Shadow of Pink Chocolate

A long day for us — we volunteered as radio hams for a new bicycling event along the American River Parkway called the Princess Promenade. This event was designed to encourage women and girls to ride confidently along the 32-mile long bike trail which runs from Old Sacramento to Folsom Lake. There were three options to the ride — a little five-mile jaunt, a thirty-mile round trip, and finally a sixty-mile round trip doing almost the entire length of the trail.

Pica’s role was as a shadow for the event organizer Janaé — she kept Janaé in communication with the radio base station at the start/finish point. My job was to patrol one section of the route as a bicycle mobile ham. I started off with the little jaunt to the east and then made three trips from the start/finish down to the Nimbus Fish Hatchery, covering about 30 miles total. The last such run was to shepherd the tail-end rider home, who turned out to be a celebrity, the reigning Mrs. California. The story was she’d hadn’t been on a bike since age 15 or so but heard of the event some weeks back and decided to do the 60-mile option. She had no trouble completing it either.

Pink was definitely the color theme of the event. Pica was dressed in the pink t-shirt given out for the ride, a pink child’s tiara she picked up yesterday, plus her radio headset. Along the way she got ‘blinged’ with a sprinking of glitter. At the start/finish there was also the most decadent thing I’ve ever seen, a chocolate fountain. Many baskets of strawberries were consumed as dipping material. Those things must be the devil to clean, though.

Animeme

Well, folks, on the recommendation of two readers I’ve immersed myself in War and Peace. I may be a while and blogging may be sporadic.

Rana tagged me for this one a while ago, sorry to delay. To tell the truth I haven’t been very inspired by it. But here’s a go.

An interesting animal I had

Not so many interesting animals. The usual budgie, dog, cat, hamster, guinea-pig. But Numenius and I do name all kinds of critters that live near us (many of these names are on our ketubah, forming two domes over our marriage vows). I suppose the most interesting was a pair of hooded orioles that nested in a banana tree in the cabin we lived in above Santa Barbara. We called them Horace and Sally.

An interesting animal I ate

A goose. Not just any goose, a goose that had been force-fed and whose liver had been engorged to the point of bursting and was then served as a delicacy on New Year’s Eve in Paris. For the nth time, the collected French guests deplored this barbarity and then tucked in with gusto. I became a vegetarian that night.

An interesting animal in the Museum

Oh, without question, the Labrador ducks at the Museum of Natural History in New York. They have over half the specimens known to exist anywhere.

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal

I buried a sparrow. Alive. I was four. It still haunts me. I became a birder that day.

An interesting animal in its natural habitat

The male wild boar that surprised me as I was crouching behind a bush in the shadow of a moorish castle in Spain. “Natural habitat” is stretching it a bit, but then it often is. There are lots of animals I could insert here but this one was especially memorable…

Next up? Anyone who’d like to be…

Lure Of Soy

The Department of Food Science and Technology here frequently sets up five-minute taste studies outside of the Coffeehouse, the main eatery in the student union. I lingered a little bit too long looking at their sign advertising soy product tasting and got roped in by one of their enthusiastic student workers.

First, the form — age, sex, status and department on campus. How often do I eat soy products? Every day or nearly so. What sort? I check three things: tofu, soy milk (right now I am addicted to unsweetened chocolate soy milk on my breakfast porridge), and soy-based veggie burgers (which was dinner last night).

Then the taste test. Three soy bars, apple, mango, and berry: rate them 1 to 10. I am partial to such bars, but these were dry, so overall I gave them a 6 (“like slightly”). I think the food technologists need to go back to work on those bars.

Tomorrow’s dinner is tofu-cilantro with rice. And we have lots of chili and green peppers from the garden. Yum.

Reading "Unread" Books

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users (as of yesterday). Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. (Via Steve Rubio’s online life)

What have I learned? That my knowledge of the grand Russian 19th century novel is poor; that I’ve never given Dickens much of a chance, and I’ve never given any later English Victorian novelists much of one either; that I’ve deliberately never given Ayn Rand any kind of chance at all, and I’m sure that’s not going to change; that I’ve never been able to stand Hardy (I really, really tried, read a lot of it, just get bogged down); that I really ought to try the Iliad and the Aeneid since I liked the Odyssey so much; that I ought to finally go through the Canterbury Tales since a copy’s sitting on my bedside table. Also, that I have a psychological or cultural aversion to starting a book and not finishing it even if I’m not really enjoying it. (I finished Don Quixote because I had to for college; I read Moby Dick in a public garden in Santa Barbara in 1996 and loved it but would have hated it in school; I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance before I had any business doing so but I kept going, not sure why, since I’m sure I didn’t get most of it; that “seminal” books of the American high school experience have mostly escaped me. I’d love to hear if folks think I should have a go at any of the unmarked books on here… Oh, I think Jared Diamond should be among them. And I usually read anything by Margaret Atwood, not sure how I missed the Blind Assassin. And I’m absolutely unsure about how I missed Northanger Abbey…)

I finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell yesterday. Hilarious that it’s the first entry.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and prejudice
Jane Eyre
A tale of two cities
The brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and peace
Vanity fair
The time traveler’s wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The kite runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great expectations
American gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales (64)
The historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath
The poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & demons
The inferno
The satanic verses
Sense and sensibility
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s travels
Les misérables
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The prince
The sound and the fury
Angela’s ashes : a memoir
The god of small things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The scarlet letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud atlas
The confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger abbey
The catcher in the rye
On the road
The hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s rainbow
The Hobbit
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The three musketeers

Butterfly Deity

Yesterday we went on a butterfly walk in the Arboretum led by the illustrious Art Shapiro. Professor Shapiro is a cult figure here; he is probably the best naturalist on campus, and traipses around his 11 butterfly study sites in central California every two weeks his only means of transport being graduate students who have been recruited as chauffeurs.

It was a gentle walk through the Arb and the family student housing garden plots to the southeast. He sees a tiny thing flitting at eight paces. “Acmon blue”. No binoculars, no net or anything. We also were introduced to the butterfly-lord technique of catching butterflies — hand goes slowly out, middle fingers scissored, and snag! — butterfly gets pinned between two fingers. My favorite butterfly learned on the walk — the pygmy blue, which is indeed tiny. And who knew that perennial pepperweed (Lepidium latifolium), which is a noxious invasive weed in California, is an excellent butterfly host and is in fact edible, in an arrugula sort of way.

Valencià

Numenius returned from his geospatial conference full of tales about the Open Source work being done by a group of geeks from Valencia and showed me the website for the Generalitat’s (regional government’s) geographic information system, which is very impressive and which is available in Valenciano (or Valencià) , Spanish (Castilian), Basque, Gallego, Catalan, English, Italian, French, German, and Portuguese.

Valenciano isn’t a language; it’s a dialect of Catalan. It’s spoken widely on the eastern/southeast coast of Spain but never was a written language (there is no literature in Valenciano, just Catalan; the de-facto official novelist of the Valencian region, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, wrote in Castilian). The people of the region have more in common culturally with their Murcia neighbors to the south and their La Mancha neighbors to the west than with the clever, proud, progressive Catalans to the north. There’s a certain amount of mutual distrust and disdain. (Not unlike that felt by both the French and the Dutch for the Belgians, for instance, with the prickliness that ensues on the part of the Belgians.)

My sister was married for a while to a Valenciano and lived in Valencia, spending time at weekends and holidays in his village in Alicante. Joaquín’s grandmother spoke Spanish with difficulty but was chatty in Valencià. At the time of the creation of regional autonomies post-Franco, when they married, I remember one member of the enormous lunch party (this is paella country, and no paella is ever cooked that serves fewer than 18 people, because it’s a lot of work and you have to make it count), bemoaning the forced introduction of Valenciano into the school curriculum, because now the schoolkids were going to have to waste their time on the (implied worthless) Catalan authors at the expense of Cervantes, Góngora, Garcilaso de la Vega, Calderón, and the rest. He was grumpy in a particularly jovial Spanish way that involves a lot of shouting and gesticulating over lunch which is amicable and ultimately tolerant. It has certainly stuck with me…

I like it that this language is now in official use by Open Source geekery. It feels fresh, subversive, and very cool. Almost as subversive and cool as the persistence of the medieval (or possibly even Roman) Tribunal de las Aguas, the court held outside the Cathedral on Thursday at noon every week since, that decides the fate of irrigation in the region and punishes those that take more than their alloted share, a court that is presided over by judges dressed in black.

The Non-Moleskine Moleskine

We find Moleskine notebooks to be well-put together, but too much of a cult object to go off and purchase them. Fortunately, there are a good set of imitators on the market now. Here are some I’ve acquired in the past couple of months. At top is my sketch-a-day notebook, with a couple of drawings from my trip this week to Victoria, British Columbia. At bottom is another landscape format notebook I picked up at our latest visit to the art store. At left the notebook I was taking notes in at this week’s conference. And at right a freebie I picked up during said conference.

Raven

I was out in the garden this morning, noting that the pocket gophers have now developed a taste for green beans (in addition to tomatoes, garlic, okra, any kind of squash, etc.) and wondering how best to deal with this next year when I heard the unmistakable croak of a raven.

We’ve lived in this house since 1999; this is the first raven recorded as a “yard” bird…

YouTube At Two Inches

I am now in Victoria, BC attending a conference this week on open source GIS. Pica has this amazing gizmo that is perfect for such trips. This is a Nokia N800 internet tablet. It’s a little bigger than a file card and does wireless: web browsing, email, and anything else you might want to do on the net. I’m blogging this lying on my back.in bed, holding it in my left hand. And I can catch up on movie trailers too:nothing like watching tte one for “Sleuth” on a two-inch wide window!

Democrats Want My Opinion? Not Really.

A survey arrived in the mail yesterday from the Department of Processing and Tabulation, Democratic Party Headquarters. It’s the stuff of nightmares: the way the questions are framed makes me wonder whether they aren’t just dying to hand the whole baby along with the bathwater back to the Republicans in 2008.

Consider, for example:

Which of the following would strengthen our nation’s economy?
_ More big tax breaks for wealthiest Americans (clearly, we’re not supposed to check THAT one)
_ Targeted middle-class tax relief (tipping our hand a bit, here, aren’t we?)
_ Both (not likely to be answered by anyone except by mistake but hey, that’s statistically as significant as “neither,” below)
_ Neither (hmmm… almost rhymes with “spoiler”)

If you check “neither,” there’s no way to say what you think might be appropriate in terms of “strengthening” the economy (always an assumed “good” thing, like “growth”). Like maybe weaning ourselves off this disastrous institutional perceived link between “consumer confidence” (read rampant spending on shit we don’t need based on lies and paper, debt and borrowing, all of it unhealthy and unsustainable) and “economic strength.” Like maybe taxing gasoline at appropriate levels to modify behavior because we’re going to need to modify it at some point, control of Iraqi oilfields or no, Arctic drilling or no, whether the democrats or the republicans or the half the country that votes or the other half that doesn’t like it or not, and they won’t like it, so they certainly won’t be “encouraged” to (one of the survey questions) by mere political cant.

If I had to make a decision today, I was asked, which of the following would I like to see running in the general election? Looking the names before me on the paper, Biden Clinton Dodd Edwards Kucinich Obama Richardson, I had to swallow hard. I looked at Kucinich, dismissed the notion as romantic fantasy. I nearly checked Obama. Romantic fantasy again. I removed my hand.

In the end, whatever they say about grass roots and listening to the “base,” it’s going to be the one with the war chest, with the big democratic machine behind her, that wins the nomination. (Just below the names was a place to check just how much money I was willing to contribute to the cause, in case we were in any doubt about this.) The lip-service paid to wanting my opinion is lip-service only; they don’t care about the progressive agenda. Our questions aren’t even on the survey form. (Like just f’rinstance the connection between poverty and race and how to address that, or the connection between justice and race and how to address THAT. If I were black and had been made homeless by Hurricane Katrina, say, or if I were black and lived in Jena, Louisiana, and had been sent this survey, I’d have assumed, completely correctly, that it was being misdelivered. It doesn’t apply. N/A.)

I believe Hillary Clinton is unelectable. Her supporters still seem to have no idea quite how much she is hated and despised by the very constituency she’s trying so hard to court (who, exactly? NASCAR fathers’ wives? because it certainly ain’t me), tip-toeing around the hard questions, fudging, fudging, because you have to be so careful, don’t take any risks, but make sure you look and sound tough. (Those of us who endured Thatcher’s “be a woman but sound and act and as far as possible look like you have cojones and then go ahead and tear apart the national infrastructure to prove it” masquerade are weeping in disbelief.) I predict, however, that Clinton will be the Democratic nominee.

In consequence, I think the Republicans will win the 2008 general election. Despite the lies, the dead and maimed and irreparably damaged American military personnel (not to mention because we never do mention it, do we, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis they’ve killed maimed and irreparably damaged), the billions we’ve wasted on this interminable fiasco and are now so far in the hole that rebuilding any kind of human services will take years and probably be abandoned as impossible or unpopular or both. Despite the scandals. Despite the much more serious systematic disregard for the constitution. Despite the continued rape of the planet. Despite the rictus on the face of the demon-clown and the grotesque cackles of those who pull his strings. Despite the continued almost comical reappearance of the demon-clown’s nemesis, exhorting the faithful to commit this or that atrocity when he was supposed to have been smoked out of his hole how long? six years? ago by the demon-clown’s Action Men, by the most powerful military machine in the world. I’m angry, people. And I’m feeling patronized by questions such as “Should the Medicare prescription drug benefit plan be reformed to make it less confusing to seniors?” I mean, come on, are they kidding? Is this a joke question?

I’ll send in my survey, though, because in spite of everything I still believe in democracy, and because I do actually have an opinion, in case that’s not apparent. The survey will be heavily annotated, even though I expect the annotations will be ignored, because along with a bonkers irrational aversion to taxes Americans have an irrational aversion to the complexity of the “essay question,” favoring instead multiple-choice answers that can be easily tabulated by Diebold and their ilk, from kindergarten quizzes to IQ tests to customer service at Jiffy Lube and Burger King to tertiary-level examination questions to deciding an “official presidential strategy.”

Yes No Maybe Not Applicable? Check.