7 June 05
Point and Click
I’m getting the cats back into clicker training.
It reminds them they’re in charge. It relieves boredom for cats whose world is very small. It incidentally teaches them things like “down” and “up” and “target.” They are very enthusiastic and purr the entire time. We all have a blast.
For me it’s a way of not dealing with the fact that the gray tabby Diego spotted outside is now starving, and that its fate is to die from this, or whatever disease gets it, or the coyote whose sign is now regularly very near the house, or by my catching it and having it euthanized; this one’s not tamable.
I don’t like any of those options…
6 June 05
Dog Days
We’re back from our trip to North Carolina and Virginia. The wheatfield is ready for harvesting: the wheat stalks all bent over. The peaches are nearly ripe. The Bullock’s oriole has stuck around, and there’s now a chicken in residence in the front yard.
It was a wonderful break. We got a good healthy canine fix as well—we spent time with two fine dogs. We met Tsuga, well known to readers of Fragments from Floyd. And we were guests of Emmett, Nicole and Mike’s dog, whom with we played many a game of hedgehog, not to mention sharing several shopping trips to downtown Carrboro. A sketch of Emmett is at right.
1 June 05
Countin’ Churches
We’ve been in the southeast for a week now. A trip to Cape Hatteras and two boat trips, a quick trip to Kitty Hawk, a quick trip to Floyd, a quick trip to Greensboro (John Neal Books), and HUNDREDS of churches later….
Going out on the boat into the Gulf Stream to see unusual seabirds yielded four life birds for both of us: black-capped petrel, Audubon’s shearwater, band-rumped storm-petrel, and bridled tern. There were many Wilson’s storm-petrels and a few Leach’s and a good, close look at two sperm whales, a longer look at Cuvier’s beaked whales. Huge manta rays. The deck hands caught several mahi-mahi and a huge blue marlin.
Numenius had the idea to play a new road game: guess the denomination of the next church. The problem with this is that there are so many, and we quickly realized we had seen more protestant denominations than bird species. So we started to make a list, driving from Cape Hatteras north into Virginia and then basically heading due west; a pretty solid transect. You can do a convincing cultural geography of a place by noticing where, for instance, a presbyterian church makes a sudden entry into the landscape coincidental with well-kept lawns versus a preponderance of churches with the words “apostolic” or “gospel” in their names that tend to concentrate around poor quality bottomland and decaying cars abandoned on overgrown patches of land that is no longer farmed.
We have been so plagued with spam during this past week we’ve had to shut down comments (the server’s been brought down several times, apparently). Sorry. We’ll work to fix this when we get home.
24 May 05
Heading East, Again
We’re off on a trip to the southeast, to see Nicole and Mike and birds and Fred. Blogging will be sporadic. The cats will be left in the wonderful care of Becky, of crow fame, who will now be able to stumble out of bed in her jammies, head over to the roost at 5 am, check on the radiocrows, and stumble back into bed, instead of heading to Davis from Sacramento having at least made coffee and put her contact lenses in.
I don’t know what the cats will make of this routine.
23 May 05
Middle Course
The Senate this afternoon reached a compromise over the filibuster standoff. Hard-liners on both sides are decrying it, which I suppose means it was a good day for moderation. Anyway, how can one not be a little pleased when Michelle Malkin is left sputtering “the GOP parade of pusillanimity marches on. With this pathetic cave-in, the Republicans have sealed their fate as a Majority in Name Only.” And more significantly, James Dobson is saying that the compromise was a “complete bailout and betrayal by a cabal of Republicans and a great victory for united Democrats.” (Via Crooks and Liars.)
Frist lost for sure in this turn of events, and by extension so did Bush and the religious Right. The moderate Republicans are asserting themselves: let’s hope this marks the widening of the fissure between the moderates and the radical Right.
One final skirmish remains in this particular battle: it is by no means a sure thing that the three judges that the Democrats agreed not to filibuster are all going to win Senate approval. At least that’s what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is hinting.
22 May 05
Another Blogger Meetup
Today was one of those perfect San Francisco days: warm, sunny, nothing more than a light breeze. We drove to Vallejo and took the ferry over. It is such a peaceful way to enter a city, by boat. And affords me lots more opportunities to sketch than sitting clenching my teeth behind the wheel on I-80.
We met Siona and Maria at the Ferry Building; sat outside and talked for some time about a different blogger meetup in Boston just two weeks ago (the narrative was illustrated with sketches); moved out of the shade and into the sun where we sat under a statue of Gandhi and talked about books, authenticity, the French, and cheese. It was a wonderful day and we decided that next time we’ll actually EAT some cheese instead of just talking about it…
21 May 05
Gremlins
You know you got ‘em when the electrical igniter for the gas stove top starts clicking away every couple of seconds of its own accord with nobody around to have influenced things. Helpless renters that we are (there’s a reason why we should never own a house), we summoned the landlord, who waved his arms over the exposed stove top, whereupon the stove was back to normal. I’ve seen sysadmins do that trick before many a computer, too.
20 May 05
Expanding Vista
There’s been an Airstream trailer outside our back door for the past three months. The landlord’s son who keeps bees has needed a lot of extra help getting new hives built, honey extracted, and bees trucked around the valley (it’s going to be a big year in the bee business, especially for someone who sprayed his bees against mites nobody else believed would be a problem).
The trailer is owned by one Charlie, a laid-back jovial guy who seems curious about everything. He’s not the one who’s been living in it, though: that’s his stepson Taylor, a third-year engineering student who’s been doing the bee work to save up enough money to finish school back in Albuquerque.
Taylor would emerge with a cigarette at roughly the time we were walking the cats on leashes outside. Convention dictates a conversation is required. Nobody really wanted this so early in the morning; normally I still had to get in the shower and eat breakfast.
Charlie picked up the trailer yesterday; Taylor’s gone to Nevada for the next phase of bee work. And our mornings will once again focus exclusively on making sure the cats don’t catch pocket gophers, on the black-crowned night-herons, on the possibly nesting Bullock’s oriole.
19 May 05
Rule Creep
Back in 1982 Douglas Hofstadter in his Scientific American column Metamagical Themas described a game called Nomic which was invented by philosopher Peter Suber. Nomic is a game where play consists of modifying its own rules. Initially rules changes have to be by unanimous consent, but this rule itself can and usually does change. Play continues until one party twists things so that they are the winner, or the game mutates into something completely different. It was a game perhaps ahead of its time, and play of it spread on the ARPANET which then turned into the Internet. Nowadays the home for the game is at nomic.net.
Would that real life were as playful as games of Nomic. The Republicans are about to pull a maneuver which, if this were a game, would lead to shouts of cheating, an argument, and then one party storming out of the house not to return. Changing the parliamentary rules of the Senate takes a two-thirds vote. If the Republicans carry out their threat to eliminate the judicial filibuster through only a majority vote (which they can do in actuality since they are the majority, and nobody is in a position to call them on the rule violation), they will have effectively broken the rule system. Simply put, this deed would be an act of fascism. And as the changes in the rules creep on we find ourselves disintegrating ever more into the soup.
18 May 05
Presence
Sometimes you hear someone and you know after about three sentences you had really better pay attention because what they’re saying is so important and ruthlessly close to what real is for you and for everyone and for the world that it’s almost like being blown over by the simplicity of it and by a wind that heals and cleans and doesn’t say anything new in fact it’s as old as the wind itself but after all the hot air we have to listen to most of the time it practically cuts you in half.
I heard Shirin Ebadi’s talk at the Mondavi Center in Davis last night. Ebadi won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, the first Iranian ever to do so, for her work in human rights and especially the rights of women and children.