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.
4 November 05
Pepperoni Ballots
The Davis Enterprise isn’t hurting for advertising these days. Next Tuesday in a local election the town of Davis will decide whether to allow a 1,864-unit housing development called Covell Village on the north side of town to go forward or not. Voices are running high, to say the least. Today’s headlines read “Tactics assailed: Covell Village criticized for ‘smear’ campaign”. The article goes on to describe events in this past week of early voting:
In the past week, Yes on X [the Covell Village project] was stopped from passing out free pizza coupons on the UC Davis Quad to students who gave proof they had voted; a Yes on X campaigner was asked to remove himself from working at the campus polling station; and a complaint was filed with the California Fair Political Practices Commission alleging that Yes on X is underreporting its campaign expenditures.
Not that the No on X folks are exactly innocent. There are a couple of entries in today’s two-page spread of letters to the editor from people who were either for Measure X or undecided on the project who were shocked and dismayed to see their names used in an anti-Measure X advertisement.
Opinions on the project range from it being sensible New Urbanist development to something that will cause horrible traffic problems and will bankrupt the city. Personally, I don’t believe that the housing mix will be very affordable, despite proponents’ claims to the contrary.
Not that we get to vote on the matter, living on the other side of the county border. At least this means we can courteously avoid engaging with those who will accost us tomorrow for votes at the Farmers’ Market.
3 November 05
Leaked, But Live
The project I’ve been working on for months got leaked to the press yesterday, so it’s now available. Online.
Conservation in California: what makes it hard, and what will make it harder. Read all about it.
2 November 05
Be Obscure Clearly
Those who are fans of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style will be pleased to learn that this classic work has been turned into an operatic song cycle. It received its first performance last month in the reading room of the New York Public Library, the accompaniment performed by the Omit Needless Words Orchestra.
1 November 05
Sharp-tailed Surprise
I got up this morning and did my usual rounds of blogs, email, work email, news, etc.
My work email is where I get local bird reports. Mostly these are about the arrival or departure of our regular birds.
Not today. A sharp-tailed sandpiper was reported late yesterday afternoon at the Yolo Bypass. This is an Asian species, well off-course. They are known in birding circles as one-day wonders; they usually spend a day somewhere and then move on. It’s not wise to dally if one’s been reported in your backyard…
I duly headed over there at around 7:15, had seen the bird by 7:40. I told the folks who were there I’d report it to the list as having been refound by Michael Perrone.
Tonight, I get home from Hebrew class, and find there is a SECOND sharp-tailed sandpiper at this spot.
31 October 05
On Spokesweasels and Bark Mitzvahs
In the spirit of Word Spy comes the Double-Tongued Word Wrester dictionary, which describes itself as a “growing dictionary of old and new words from the fringes of English.”
Fitzmas, anyone?