16 August 05
The Lost Art of the Thank You Note
I have a birthday coming up next week, and my mother sent a card and a gift before she left to visit my brother in Alaska.
We’re in touch a lot, my mother and I: she lives about two hours away. We speak on the phone often, we email. But I don’t write her letters so much anymore. She’s a very thoughtful letter-writer, and whatever awkwardness she might feel socially vanishes when her pen hits the page. Anyway, I picked up my own pen to thank her for my birthday present and suddenly it dawned on me it had been a long time since I had done this for anyone.
She taught us to write thank-you notes growing up. It’s an art, and it follows a very simple formula. The art comes in making it sound less formulaic. It’s not about you, this letter; it’s thanking someone for their thoughtful generosity.
Leslie Harpold of The Morning News has a good column on this (via Rebecca’s Pocket via MakeReady).
15 August 05
Calligraphy Into Font II
I’m now well underway with the project of turning my foundational hand into a font. It’s extremely slow work, of course, though now that I’m getting the workflow down, things will move ahead more quickly. At right are the first four glyphs I’m happy with. Ninety-five more to go after that, and then comes setting the character widths, kerning, and finally hinting!
14 August 05
The "M" Word
One of the advantages of working in academia, which I’ve done most of my professional life, is that you get quite insulated from corporate doublespeak, the scarily surreal world of Dilbert. This is changing, though. Universities in the U.S. are facing budget cuts and all compete for the best students. In upper levels of university administration this means that eyes are ever more fixed on the bottom line, and how to improve it. Strategic plans and mission statements pop up like Hello Kitty banners all over the place. Nobody ever pays any attention to them, but it’s important to be seen to be “doing” something. Style, not substance. Slick, not sweaty. Fluff.
And then, suddenly, right out of the blue, everyone’s a goddam marketing expert. Oh, but you have to have branding, a veterinary epidemiologist tells me. We need a logo, says another one, never mind that this contradicts university policy (there is already a UC Davis logo and an illegitimate Vet Med logo, and we need a third on top of that? Oy.). I’m a communications specialist and I agree, the message needs to get out there, but I get very weary of these pushes to corporateness when underneath it all it’s not about being better or more effective, it’s about looking good and staying on message.
Weary, and also suspicious. If we have an undergraduate drinking problem—which we do—surely the way to address it is not by marketing and advertising to the students but by trying to understand exactly what it is that makes them want to drink 21 shots on their 21st birthday (hint: it’s not because they’re a member of the “Millennial Generation,” a term coined by a clever dick marketing whizz). I wish more emphasis were placed on learning around here rather than how to attract more dollars. It’s rule by committee taken to glossy, ludicrous extremes.
Everyone protests that more dollars will lead to better learning, but I’m seeing that this marketing drive has taken on a life of its own, has become its own end.
Which, if you think about the most successful marketing campaign in history, is just about on the mark. It was a few unsavory characters in Germany in the 1930s who got it so very right, where the logo became the vortex leading to a hell never before seen. Logo? Check. Strategic plan? Check. Staying on message? Check, check, check mate.
If you need a marketing campaign to be so successful, though, where’s Osama Bin Laden’s? Where’s the logo? Where’s the strategic plan? Where’s the mission statement? Where are the ubiquitous ineffectual committees? Oh. Right. In Washington.
14 August 05
Waterfall Lost, Waterfall Found
Who’s to say that the era of exploration is over? A 120 meter waterfall was recently brought to light in a remote corner of Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in Northern California.
12 August 05
Soundscape
Karen of Not Native Fruit has come up with ten sounds from her immediate surroundings.
Here are some from here, at this time of year:
1) Crickets. Fewer than other years, because they’ve disced the field recently. At least two species, as I’m hearing them now.
2) A train across the field: a freight, a commuter, a first-class freight. They all sound different, have different whistles.
3) Coyotes howling, almost always at the train, always at night.
4) The sound of lightly pouring water. This is the cats’ drinking fountain.
5) The screech of a barn owl, eerie, ghoulish. It makes my heart sing every time, though.
6) The clatter of a trailer-truck laden with tomatoes as it gears down to get over the tiny bridge over the creek.
7) The snuffling of a raccoon outside. He’s taken to sitting in the walnut tree.
8) The chatter of cyclists as they barrel down from the bridge, faster than the truck went up. (Both these sounds make the cats growl, or at least look.)
9) The sound of the landlord lovingly chastising his dogs.
10) The hum of the fridge, omnipresent, unoticeable till it stops.
11 August 05
Those Amazin' A's
Don’t believe my baseball prognostications. Towards the end of June we went down to Oakland to watch the A’s play the Giants. Since both teams were well below .500 at that point I figured the game didn’t have much significance, since it seemed highly unlikely either team would be making the playoffs.
Ah, but the Oakland A’s have been on an amazing tear since the closing weeks of May. Today they moved into first place in their division, beating in a game at home their rival for that spot the L.A. Angels 5-4. I checked on the score during the 7th inning, saw that the A’s were down 4-0, and thought oh well. Later in the afternoon I looked again, and saw that the A’s had won on the strangest of plays.
The A’s had tied it up 4-4 in the 7th, and the game stayed tied until the bottom of the 9th. Two outs, the A’s had runners on 1st and 3rd, and Eric Chavez was at the plate. After the first pitch was called a ball, the catcher tossed the ball back to the pitcher Francisco Rodriguez. The pitcher failed to catch it. Seeing the ball glance off his glove, the runner on third, Jason Kendall, alertly broke for the plate and scored. End of game. The A’s take over the division lead. Wow.
10 August 05
Why You Should Pay Attention When Your Mother Says Your Horoscope Sucks
So I get to work on time for once having biked in and I look in my calendar and it says I need to be at the dentist in ten minutes so Kathy says quick take my car so I hop in and get there but my appointment is actually for tomorrow not today but they’ll squeeze me in anyway and the dentist is a kindly tall Swedish endodontist and he explains to me patiently why the root canal I had done in Spain in 1979 is going to need to get redone but that there are Risks like breaking the crown or breaking the tooth and by the way this isn’t cheap and would you like an appointment on Thursday so I think well now that I’m out I’ll just pick up some cat food so I take my keys into Petco because that’s where my Petco discount tag lives and as I’m paying I realize these are my keys not Kathy’s and I don’t have her phone number so I have to call my former office mate whose number I remember to get Kathy’s and then I call the guys to jimmy into the car and the moral is just do one thing at a time like you’re sposed to but to make myself feel better I go to the art store at lunchtime because that always works.
9 August 05
Psittacine In The Morning
Another exotic bird has joined Don Gallo about our homestead. For the past two mornings, we’ve heard and seen some sort of parakeet up in our nectarine tree and flying over from the osage orange a hundred meters distant. I don’t know of any psittacine colonies in Davis, though there are plenty in California. Pica saw some red about his face on an overall green body, which points toward him being a red-masked parakeet or a mitred parakeet, but as a likely escapee, he really could be anything. We won’t know until we get a better look.
8 August 05
Lunchtime
Riding home at lunch, which is absurd since it’s really only a seven minute walk, doesn’t give me time for much musing or anything else; occasionally a three-line poem will flash into my head and the key then is to make sure I remember it when I get to where I’m going.
On Friday, though, I rode into campus. It was very hot. The smell of the California bay trees mixed with warm pine needles. It’s so intoxicating I almost forget where I’m going and keep on the bike path that will give me more of this.
A juvenile ground squirrel darts in front of me, tail high in a warning banner. The horses in the field are clustered in the shade of the lone cottonwood. The wild grapes are opulent lime green this year. Four plum tomatoes, spilled from a truck that was taking the corner too fast, lie in the bike path like poison easter-eggs. The slow freight train creaks over the tracks, in less of a hurry than I. The smell of trains—wood and oil and smoke and timber and—what—iron? rust?—clatters southwest.
I see fewer magpies now.
7 August 05
Omniglot
This site is a guide to written language which seems pretty comprehensive. All manner of scripts are covered, everything from Glagolitic to Tengwar. The multilingual tongue-twisters are quite fun as well.