8 December 09
Archeology
We cleared off the counter this evening, uncovering, in no particular order:
A DVD of Return of the King (Extended Edition)
An emery board
A sample (2 capsules) of raspberry-flavored Ultimate Omega, which we each ate one of
A cat brush, loaded with diatomaceous earth
Yarns of different lengths
Random thread
Buttons shaped as teapots and cups and saucers
An aluminium wingnut and washer and single washer
A box of kleenex
About 80 end-of-year solicitations
Stitch markers, different colors, materials, functions
A cork
A shrivelled tomatillo
A bottle of Estro Soy capsules
Knitting patterns for twined gloves and a lace shawl
An Exacto knife
A blue-and-white pottery ink pot
Mail from at least 5 months ago
Grains of rice
A stack of Artist Trading Cards
An accordion-fold book of sketches of a wedding we went to a year ago in August…
Sheesh. We should tidy a bit more often.
26 November 09
Thanksgiving Mix
Having taken care of all of our familial Thanksgiving duties a week-and-a-half ago, we were free to do what we much prefer for the holiday, to have a mellow day on our own. These past several years we’ve had a little tradition on Thanksgiving to go on a walk up Mix Canyon Road, which is a steep road that goes right up to the crest of the Vaca Mountains about 25 miles west of here. We never make it into a big hike, rather we just enjoy being in the canyon in late fall with the chestnut-colored buckeyes rolling down on the ground and the bigleaf maples in color. Alas Pica didn’t make it a hike at all today: she slightly wrenched her knee looking at a Nuttall’s woodpecker within 50 yards of the car, so she stayed put and drew while I walked up the canyon a ways where I was lucky to see a couple of pileated woodpeckers.
We wanted to have the traditional Thanksgiving meal of going out for Chinese food — I was especially craving hot-and-sour soup — but none of the Chinese places we looked at in Davis were open. Happily, the Nepali restaurant Kathmandu downtown on G Street was open so we now have a new tradition of having palak paneer and saag chana masala thali plates on this day.
23 November 09
25th Sketchcrawl
![Peeps, watercolor]()http://www.magpienest.org/images/1138.jpg "Peeps, watercolor")
In honor of the fifth anniversary of the Worldwide Sketchcrawl movement, we headed out on Saturday morning at 9:30 to the California Raptor Center where they were holding an Open House, moved on to Mishka’s Cafe, on to lunch at Cafe Bernardo, out to the Yolo Bypass for a blackbird study, ending up at the Davis Library and a warm house where I drew Charlie. We had hoped to run into Pete Scully of Urban Sketchers fame but missed him.
More sketches can be found here. Unfortunately Numenius seems to have caught a cold from one of the kids we were sitting next to in the Raptor Center classroom during the presentation….
Bird sketches can be seen on Bird by Bird.
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.