22 July 05
Charles Darwin Has A Posse
The author of this sticker concedes that as an effort to increase awareness of science and reason it is probably completely futile, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth a try.
For those of you who have no idea what the text is referring to, see here.
21 July 05
Freecycle
Thanks to a post by Chris of Sister Spirit, I’ve finally discovered Freecycle, an organization seeking to redistribute things (okay, junk) according to whoever wants them rather than have them all end up in a landfill. The rules? It’s free, and you pick it up. I’ve joined the Davis group mostly because it’s good to have things go where they’ll be appreciated when you’re decluttering. And you never know: somebody might just have the perfect teapot out there, not sure about what to do with it…
20 July 05
Catching Up
Upon a recommendation of PZ Myers, I’ve been reading Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom, by Sean B. Carroll. This is a new book about evolutionary developmental biology, a field which has undergone a revolution in the past couple of decades thanks to advances in molecular biology. Conveniently, it’s been almost that long since I was seriously studying evolutionary biology, and the book is helping me catch up to what we’ve learned since then. In the next two chapters I will learn about how the butterfly got its spots and the zebra its stripes. It’s great stuff.
19 July 05
Tomatoes
The tomatoes getting good here. Gazpacho time, cherry tomatoes in salad time, mozarella and basil time.
I’m amazed I like them. My mother tells of the time my father went to England for a week when we were tiny leaving her with no cash; the only thing there was to eat in the house was a box of tomatoes brought over by a neighbor. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. She says there might have been a little cereal, but no milk.
Right now, I can’t get enough of them.
19 July 05
Hurrying Through Harry
Not long after Pica finished the new Harry Potter book yesterday did I take it up, and finished it myself around 9 PM this evening. It’s a far better read than its predecessor, which was in need of about 200 pages worth of excisions. And lines are already forming, or at least should be, for the release of the seventh book. There are, as they say, major plot developments in need of resolution.
I also found today that Wikipedia has a great set of articles discussing the Harry Potter series. And yes, they’ve been updated in the past couple of days!
17 July 05
Tour de France or Harry Potter?
In July, my mornings tend to go like this: I get up, get the tea on, get online to check on the Tour de France website to see what’s going on. The time lag between California and Europe means that normally I can catch the last hour or so; there are newsflashes every few minutes.
A friend brought over my copy of the Half-Blood Prince last night. She stayed to have a bowl of gazpacho with us. I stopped reading around eleven; got up around 7, intending to intersperse my TdF newsflashes with Harry.
It was not to be; the intense heat has driven a lot of ants indoors. They were swarming over one of the catbowls. This is the hardest day of the Tour, with six brutal Pyrrenean climbs. I caught the end and George Hincapie’s stage win.
I finally finished the book at 2:30 this afternoon. Several readers of Feathers of Hope are reading it too, so I will say nothing except hurry up so we can talk about it…
16 July 05
Reptile Refuge
We went to the Sacramento Zoo today to take a class on drawing animals. Our instructor was Robert Dvorak, who taught the travel sketching course we took here in April. The Sacramento Zoo is a good size for this exercise, it being easy to do the rounds in a half-day. We started at the flamingos, visited the hornbills and griffon vulture, and ended up at the giraffes (a challenge to get all angles and legs on the page, particularly when they move) before breaking for lunch.
By that time I was in my rhythm. We continued on to the zebras, bongo-bongos, orangutans, and chimpanzees. We moved on to the big cats, but they were all in their shelters from the heat. We got the hint and proceeded to take refuge in the coolness of the Reptile House. A wise move, since it got to be 104° F today in Sacramento. The reptiles are fun to draw. They like holding interesting poses, the lizards have great scales, fringes, and eyes, and you can get up close to them. (None of them came through the glass, despite it being Harry Potter day.) At right is a drawing I did of a flat-tailed tortoise from Madagascar, done with a non-waterproof roller ball pen and light wash.
15 July 05
Hot 'n' Harry
It’s hot, the kind of heat that if you go jogging in at six pm you’re risking your life. We are getting the Delta breeze at the moment but it’s still really hot.
But it’s a dry heat.
Barring Alaska, Hawaii, and a few other Pacific islands, the west coast is the last place on the planet to get hold of a copy of Harry Potter legitimately today. There is a free showing of the third film at the Avid Reader which started about 45 minutes ago, and which will end pretty much at midnight in time for readers, young and not so young, to be able to pick up their copies and lug them all over Davis with them all weekend.
We’re off on a drawing class tomorrow at the Sacramento Zoo, and I can’t stay up till midnight tonight. So the earliest I can get my copy is around five tomorrow afternoon.
See you at the other side of this.
14 July 05
Ten Thousand Wins
I turned on the radio earlier this evening when I saw that the Giants had a 4-3 lead over the Dodgers going into the bottom of the ninth. They held on to win the game, a good way to start out the second half of the season. But there was a milestone reached as well. With this win, the Giants are the first North American major league sports team to reach 10,000 wins over the franchise’s history. Granted, I think this dates back to 1885 when the New York Gothams became the New York Giants, and it’s been 51 years since the team has won a World Series, but here’s to the next ten thousand!
13 July 05
Resh
Yesterday afternoon a friend happened to mention she was starting Advanced Beginners Hebrew that night. (Davis is a great place for contradictions in terms.) I decided to join her. No long, thought-out language learning strategy, here. I seem to remember I started classical Greek in much the same impetuous way.
This class is only an hour long, once a week. This means there is lots of work outside, but 8-9 on a Tuesday I can handle.
Aleph. Bet. Gimmel… Mem sofit.