21 March 04
Zoo Happenings
Numenius’ brother and nephew are visiting from Indiana, so today we went to the Bay Area and went to the Oakland Zoo with them and Numenius’ sister and boyfriend. A few of us took the short cable-car ride over the lions up the hill, which is how we managed to get the angle into the giraffe enclosure.
This is a zoo where many languages are spoken. Middle-class anglos are definitely in the minority, which was fun. We wondered how the demographic might be different at, say, the San Francisco Zoo, which is much larger.
20 March 04
Wedding On The Equinox
Our friends Nicole and Mike got married today, in a wedding that started off this afternoon at St. James, the Catholic church in Davis, and then moved to the International House just north of campus for the reception.
Nicole officiated at our wedding back in August. At left we see Pica and Nicole today dancing a reprise to the jig at our wedding that resulted in Pica’s ruptured Achilles’ tendon. Even the musicians playing are the same. Happily, no injuries happened this time, and we’ve been at a fine party this afternoon and evening.
19 March 04
The Luxury of Taking the Train
We live in a place where we see a lot of trains each day (I can also see them now from my new office). The Amtrak Capitol Corridor run from San Jose to Sacramento has been successfully augmented; it’s our favorite way to get to the Bay Area. There are fast freights and slow freights. And then there are the two long-distance passenger trains: the Coast Starlight, that goes from Seattle to Los Angeles, one of the most beautiful journeys in the world, and the California Zephyr, which goes from Chicago to Emeryville, just beyond Berkeley.
We just met someone this evening who has come to Davis for a wedding from Virginia: by train. He got the train from Washington to Chicago and caught the Zephyr, three days ago. He has done this round trip five or six times; it’s his favorite way of travelling across country.
What I didn’t know, though, is that there are people—writers, showbiz folks, executives—who take the trans-continental train precisely to relax. Writers can get their books written; people can escape from phones, tv, email, and the like. Sounds like a great recipe for mellowness to me.
I’ve never taken this trip across the U.S., but I often took the train from London to Madrid in my younger days—Folkstone or Dover to Calais or Le Havre, Paris, St. Jean de Luz, Madrid, the different gauges of Spanish and French trains a quaint leftover from the Napoleonic invasion and the consequent 3 am lifting of the whole train off its wheels for a new set at the border. The Puerta del Sol was an institution. It’s been replaced by faster trains, but in general on the train I wasn’t in a hurry.
18 March 04
The Prevarication Boxscore
In a comment in this thread on Eschaton, Jonathan laments that the following story is not getting enough play in the blogosphere, so here I’ll do my part.
A couple of days ago, the minority Committee on Government Reform in the U.S. House of Representatives released a report, entitled Iraq on the Record, that documents misleading statements made by the Bush Administration between March 2002 and January 2004 concerning the threat posed by Iraq. The investigators examined 125 public appearances made by Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice and identified 237 misleading statements therein.
Bush had the highest number of misleading statements, with 55 (including 11 in a single appearance!), with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell close behind (51, 52, and 50 respectively). Rice had the fewest public appearances (16) and thus the fewest number of misleading statements (29) but she had the highest number of statements that were false outright—8. The greatest number of misleading statements were made about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities, and the highest number over any thirty-day period occurred in the month prior to the October 2002 vote in Congress authorizing military action.
On the web page, the committee even provides a handy search interface to the database of misleading statements. “Nuclear” pulls up 84 statements.
17 March 04
Democracy in Action
There is no shortage of opinions about what the results of the Spanish elections mean, but roughly, the right claims that Spain has capitulated to terrorism, while the left holds that there is no connection between Iraq and Al Qaida. One of the most interesting pieces on this I’ve read is Juan Cole’s, who wonders why there has been such a disproportionate level of U.S. military spending on Iraq versus Afghanistan.
Much of the commentary in the Western press which accuses the Spanish of cowardice at the polls strikes me as patronizing at best. The exercise of the vote over the weekend was, exactly, just that: democracy. Democracy means you get to have a choice. The Spanish chose to dump the Partido Popular and a Prime Minister who led them to war against at least 85% of public opinion, probably higher. And those who might otherwise have stayed at home, resigned to the fact that their vote would mean little, were moved to vote.
16 March 04
Spiders Of The Sea
It’s been a while since I’ve studied any marine biology, but this Ecotone wiki topic on spiders and place makes me think of pycnogonids. The Pycnogonida are a group of marine arthropods related to the arachnids such as spiders, scorpions, mites, and ticks. Another name for the group is the Pantopoda, meaning “all legs”, which is pretty much a description of what they look like.
I don’t know whether I’ve seen one live, but they’re to be found on the Pacific coast. One list gives nine species for the San Francisco Bay. Around Bodega Bay (home of the Bodega Marine Laboratory), one species Pycnogonum stearnsi is listed as uncommon under rocks (given the locality, I think this means the rocks of the breakwater). Members of its genus feed on coelenterates, especially sea anemones. To quote from Ricketts et al. book Between Pacific Tides:
A border design of these grotesque yet picturesque animals might surround the pen-and-ink representation of a nightmare. Most sea spiders spend part of their tender youth in close juxtaposition to a coelenterate—the larvae, in fact, usually feed on the juices of their hydroid or anemone host…It is especially common among the caves and crevices of Tomales Bluff, Marin County; sometimes half a dozen occur on a single anemone.
15 March 04
So. The Spiders.
Seamus Heaney’s masterful translation of Beowulf launches the epic thus: So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by… Makes you think you’re around a fire, about to hear a jolly good yarn, and yes, you get one.
So, the spiders. We have spiders here, in Davis, lots of spiders. Spiders that spin webs everywhere, even in places you’d think a spider could never get.
Mostly they’re the long-legged, tiny-bodied “daddy long-legs” which Numenius tells me are harvestmen and technically not spiders, but we’re going to ignore that for now. They are fierce fly hunters and occasionally they eat each other. They are very tolerated by us until I have fit of cleaning up where they are the first casualties.
Garden spiders in the garden or yard, or more like woodpile, where they are fodder for the house wren or wintering rock wren.
The spiders that everyone thinks of when they think of California, though, are the black widows, the shiny black spiders with a red hourglass warning sign on the belly. They can hurt you worse than a rattlesnake.
Black widows are easy to tell even if you can’t see them because their untidy yet contained webs have a single, verticle strand that leads to another untidy, contained web below. They are most active on hot summer evenings.
Lactrodectus species have the stickiest of all spider webs and are surely the inspiration for the sticky cobwebs on funfair ghost trains.
We leave them alone, too, as long as they don’t decide to move inside. By the fire. To listen to the stories.
This is an Ecotone entry for Spiders and Place.
14 March 04
The Grain Of Letters
One of the exciting things in our workshop this weekend was playing with the textural quality of letterforms. Nibs made out of sheets of balsa wood make very interesting and organic marks on paper. And as we discovered, the most unusual things can make for writing implements. In the last series of exercises we did, we experimented with a square of Stim-u-dent toothpicks! They made marks like a music ruling pen, only more so. The textural quality of letters for the most part gets lost using digital type, which is of course most of the letters we encounter these days.
The alphabet at right is one where I was struck by the very reed-like quality of the letterforms of the E and the F, and tried to build upon that for the rest of the letters.
13 March 04
Twenty Alphabets and a Cousin
Numenius and I have spent the day at the San Francisco Center for the Book, studying with Maine calligrapher Nancy Leavitt. The entire day was focusing on variations of Rudolph Koch’s Neuland typeface, a blocky, geometric alphabet we rendered in pieces of balsa veneer. It was such a treat to get covered in ink and eke texture out of these very tactile materials.
I also met my sixth cousin Stephen. He joined us after class and we went to Farley’s on Potrero Hill to exchange genealogy findings. Our common ancestor moved from Duchess County in New York following the Revolutionary War to Canada…
12 March 04
Redbud Days
The western redbud (Cercis occidentalis) is one of the first native trees to come into flower in our local foothills, even before it leafs out. On my ride into campus along the arboretum, the ones planted there are greeting me very happily right now.