3 September 03
The White Cliffs of Davis
They aren’t really cliffs (nor are they really white), but the walls of the latest campus monstrosity have the merit of acting as cliffs to dozens of migrating white-throated swifts. These birds nest in desert cliffs and crags and seem to use the sheer walls of the Mondavi Center to catch trapped insects at speeds that defy reason.
If you click on the above link, you will not be shown an exterior shot of the building—I’ll try and take one tomorrow. This is because it looks like a cross between a prison and a nuclear reactor. Inside it’s gorgeous, without question. But the building is completely out of scale with its site, with the campus, and with Davis.
2 September 03
On Cartophilia
This is an entry for the Ecotone wiki topic on maps and place.
Maps etch my life. The tale goes that I learned to read from maps, associating familiar placenames with words on the mapsheet. When growing up I prized my map collection. I would become lost in the world of maps: one game I would play would be to take a street map, start at some intersection, and trace sequences of turns—left-right-left-right—and see where I ended up on the map. Exploring that way was a lot less work than trying the experiment on foot. Another time I went to the long-gone Berkeley store Lucas Books, which had an excellent natural history section, to buy my first USGS topographic maps: I wanted to seek the source of Wildcat Creek in nearby Tilden Park, an expedition I would think about but never undertake.
Much later on I would become a geographer, and dabble in making my own maps. My thesis was on how to make maps of the distribution of animal species. There I glimpsed a bit of the mystical nature of maps, for who can ever be certain where a species isn’t? All territories look vast when you start to make your own maps.
Maps are talismans. Even a map of the most familiar of spaces reveals new things: a forgotten street name, an unvisited urban park. A map collection, small or large, is a blessed thing, for it promises a feast for the imagination. Adventures to unknown places beckon, whether they are in the same town, county, or in the antipodes. And every once in a while we take the map in hand and follow the paths to that beckoning place.
1 September 03
A Map Book
The Ecotone Wiki is running a collective post today on Maps and Place. Please stop by and check out all the entries and please feel free to participate either by linking to your own post about maps and place or by joining the discussion!
Below is the text of an artist’s book I made a while ago as a present for my father, who loved maps and the understanding they conveyed. He could study a map of a place he had never been (Spanish military maps were superb, almost as good as the British Ordnance Survey Maps) and decide that THIS place would be a good spot to camp in (we wildcamped throughout the 1970s and 1980s in rural Spain). He was always right, down to the abundance of firewood he predicted just by looking at an unfolded sheet of paper.
We had our moments, my father and I, but talking about maps always makes me realize how much I miss him…
Map Book
I never told
anyone
THE SECRET
that Jennifer
& I looked
for years
in the Casa
de
Campo
on horseback
& amid the
ruins of
countless
Castilian
castles
for
an iron
RING
we were certain
would lead us
to buried
TREASURE
but we had
NO MAP
It took years
to discover
that the
Treasure
lies in the very
art of being
able to read
a map
at all.
(Thanks Dad.)
31 August 03
A Team For The Statheads
The Oakland A’s beat the Tampa Bay Devil Rays 4-3 today, winning their ninth game in a row. This has become an A’s trademark, to come on strong in the second half of the season, often after Biilly Beane has made a clever trade just before the July 31st trading deadline. I have just finished reading Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, which is an account of how Billy Beane, general manager of the A’s, has turned the A’s into a successful franchise through superior wiles and a deep statistical understanding of the game despite having a rock-bottom budget. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read, even if you aren’t enamored of statistical analysis or particularly interested in baseball. (Tim O’Reilly, the renowned tech publisher, is one of the latter, writing about the book: “I’m not much of a baseball fan, but Michael Lewis’ Moneyball has been a revelation. Not only has it given me understanding of why people like baseball so much, it’s given me a real impetus to rethink how I approach my business.”)
The book gives an excellent account of how a set of passionate fans and writers, most notably Bill James, started doing novel quantitative analyses about the game. They questioned the traditional statistics used in baseball, such as RBIs or win-loss records for pitchers, and began to come with better metrics for individual performance, such on-base percentage. These fans were all outsiders to the baseball managerial system, but their ideas started to percolate.
Enter one Billy Beane. He started out as a baseball player who had the burden of being marked for greatness. But rather becoming the All Star everyone expected him to be, he floundered in the majors, and at the age of 27 made the unusual decision to quit playing the game to take a front office job. Here he excelled, and a few years later became general manager of the A’s. Because of his experiences as an unsuccessful player, he was skeptical of traditional baseball methods for evaluating prospects, and quite receptive to the statistical approach of Bill James and his followers. With little money to spend, Beane soon calculated he was far better off stocking his team with unheralded up-and-coming players rather than paying top dollar for established stars (noting that once stars reach free agency, they are usually old enough that their performance starts to decline).
Good baseball quote for the day:”Baseball is a fat Victorian novel, replete with colorful minor characters and discursive subplots, into which a fan can disappear for months; football is a series of quick- cutting TV cop shows.”
30 August 03
Getting Moving Again
Yesterday was my first visit to the physical therapist’s since my injury. The doctor was a little worried I was getting started too early, but I assured him I’d be in good hands—this guy was recommended to me by a colleague who had had a similar injury who just raved about him.
It was exhilarating: not only was I told I was putting about 2 pounds on my foot (as opposed to the 20 or 30 the doctor said I could: how can you measure this kind of thing?), but I was able to produce some measurable flexing, which gave him a baseline from which to proceed. After about an hour he said okay, let’s get you on the stationary bike—right leg only.
It’s been a few weeks now since I did anything physical that caused me to sweat, but heavens it felt good! I’m really looking forward to this now. He’s going to work on strengthening the rest of my body so I’m better able to compensate for the left achilles, and upper body strength is a priority too. I am all fired up, ready to take this on, grateful my sister-in-law urged me to push for early PT intervention.
29 August 03
One Down, Two To Go
The Red Sox beat the Yankees this evening 10-5 in the first game of a key three game series at Fenway. I checked out the score early on and saw that the score was 2-0 Yankees in the first inning and thought oh no, it’s going to be one of those games. But the Red Sox rallied twice from behind to win the game.
David Halberstam has an excellent piece in today’s Boston Globe about the state of Red Sox Nation.
28 August 03
The San Marcos Trout Club
At the end of June 1997 Numenius and I moved into a leaky cabin from the 1930s that nestled in a tiny hidden community in the mountains above Santa Barbara. Called the Trout Club by the inhabitants and the US Postal Service and “the old fish farm” by the few Santa Barbarans who knew about it, it was originally set up as a place where well-to-do doctors and lawyers could ride their mules or horses up to in the summer months to fish (and escape their families and the oppressiveness of Fiesta, it seems). They built cabins and had themselves a rustic, peaceful, male time nestled among the oaks that bordered San Jose creek.
The Trout Club is now prime real estate. It houses an odd mixture of alternative lifestyle folk who shrewdly bought when they could, early Microsoft investors, and professionals. We were going to rent a cabin from one of the first of these while they travelled for a year to Cuba, Mexico, and Belize. The appeal was great: apart from the beauty of the spot overlooking the Channel Islands, there were forty fruit trees, including four avocados, an outdoor shower with solar-heated water, and a bike commute that went through at least five ecosystems (which led to the most incredible “birds on the way to work” list I ever expect to have in my life, as well as the best bicycling fitness).
It wasn’t pure Eden, though. There were problems, like the proliferation of rodents around all that fruit; the local snakes had their work cut out for them. It was the wettest winter in over a century, and the mountain threatened to fall down around our ears at any moment; the constant rain deprived us of a lot of solar-heated water. But it was exciting and reminded us it was still possible to live simply; that one’s surroundings and the wildlife that inhabit them constitute ample entertainment; and that this might be the kind of place we might consider living—provided we found it before it became trendy and expensive.
27 August 03
Sunset With Cam Walker
A homage to Coup de Vent. Pica watches the sunset from her reclining chair in front of the house.
27 August 03
Beavers Go On Rampage
19 out of 20 players on the Portland Beavers, the Triple-A team for the San Diego Padres, were suspended yesterday after an incident in a game in Las Vegas last month where they chased and got into a scrum with a Las Vegas fan who heckled and threw a stress-relief ball at one of the Beavers’ players. The one remaining player, a pitcher, will have his work cut out for him if the team wants to make the playoffs.
26 August 03
Have Cam Boot, Will Travel (Some)
Being able to put a tiny amount of weight on my left foot is better than none at all, but it doesn’t mean I’m able to start turning cartwheels yet by any means—or even getting myself a cup of tea. (Crutches are NOT GOOD for carrying anything that can spill.) After a minor meltdown about this last night, I’m feeling a lot better today, and have begun to resign myself to the fact that this really is going to take a long time. Today I had to beg off a bus ride into Sacramento next month because I have no idea how I’d get onto a bus with crutches unless I sat on the bottom step and edged in backwards like a crab, which even I’d balk at, having done enough to sacrifice my dignity this year already.
I’m boring even myself with all this talk of infirmity, so I’d like to urge everyone on down to check out the fabulous Doc Rock at WriteOutLoud, who is dodging desert thunderstorms and articulately bemoaning the state of the teaching profession, all the while wielding a machete.
Finally, I just started reading Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, a wonderfully entertaining account of the paradox of poor baseball clubs and their strategies for selecting winning players—against all the traditions of this tradition-laden sport.