19 November 09
Incident at Mrak Hall
The headline news in the paper today is “UC headed to huge fee increases”, the story beginning “The financially hobbled University of California moved Wednesday to boost student fees by $2,500 as students staged raucous demonstrations across the state against the higher costs.” A couple times during the day through my office window I heard the sounds of marching students. It was evident when I rode by Mrak Hall, the campus administration building, in the evening to pick up the newspaper from the paper lock box that the excitement was just beginning. Lots of protesters outside the building, news crews, a helicopter overhead, and large numbers of police. Riding south from there I saw two police paddy wagons from the Yolo County Sheriff’s office poised to go into action. I listened to the campus radio channels over the course of the evening. Many arrests were made, but the violence seemed limited to one case of battery and several police cars getting their tires slashed.
The student fee situation is pretty horrible. This evening everyone was very good at their respective roles. The police were being business-like, the students being loud and demonstrative. Somehow though I think this energy needs to be directed elsewhere: blame the populace of California that has on the whole supported the cause of tax reform (read starve the government) ever since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. We could start by repealing that damned proposition.
14 November 09
Shearing Day at Meridian Jacobs
We went to the open house sheepshearing event at Meridian Jacobs, where 65+ sheep were being shorn on a chilly but sunny morning.
Shearing sheep is intensely physical work. Jacobs are small sheep but still plenty big enough to be trouble, and they have two or four horns, both male and female. The shearer was a focused young man with huge biceps and an impressive aura of calm. Sheep panic at the drop of a hat and he gently but firmly moved them around without panicking them further, taking maybe 90 seconds to relieve them of their fleeces.
I was impressed by his hide (sheep hide?) overshoes (at left). A lot of the work is done by your feet—controlling, moving, holding—and you don’t want to slip or hurt the sheep. The booties have to be special ordered from Australia.
The sheep suffered themselves to be turned, rotated, inverted, fleeced. The shearer needs horse-whisperer-type qualities, I think, at least this one seemed to have them. I was sorely tempted to buy a fleece, but I think I’ll wait till I get more experienced in spinning and figure out a way to heat enough soft water to process it. It’s a lot of work. And I don’t have those biceps…
ETA: the 25th Worldwide Sketchcrawl is this coming Saturday, November 21. Davis sketchers will meet at the Raptor Center at 9:30 and head into town around 11. Let me know if you’d like to come.
11 November 09
World's Best Place Wiki
That would be our very own Davis Wiki. Michael Andersen writing last week" for the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard comes up with “Six lessons from the world’s best local wiki”, discussing how the quirky origins of the Davis Wiki — developed by a couple of students in their spare time, seeded with 500 pages of good original content on the town — has led to such a large and massively useful site (it has 14,000 pages of content and gets 10,000 hits a day). He suggests that corporations for the most part have been really, really bad at managing sites with content for a locality coming from its denizens, and that folks getting into that business had best have a look at the Davis Wiki!
8 November 09
Sitting in the Sun, Sketching
Regular readers of Feathers of Hope and Bird by Bird know I do this a lot. Today, though, I did it with my mother and sister. We drove out to Booth Bay Harbor for lunch. It was so warm we sat outside to eat, enjoying a Vietnamese lunch in a place that fronts as a bakery (the donuts are very popular with the locals).
We sketched, we ate, we drove down inlets, we popped into Halcyon Yarns in Bath (a dream palace and unexpected as their website says they’re closed on Sundays).
It’s a simple pleasure, picking up a pen and sketching a common eider or a lobster boat or the blue bay with conifers edging down to the water, red barns, oaks past their peak.
I live very far away. I wish I didn’t…
4 November 09
Consolation In Defeat
The baseball season ended this evening in disheartening fashion with the Yankees convincingly beating the Phillies 7-3 to win the World Series, an event dreaded this year ever since the New York team pulled out of the doldrums of playing under 0.500 ball with a 9-game winning streak in the middle of May. We look for consolation in this time of loss:
- Perhaps it is karmic balance for having a Democrat in the White House again; when the Yankees last won the World Series in 2000 Clinton was still president.
- We didn’t have to witness would-be and perhaps future Commissioner of Baseball George W. Bush present the trophy to the winning Yankees. (Bush did however a couple days ago throw out the first ball at Game 3 of the Japan Series.)
- Baseball was never meant to be played in November: maybe this oddly late Series will convince the powers-that-be of baseball of that fact.
- A-Rod didn’t win the Series MVP award.
- I live far enough from their home base that I don’t have to put up with much gloating from Yankees fans.
- If September had gone better for the Giants and they had made it into the playoffs and then somehow snuck on through on the basis of stellar pitching from Cain, Lincecum, and Zito to win the NL championship, we didn’t have to just see the Giants being thrashed by the Yankees 4 games to nil, the Yankees outscoring the Giants by a total of 34 to 3 runs.
- There are only 15 or so weeks left until pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training!
3 November 09
Pain
I’ve been, like Jean, thinking about pain. In part because my mother and several other people around me have cancer and other conditions that are either always or occasionally sources of acute pain; another couple of people I know are pregnant and will at some inevitable point in the near future have to decide whether or not to try and lessen the pain of childbirth with medication; and a story I read about the end stages of a dog’s life in Japan. Working with vets who have the ability and power to prevent suffering, and to end an animal’s life when they can, I was curious about the cultural differences that would make this a different choice in Japan. From Butuki:
In general Japanese accept and suffer pain and suffering a lot more than westerners. Even for humans far fewer drugs are used for patients in pain and who are suffering; they believe that the natural things the body goes through is part of the healing process. People (and animals) are expected to accept pain as part of life. That’s why you rarely hear women screaming and cursing in a maternity ward, or men getting into fights on the baseball field when a pitcher hits a batter. It’s considered extremely childish and weak not to bear the pain.
As I was walking around the Fernando Botero show at the Berkeley Art Museum recently, seeing his Abu Ghraib series — the paintings staggering in their intensity, number, and stark visual exploration of human atrocity — I was struck by how closely human pain is probably linked to the fear of it. I’ve been bitten by a dog in the past, and it was a local pain, a reminder that it’s a good idea to keep your hands out of the way of dogs’ mouths, and I patched myself up and moved on. But if I had been afraid of dogs — deadly afraid of all dogs and what they were and could be, wolves and agents of demons — would the pain of the bite have been worse? I’m guessing, yes.
Torture is supposed to work as a method of obtaining information because the victim’s fear of pain is supposed to overwhelm his or her resolve to keep such information from getting into the hands of the torturer. Of course, such a strategy breaks down on even a cursory examination: in the main, the strong resist and the weak say anything. But it does, by soft rumor, spread fear through a population in much the same way “terrorism” does — it breaks with codes and rules that have been established as belonging to proper human interaction, even when that interaction involves killing “enemies.” Pain as weapon. Unpredictable pain as more terrible weapon. The result raises the stakes and makes sadism fair game in warfare, presumably not the intent of the Abu Ghraib perpetrators.
Although I’m impressed by the Japanese stoicism Butuki describes, I am grateful for the advances in medicine that make it possible for people (and animals) in agony to have some relief. Whether we’ve gone too far — chugging analgesics in order to be able to run marathons when in fact our body is telling us, quite sensibly, that we are inflicting serious damage to our skeletomuscular systems — is another blog post.
24 October 09
Roadkill On The Information Superhighway
No, this is not a reference to watching one’s unbacked-up data vanish forever off into the ether…
Rather, it’s to highlight a citizen science website some colleagues of mine have put together. This is the California Roadkill Observation System which allows you to enter observations of road-killed animals in California so that we can better understand what factors contribute to roadkill and then try to reduce these.
I tested out the system this morning and logged a poor jackrabbit that had been hit on the road I take to work. It’s straightforward to use, and has a helpful Google Maps interface for inputting the location.
18 October 09
Bikes, a Bride, a Big Boo-Boo
Yesterday was Foxy’s Fall Century, a fun bike ride of 100 miles, 100 K, or 50K out of Davis put on by the Davis Bike Club. We’ve been providing radio support for Bike Club rides pretty much since I got my license. Yesterday I was SAG 10 again and Numenius helped out in Net Control.
There were flats all day. I handed out many tubes. Seems like the puncture vine thorns got washed onto flooded areas of roads during Tuesday’s storm and ended up in tires. One woman had mended 4 flats and declared if she got another one she was heading in… don’t blame her! The weather, on the other hand, was perfect, warmish in the morning and just barely breaking 80 during the day (though it did get a bit muggy). No wind to speak of.
Two people who met at Foxy’s last year arrived in bow tie and tiara and got married on the course; I sagged in a guy who clipped a wheel and fell down in gravel just west of Winters. He was tough and would have carried on but his bike wasn’t up to it. After bringing him back I took Numenius with me west to do one final sweep.
Just by Lake Solano we were flagged down by a bunch of cyclists. Two were sitting down — always a good indication of trouble — and it turned out that a guy on the UC Davis race team had hit a pine cone and gone down, taking the guy on his wheel with him… Broken nose, probably, and blood everywhere. Ugh. We radioed in and waited for emergency services to arrive. Grateful of my Red Cross training, I want to do some more, and I definitely want to have more equipment in the car for first aid next time. We were lucky to be close to Winters and the guys responded right away (they were awesome, all volunteers) but sometimes you can’t count on that.
A great day. I love doing this! Numenius will be working on a tracker for us for the next one so we don’t have to snag one of Dave’s…
15 October 09
October Storm
The first big storm of the season was yesterday, unusually early in the fall. Davis got 2.94 inches of rain, mainly in the daytime. There was a new record low pressure set in Sacramento for the month of October — 29.39 inches. I rode off to work into my first downpour in a while and promptly crashed my bike. Not so fun. Are we due for a big El Niño year this time around? Stay tuned.
7 October 09
Fibered Up...
We visited Dixon Lambtown on Saturday, a wonderful festival a mere eight miles from home. We met and petted alpacas and chinchillas. I learned how to spin worsted, Navajo, and long draw, and how to prepare fibers for all of these things. We saw the sheep to shawl competition. I overdosed, I think, on fuzzy yumminess.
But not quite, because this Spinners Giveaway definitely caught my attention. All you have to do to enter is say a bad thing and a good thing about moving. (Hard pressed to find a good thing to say about it, but I did come up with something.)