3 October 03
My New Goddaughter
One of my oldest friends has recently adopted a baby girl from China. Jennifer and Harald live in Sweden and their new daughter, Linda Qiu, seems to be adjusting quite well to the cold, to five dogs, and to a red-painted farmhouse.
I hope to join them all in Madrid in early December for the Christening. For now, I’m having a lot of fun trying to find suitable children’s books! Linda will grow up speaking English at home, Swedish at school. (Hope there’s some Spanish in there too…)
This is a great honor for me. I have never been a godmother. It seems really, momentously, important, somehow.
2 October 03
Ohio Roots
A note on Ancestral Place for the Ecotone Wiki.
Both my parents grew up in Ohio, they meeting as undergraduates at Ohio State University in Columbus. My father’s side was the more recent arrival in the state; my mother’s side arrived first and settled in Lorain County, a bit west of Cleveland, around 1840 or so. There they stayed for well over a hundred years, apparently staying out of the limelight, working as small farmers and laborers.
One of these years I’ll poke around Lorain County to learn what I can about the lives of my ancestors and their land. In the meantime I’ll content myself with resources such as the Lorain County Genealogy page, and a memory of a winter birding trip up to Lake Erie during which I saw my first rough-legged hawk and northern shrike, and returned via the ancestral territory.
Oh, and I pronounce “root” with a short vowel. Is that an Ohio thing?
1 October 03
Northern Climes
A contribution to the Ecotone Wiki’s biweekly topic, Ancestral Place.
When I first moved to the United States from England, I was astonished by how important it seemed to be to people where you came from. This is of almost no consequence in England, where far more importance is placed on the way you speak, the school you went to, your name—all the important class indicators.
There are lots of class indicators here too, but they’re different, more hidden. Having “come from” (i.e. having “people” who “came from”) England places you on a higher social rung than having “come from,” say, Serbia, or Ghana, or Armenia. Much higher. Having “come on” the Mayflower (the fact that most of the people on the Mayflower were barely literate is irrelevant) gives you the highest cachet of all. Since I do, in fact, have a Mayflower ancestor, despite my English accent, my Ancestral Place is sort of a guessing game (I get asked where I’m from at least once a week).
But it’s mostly Lancashire, it turns out. Both sides. From sheep farmers to mill owners to petty bourgeois shopkeepers. Lancashire is a wet, soggy place, much blackened by the ravages of the industrial revolution and neglect from the center of power in the south, which no doubt contributed to the spread of nonconformist sects. Its inhabitants are gritty, silent, phlegmatic, and excellent cricketers (a sport that requires infinite patience). Lancastrians are given to interesting turns of phrase when particularly inspired.
I hope I have some of the resilience they are known for.
30 September 03
The Complete Peanuts
The complete run of the Peanuts comic strip—all fifty years—is about to be reprinted. The comics publisher Fantagraphics will be issuing these in 25 hardbound volumes, releasing two a year. I am happy to see that the strip will be republished in its entirety: it’s been a significant enough part of American culture that people will enjoy and learn from the complete set for a long time to come. This news is also a reminder that Pica and I should one of these months make an expedition over to the Charles M. Schulz Museum, not too far from here in Santa Rosa.
29 September 03
The Creatures of Autumn
Fall migration has been going on for some time now, but the birds that spend the winter here have started arriving just within the last week. The white-crowned sparrows are now busily rooting around the oleanders for seeds. They will sing all winter, cheerfully lighting up the short days. The Swainson’s hawks have almost all gone-we still have a lingering two or three that seem to be juveniles, crying pitifully in the morning-and the red-tailed hawks are coming in to take their places, down from the foothills for the winter.
Yesterday I went with some friends west to Bodega Bay, birding. The promise of eastern warblers in the trees of Owl Canyon along with the chance to see my mother lured me out of bed at 5:00 am (Numenius sensibly declined). We didn’t see many warblers, but another birder alerted us to large numbers of warblers in Point Reyes to the south. We all made our way there and were rewarded with an extraordinary number of eastern vagrants; I was able to see most of them even with my limited mobility. (Things are looking up in this department: I got the final insert out of my boot this morning, and am now able to walk almost normally instead of lurching about like a drunken sailor.) There was a nip in the air, well described by Lisa of Field Notes.
The birds remind us that the light is waning. It’s time to think about different dinners, different clothes. To think about abundance and to be grateful. I always, somehow, prefer this season to spring.
By the way, the next joint Ecotone topic will be Ancestral Place (October 1). Everyone is invited to write something about this and post an excerpt and link to it on the wiki.
28 September 03
End Of Season
Today was the last game of the regular baseball season. The one game I followed was the Detroit Tigers-Minnesota Twins matchup: the Tigers won, thus avoiding the ignominy of tying the 1962 Mets’ record of losing 120 games in a season. The downside of their sudden winning ways—they just took 3 games out of 4 from the Twins—is the fear that the Twins won’t be up to their forthcoming duty to eliminate the Yankees from the playoffs.
The playoffs look to be quite exciting. All three of the teams we root for—the San Francisco Giants, the Boston Red Sox, and the Oakland A’s—made the playoffs. Alas, at most two of them will make it past the first round since the A’s play the Red Sox right away. Then there’s the Cubbies factor. The Chicago Cubs swept yesterday’s doubleheader with the Pirates to win their division. I was pleased by this event; Pica less so, since this sets up the possibility of a Cubs-Red Sox World Series. Since the Red Sox last won the Series in 1918, and the Cubs in 1908, heartbreak is inevitable. Indeed, some suspect such a series would be a sign the Apocalypse is near.
27 September 03
The World Lost a Great Mind Yesterday
Edward Said died at the age of 67 after living for years with leukemia. He spoke eloquently not only for Palestinians but for justice throughout the world. A scholar at Columbia University for many years, his book Orientalism (1978) is credited with starting the post-colonial studies movement.
Whenever I saw him through my work at Harvard University Press he was debonair, brilliant, a little intimidating, and always intensely thoughtful. The Arab world has just lost its most articulate mouthpiece.
26 September 03
A Vision Of Lucre
Last week Pica attended the Chancellor’s Fall Conference, a day-and-a-half shindig where UC Davis faculty and staff discussed the just released campus strategic plan, a document entitled The UC Davis Vision. This document is filled with platitudes about how the campus will “ensure that [it] maintains and develops high-caliber courses, curricula and academic programs” and will “invest in targeted areas of established and emerging excellence and distinction.” This is the sort of document that university administrators feel the need to produce every few years, and one wishes they would merely dust off the previous edition from the archives in the basement rather than go to great effort to rewrite the thing anew.
Absent from the plan is much discussion of how the university plans to achieve this grand vision in the face of a massive budget crunch, let alone avoid the internecine fighting that accompanies such. There lies however, off in the bucolic northwest corner of Yolo County, a possible solution to the university’s woes. This valley is home to the Cache Creek casino, a fantastically successful enterprise a few years old run by and for the benefit of the Rumsey Band of Wintun Indians. (In California gambling casinos are only allowed under tribal auspices.) Many Cache Creek Valley residents are not very fond of the casino for bringing lots of traffic to their formerly quiet valley, but given tribal sovereignty there is little they can do.
But here an opportunity beckons. What if the Rumsey Band were to partner with the university to move the casino to campus? All parties would benefit. The casino would be in a much more accessible location, being right off the interstate running from the Bay Area to Sacramento. Both the Rumsey Band and the university would share in the profits, and the university would be ensured of a stable and growing funding source. Cache Creek would get their quiet valley back, and there would be many new part-time jobs for the students. (Who wouldn’t rather be a croupier instead of delivering for Woodstock’s Pizza?) Indeed, whole new university programs could spring into existence—what about a hotel administration department? (Cornell has one, why not UC Davis?) And seeing as how the Mondavi Center is built on a Native American gravesite, placing the casino nearby is not that geographically inappropriate.
Looking a few miles and years down the road, there are other prime opportunities for public-private partnerships. There’s a proposal afoot to build a $250 million racetrack and entertainment complex entitled Dixon Downs, to be located about 7 miles down the highway from UCD. Think of the funding that could come the university’s way with a little bit of creative outreach! Plenty of opportunity for the veterinary school at the very least.
Serving the entertainment industry—the new function of the university in the 21st century! Sounds like it would make a good proposal for Governor Arnold.
25 September 03
They’re BAAACK…
Today was the first day of classes at UC Davis. There were thousands (about 30,000, to be concrete) people wandering around these 5,000 acres, many of them a) completely lost b) on bicycles they hadn’t ridden since grade school c) talking on cellphones d) oblivious of the hazards they posed. Sometimes they just fall over for no apparent reason and get up again.
It’s at times like these when Davis and campus are best avoided if possible. Unfortunately it’s not really possible; we both work on campus. Going somewhere for lunch or dinner just got a lot harder. So did getting from A to B.
Our drive to the Coop this evening was a slalom run through kamikaze eighteen-year-olds. We almost entertained driving miles out of our way to get home via the freeway in order to spare ourselves the dangers.
For all this, I’m still happy to see the students back. They’re young and hopeful (at least some of them). They’re our future, even if they’re not sure about this. I just wish they’d learn elementary bicycle safety…
A baseball footnote: the Boston Red Sox beat the Baltimore Orioles tonight to clinch a spot in the playoffs. I’m ecstatic. Which is very dangerous for a Red Sox fan.
24 September 03
Chance, Statistics, And The Game
One of the compelling aspects of baseball is how the whole enterprise skates on a mirror of luck. At the major league level, differences in talent are slight, and it really takes much of the 162-game season to sort out the pecking order among teams. Perhaps because so much of the game takes place in discrete events—pitch-by-pitch, batter-by-batter, out-by-out—statistics has been a large part of the game. Terms like batting averages, on-base percentages, and earned run averages make up the common idiom.
I recently read Curve Ball, by Jim Albert and Jay Bennett, a book that takes a look at the plethora of statistics in baseball from the point of view of a couple of academic statisticians. It’s an excellent introduction to thinking probabilistically about baseball. Some numbers are meaningful, some are not. Often broadcasters will say things like: “His lifetime batting against Jamie Moyer is 4 out of 11”. Even though this represents a batting average of .364—very high—it is a statistically meaningless ratio since with so few at bats the result is probably due to luck. Other times intuitions lead managers quantitatively astray. Albert and Bennett give the example of Barry Bonds being walked intentionally so often in the 2002 season (a pattern which has persisted in this season). Despite Bonds’ immense home run threat, when one goes through the play-by-play probabilities, it turns out in terms of expected runs that one is better off pitching to Bonds rather than putting him on intentionally in almost all situations.
Baseball is a game where the unlikely turns commonplace, given all things that can occur. How often does a team score 10 runs in a single inning? Not very often, but the Giants did it last night in a game against the Houston Astros.
The Red Sox will be the AL wild card team unless a) they lose all of their final four games of the season and b) the Seattle Mariners sweep the Oakland A’s in their final series this weekend. Let’s hope that unlikely combination doesn’t come to pass.