10 April 04
Religion and Non-Violence
I finished my religion and non-violence class here at UC Davis back in mid-March in a mixture of stress (I was just starting a new job) and depression, because it really does seem, when you consider all the evidence from all different cultures, that the case that religions are inherently non-violent is not tenable. Certainly, it’s easy to find references throughout the New Testament to support the non-violent position, but basically people will find what they want to find in religious texts.
George W. Bush and his family, on vacation at his ranch in Texas, will no doubt go to church tomorrow morning, a church full of flowers and beauty and hope and soothing words. I’m almost certain that Bush sees no moral inconsistencies in his position.
American forces bombed a mosque this week where people were praying.
They were PRAYING.
When you have the most powerful country in the world-where the number of religious believers is growing and becoming more conservative-bombing mosques, many of us wonder when the madness is going to end. Where is the outrage?
Maybe with women getting more involved in public life (though with women like Margaret Thatcher and Condi Rice, who needs men?) there’s a chance. Maybe so through secular humanism. Maybe just through more hard thinking.
Good luck. The world isn’t looking like this tonight.
9 April 04
Arboretum In Line And Wash
Inspired by our circumambulation last weekend, I’ve been having fun doing some ink sketches with watercolor. At left is a sketch I did this afternoon of the gazebo at the Arboretum on campus. Nearby is a tree where black-crowned night-herons roost; they were keeping me company with their frequent squonkings.
8 April 04
First Game Scored this Season
The difference between scoring baseball and scoring cricket is the length of the job, but I always find myself tiring of scoring a baseball game early in the eighth inning. The Giants are playing San Diego in their new park, Petco Park (Bark Park, the Doghouse, etc.), which is getting its major league debut today.
Thirty years ago today, Hank Aaron beat Babe Ruth’s home run record with his 715th long ball. He was in Atlanta today, enjoying pre-game festivities with his old club, the Atlanta Braves.
Numenius is kindly finishing up scoring this game for me. The Giants are losing 1-0. Barry Bonds had the chance to tie Willie Mays’ home run record. No luck so far….
7 April 04
Rewatching Lawrence
Inspired by last week’s outing to see “Hidalgo” (an entertaining horse movie featuring Viggo Mortensen riding across the desert), we just watched “Lawrence of Arabia” again, having found the DVD at the library this weekend. It remains an amazing film, an epic which after 42 years hasn’t lost a bit of its power. I love the shots of the desert, the horses, the camels (the greatest camel movie of all time).
Favorite T.E. Lawrence fact: in the summer of 1908 he rode his bicycle 2,400 miles around France for his study of Crusader castles which he wrote up in his thesis at Oxford completed in 1910.
6 April 04
Dissertations
Our friend Mike had his dissertation signed off on tonight at a party, not by his entire committee as hoped but at least by the Chair. The food was wonderful, the music was live, and the occasion was perfect. (I’ve never been to a “live” signing before, performed to a drumroll followed by “Blue Eyed Girl.”) A bottle of St. Emilion 1993 (which, I’m told, is a “vin des dames”) was opened and finished off.
Lorianne just got her dissertation (“Bill”) through as well; stop by and congratulate her if you haven’t already.
5 April 04
Season Underway
This notion of having a couple of regular season games in the week before everyone else gets started is pretty silly, but the regular baseball season is finally underway for good. Already there’s excitement. The Detroit Tigers, the biggest underdog team in all of baseball, given their performance last year, opened their season by shutting out the Toronto Blue Jays 7-0. And the San Francisco Giants won in familiar fashion. Down 4-1 in the eighth, Barry Bonds hit a three-run home run. The Giants scored another run in the ninth to win 5-4. In the game Barry Bonds went 3-for-3 with a walk.
One down, 161 to go.
4 April 04
Archeology of a Car
Inspired by Jenny and Tvindy, I made an inventory not of things that were in my fridge (nothing really interesting in there except a whole drawer full of walnut ink), but of things that were in my car. Here is a partial list from March 27, 2004. The photo at left is the little flutter book I’m in the process of making of the same subject.
A bottle of generic Ibuprofen that doesn’t expire until 2005. (This seems miraculous.)
An envelope, empty, from the Registrar of Voters in Fairfield, dated November 2003.
A press clipping on Sicilian puppeteers and Osama Bin Laden (Charlemagne’s betrayed again).
Half a ream of orange cardstock.
Denise’s green marble. It’s lain in the tray where it was since she sold me the car back in 1995.
A black umbrella I found on a train from Berkeley to Davis.
A broken #2 pencil.
A plastic bottle with SPF 40 sunblock from 1998.
A tube of Boots Lipsalve from England, long melted into oblivion.
A light that’s supposed to come on when you open the door; it just dangles from the roof instead.
A glass Venetian egg given to me by Rachel as I set out on my western quest.
The draft program for a peace ritual Karen and I held outside Mrak Hall on March 17, 2004.
Two jumper cables. They lie on the bed of the hatchback, which is where they’ve been for eight years.
A first aid kit I haven’t opened since I bought it in 1996.
Some Yolo Audubon raffle tickets from 2001.
An empty green Delorme Atlas bag.
Two inscribed art books, on Burne-Jones and George Watts, given by my great-grandfather to my great-grandmother for “her birthday, September 6, 1906.”
The Chicago Manual of Style, 13th edition, faded to pale pink in exposed patches.
A few dessicated pads: alcohol and Wash ‘n’ Dry.
A green Irish stone to put in my pocket, given to me by Gail.
An art book in German, ca. 1899. Condition poor.
Marian’s copy of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. I still haven’t read it.
A blue blanket with yellow stripes, the “donkey blanket.” Slept on in Spain, France, and Michigan.
A black flowered Spanish fan bought at the Corte Ingls on the Castellana. This is our only air conditioning.
A pasta spoon, white plastic with prongs.
Five assorted Spanish earthenware dishes.
A Japanese travel blessing, the string now broken, given to me by Cora, best massage therapist in Cambridge.
Exam questions for my 1981 Birmingham B.A. Combined Honours [sic] finals (French and Spanish).
My Latin linguistics exam taken in Montpellier in 1980 (in French). (I got 18/20.)
A day parking permit for UC Davis from early August 2003. Price: $6.
A receipt, type faded into illegibility.
A box of Rose Pastilles we bought in Santa Barbara in 1999.
A calligraphed “Poets Against the War” pin.
A Davis Bike Club T-shirt for the July 4th, 2001, Criterium volunteers.
A gallon ziploc bag containing traces of Skippy peanut butter.
A French orange Rhodia notebook where we write down our gas mileage.
A purple coolmax shirt from REI.
A bag of plastic styrofoam peanuts that needs to go to PDQ for re-using.
Owner’s Manual, 1986 GL Subaru 3-door.
A Giants cap with Jeff Kent’s name on it, won by Numenius in a baseball trivia contest.
A few strips of balsa-wood veneer, used as nibs in a March 2004 calligraphy workshop in San Francisco.
A pair of pink dreamcatcher earrings, given to me by Chris the day Medea Benjamin came to Davis.
A receipt from Arco, Russell Boulevard, dated March 20, 2004. Gas cost $2.19/gallon on that day.
A Bic pen that doesn’t work, and another one that does.
A brown paper bag with only one functioning handle and another one with none.
AAA maps: Davis, Woodland, Northern California. Bike map: Yolo/Solano counties.
A yellow plastic funnel and an orange plastic trowel, neither of which has ever been used.
Empty plastic bottles: Odwalla Soy Chocolate, Aquafina 16.7 oz, two nalgene water bottles.
A UC Davis L permit, good only for Lot 11, and a disabled parking permit. Both expired.
A wire coat hanger from the Santa Barbara Cleaners. I think I went there twice.
A strip of Velcro that held a trash bag, now lost, given by Auntie Kit in Cohasset for our westward trek.
A whole series of Yolo Audubon Burrowing Owl newsletters from the mid-1990s.
Two unopened bottles of brake fluid. They’ve sat through two or three stifling car-summers.
A pair of sandals I last wore while gardening at Barbara’s in April 2003.
A pair of psychedelic sunglasses I bought in Santa Barbara for the boat trip with the island scrub-jay and the red-footed booby.
Framed photos: my sister and me in 1962 (Tiburon), us with our brother in 1973 (Madrid). The frames are disintegrating.
A pair of blue shorts and a brown ponytail holder, both belonging to Numenius.
An orange plastic rain poncho, $1.99. Never been opened.
Some Windex in a blue squeezable plastic cologne bottle.
A blue cotton sheet for a twin bed.
A length of pink tulle, part of my going away present from my former job, and last worn at Code Pink.
An Aramis umbrella I found at a bus stop in Harvard Square.
Assorted socks and parts of trousers that are now officially rags. (Actually, now officially trash.)
3 April 04
Tuleyome Tour
This is the eighth year running that David Robertson and Rob Thayer, founding members of the Putah-Cache Bioregion Project and professors at UC Davis, have taken folks on a 225-mile circumambulation by bus of the Putah and Cache Creek watersheds. Today we finally went on this trip, starting at the headquarters of the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area just east of Davis early in the morning and returning after sunset.
Our route took us in a clockwise direction up the Putah Creek drainage, crossing over the watershed boundary to the north in Lake County, and returning following the Cache Creek drainage (approximately the same route of the Davis Double Century epic cycling event held each May). Water and people were the themes of the trip—we stopped at lakes, dams, creekside preserves, and historic settlements by the wayside. We sang several chants along the way invoking the spirits of the creeks, and carried out a couple of water rituals, one of them being carrying cups full of water across the Solano Diversion Dam (half of Putah Creek’s water flows south at that point to supply Solano County with drinking and irrigation water).
The high point of the trip literally and figuratively was passing by the headwaters of Putah Creek on Cobb Mountain in Lake County. At right is a photo of where we stopped here. The vegetation is much, much different from where we live: it is a montane forest with ponderosa pines, Douglas firs, black oaks, and white alders along the stream. Despite having lived here five years, neither of us had been to Lake County before, a surprisingly isolated place. It is one of the only counties in the United States to have never had a rail line in it, and economically the county has never quite taken off, going through a series of booms and busts. This decade the growth sector is wineries. The last boom centered on geothermal energy. (It’s a volcanic area, the Clear Lake Volcanics perhaps being 600,000 years old. The most impressive volcanic cone in the area is Mt. Konocti, though some believe it is hollow and inhabited inside.)
I did lots of sketching at stops and from the bus, and was able, a bit to my surprise, to add some watercolor to my sketches while travelling in the bus. At top shows my sketch of a hillside dotted with blue oaks in the Cache Creek drainage.
Pica kept a bird list for the day. Highlights were seeing both golden and bald eagles, a peregrine falcon, and white pelicans at Clear Lake.
Tuleyome is the name the Lake Miwok gave to themselves and their homeland. It means “deep home place”, a place not too far from where at the Guenoc Winery we had lunch today.
Postscript by Pica: Since we had this watershed be a significant part of our wedding ceremony last August, it was particularly important to me to see its headwaters, scrambling down the bank with my now-repaired Achilles to put my hands in this very cold water…
2 April 04
Warm Pine Needles
July in the Gredos mountains, west of Madrid . . . June in Idyllwild . . . May in South Carolina . . . August in the Landes near Bordeaux.
When pine needles have been sitting on the ground, piled up for a while, and get warmed by the sun of the late afternoon, and that languid time and scent is punctuated by occasional languid birdcall, when the breeze rustles the tall pines overhead, then is the best time, the best place, for a nap.
For the Ecotone Wiki’s joint post on Smell and Place.
1 April 04
Earthworm Perfume
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on smell and place.
There is such a thing—honest. Amy Stewart, author of an excellent new book on earthworms and their achievements, writes in her book tour blog about discovering this fragrance:
Finally I pulled off the cap and sprayed it into the air. It hit me, instantly familiar. Worms. No doubt about it. It was the smell of dirt and rotten leaves and compost piles, and also the faint scent of skin, worm skin. I dont know how else to describe it. It was just vaguely—invertebrate.
The creator of this scent is Christopher Brosius, co-founder of a company called Demeter Fragrances, whose line of fragrances include many evocative of place. One, called Holy Water, comes from the smell of an old Norman church in England. Others in their list include bamboo, funeral home, New Zealand (by special request for the premiere of The Two Towers), and the most popular one of all, dirt.
As for Earthworm, Brosius says that the scent is “surprisingly popular…It sells at smaller upscale shops with a very sophisticated clientele.”