Back Home. Olé! Brain Neurons, Photojournalism, And Beowulf

We  left San Francisco yesterday afternoon



and flew into Anchorage last night.

Today I went to three Olé classes at UAA.  Olé is the acronym for Opportunities for Lifelong Education and is set up for older folks.  You pay a fee for the year and can take all the classes you can fit in.  Well, if others don't fill it up before you sign up for the class.

There were two I was waitlisted for were:

• Brain Workings:The Secret Lives of Neurons 
• Photojournalism in the Modern Era

(Links take you to the Olé course descriptions)

Then one more I got in.  And I even volunteered to be the class manager, which I understood to mean minimal extra work - introducing the instructor and putting out the roster.  (I learned today I also need to write a thank you note to the instructor.)

• The Origin of the English Language

My head is spinning.  The brain class was in the planetarium and we saw 3D images of the brain which the instructor Rachel Hannah could manipulate so we could see it from different angles and at different levels of magnification.  She could also add and subtract parts.  She suggested going to brainfacts.org which has lots of interesting info, including a link to a 

3D brain like we saw in class.  You can get to the 3D Brain here.  Do it! Much better than an hour of Facebook or Twitter.  

The photojournalism class, taught by two retired ADN photographers - Erik Hill and  began with a history of the field starting with this picture:

Picture above and text below are from a Business Insider article:

"Boulevard du Temple", a daguerreotype made by Louis Daguerre in 1838, is generally accepted as the earliest photograph of people. It is a view of a busy street, but because the exposure time was at least ten minutes the moving traffic left no trace. Only the two men near the bottom left corner, one apparently having his boots polished by the other, stayed in one place long enough to be visible.

Then we saw the work of photojournalists over the years.  It seems like war is a photojournalist magnet, or perhaps the pictures are so memorable because they are so horrible.  I did begin to start feeling bad about all the photos I put up here, but then I realized the ones we saw were the best of the best and that all the photographers had taken thousands, probably tens of thousands that weren't  perfect.  

Finally, the English Language class.  The instructor has a very well known name - David Bowie - so as manager I decided to head off questions about the name by playing David Bowie's Space Oddity as people came in.   Since I had my computer with me, I took lots of notes.  I'm a language freak so I enjoyed this class a lot.  He was answering riddles I've never solved about English and its relationship to German and other languages.  It's getting late, so maybe next week I'll put up more.

But we have a homework assignment.  We've got a copy now of the Prelude to Beowulf in Old English and translated into modern English.  We're to find an oral rendition in the old English and listen as we read along until we start getting it.  

OK, I found one with the words on the screen as it's read.  I'll put it here so I know where to find it tomorrow.

It's good to be home.  The snapdragon seeds I planted before we left are starting to sprout.