10 June 03
The Stink on Campus
This isn’t corruption in the administration building, but rather the blooming of a rare “corpse flower” (Amorphophallus titanum) in the campus botanical conservatory. The rarely cultivated plant from Sumatra gets its name from the strong fly-attracting odor of rotting flesh it emits when it flowers, which only happens every 10 or so years. This is the first corpse flower to bloom in Northern California.
Our plant in question, nicknamed “Ted the Titan”, was raised from seed planted in 1995, and the flower bud first appeared around 15 May of this year. The bloom is a very transient event, and the flower lasts only about 24 to 36 before it collapses. Also, the stench only lasts about eight hours. The bloom was predicted to start around 11 June, but it was two days early, starting yesterday around noon. We all went over to the greenhouse a little after six that evening, where there was a small crowd gawking at the 3 1/2 foot tall flower, pictured at right. The stench, which I thought was something like rotting cabbages at the bottom of a compost pile, wasn’t overwhelming at that point, but would become so later in the evening. Ernesto Sandoval, the conservatory curator, was full of parental pride, giving interviews to the press on his cell phone, and making sure everyone got a good look and smell.
Addendum:There’s a RealOne webcam for the plant here. Also, the Sacramento Bee has an amusing editorial cartoon featuring the plant.
9 June 03
The Worth of a Blog
A Brazilian blogging friend recently told us that, last year, there was a service offered in Brazil’s burgeoning blogosphere (estimated at more than 300,000 strong, most using Blogger) where someone would leave a comment on your weblog—for a fee. Not just a “me too,” or “right on,” or trite comment (see Fred First’s chuckler on this, where he discusses comment anxiety), but something of substance.
Apparently that didn’t fly, because now there’s another enterprising Brazilian movement afoot: “I’ll leave a comment on your blog if you leave a comment on mine, and in less than a month you’ll have five thousand comments…” Comment CHAIN LETTERS?
Gosh. I guess I have a different idea of what makes someone’s writing worth reading. We were more than a little amused, then, to dicover we’d been listed in Blogshares. Our blogworth is apparently $2,002.51 as of 6:00 pm today. The value seems to be calculated by, among other things, inbound links, which will surely exacerbate the “please blogroll me” pleadings. If we add the Blogshares logo onto our homepage, we’ll apparently be “verified” and able to trade.
An interesting measure of one’s existence. Insider place blog trading, anyone?
8 June 03
Landscape in K-Band Radar
People key in on vastly divergent elements of the landscape. This is one of these facts that makes studying place so fascinating and challenging. With that in mind, I was bemused to discover that there’s an online exchange forum for information about speed traps. Driving fast through an unfamilar area? Go to the site to learn where you need to be careful. Is there a particularly nasty speed trap on your own commute? Write it up and submit it through their contribution form.
The town of Davis doesn’t cut a very good impression with these contributors. The entry for Davis says: “this whole town is a speed trap. Several tickets issued for 1-2 miles over the limit. Whole town is 25 except for 2-3 roads.” And a follow-up comment reads: “Not only due you have to watch your mile over the speed limit, but the parking tickets are HERENDOUS!! [sic] Even if the security knows your car!! No permit… TICKET!!!”
Sigh. My bicycle commute—over the creek, past the horse stables, and under the freeway where the rough-winged swallows nest—is in a very different world.
7 June 03
An Evening with the River Cats
We went to the Sacramento River Cats game this evening. The River Cats are the Triple-A team for the Oakland A’s, and they were playing the Albuquerque Isotopes, whose parent club is the Florida Marlins. I had to go watch a team named the Isotopes: aside from being a joke from The Simpsons (in one episode Homer had to stop his favorite team, the Springfield Isotopes, from moving to Albuquerque), it’s in the family—my father in his days as a nuclear chemist was the co-author of several editions of the Table of Isotopes. Anyway, the team has a neat logo, so I picked up a hat.
The River Cats played well, and won 6-2. Bobby Crosby, their young shortstop, went 2-for-4 with 3 RBIs. Since the A’s shortstop, Miguel Tejada, will probably not be staying with the A’s next season (he becomes a free agent, and the A’s don’t have enough money to keep him), there may be forthcoming advancement opportunities for Crosby. Eric Hiljus, who’s bounced between the A’s and the River Cats a lot, pitched for the win.
Raley Field is a great little stadium, and Sacramento fans, generally starved for sports, have really taken to the team. The game was sold out this evening, with 14,611 in attendance. Minor league ball has these endearing sillinesses you never find in the majors—tonight’s favorite was The Dancing Usher Guy.
And what River Cats game is complete without the antics of their mascot, Dinger, shown at right.
6 June 03
Commencement is my Life
I was wearing a T-shirt today that said “Commencement is my Life”; I silkscreened the calligraphy onto a white shirt a couple of years ago. Among other things, I’m responsible for making sure that 500 graduate students and their faculty go across the stage next Thursday in the Recreation Hall at UC Davis in an orderly manner; that the 70 or so volunteers show up and make this happen; that there are enough chairs, not too close together to impede movement nor too far apart to overrun the space; that the faculty who say they are going to show up to get their PhD students hooded in fact do so and go to the correct side of the building; that the food for the volunteers, food for the orchestra, food for the police, and food for the guests and students gets to where it needs to be in time; that students have their academic dress on the right way around and the correct names on their reader cards and an adequate pronunciation guide of their name in case it’s needed; that guests not place themselves and others in mortal danger by hanging over parapets with tripods. I’ve never been a mother but I imagine this is what it’s like to have several children under the age of five.
And yet….
It’s not quite true. Commencement isn’t really my life. Certainly, the graduation ceremony does occupy an inordinate amount of my time at work these days, but it will be over soon. To be honest, I was tossing and turning at three this morning, but it wasn’t because of commencement stress; I was mentally composing an essay in response to our first collective “Bloggers of Place” assignment (see the Ecotone Wiki, Collective Blogs). I did get up. I did write the essay. And now I can sit and watch it percolate (it’s not due until June 15, but who knows what my life will look like between now and then), while the last few stragglers (“I don’t really want to walk at graduation but my mother wants a picture”) beg for late, atrociously late, admission, while the details of who hands out programs (which of course omit the names of the atrociously late) and where the sign language interpreters stand and what the Dean says (which depends on what the Provost says) and where the bigwigs sit and what position the flowers take and how to explain to the conductor that no, we can’t have the orchestra fill the entire auditorium, because there are nine hundred people that have to file past it—take up my day to the point of breaking.
I’ve been thinking hard about place. My heart has been in Venice today.
5 June 03
Marking the Sprint
I was cycling the other day past the Tremont Cemetery when I noticed a series of pavement markings every 100 meters: “400…300…200…100…Finish”. And after that, the marking depicted at right, followed by “Nice Job”.
Somebody’s doing time trials out on Tremont Road. The local racers have in the past done Wednesday evening time trials out on Putah Creek Road, along the usual bicycling route between Davis and Winters, where there is a similar series of markings. But the markings on Tremont are new—perhaps they’ve changed location, or it’s a different group of cyclists.
Cycling is, needless to say, an ideal way to explore the landscape. But not when you’ve got your nose to the bike stem in the last 100 meters of a time trial sprint!
4 June 03
Gandhi’s Way
The UC Davis campus embarked on an ambitious but very successful project last year, namely, to have students, staff, faculty, and the community read the same book and then talk about it. The chosen book was The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. Dozens of events were organized around this book in Fall 2002, culminating in the visit to Davis by the author and some of the protagonists of her book.
This was always going to be a hard act to follow, but in the end Gandhi’s Way, by Mark Juergensmeyer, a UC Santa Barbara professor of sociology, was selected as the project for Fall 2003. Published over 15 years ago, it calls itself a “handbook of non-violent conflict resolution”—a book whose time has surely come. We are hoping it will help campus and community members learn to welcome, instead of avoid, conflict, and think creatively about ways to bring about change that works for both parties. The Davis Enterprise ran a nice write-up about this project on Sunday.
3 June 03
New York Songlines
Jim Naureckas offers a set of New York Songlines, pathways through the city annotated with stories for each block. The name, made famous in a book by Bruce Chatwin, comes from the elaborate mythological song cycles Australian aborigines would learn to enable them to navigate across a harsh landscape.
He feels that in their hurry to get to their destinations without noticing what lies between, New Yorkers have lost their sense of place, and writes:
[This] is a shame, because New York has its own giants, heroes and monsters who left their marks and their names on the land around us. If we learn their stories which are written on our streets and avenues, we’ll have a much better chance of knowing where we’ve been, and where we’re going.
Does thinking of a landscape as narrative, rather than as cartography, increase one’s sense of place?
2 June 03
Duck Days in Davis
On my way home from work tonight along the Arboretum, a fat and slightly dingy Norway rat ran in front of my bicycle wheel. I often see them around but I can never quite get used to it. They are superb swimmers, highly adaptable, and they have an inexhaustible supply of food from the well-meaning duck-feeders. They are here to stay.
The duck-feeders fall into three basic types: most common are families with young children who come to the lake at the Arb, sit on the very well-fertilized grass, and toss bags and bags of bread to the ducks, mostly mallards with every possible intergrade hybridity imaginable (an untidy bunch). Second are the sporadic “dotties”—folks, normally older, who talk to themselves as often as the ducks, and are mostly tolerated as benign, not-quite-there, members of supervised-care facilities.
The third type is the most frightening. I’ll call her Guerrilla Girl. She rides her bike up and down the length of the Arboretum daily with a black carrier sack full of grain, which she deposits in strategic locations where “her” ducks know her and fight over themselves to start gobbling before the rats can get to it (a futile gesture, of course). Her eyes are glassy and her jaw is set in a square grimace, a defiant warning to the world not to jeopardize her Right To Feed the Ducks. She reminds me of early 1970s Trotskyites or Roger Clemens—the expressions are identical.
I did make the mistake once of gently pointing out to Guerrilla Girl that she was feeding the rats more than the ducks; that the ducks had plenty of food anyway; that their overpopulation in this artificial oxbow lake was raising the fecal coliform count to lethal levels; that they were becoming vectors of all kinds of disease which they would pass along to other ducks (not to mention other birds). I was told in among the tirade of invective that the University could only get rid of the rats by poisoning them, and that she knew these ducks, she followed their movements throughout the seasons, and that they had their own patterns (I could hardly disagree with this: they start drooling when they see Guerrilla Girl’s black bag from half a mile away). She nearly killed us last week by squealing her bike dementedly into a right-angle so we wouldn’t hit a heavily gravid female that was heading down to the water.
I’ve never, unlike bsag, been mugged by a duck, so I don’t feel a personal hostility toward these avian misfits. In fact, I’m kind of impressed they’ve managed to win such an ardent champion to their cause. Laughing all the way to their holes are the rats, who emerge at dusk to reap the rewards of this crusade.
1 June 03
Watering Valley Oaks
Our neighbor Jim has taken the initiative to start a valley oak restoration project along the UC Davis Putah Creek Riparian Reserve. For several months he has turned his carport into an oak nursery—collecting and germinating acorns, and growing the seedlings in pairs of half-gallon juice cartons duct-taped end-to-end together. Then with the help of a few volunteers and somebody to assist with the two-person auger, he planted about 80 or 90 seedlings along the north side of Putah Creek, in two locations.
Summer is upon us—it was well in the nineties today, and we don’t expect to see rain again until at least October, so the plan is to water the seedlings every couple of weeks over the summer. This, it turns out, is a major project. Today was the kickoff watering session, and about a dozen volunteers showed up. Each oak seedling got five gallons of water, hauled in buckets quite laboriously from the creek. I’ll estimate we shifted about a ton-and-a-half of water in our three-hour long effort. We also engaged in a bit of weed-whacking, trying to keep the mulched circle around each seedling clear of star thistle and other nasties. At right is a photo of the bucket brigade.