28 September 05
Zen Hunting
If you meet the Buddha on the road, watch out, he may bear claws.
27 September 05
A Day at Adobe
I found out yesterday there was an Adobe conference in San Francisco today, so I joined some folks from the main UC Davis design office on a train jaunt down. Lots of interesting new features in CS2 but it was mostly a ploy to get us to buy it. If I’d had this earlier in the summer my big project would have taken a lot less time, at least if I knew how to use the features in question.
I did another doodle at one rare slightly boring bit. I’m too tired to scan it this evening but I’ll put it up tomorrow.
26 September 05
Move Over, Darwin Fish
Those who wish to proclaim the Revelation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster can now do so on the back of their vehicle.
(From Shakespeare’s Sister )
25 September 05
Place Bloggers Meet in Bodega Bay
Today we met up with Tim Lindgren of the Where Project. Tim was over from Boston for a wedding, and we had some work to do on my mother’s computer, so we met up for brunch this morning at the Seaweed Cafe.
Tim always asks interesting questions about blogging place, and it seems that people often ask interesting questions about place themselves when they are somehow in transition. We came up with quite a few blogs between us where this is the case. Being on the edge is what ecotone means, and it’s a challenge to find the edge when you’re feeling settled, of finding the extraordinary (or at least blogworthy) in the everyday. I think one way I’m able to do this is through sketching. (I didn’t do any sketching this morning but we did talk about it.)
Speaking of Ecotone, Tim is heroically moving the spam-beleaguered wiki to a Drupal interface. There should be a skeletal prototype available soon. Please indicate in comments here if you’d like to be involved in testing the new format—we’d love help here! (From highly advanced users to novices, people who have never even left a comment before.)
25 September 05
Winding Down
There are seven to eight games left in the season. The Red Sox and Yankees are in a dead heat, with a season-ending series next weekend at Fenway. Cleveland is 1 1/2 games out from the White Sox and in the lead in the wild card race. Alas, poor Oakland is fading from contention, 4 games back of the Angels.
What could be more fun?
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.