7 January 04
Baseball News
The Eck, as Chris reminds me, was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame yesterday. Dennis Eckersley pitched for Boston as a starter, had a break and a bout with alcholism, and had a second career with the Oakland A’s as a fabulous closer. Doc Rock used to watch him at the Coliseum and said he only had two pitches but he always nailed them.
Paul Molitor was also inducted into the Hall of Fame yesterday and is apparently miffed that Pete Rose, the Bad Boy of Baseball, chose this week of all weeks to admit that he had, in fact, yesiree bob, bet on baseball while a manager for the Cincinatti Reds. For this crime he has been permanently barred from baseball and the Hall of Fame.
Pete Rose was possibly the greatest hitter the game has ever seen. He certainly had the most hits. But his gambling habits got the better of him, as he admitted on Monday. He also made some dubious decisions as a manager.
The Hall of Fame is an American oddity and, in my opinion, an anachronism. There’s a Basketball Hall of Fame, a Football Hall of Fame, a Tennis Hall of Fame, and no doubt a Trivial Pursuit Hall of Fame. This is the place where the ball that was someone’s 300th strikeout is housed and on display; where the boots worn by some fabulous base runner are kept; and on and on to the nth degree. But it is also the bastion of morality in sport, and gamblers and low-lifes are not welcome.
The fact that Shoeless Joe Jackson, who is supposed to have “thrown” the World Series (against the Cincinnati Reds, of all teams) along with seven of his teammates in 1919, is disbarred from baseball and the self-righteous Hall of Fame so long after his death is a scandal. So, I would argue, is the barring of Pete Rose. If Ty Cobb, a wife-beating, racist, homophobic maniac who routinely maimed his opponents on the field is in the Hall of Fame, I see no reason to barr the others. Paul Molitor, shut up and take your place gracefully. Like the Eck.
6 January 04
The Future Of Search
I’ve finally found a web search engine that can give results that are much more useful than Google’s. This is Vivsimo, and its innovation that it can organize search results into useful categories on the fly. These clusters appear on the left-hand side of the search page in a tree that you can click on to expose deeper levels of the hierarchy. For work I have been doing lately a fair number of searches trying to catalog resources on California invasive species, so I know the useful resources on the web pretty well now. After playing around a bit with Vivsimo, I think its ability to categorize results (e.g. search on “yellow star thistle” and have it return a clustered set of results on yellow star thistle control) is going to be very handy.
For a quite an informative set of pieces on search technology, see Tim Bray’s blog here.
5 January 04
Vatican II and the Equalization of the Liturgy
Back in the days when I still attended Mass more or less regularly I always sought out the ones with no music. Not because I have no musical ear and hate singing-quite the contrary, actually-but because the music we are now forced to endure is so saccharine as to render the whole ceremony vacuous (or worse). This is a purely personal position, you understand. But Vatican II, with its well-meaning (and no doubt long overdue) proletarianization of the Mass, happened at a time when the worst excesses of pop culture could (and did) destroy Catholic liturgical music. When they aren’t trying to sound like Hollywood scores, contemporary American Catholic hymns sing about love and peace and soaring like eagles and guitars (which should never be brought within 100 yards of any sacred place, in my humble opinion).
This is not the Catholicism I left the Anglican church for so long ago: I wanted the beauty, the guts, the blood, the tangible fusing with the ineffable. It was a strange journey and has marked me, probably more than I’ll ever know. But if they keep making us sing that stuff, I’ll keep staying away. (Signs are that it is indeed compulsory: musicless Sunday masses are no longer permitted by the California bishops.)
Mel Gibson is now famous for his adherence to a Tridentine sect for whom the Latin Mass is the only acceptable medium for approaching the divine. I would never go to one of these ceremonies, but more for political than religious reasons. I have no argument with these people when they say that the Mass as currently served up in parishes across the continent, two, three, four times a Sunday is like eating porridge with treacle. (I don’t know if they DO say this, but someone should.)
Going back to St. George’s in Madrid in December with the beautiful singing of old, beautiful hymns, took me by surprise. I’d forgotten about the pleasure of beauty mixed with the divine. I would love to hear what Beth’s choir sounds like. And I wish someone could write contemporary holy music that didn’t sound like John Denver overdosing on aspartame.
4 January 04
Orclets In The Kitchen
Every now and then, our kitchen gets overrun with ants. This seems to happen either in the middle of winter, when the ground is saturated and they may have to move above ground, or in the dead of summer, when I think they come inside looking for water. Right now one is crawling across an envelope next to the laptop bearing a fallen comrade.
These are gourmet ants. They excel at finding bits of asiago cheese and morsels from lemon-apricot bars. I expect them soon to develop a taste for our favorite Chilean merlot, and to walk off with a vat of soup carrying the pot.
We show them no mercy. These are invasive Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) that arrived in California about 100 years ago, spreading up the coast and in urban regions. They have displaced native species of ants and have thus been linked to the decline of the coast horned lizard in Southern California. These ants in California are remarkable in that they have very little genetic variation, much less than the native population back in Argentina. In effect, the entire California branch of this ant species forms a giant supercolony. By now they’ve probably created a large database of our eating habits, and have shared it with the NSA.
3 January 04
Buying a Goat
Since I mentioned it on our Christmas card this year, several people have asked about the goat I said we bought. We did buy a goat, but it will go to people we’ve never met. This is done through Heifer International, a charitable organization for sustainable development. The goat we paid for is given to a family in a developing country; if it bears any offspring, that family’s obligation is to give the kid to another family in need, and so on. So there’s milk all round. You can also buy a cow, a sheep, a pair of chickens, rabbits, and even a hive of bees, but we like the sassiness of goats. See Numenius’ sketch of one we met last March up in the Capay Valley.
Other organizations I think are worth supporting: Doctors Without Borders, an excellent French organization specializing in critical medical relief; Oxfam; Planned Parenthood; and the Point Reyes Bird Observatory.
2 January 04
Hermione Gets A New Cat
Several days ago I installed Mac OS 10.3 (“Panther”) on our iBook laptop named Hermione. We’re quite pleased with this update of the operating system. Our favorite features include the fast user switching (Pica doesn’t have to log out completely if Numenius want to switch to his desktop for a bit), the more tightly integrated look and feel, and the already quite good email application, complete with a trainable spam filter and a nice interface for sorting mail into different mailboxes according to rules that one defines. A little clunkier than we hoped is the new font manager: I doubt it’s up to handling thousands of fonts, but that’s hardly needed for what we do with the laptop. Now it’s the time to reinstall software: I just put on software for connecting to our GPS unit—what every geographer needs!
1 January 04
Sweet Auburn
Another joint blogging entry for the Ecotone Wiki on Cemeteries and Place.
DocRock has written about the fun involved in wandering around cemeteries, mostly in connection with the stories that are told-and made-in these places. My own passion for cemeteries originated in a passion for birds, which are often found in profusion in cemeteries, where there are often trees and water, just the thing for a 2-ounce warbler exhausted by the northward migration. Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge is full to bursting with birders in May, but since they mostly arrive at 6:00 am and leave to go to work by 8:00, they don’t get in the way too much of mourners.
Hanging around gravestones for this long was bound to have an effect on me, though, and like it or not, the stories started coming. Here’s one I haven’t finished telling, yet. Lizzie died in 1869. Her stone bears the inscription “Lizzie.” (period at the end) with a garland of flowers. On the back of the stone is more information: Lizzie died a few days after giving birth to a son, Matthew; he died a month later and is buried with her. Her husband and parents lie nearby; also Lizzie’s sisters, and her husband’s new wife.
So my made-up add-on to this rather sad tale (her father’s memoirs are in the Law Library here at Davis, he being a Somewhat Important Person, yet he never mentions her at all) is that, in fact, she didn’t really love the man she married; she was torn between two brothers, who are buried up the hill where I saw my first ever Cape May warbler, and who both got killed (really, not fictionally) in the Civil War. At left is a drawing of the effigy of their dog, a sculpture encased in glass. The dog has no name; the inscription simply reads “Their favorite.” Period. It’s hard from three thousand miles away, but someday I mean to finish this novel.
For now, though, the verb “to Lizzie” means to wander around a cemetery, usually Mount Auburn, where the focus is NOT birds. (I peek anyway.)
31 December 03
Virtual Cemeteries
This is an entry for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic on Cemeteries and Place.
Not far from where we live, down the road past fields and out to the east, is the Tremont Street Cemetery, an idyllic little rural cemetery with the interments starting from the 1870s. It’s a good destination for a short bicycle ride from here. None of our ancestors are buried there. In idle moments, we entertain the thought of transcribing the gravestones there so that genealogists from elsewhere might be able to look up information about deceased relatives online.
We dabble in genealogy and too have benefited from online cemetery transcription projects. In virtual explorations of my ancestral roots in Lorain County, Ohio, I came across this page of Lorain County cemetery transcriptions, and found maybe a dozen relatives listed in the publication. It’s not as gratifying as making a gravestone rubbing, but visiting an ancestor’s virtual cemetery is still a form of homage.
30 December 03
Avoiding the Latinate
Maria from Alembic has got me thinking that perhaps I equate the Latinate in English with the bovine. At any rate, I’ve been musing on Tolkien’s rabid avoidance of it and have attempted to write a sonnet (below) containing no Latin. The problem with this is that a) you immediately get taken for a demented Scotsman, and b) you sound like you’re auditioning for Radio Shakespeare. It’s all in fun, of course, so please have a go if you feel so inclined. Anyone who spots a latin word gets a bottle of ink (poem title excluded, but as you can see, there will be plenty of ink to go around; send me your snailmail address and I’ll send one along). Oh, and one other problem with making walnut ink: your house smells like Grendel’s mother’s lair for about a week. Think wet dog plus badger carcass. Pleasant, yes? (If I had done this in October like I was supposed to, the windows could all have happily been open.)
Alchemy in Brown
The walnuts sat forlorn along the road
And, scattered by the howling wind, they thought
(Since walnuts think, crass doubter: brains they hold)
Their fate lay in a headlong drop to nought
Bestowed by crows: on railway sidings hurled,
To tear asunder husk from hull and meat;
The black birds cawing at their underworld.
No murder was more gleeful, feast more meet.
She wandered slowly through the side-strewn rain
To stoop and gather (carefully, though sore).
Into the basket, then the pot again
And sat to simmer for three days or more.
The walnuts sighed and gave their souls to ink
For words and drawings: life beyond the brink.
29 December 03
Frog-Strangler
That’s our landlord’s expression for the sort of weather we’re having now. I’m not sure where the phrase comes from.
We’ve had 1.62 inches of rain in the last 20 hours or so. There have been high winds, lots of snow in the mountains, highway closures, and flooding. The electricity just went out here, which is hardly unexpected in big storms like this one. I’m typing this on our laptop’s battery, and better post this before the phone goes out as well. Pica was in the middle of the letter ‘g’ on a new font she’s designing when the power loss interrupted everything.
At least we have lots of Double-A batteries…