28 March 05
Painted Ladies On The Move
We’re in the midst of a massive migration of painted lady butterflies (Vanessa cardui). My officemate alerted me to this late this morning, and when I went over to the Memorial Union for my lunch there were dozens passing by each second, moving determinedly northwest at a good clip — 15 MPH perhaps? — against a headwind. Pica went home for lunch and saw thousands while she was crossing the bridge, swirling around traffic like a tornado. (Not all of them made it across, and Pica retrieved a fallen one for me to sketch.)
The butterflies are in the middle of a three-day trek from the desert by the Mexican border to the Central Valley and the foothills of the Coast Ranges. The impressive turnout this year is probably due to the heavy rains and subsequent plant growth in the desert this past winter.
27 March 05
The Big Man
Postscript: I’ve edited this post to substitute “enlightened” and “unenlightened” for “evolved” and “unevolved” following some confusion about the terms…
1. Most men in the world are not Big Men.
2. Being a Big Man is something that is highly valued in many cultures, particularly in the United States. This is how you can end up with a bodybuilder turned Big Man actor as governor of California.
3. The Evolved Big Man is the Buddha. The Unevolved Big Man is Dick Cheney. Unevolved Big Men outnumber the Evolved ones by a factor of 1,000,000 to 1.
4. The prime motivating force of the Unevolved Big Man is power. Power over women, power over the future, and particularly power over other men who are not big whom they hold in cold contempt.
5. The Unevolved Big Man need not necessarily be a) large in physical stature, though this helps; b) male, though this helps even more. Margaret Thatcher is an example of an Unevolved, un-male, Big Man.
6. Many small men who are wannabe Big Men end up running countries or empires tyrannically. They include Franco, Hitler and Mussolini in the last century, Napoleon Bonaparte in the previous. A more vapid counterpart today is George W. Bush. But they all share an ability to get Unevolved Big Men to work for them and keep them in power, and since power is the prime motivator of the Unevolved Big Man, the Big Men get to rule just below the top. Goebbels comes to mind. (Examples of Unevolved Big Men who also ruled tyrannically include Slobodan Milosevic and Augusto Pinochet; Bill Clinton, on the other hand, is an untyrranical Unevolved Big Man.)
7. Unevolved Big Men hold a particular scorn for small men who are Big Men wannabes. This enfuriates the smBMws who then become the most dangerous of all men, violent, cruel, and sadistic. The Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church and the secret services of many cultures are filled with men like this. They often masquerade as innocuous small men. They are easy meat for the CIA and its counterparts and are prime fodder for terrorist organizations. They issued the orders at Abu Ghraib. They are the people who apply lit cigarettes to body parts belonging to persons that end up on Amnesty International lists. The less grandiose can become high school teachers, policemen, postmasters, and perpetrators of Road Rage. Or they beat their wives and children. Or all of the above.
8. It is a characteristic of the Unevolved Big Man to dismiss any criticism out of hand without offering explanations. Explanations are for everyone else to provide.
9. Big Men who are on their way to becoming Evolved are often mistaken by others, especially by women, as Unevolved Big Men, and are feared and shunned. This is especially perplexing for them because they’re trying hard to become unthreatening without becoming small. It’s the work of a lifetime, fraught with peril and disappointment; it’s also Really Important.
10. I have a particularly acute fear of Unevolved Big Men. I’m not sure why. I’m working on this.
11. I have recently discovered this fear is such that I will avoid any Big Men, evolved or not, just in case.
12. I realize this puts me at risk of never meeting some truly wonderful human beings.
Today is the second blogiversary of Feathers of Hope.
26 March 05
March Farmers’ Market
This morning I went to the Davis Farmers’ Market to have a go at sketching the crowd. In a week-and-a-half the Wednesday evening Picnic-in-the-Park starts up, but for now the farmers’ market is only on Saturday mornings. But Saturday brings the usual medley of kettle corn, fiddlers, strawberries, and rescue Labrador retrievers — a delightful stroll.
25 March 05
Downshifting Amid Butterflies
While DocRoc was off up the mountain to do Shakespeare with a bunch of brainy teenagers of different ages, I headed south to Anza Borrego to meet up with a friend from Boston and do some botanizing.
This friend is my best birding buddy, and we’re definitely out of our element looking at things that don’t fly off at the slightest provocation. Before I got to the visitor center she had found a black-tailed gnatcatcher; I pulled the car in under the nest of an incubating Costa’s hummingbird. But we were there to look at flowers, so we armed ourselves with lists, maps, directions, and a bag of Fritos.
North of Borrego Springs was a carpet of yellow stretching all the way up the canyon. This was desert sunflowers, primarily, interspersed with magenta sand verbena and white evening primroses. There were thousands and THOUSANDS of butterflies: painted ladies, they were called, and they were wafting through the morning while the huge caterpillars of some striped moth methodically chomped through primrose petals.
We headed south on our way to ocotillos and Yaqui Wells, but stopped as the colors shifted abruptly from yellow to white. What you do is you get out of the car and see the white flower (desert chicory, in this case). Then next to it you notice another large plant with a white flower which you hadn’t seen from the car (Fremont’s pincushion), but below that is one you couldn’t possibly have seen from the road, and underneath that is a diminutive white five-pointed flower (4mm diameter) I couldn’t find in any of the materials we had and will have to look it up in Jepson, scary though that prospect is.
It’s like Russian dolls. This just isn’t what happens when you bird.
We found our ocotillos. We also found blooming barrel cactus, blooming smoketree, blooming millions of DYA’s (damn yellow asters). And Lawrence’s goldfinches, singing, on territory, busily getting on with spring before summer hits and everything dies out.
I’ll post photos of some of these when I get back to Davis…
24 March 05
Bloom
This is an entry for the Illustration Friday topic on Bloom.
A couple of weeks ago when we went to our friends’ picnic in the foothills of the Vaca Mountains west of here, there were many brodiaeas out on the grassy slopes. Here is a sketch I did of a couple of plants near the top of the hill.
23 March 05
Things People Say
If you haven’t had a chance yet, definitely take a peek at Overheard in New York.
I can’t compete with ANY of these. People do say interesting or inane things in Davis but I don’t ride the bus, and if I’m in a place with a lot of people they tend to be students, so you don’t get the same range of ages, ethnicities, social classes, and outright weirdness that only happens in New York (hobo to Hispanic construction workers, f’rinstance: “Remember the Alamo”).
But I did once spend a day at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the big white towering thing over the 405, and in the cable car ride up people were already saying things worth writing down, so I started. Here are a few of them:
“Oh! It’s Jerusalem.”
“You know, everyone who comes up here says this place looks like Jerusalem.”
“Isn’t this one of the more beautiful spots, Adele? Man-made, I mean?”
“It’s just nice to sit out here in the sun.”
“Belle! Where’d you get that clock bag?”
“Really, aesthetically, I think it works. Even though from a distance it’s horrible.”
“Let’s go. There’s way too much scary furniture in here!”
I’ll be getting on a plane tomorrow to go to the desert to see my friend DocRoc and the most amazing wildflower show in 50 years, so I’ll have a chance to do some listening in to conversations that are quite different from those in New York OR at the Getty. Stand by.
22 March 05
Creek Overfloweth
We had 1.05 inches of rain overnight, and sometime mid-morning the creek burst its banks on the stretch near where we live, in particular flooding the field (alas since last season covered with perennial pepperweed) southeast of the bridge up to the levee. Word has it that the Glory Hole is spilling over as well.
21 March 05
From Romans to the Dark Ages
My Roman Majuscule class is over; the next one in the series is Uncial starting in April.
The story of Western writing is the history of empires that came and went, of striving for perfection and going beyond it to precious and eventual decay.
I don’t know what future paleographers will make of the American empire through its writing (or lack of it). At any rate, I’ve been playing with 4th-century letterforms, some of which have made their way into the new Feathers of Hope masthead. I think we should change this more often than every two years. Walnut ink remains plentiful in the fridge.
20 March 05
Northern Rail Line
We went on our usual Sunday run to the food co-op and noticed two locomotives of the California Northern Railroad on the tracks that run north-south behind the co-op. The geography of Davis has been built around a T-intersection of rail lines just east of downtown. There is a doubletrack line running northeast-southwest heading into Sacramento that get both Union Pacific freight trains and Amtrak traffic, and then there’s the line heading to the north, the one running by the co-op, that gets only light use, mostly by the California Northern.
This is a small railroad with a dozen or so locomotives. It’s based in American Canyon in Napa County, but they also run trains on a line stretching from Davis up to Tehama in the northern Sacramento Valley. We like them because the locomotives are pretty, with green and beige trim. Someday we’ll sketch one in color.
19 March 05
Berkeley for Indian and Blogging
We took a trip to Berkeley today to meet Allan’s sister et al. for lunch at Vik’s Chaat House (an Indian fast food restaurant in a warehouse, exceptional food, two-foot-wide pooris) and then to meet up with Tim of the Where Project.
We had a great cha(a)t with Tim about the future of Ecotone and how we might all get this back to the vital forum it was before it got so attacked by spammers… If you’re interested in joining this discussion, leave a comment here, and we’ll add you to the mailing list. It looks like there will be a new host, a new domain name, an archive of material that’s already there, and lots of new goodies.