23 September 04
Tossup
This election is far too close to call. The ever-valuable Electoral Vote Predictor today has Bush up 273 electoral votes to Kerry’s 255, but these values are changing all the time depending on the results of new statewide polls: yesterday this site had Kerry leading 269 to 253. And a state-by-state analysis in the diaries section on Daily Kos today comes up with Kerry winning by 291 to 247 electoral votes.
At least Kerry has locked down the Klingon vote.
22 September 04
He Just KNOWS
Michael Moore definitely has his finger on the pulse of the anti-Bush camp. I thought he had written this piece specifically for me.
21 September 04
White Shark Comes To Monterey
The Monterey Bay Aquarium placed a young white shark on exhibit a week ago Tuesday, and she is doing well. This shark was accidentally caught by a commercial halibut fisherman off Southern California in August, and then transferred to an ocean holding pen used by the aquarium as part of their study on white sharks. The four-foot four-inch, 62 pound shark has been eating consistently since arriving at the aquarium, which is remarkable as this is the first time a white shark has fed while being on exhibit. The aquarium hopes to keep the shark on exhibit long-term, but that depends on how well she continues to do.
20 September 04
Choking
The Red Sox are doing their thing, right on schedule. They lost yesterday 11-1 against the hated Yankees and lost to Baltimore today. You wouldn’t mind so much if they had been awful all season, but this follows a good run. They’ll probably just squeak the wildcard, do well for four games, and then JUST lose. You’d think we wouldn’t come back year after year for more, but here we are.
I don’t believe in the curse of the bambino, but the Red Sox sure as hell do.
19 September 04
Xocolatl
This week I tried some exquisite dark chocolate stocked at the Davis Food Coop, made by Dagoba Organic Chocolate of Oregon. This bar, xocolatl, has chilis in it, making for a bit of an afterkick! The darker the chocolate the better, as far as I’m concerned, and this bar is very dark with a 74% cacao content. The label is attractive, too.
18 September 04
Birth of an Urban Legend?
There’s a story whizzing around the internet that it’s possible to break in to Kryptonite U-locks for bikes with a simple ballpoint pen. I was just at my mother’s and she announced this latest catastrophe to me, admonishing me for not keeping up to date with dangers OUT THERE, like shark attacks and sleeping-bag murders. (I lock my bike with a Kryptonite, which cost me $56 some time ago. I have no plans in the near future to swim in shark-infested waters OR sleep on the beach in a sleeping bag, but this doesn’t exactly placate her.)
I was hoping to be able to post a short film of me breaking into my own lock, but it seems we don’t have the right kind of ballpoints (Bic) in the house. A friend visiting from Edinburgh produced a Bic but it’s an English octagonal version, not round, in shape. So my feeble attempts at empiricism and the high-tech display thereof are foiled this time.
The local bike community remains skeptical, having attempted and failed to break into various locks.
So Martin’s recommendation on waking Sunday morning was to sell stock in Kryptonite, buy stock in Bic
17 September 04
Delicious
Once again, I fall behind the times. It is only this week that I discovered the site del.icio.us. The author of the site describes as a social bookmarks manager. Basically, it’s a website where you can store your webpage bookmarks. This is definitely useful if you use multiple computers since you can have access to your bookmarks from any computer online.
But what makes the approach of the site novel is that you also have access to everybody else’s bookmarks. On the front page, there is a list of the most recently added bookmarks to the system by anybody, and on the side there is a list of the popular topics by keywords. When you post a bookmark, you may enter a list of your own keywords to describe it. It’s intriguing how the whole community starts to converge on using the same keywords for common topics.
It’s a great way to find new webpages on themes you’re interested in, as well as folks who track the same topics you do.
16 September 04
Mojo Crow
My colleagues at the Wildlife Health Center have yet to catch their first crow—a live one, that is. (There have been plenty of dead ones brought in testing positive for West Nile Virus.) Crows are highly intelligent and not easily duped into captivity. So today Yvette set up Mojo Crow in one of the straw bales outside my window.
Mojo Crow is a plastic, life-size battery-operated crow whose wings rotate manically like those plastic flamingoes you see on people’s lawns.
Within five minutes of Mojo’s epileptic frenzy, there were over 200 crows circling high and cawing. They continued to caw as they landed in the eucalyptus trees nearby. But they didn’t come anywhere near, figuring that whatever had gotten to poor Mojo was probably going to do them in too. Mojo might have to be retired and something else will have to be tried. I’m glad I’m not the one having to catch them: this is really tough.
In other wacky news today, a Dodger baseball fan spent $25,000 buying out all the seats in a section of Dodger stadium beyond right field on the off chance that slugger Barry Bonds might hit his 700th home run there later this month (in which case the ball would be worth a great deal more than the $25,000). Well, Barry’s likely to get there well before then, so our enterprising fan has been selling the tickets for well over three times what he paid for them.
15 September 04
Questing For Bookshops
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on Places for Books.
These next two weekends we’re busy so any field trip to Powell’s will have to wait for a while. But such an imagined trip leads one to ask where are the truly great bookstores, the ones worth making long journeys to visit? Powell’s is clearly one, but others? Here are a couple of resources that may help.
Evelyn C. Leeper edits an annotated list of bookstores of the world. This list seems fairly comprehensive and is updated frequently.
More selectively, Robert Teeter has a personal bookstore hall of fame. I’m glad to see I’ve been to a few of them.
I’m sure there are other such lists out there, but this is a start.
14 September 04
Ivan
My brother used to live in New Orleans, where he and one of his many international roommates washed windows for a living (he had just finished university in England and this was his first stop in the U.S.). They lived in the French Quarter, in an apartment with high ceilings and exposed brick walls.
He’s fetched up in Juneau, Alaska many years, and many stops, later. But he and his wife are in New Orleans now, visiting following a conference she’s been attending. One of the largest hurricanes recorded in the Atlantic is heading their way. I hope they decide to leave sooner rather than later; New Orleans could be a swimming pool of sewage, industrial waste, and floating coffins. Not likely, but possible. I’d rather they not be around to find out.
(Postscript, September 15: They’re safe in Seattle, will finish their vacation there and head home on Saturday.)