29 June 03
The Midseason Review
The baseball season is nearing its halfway point. The Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants just wrapped up their second round of interleague play, but I’m one of those who thinks that interleague games are a bit of an abomination. Bay Area native that I am, I root for both the A’s and Giants, so why do I have to choose between them just yet? Meanwhile, the Arizona Diamondbacks are creeping up on the Giants, after having swept an interleague series with a team that is hardly their natural geographic rival, the Detroit Tigers (who have the worst record in the majors).
Midseason also means it’s time for the annual ritual of All-Star Game voting. Figuring out who to vote for is far more interesting than the actual game itself: last year’s game, declared a 7-7 tie in the 11th inning by the much despised commissioner of baseball, Bud Selig, when both teams ran out of players, epitomized the all spectacle, no content, nature of that game. So here are my choices, with a smidgen of commentary:
National League:
1st base: Todd Helton, Colorado. I was all set to choose Albert Pujols until I figured out he plays more in the outfield.
2nd base: Jose Vidro, Montreal. Highest batting average among second basemen, plus I like voting for Expos players.
Shortstop: Edgar Rentaria, St. Louis. No stellar performers here, but I’ll take Renteria on account of his on-base percentage and stolen bases.
3rd base: Mike Lowell, Florida. I don’t know a thing about him, but he’s being quite the slugger, with 25 home runs so far.
Catcher: Benito Santiago, S.F. Giants. He’s been a mainstay for the Giants.
Outfield: Barry Bonds (S.F. Giants), Albert Pujols (St. Louis), and Jim Edmonds (Colorado). Bonds continues his remarkable career. Pujols and Edmonds also have very strong numbers.
American League
1st base: Carlos Delgado, Toronto. Very strong on-base percentage, with 26 home runs.
2nd base: Bret Boone, Seattle. Hitting for both average and power, with 22 home runs.
Shortstop: Nomar Garciaparra, Boston. His .343 batting average is very strong, much higher than the well-lauded A-Rod’s .296. Miguel Tejada of A’s, last year’s MVP, is struggling at the plate with a .250 batting average.
3rd base: Hank Blalock, Texas. No strong choices here.
Catcher: Jorge Posada, NY Yankees. He fills the token Yankee spot.
Outfield: Milton Bradley (Cleveland), Manny Ramirez (Boston), and Garret Anderson (Anaheim). Best overall OPS (combination on-base and slugging percentage)
Designated Hitter:Edgar Martinez, Seattle. The perennial DH, still quite consistent.
28 June 03
The Painting of Place
I went yesterday to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to look for some paintings by Ellen Ahrens, a cousin of mine and a student of Eakins’. I failed to find them and was about to leave grumpily when I stumbled into an exhibition of the work of Warren Rohrer.
Here is an artist whose sense of place-concretely Christiana, a Mennonite town in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania-informed all his work. His paintings are abstract renditions of light on farmland, whether the hazy heat of June (of which I had first-hand experience) or the still, breathtaking cold light on snow-covered cornfields. Regular patterns across the square canvasses echo the regular lines of ploughed furrows or falling shadows, and the textures in the paint echo husks of corn and rustling hay, waiting to be cut.
Meditative like Rothko or the Amish and Mennonite quilts he grew up around, Rohrer is also playful, particularly with regard to the titles of his paintings (Christiana Boogie Woogie, for instance, shows a very light pink motif overlaying in a subtle way the riotous Mondrian strips beneath it).
It was his very late work that excited me most; Rohrer developed over the years a calligraphic dance from forms he saw in the Pennsylvania fields, and started inserting it into his landscapes in the 1990s.
I love the metaphor: that landscape has its own language. I think of landscapes I know in a more intimate way and try to imagine their calligraphies: what would a levee say if it could speak? I have no doubt about the colors, though, now that I’m back in Davis: ultramarine, yellow ochre, and burnt sienna. It’s hot. I’m home.
27 June 03
Census Geographies
After my outing last Sunday circumnavigating east Davis, I spent some time looking to see what information was available about Davis from the 2000 U.S. Census. I was quite pleased with the resources they have online, especially the interactive thematic maps linked from the American FactFinder site. This mapping tool allows you to make a map showing census information for any geographical level in the census system. The smallest unit in system is the census block, which is roughly equivalent to a city block. The next higher level is the block group, followed by the census tract. Those of you who filled the 2000 census may remember that there was a “short form” which most people filled out, requesting basic information about age, household size, housing status, and ethnicity, and also a “long form”, which about 1 in 6 people filled out, requesting additional information about employment, income, and so on. These maps allow you to depict information from the short form at the block level, and information from the long form to the block group level.
It’s a quite well-designed mapping interface, and has some nice cartographic touches such as allowing you to select the type and number of classification breaks to use in the theme legend. My one gripe was that the steps in the different zoom levels are too widely spaced: I kept trying to get all of the city of Davis to fit comfortably in the window at the block mapping level, but it didn’t allow me to do that.
26 June 03
Two Pennsylvania Houses
I’ve been visiting family in Philadelphia, some of whom I had never met before. I arrived on Monday to a town house with three floors and lots of interesting people coming in and out… and spent yesterday and the day before in the hills west of the city, in an old farmhouse with bowed walls and wooden floors. It’s hot, now, hot and sticky, and my cousin Maggie and I have been exploring nineteenth-century family haunts. It’s odd to find a park named for an ancestor on the site where the mill he founded used to be. It makes exploring a place a different experience.
25 June 03
The Unexpected Guest
I got home late this afternoon after doing grocery shopping, got out the bag of mixed greens for a salad out of my backpack, then looked up on the kitchen windowsill and was quite surprised to see to see a western fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) happily at rest on the inside of the windowsill. I have no idea how he got there — the house seems fairly well-sealed (at least compared to the drafty cabin in Santa Barbara where we lived previously) and there are no obvious holes by the window. Perhaps it’s a bit patrician of me, but I think lizards belong outside the house, so I showed him an open window. After about five minutes of maneuvers on the countertop, I got him to go out the window, where he leapt to land on the African violets below, losing a bit of dignity in the process. He did seem very content where he was on the windowsill. Sigh.
We like western fence lizards though. Apart from being our most commonly-encountered reptile friend around here, they are believed to be important in reducing the incidence of Lyme disease in the state. When nymphal ticks feed on the lizard, some factor in their blood destroys the spirochetes that cause the disease.
24 June 03
Soundscapes
Fred of Fragments from Floyd today shares a journal entry from the summer solstice that is particularly evocative of the soundscape of his little valley — he hears the creek rumbling with the recent plentiful rains as the low note, the incessant stridulations of cicadas in the middle register, and the wind blowing a million soft leaves on the ridge as the treble voice.
The term soundscape comes from the Canadian composer and communications researcher R. Murray Schafer who in the late 1960s started the World Soundscape Project, aiming to document the relationship, both good and bad, between people and their acoustic environment. He wrote in his 1977 book The Tuning of the World:
Noise pollution results when man does not listen carefully…We must seek a way to make environmental acoustics a positive study program. Which sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply? When we know this, the boring or destructive sounds will be conspicuous enough, and we will know why we must eliminate them. Only a total appreciation of the acoustic environment can give us the resources for improving the orchestration of the world soundscape.
Schafer’s interests led to the development of a new field called acoustic ecology. There is now a society called the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology whose members are interested in the social, cultural, and ecological aspects of the sonic environment. A favorite activity of acoustic ecologists, recurringly described in their writings, is to go on soundwalks, an excursion where the point is to listen to the environment.
These people are on to something: awareness of our acoustic environment is very much neglected, and gaining this awareness makes for a much richer life. So step outside sometime, close your eyes, and listen…
23 June 03
Blood and Water
Coming back East is a major exercise in juggling for me… I have family in Maine, now, and all my friends in Boston where I used to live. I’m also taking advantage of this trip to do some genealogical research, which means travelling to New Hampshire and Philadelphia—and spreading myself thinner over a two-week period than I usually do.
Yesterday, however, felt a bit like I was back in my former life. I took a trip to Plum Island in northern Massachusetts with two birding friends, and we sloshed our way through the muck into Plumbush marsh looking for seaside sparrows (no luck, though plenty of sharp-tails), edged quietly down a boat-ramp trying to find the clapper rail that was clacking incessantly (saw it several times as it collapsed itself vertically through reeds and grasses), pottered about the New Pines to the overlook where we saw a tricolored heron, and generally ate salty and sweet snacks in between forays. The weather wasn’t good (showers all day, which to me were heavenly) so few other birders were around, but I still ran into old friends all along the way.
It’s a dislocating experience to catch glimpses of a time that is past. I have left people behind me each time I’ve moved somewhere, which has been often, and these friends get connected in my mind with the place I left. Sometimes they move too, and the past gets fragmented, almost ruptured. We are a culture that is just manic to move. When I read Fred’s posts on Fragments From Floyd about how he’s stayed pretty much in the same region all his life, I’m astonished and a little envious. Maybe that’s part of the reason why I’m pursuing the naming of dead ancestors: if I can’t be rooted in a place, there’s no way of escaping the fact that their blood flows in my veins…
22 June 03
Last Bastion
This afternoon I went on a cycling ramble around Davis, a bit of a cultural field survey in preparation perhaps for a later Ecotone joint blogging exercise on suburbs and place. I was riding north on Mace Blvd. at the eastern limits of Davis, north of I-80, when I saw the above bird perched on top of a sign reading “Rick Price – Custom Homes”.
This is a burrowing owl, a species which is in the process of being extirpated from the Davis area, owing to its proclivity for living in sparsely vegetated plots inhabited by ground squirrels, the same sort of land that’s ideal for building things like housing developments and college football stadiums. This bird was part of a pair inhabiting a thin plot of ground, which looked like it was recently scraped, between the road and a tomato field. This is just east of the upper-middle class McMansion tract houses comprising Mace Ranch, which was the scene in the year 2000 of the developer deep-disking burrowing owl habitat without any notification. The city is suing the developer, but such actions are most likely far too late for the population of the birds.
21 June 03
Kindred
On Thursday I met up with Beth from Cassandra Pages on my way to a family visit. We both looked at each other as though we couldn’t quite believe it. I was in her place-the place she writes about, thinks about, grows, breathes, inhabits. It was an honor. New England this year is lush and outrageous-the pine trees explode in yellow clouds of pollen and the next rainshower coagulates it on the windshields of cars in a sulphur-like glop. I saw a common loon on a nest on the way over.
Above is a photo of the two of us looking at the Ecotone Wiki and posting a joint thing, which I never even do with Numenius—felt like stirring up the dynamic of a 60s commune, in a way.
20 June 03
Red Planet in the Morning
In two months time, on August 27, Mars will be closer to Earth than in any time in the past 59,619 years. Every two years, Mars is favorably placed for observing, being on the same side of the Sun as we are, and this time around we are approaching a record-setting opposition of Mars. Now is the time to start watching in a telescope the lead-up to this event, as the planet, rising in the early morning, is already 60% of its maximum apparent size in the sky.
Getting up at 4 in the morning is not something I am wont to do, but for some reason I woke up at that time, so I got up, poked my nose outside to check the sky and wind conditions, and thought why not? I hauled the 7” reflector outside to get it cooling to ambient temperature, went back for a little bit of a doze, threw some clothes on, and started observing.
Telescopic observing is good exercise in the discipline of learning to see. Anybody expecting magazine-quality images in the eyepiece will be disappointed; visual details are instead subtle and take much patience to tease out. In the case of viewing planets, one is constantly battling atmospheric flickering (known as “poor seeing”), and one’s impression of surface detail gets built up over many tens of minutes of observing.
The conditions were good this morning—it was cool and the air was pretty still. I think such conditions are typical in the summer here, which bodes well for Mars-watching in the next couple of months. It’s getting up at that hour that’s the challenge. Above is a rendering based on a sketch I did at the eyepiece. The South Polar Cap was quite evident, as was a darkish area in the Southern Hemisphere.
Some critters were up too and kept me company. A coyote howled once at the passage of a freight train, and a western kingbird sung for a bit while it was still quite dark.