8 September 03
The RealAudio Jinx
We finally got around to subscribing to the MLB Audio deal where you can listen to live streaming RealAudio of the radio broadcasts of any major league baseball game. (It’s $10 for the whole season.) This lets us listen to the Red Sox games over the computer. Tonight’s game turned into a miserable Boston bullpen collapse, and we’re now 0 for 2 in games listened to via RealAudio. Have we started something for ill here?
At least tying up the phone line like this is a good way to shoo off telemarketers.
7 September 03
Bees: A Secret Life
I finished reading Sue Monk Kidd’s Secret Life of Bees yesterday. Several people have recommended it to me but it is also under consideration for next year’s Campus Community Book Project.
The story of a white girl coming of age in the Deep South during the era of Civil Rights unrest, it weaves the orderly, matriarchal society of bees through the sometimes turbulent lives of a group of women, most of whom are black, and the black Madonna, an interesting and incongruous figure in this setting. The writing is good. The story is powerful; the threads are drawn together at the end in a satisfying but not quite predictable way. Why, then, am I so ambivalent about this novel?
For a book that features so many strong female African American characters, I fear it will only be seen by black readers (if this book ever has any) as yet another Aunt Jemima story. A friend pointed out recently that black movie audiences and white movie audiences are, today, almost completely segregated. Eddie Murphy, for instance, has made the crossover into the white mainstream, but he no longer has a strong black following. At least in certain films. Did I go and see Antoine Fisher? No. I didn’t. I wanted to; it didn’t come to Davis. But surely that only strengthens her point.
If there’s anything I’ve learned over the last year when racial tension has been rife in my office and in the university, it’s this: African Americans are sick and tired of liberal white angst about race. They don’t want to hear any more “I get it now” stories. They want action, they want change; they don’t want to see or hear about any more handwringing. Liberal white guilt is the least effective agent of change.
The Secret Life of Bees is a story about a white girl, for white people, about a successful, healing, powerful interaction with black people. From where I sit today, it reads as fantasy. I wish it weren’t so.
6 September 03
Laptops At The Game
According to a report in Wired News, fans at Raley Field, home of the Sacramento River Cats, next year will be able to use a free wireless network to order food, beverages, and check email during the game. We really ought to get out to more games next season: the River Cats have played superbly this season and are about to start playing for the Pacific Coast League championship.
Back East, the Red Sox routed the Yankees in the Bronx today 11-0. We are thrilled.
5 September 03
A Contraption Named Lila
Yesterday afternoon we went over to visit Peter Wagner, owner and creator of Whymcycles, which can only be described as elaborate contraptions made up entirely of used bicycle parts. I wanted a stable bike that could transport me, my crutches, and my assorted bits and pieces to work and back.
He had just the thing: a lilac/lavender piece made up in the front of two girls’ bikes welded together and joined to a larger bike. It has five gears and a parking brake. I am ALL SET.
I caused a sensation at the Physical Therapist’s office this morning, showing everyone the photos. The PT says I’m ready to ride the two miles to work and back on Monday. Move over, Lance Armstrong…
4 September 03
MondaviCenter.Com
A view of the Mondavi Center on the south edge of campus, quite a landmark from the freeway. It’s about to start its second season of performances. Maybe I’m just uncultured, but it’s hard for me to see the center as anything other than a $60 million dollar vanity project to benefit a completely different clientele than the students attending the university. This student’s letter expresses a similar view.
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.