29 May 09
Going to Meet the Makers
We’re off to the Maker Faire in San Mateo tomorrow morning. This is the annual gathering of creative types who make stuff — kind of like Burning Man with a point, but without the dust, wind, and gratuitous nudity.
I’m going to look for the spinners, the bookbinders, the printers. Numenius has his own agenda and we’ll be taking radios to coordinate.
The Shy Turtle is a good example: using technology to teach children how to respect nature.
29 May 09
Fivefold Pestilence
Don’t ask us to save the world. We are now 0-5 in games of Pandemic. This is a cooperative game from two to four players who form a team who try to rid the world of four nasty diseases before they do in much of humanity. The game turns out to be very hard to win. In the last game we played we eradicated the disease threatening North America and Europe, but got felled by cascading outbreaks of a second disease in the Middle East. Finally, an unrelated outbreak in Santiago, Chile spelled our doom.
27 May 09
Gardening as a Board Game?
Scenario: you have some of the finest soil in the country (30 feet of loam with silt, an old flood plain now spared from flooding by a somewhat compromised levee and decades of illegal water diversion), though the soil contains almost no organic matter (something you can remedy by getting truckloads of horse manure and bedding from the horse barn across the road and working it in; the compost pile you tend assiduously is never, ever enough). Your climate is extreme Mediterranean. The landlord has said you can use a triangular plot with 12+ hours of sun exposure but that is overrun with weeds and ancient grape vines put in maybe 30 years ago which now host a strapping colony of ground squirrels (the landlord’s only request is that you put in a large assortment of sweet curcubits, such as melons, muskmelons, and watermelons, all of which require copious space). Other creatures willing to eat everything you put in the ground are pocket gophers, jackrabbits, cottontails, introduced wild turkeys and the usual earwigs and slugs after a wet spring (we haven’t technically had a wet spring but the timing of our two big rains has conspired to produce a bumper crop), aphids and other beauties like the tomato hornworm, plus Zonotrichia sparrows in winter.
You are given 100 yards of chicken wire, 12 T poles, assorted seeds which, if they bear fruit, will include ratatouille fixings and then some, an inflatable snake to deter birds (ha!), and a copy of Sunset Western Garden. Toxic chemicals are forbidden (don’t look at what they’re putting on the adjacent alfalfa field), but you can use cayenne, garlic, fish oil, and any concoctions made from them, if it makes you feel better. You are to observe the time-honored principles of not planting the same vegetable in the same spot for at least three years.
Your challenge is to get as much as you can to a) germinate (1 point per plant), b) get more than two sets of leaves before it gets eaten by insects and molluscs (2 points), c) encourage pest predators (in this case coyotes, ladybirds, etc.) (3 points per creature eaten, except for aphids, which are 3 points per 1,000), d) flower (4 points per plant), set fruit (5 points), and e) make it into your kitchen after it ripens but before it gets eaten by some creature (remember, ground squirrels can smell exactly when a cherry tomato is at peak; you can’t). You lose points for rotting stems and fruit, infestations of toxic weeds, insufficient or too much watering, and every zucchini that grows over 6” long.
You win the game when you have successfully cooked a ratatouille for eight people in the solar cooker (which will take at least three rounds).
26 May 09
Black Stone, White Stone
My rediscovered interest in board games has not abated. We’ve been playing lots of games of Carcassonne lately. Today on a trip to Berkeley we stopped by the friendly local game store and picked up a couple of Carcassonne expansions as well as a copy of Pandemic. I don’t wander very long in this gaming direction without contemplating learning the ultimate board game — go. Usually this takes the form of downloading a computer AI version of the game and practicing against it on a 9 × 9 board, routinely getting thrashed. But that is because I am exceptionally lousy at this point. One of the refreshing things about go is that unlike chess, computers aren’t very good at the game. A reasonably experienced amateur is better than the best of the computer programs. It’s a long way to go before I become reasonably experienced, however. Yesterday online I played my first game against another human, someone who was also an absolute beginner, and even won, which I suppose is a good start. I’m still worse than 99% of the people who play on that server though. It’s a long road of study — will I start travelling that way?
22 May 09
A Million Drawings
World Drawing Day is coming up… June 6th, help us put one million drawings online! They don’t have to be masterpiece: go out and sketch and have a blast. Then scan and post your drawings, and report them.
I may user this occasion to start my new sketchbook. I’ve been thinking about what to do with it. Time to stop thinking and start drawing…
21 May 09
Even The Petals Are Edible
Our guava bushes are blooming profusely!
17 May 09
Burning
Like this, he said.
A stone circle first
then paper (FT’s best)
then twigs then kindling
then, when that’s caught,
a log.
And another:
a teepee or crossways.
A path for the air.
Camping chairs shifting forward then back
a dance with the cold and
the size of the fire
the kind of wood
(oak’s best, well seasoned)
and how many clothes
we’d lugged into
which Castilian landscape.
Bottles surrounded us
(Chinchon’s good, but best
with coñac).
The bonfire beacon
summoned
shepherds and in pairs, guardias,
and frozen, parched hikers:
all offered a copa
and given a smoke.
Those fires: the cracking and
smoke and bane of
scorpions, spiders, the beasts
that emerged from their midst:
swallowing, omnomming
the night. My youth smells like this.
But the first time —
when I had just learned
to read —
that time, when we walked half a block,
he and I, with our tent and two bags
and the matchbox that held
“cosy” and “warm”
The dry thistles caught and
he beat them: slap! thwack!
the bag snuffing the life
yet there was the mock, the crackling
flames, rebirthing themselves:
That time, I saw something bigger
than Dad
and learned fear.
Ten years
since the flames took the flesh
off his bones
and consumed it all:
fire bigger than Dad —
the land cracks,
the breeze lifts,
and it’s
re-licking its
lips.
17 May 09
Riders in the Heat
Today we did radio support for the 40th running of the Davis Double Century, which always makes for a long day, both for us and for the riders. And it got hot: the temperature hit 99 degrees here in Davis. This year we split up assignments — Pica drove the course as a sag vehicle, and I spent all day at start/finish working as radio net control. There are always crises when one sets out to work such events; our started last night when Pica discovered the car wouldn’t start since the battery had been drained after the interior lights had been knocked on. We hooked the battery charger I usually use to charge my 12-volt SLA batteries for the radios and let the car battery charge overnight. Happily, the car started in the morning, and the battery got plenty of charging over the day. And then there was the issue with our mobile radio whose mike now wants to stick open. This is still unresolved, but didn’t end up being much of an issue on the course.
Pica drew the luck of arriving on the scene at the first and I think most serious accident of the day — a tandem in a descent hit a pothole and both riders got thrown. The stoker was unconscious for a little bit, and both riders ended up being transported to a hospital in Napa by air ambulance. Fortunately, the riders weren’t that seriously injured, and they were discharged later in the afternoon. I meanwhile at net control had to deal with lots of reports coming in all at once — such pileups occur in dribs and drabs. I’m glad the radio ops out on the the course are patient and don’t mind repeating things.
It’s a lot of fun working these events, but we’re going to have a mellow day tomorrow.
12 May 09
Rhétorique Française
I am very happy to be back in touch with an old friend and wonderful translator from my Harvard Press days, Art Goldhammer, and even more so to learn that he has a blog, French Politics. It’s a great way to follow gallic happenings, which I admit I haven’t been, much. (I really wish there were a counterpart for Spain, and if anyone knows of one, in Spanish or English, please let me know.)
Today there’s a link to an article by Jean Daniel of the Nouvel Observateur on his recent luncheon meeting with Nicolas Sarkozy. This is quality, elegant writing, and reveals, as Art points out, a nuanced series of layers in the French President which I found surprising. (Why? I mean, nobody can argue he’s not a clever bastard.)
Nuanced he may be, but Sarkozy doesn’t seem to tire of the sound of his own voice, and the quote in the article I thought most telling about his character, about his vision of his place in history, and which he apparently uses to justify his “maverick” independence, is this one: « Les grandes choses, on les décide seul car le consensus interdit l’audace. Reste que les grandes réformes, comme la décolonisation ou l‘élection au suffrage universel, sont nécessairement impopulaires au départ puis qu’elles modifient le cours des choses. » (The really big things, you decide on alone because consensus precludes audacity. So the great reforms, such as decolonisation or universal suffrage, are necessarily unpopular at first, because they change the course of things. Sorry if my translation’s not as good as Art’s would be, but you get the idea.)
This sort of quote would in years past have found its way into British A-level, Oxbridge entrance, or university examination papers, with the simple addition of the word “Discuss.” We’d have been expected to provide copious (but not too many!) historical examples along with memorized quotes for bonus points and provided a series of pros and cons, plonking down in the end on one side or the other, trying all the while not to make it look too pedestrian. Our French counterparts, though, would have been expected to provide, in addition to such arguments, an elegance of phrasing and structure.
I bet Sarko aced these kinds of exam questions.
11 May 09
Bistro Nagini
At left is the sign for a rather poncy restaurant in downtown Davis. There are some things you shouldn’t do to threes.