9 July 04
Telemetry, Here We Come
When your boss-the big boss-comes in your office and asks if you have your bike here today, to which you respond yes, and then asks whether you’d like to go out with him and test a radio transmitter to be used on corvids, backpack-style, hauling your yagi antenna around on the bike, you say yes, not knowing that he actually means RIGHT NOW. This is what I did at 10:30 am. I found the transmitter he had hidden in the wild grape near the freeway. He showed me how to use the directional antenna, how to alter the controls to get the most efficient pinpointing of sound.
Numenius and I will almost certainly be participating in a study Walter Boyce will be heading up at the Wildlife Health Center focusing on crows, yellow-billed magpies, and West Nile Virus. We’ll be checking in on the birds every day, trying to track them down if they die, which we’ll know because the radio signal will change. It sounds like a lot of fun. And it’s even all in a day’s work.
8 July 04
Octarine Kitties
Diego and Charlie are here playing with the magic wand that Pica’s sister sent her a while ago as a gift. Fortunately, no permanent damage resulted, though we did have some difficulty retrieving the storage box after it levitated to the top of the ceiling.
[Postscript by Pica, Friday, July 9: I’ve added a few more photos to the kitten gallery.]
7 July 04
Tour Time Again
Mornings are back, for me, to going to the official Tour de France website and following the agonizingly slow feeds of the day’s stage, live. This is only televised on OLN, a cable channel, a channel we don’t get because we don’t have cable because we don’t have a TV. But just occasionally I wish we did.
Lance Armstrong is up for a record-breaking sixth Tour de France win, and also a record-breaking sixth consecutive win. He is neither as likable as Miguel Indurain, the quiet Basque who dominated the Tour in the early 90s, nor as brilliant (or crazy) a cyclist as Eddy Merckx (nicknamed “The Cannibal”), but he is OBSESSED with the Tour de France (detractors would say to the detriment of cycling in general). He is so obsessed that he’s turning it into a race that cannot be won without this level of obsession. The next two and a half weeks will be full of our contemplation of this obsession.
(You’ve been warned.)
6 July 04
Watercolor Compendium
Today I found the site handprint: watercolors and watercolor painting, which is an amazingly comprehensive resource about watercolor materials and techniques. The section on paints and pigments, with hundreds of evaluations of different paints, is alone worth much study.
5 July 04
Riding the Ferry
As Numenius says in his post from yesterday, we took the ferry from Vallejo to San Francisco and got deposited right at the ballpark rather than at the Ferry Building owing to some crisis or another. It gave us ample time to wander around SBC Park, enjoying what has to be one of the great sports arenas of the world.
When you go to a city by ferry rather than by driving there over a bridge, your whole perspective of the city changes. Obviously, you’re looking at the city from below rather than from above, with all the literal and metaphorical implications; but there is somehow this shared sense among fellow ferry-riders that we’re ON to something: we share a secret.
Cities are formed by arteries and what’s between them; organs, if you like. Arriving by ferry deposits you plonk in the middle of an organ. You bypass the bloodstream, go straight for the heart. It’s a good way to travel.
It’s also what my father used to do in the early 1960s; take the ferry from Tiburon to the Ferry Building. I always feel a connection with him when I do this. The ferries, the buildings, the city have changed, but not, I think, that essence.
4 July 04
A Holiday Baseball Outing
Today we went to see the SF Giants play the Oakland A’s in SBC Park in San Francisco. We drove to Vallejo and took the ferry from there into San Francisco. The ferry ride is a very pleasant 55 minute journey, and it was crowded with people going to the game, both A’s and Giants fans. The boat even docked at the pier nearest the ballpark, owing to some temporary problems at the Ferry Building. This was convenient allowing us to arrive in time to catch some of the batting practice. We got some lunch, and then went to our seats high above home plate (see my sketch at right).
The A’s were dominant all day, and ended up winning 9-6. Mark Mulder pitched well and won the game, bringing his record to 11-2. Eric Byrnes had a banner day, hitting two three-run home runs. We saw Barry Bonds break a record: he walked twice and thus became the all-time career walks leader, passing Ricky Henderson. But he didn’t get a hit today, and struck out on a 96-mile-an-hour Octavio Dotel fastball (the A’s new closer from Houston) to end the game.
It was a long 10-hour outing. The kitties were hungry when we got home, but seemed to harbor no resentments at our extended disappearance.
3 July 04
Distant Cousins
Numenius and I took a trip to the Sacramento Zoo today to do some sketching. If you don’t mind an audience (human), it’s a great place to sketch; the animals are used to having people around and sit still. Actually, they sit in a torpitude that only prolonged incarceration can bring.
This sketch is of a female orangutan that picked up a piece of fabric and draped it over her head not unlike the chadors I saw when I was in Iran. She looked right at me, a suffering buddha. I was almost too distraught to notice the children around us, yelling “monkey, over here!” or older children yelling “where’s the wrench”? I got fatigued quite quickly after this.
A creature that can gaze at us like this—it knows. It knows us. It knew me.
2 July 04
Interactive Online Keying
One of the problems with using a traditional dichotomous key such as found in most floras to identify an organism is that it’s easy to get stuck if you can’t determine which choice of the key is correct, especially at the topmost levels of the key. What you really need is an identification tool that lets you enter the characteristics of the specimen you do recognize, and narrows down your choices accordingly.
Such a tool is difficult to create in the pages of a book (though I have seen punch card examples), but is straightforward to build on a computer. At last week’s NBII meeting, I was reminded of the IDnature guides that are being produced at the Discover Life project at the University of Georgia. These are a set of online interactive keys to many different taxa ranging from dung beetles to liverworts. It’s a very promising approach to helping non-experts identify critters.
1 July 04
Twang!
About twenty years ago I was walking through the streets of Cambridge (England) with my mother. We wandered past a music shop. There was a mandolin next to a banjo in the window. It was my birthday coming up and, well, we walked out of there with a mandolin, a beautiful instrument I never really took to. When I moved to Boston, the mandolin stayed behind.
I’m wondering whether I just made the wrong choice. This evening I picked up a clawhammer banjo from a friend’s house across the way. Jim plays bluegrass guitar AND mandolin and won’t be needing his banjo for a while, so he’s generously lending it to me.
I’ve learned three chords so far; I am mystified by the upper register fifth string and how to play it (backwards from a guitar, it turns out); and I have the kittens totally intrigued. More anon.
The Ecotone wiki discusses Courage and Place today. That seems to be more than I’m up for just now but please scoot on over to take a look.
30 June 04
A Pancake Journal
If one is ever lacking for subjects to sketch, breakfast is always a possibility. The site Pancakes Across America has a set of galleries of pencil sketches of pancakes from many breakfast places across the country. For instance, here is a sketch of a three-stack of buttermilk pancakes eaten in Bardstown, Kentucky.
I’m not sure what subject would make a good culinary travel journal for me. Burritos, perhaps?