29 October 03
Floppy Timing Chain
Lila’s front chain, the one used by the front passenger when there is one, got pretty loose a few weeks ago. Since this is not a conventional rig I took her back to Peter the Whymcycle guru. He performed technical miracles (removed the shoe from his right foot and pushed the bar holding the wheel a bit further down, to be precise).
Chains do stretch over time, however, and we have simply removed the timing chain so I don’t have to stop every time I hit a bump in the road on the way to work and get bike grease all over my hands. Today I gave a coworker a ride to the local Indian restaurant for lunch. I did all the work instead of have a pedalling stoker. It was okay, but I wouldn’t want to try this on a hill!
28 October 03
Maggot Art
As Fred from Floyd is showing interest in career possibilities involving decay-loving creepy-crawlies, I should point out a similar opportunity for those of an artistic bent. Rebecca Bullard, a UC Davis graduate student and a forensic entomologist by training, has created a teaching curriculum she terms Maggot Art. By bathing her maggots in non-toxic water-based paint and then letting them crawl on paper, her dipteran collaborators produce trails which can be surprisingly beautiful. The first public exhibition of these paintings will be held in Davis in April 2004, so now is the time to become a pioneer in this art form.
27 October 03
Back School Started Today
I’ve been so impressed with Numenius’ progress with his back problems that I’ve decided to go to back school myself in order to fend off what seems to be an almost inevitable result of being a biped, namely, pain in the lower back. Today I got the thorough work-over, trying to determine where my weak spots were (between L5 and S1, for all you PTs out there). On Wednesday I learn how to lift, bend, deload deload deload, and so on.
Mat the PT talks of the back as analogous to a bank: you put checks in, you take checks out. Deloading sets up credit; lifting boxes of books sends you shopping. I’m not sure I quite understand all this but I’m happy to start super-strengthening my trunk; to deload when I get home from work (lie on the floor and push myself away from the door with a broom handle); to bounce around on the exercise ball; and to watch how I sit. I might start raising a few eyebrows at work, is all.
26 October 03
Baseball’s Paleontologist
We’re still celebrating the defeat of the New York Yankees here, and remain convinced that the only people who have any business rooting for the Yankees are those that actually grew up in New York. As the saying goes, rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for Microsoft.
One famous Yankee fan who did grow up in New York was Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist and prolific writer who died a little over a year ago. I just finished reading Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball, which is a collection of his many pieces on baseball. I was happy to see this collection come out, which he left as a neatly organized manuscript before he died.
Gould grew up in Queens in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s, which was a golden time and place for baseball. There were three teams in town then: the New York Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the New York Giants. Loyalties were quite divided depending upon the borough, but almost every boy and a good many girls were fanatical about baseball there and then. Gould rooted for the Yankees, and secondarily for the Giants. Of his intellectual attraction to baseball, Gould saw this as a contingent fact of his upbringing, and not of any inherent quality of baseball itself. (For a 1950’s childhood baseball memoir from the opposite side of town, see Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Wait Till Next Year. She was a Dodgers fan, and was heartbroken when the team left for Los Angeles in 1958, along with the Giants, who moved to San Francisco.)
I think the most analytic piece in the collection is the essay “Why no one hits .400 anymore”. The last batter to have a batting average over .400 was Ted Williams in 1941. Gould explains the absence of .400 batters these days as an outcome of the long-term trend towards there being much less variation in the quality of major-league baseball players.
Gould was a Yankees fan who held season tickets to the Red Sox, and had dual loyalties to both teams. Though he hated the introduction of wild-card teams to the playoffs (a change starting in 1995), he did see the Red Sox meet the Yankees once in post-season play in 1999, and I suspect he would have been thrilled to see the 2003 matchup as well—baseball at its finest, though the ghosts haunted the Red Sox in the end.
No ghosts appeared Saturday night though: I guess they forgot the game was on, and didn’t appear in time to rescue the Yankees.
25 October 03
Poetry, Peacemakers Theatre, Pink
Today was the Peace Picnic, an event that is part of the Campus Community Book Project but which took place within the community rather than on campus. We spent last night in a production line in the kitchen making 600 pooris; this morning I must have chopped about 300 potatoes. It was wonderful to be around people with so much laughter!
We read poetry; we watched a jujitsu demonstration; we participated in a conflict-theatre-demonstration; we had a great Indian lunch; and we stood in a circle at the end and exchanged thoughts, ideas, prayers, and songs for peace.
It got hot today, into the 90s, hot for late October. It was perfect for a picnic.
And then, to round off a splendid day, the Florida Marlins beat the Yankees 2-0 to win the World Series. We went out for ice cream to celebrate. Josh Beckett pitched a 9-inning shutout and was named Most Valuable Player of the Series. Watch out for this fearless 23-year-old!
24 October 03
More Critters Of Fall
A few more wildlife observations for today. I heard pipits in our field for the first time this season. Most likely these were American pipits, but Pica tells me to keep an eye out for wayward red-throated pipits, definitely rarities but that’s how you spot them. Second, from the email grapevine I learned that last week a 30” chinook salmon was seen upstream in Putah Creek. Salmon have been coming into Putah Creek in small numbers since 1997, and I’m glad for that update. Finally, riding my bike home past the railroad tracks this afternoon, I saw a crow wheel above the road and drop a walnut which landed on the pavement and opened with a satisfying crack. They’re clever, the crows.
23 October 03
Fox Sparrows and Peregrines
For all you non-baseball people out there, you will probably be relieved to know that it will all be over one way or the other by the end of Sunday, and we’ll be talking about other things on here than World (i.e. American) Series, RBIs, closers, sluggers, injuries (well, maybe there are still a few more injury tales), irate Yankee coaches, and the like.
Instead, there will be more tales such as this:
A fox sparrow was scratching around in the oleander leaves this morning. Fox sparrows in California are much darker brown than their reddish Eastern counterparts. Some rascal is working hard to split the different races of fox sparrow into three or possibly eight different species. I love the splotches on their chests, their shyness, and their song in spring, which we don’t hear much except in the mountains.
We don’t see peregrine falcons much, either, since they are much more rare than the American kestrel, the more common falcon of these parts. Coming out of Medea Benjamin’s talk on Tuesday, though, a peregrine flew southeast over Environmental Horticulture. It now appears that this is a bird that may be hanging around the Arboretum. Which is great: their favorite food is ducks, and there is no shortage of ducks for them in the Arb!
22 October 03
All Tied Up
Despite running into trouble in the top of the 9th inning, the Florida Marlins won tonight’s World Series game 4-3 with an Alex Gonzalez home run in the bottom of the 12th. This was pitcher Roger Clemens’ last start of his career, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he puts in a relief appearance in game 6 or 7 back in New York. The series is now even up at two games apiece for the Marlins and the Yankees, with one more game to be played in Florida before the series heads back to New York.
Dave Barry meanwhile has an illuminating column about the return of the World Series to Pro Player Stadium in Florida, the “first major stadium ever constructed entirely from recycled Legos.”
21 October 03
The Book Project Turns Pink
The Campus Community Book Project was launched a week ago and so far the response has been great. The wide variety of programs ranging from talks, lectures, and workshops to martial arts demonstrations, a peace picnic, and a performance of Lysistrata means that there’s something for everyone. The visit by the author of Gandhi’s Way, Mark Juergensmeyer, last week was a great success.
Tonight we heard Medea Benjamin, Green Party candidate for Senate in 2000 and one of the founders of Code Pink, explain how U.S. policies have been a disaster in Afghanistan and Iraq and how social movements are, in her view, the way to change the world (as opposed merely to the electoral process). Her three visits to Iraq this year and her conversations with people who are having to live through the results of the occupation give her an authority that radiates through her vibrant energy.
The peace movement is demoralized, almost defeated. Today, I felt I got some batteries recharged. It is important to keep going, not to let fatigue and hopelessness stop us. Benjamin sees a lot more than I do to demoralize her, but I have rarely seen so much energy in one person.
We wore pink. Arnold’s going to get a pink delegation on the eve of his inauguration in November. Being silly is a good way for me to stay engaged; it’s certainly more fun than the alternatives.
20 October 03
Serpent In Icicles
Last Friday we by chance discovered that Rivers and Tides was playing downtown. We both wanted to see this documentary so we altered our evening plans a bit to watch this film about the English environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy. He is a sculptor who works with found organic objects in nature, assembling these in patterns whose beauty derives from their ephemerality. In one sequence along a frozen Canadian seashore, he constructs an upright serpentine figure out of bits of icicles; its destiny being to shine briefly in the sun before melting into collapse.
The images in the film are quite striking: the pool by the stream filled with leaves in fall colors, sorted to range from yellow to deep red; the monolithic cones Goldsworthy builds from wood, ice, or stone; the snake of leaves laced together by single twigs leaving a pool to float downstream; the half-mile long wall weaving its way through the woods of the Storm King Art Center in upstate New York.
His wall will last quite awhile. But even when he works with stone, he is keenly aware of the impermanence of natural beauty, from icicle to stone forming a mere continuum. His is an art that seeks essences in earth, stone, growing things, rivers, and the sea. But doesn’t everyone who ever built a sand castle, or played with mud as a kid, long for such contact with earth once again?