more to it than that.
The stark images of destitute African Americans made homeless in the wake of the hurricane in New Orleans are a clue.
It’s tied to race, but it’s not just race. It’s tied to class, but it’s not just class.
We went to see the San Francisco Mime Troupe in Davis today. These people, at least, are not afraid to take on class warfare, or American imperialism, or the evils of globalization.
Refreshing.
16 September 05
Friday Catblogging
Leaving the closet doors open can prove risky.
15 September 05
Doodling Away
A recent thread on the Cyberscribes list explored how some people found it difficult to doodle, or to know what to doodle. Clearly, I’m not one of them, at least during Audubon Board meetings…
For some real fun, take a look at what Danny Gregory’s mother’s been doing…
Postscript, 9-16-05: the link to “mother” above no longer works. See Hazel Kazan’s site to view her leafages.
15 September 05
Fanciful Travels
If you are looking for an unusual vacation, you might wish to visit the nation of Breda in the South Pacific, or perhaps the island-continent of Bergonia in the mid-Atlantic, the latter noted for its stable anarcho-syndicalist socialist democracy, a subtropical to temperate climate, and three species of endemic wild cats.