27 April 05
Ban Comic Sans
A campaign to rid the world of that design perfidy spawned by Microsoft, complete with stickers, flyers, and t-shirts.
26 April 05
Enthusiasm
Today, I was enthused—
By the California poppies blooming like mad
By a cat that purred while I woke and another that hid under the sheets while we changed the bed
By a new black horse, sleek and shiny, in a paddock on my way to work
By the singing blue grosbeak
By the displaying Swainson’s hawk
By the hot tofu at the Coffee House
By the hot, sweaty sex scent emanating from a flower whose name I don’t know
By the pair of Western bluebirds and the pair of Western kingbirds outside my window at work and by the brush rabbits and jackrabbits jumping vertically in lagomorph ecstasy
By the prospect of a load of paper being shipped my way from John Neal Books in North Carolina
By my new Enthusiasm Tshirt designed by the fabulous Natalie
And
In spite of the fact that my bike chain needs oil and the fridge is still not clean.
25 April 05
Spring Ripenings
This year the field outside our house is planted in wheat, as are many of the local fields. It’s still quite green, but the wheat heads are fully grown. Closer in to the house, the stone fruits are developing. The plums on the tree here are turning from green to wine-colored. 
24 April 05
Sundancing
Numenius and I took another class today, this one five minutes from home rather than two hours. Robert Regis Dvorak led a full-day workshop on travel sketching. Rather than have us wander around Davis, sketchbooks in hand, he encouraged us to try a full range of techniques in the classroom—pen, watercolor, dry brush—in a specially-made drawing pad. The subject was mostly Greece.
This pad contains 80 lb Sundance text paper. It works well with all the above media and takes a calligraphic line very well despite the texture. I’m thinking of getting larger sheets and binding my own sketchbooks so they open flat (it’s a bit of a gripe of mine when they don’t).
Here’s my first attempt at dry brush (the wash is laid in afterwards).
23 April 05
Our Dinner With The Katzes
Our friend Virginia invited us over this evening to the seder she and her partner Ben were hosting for his family this year. The Katz clan is large — almost thirty people were at the seder — the patriarch being ninety-year-old Joseph, seated across the table and several seats down from me, with a wonderful portrait of him hanging from the dining room wall.
It was probably the rowdiest seder I’ve ever been to: the centerpoint of it was the family taking turns telling the story of the Exodus all from memory. And we were delighted to find that Virginia was using the Velveteen Rabbi’s haggadah for the service!
No sign of Elijah this evening. But Virginia’s kitty Eloise made fleeting appearances throughout, wondering why in a tale that began with seven years of famine and diminishing grain stores, cats have gotten left out of the telling.
22 April 05
Mountain Lion Week
There have been three events in Davis this week focusing on Puma concolor, the large cat of North America. It’s California’s last large predator, the wolf and grizzly having been extirpated.
Walter Boyce of the Wildlife Health Center gave a talk on Tuesday to a general audience; there was a showing of Counting Sheep (an independent film about bighorn sheep and mountain lions) last night where he answered questions at the end, and then a summit meeting today that involved agency folks, scientists, non-profits, and a host of other interested parties.
I’m quite tired—I took notes for the duration of this five-hour meeting—so I will go to bed and hope to dream about this beautiful animal that is holding its own in the state (for now).
21 April 05
Stalino-Papism
Marc Cooper’s take on Pope Rottweiler.
20 April 05
God’s Rottweiler
“Insofar as Vorbis got any pleasure in life, at least in any way that could be recognized by a normal human being, it was in seeing the faces of humble members of the clergy as they rounded a corner and found themselves face-to-chin with Deacon Vorbis of the Quisition. There was always that little intake of breath that indicated a guilty conscience. Vorbis liked to see properly guilty consciences. That was what consciences were for. Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of authority turned.”—Terry Pratchett, Small Gods“It’s Ratzinger. Be Jewish.”—My Friend Barbara, minutes after the Habemus Papam announcement
Here we go. Why do I feel like I’m back in the sixteenth century?
Here comes a guy who declares relativism the greatest threat to the Catholic Church (and, by extension, to the World As We Know It). No compromises, everyone. No compromises on the role of women in the church, no compromises on married priests, no compromises of course on homosexuality or abortion or contraception (including condoms, in an age when AIDS is pandemic), no compromises on anything, especially not on any kind of silly Marxist preoccupation with poverty. Vatican II was an embarrassing aberration, a blip, an Error. We are in the land of No Compromise. This sounds awfully like last November. When people are so certain they’re right, compromise is unnecessary. (They don’t care that history has shown these people to be tyrants.)
John Paul II was a skilled communicator, a politically savvy actor (and, I believe, a profoundly devout man) who was able to navigate turbulent waters with finesse and diplomacy.
He left the details of dogma to his buddy Ratzinger, is why.
This is why I’m especially grateful for a welcome to a friend’s Seder this Saturday. We are all invited to bring a visual representation of freedom from something that enslaves us. Since I seem to be unable to wrench myself entirely from the clutches of the Catholic Church, I might ponder something along those lines.
Does God really need a rottweiler?
19 April 05
La Rata
Congratulations to all of you who made the correct picks in the Papal Conclave Brackets; for the rest of us, do hurry on over to Pharyngula for discussion of the selection of Joseph Ratzinger as Grand Inquisitor Pope. Somehow it seems fitting that I got an emailed pdf today of last week’s editorial in Science entitled “Twilight for the Enlightenment?” Oh well — maybe Pope Benedict XVI will have the decency to bring back the Latin Mass. Or at least ban guitars.
18 April 05
Quill Knives
Ten years ago today, I posted a message to the calligraphy usenet list asking what the best knife was to cut goose quills, since I was a birder in Boston and all the geese on the Charles River were dropping their primary feathers. I got the name of a knifemaker in Minnesota and bought one of his beautiful quill knives.
I also got a note from a graduate student in geography at UC Santa Barbara saying he knew nothing about quill knives but just wanted to say hi from another birder-calligrapher.
The rest, as they say, is history…