Response to Anonymous

The previous post garnered a response from Anonymous. 

"Tells us why? Women and Girls: Reports from UN Women indicate that over 38,000 women and girls have been killed in Gaza during the conflict. Of these documented deaths, approximately 22,000 were adult women and 16,000 were girls.

Children: UNICEF estimates that at least 21,000 to 22,000 children have been killed, with over 44,500 children injured. Why did they have to die to make Israel safer? That would mean that every other child in Anchorage would be dead, Look around that classroom you volunteer at and every other child would be dead.

"Approximately 1.16 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes." 

Really?? What does that have to do with the genocide Israel has engaged in??

Hey but if it makes you feel better. The usual whataboutism from you."

It's easier to respond here in another post than in the comment section.  

 I'm trying to put myself in A's head to understand what he's (I'm guessing Anon is a 'he') trying to say and why. I guess I could just ignore it.  The challenge is to respond positively.  Well, at least neutrally.  Just focusing on the content.  Though that's hard because I'm puzzled at the hints of hostility.

1.  For starters, this is clearly from someone who reads my posts often enough to refer to 

• He's read here about the third grade class where I volunteer
• The last sentence "The usual whataboutism from you."  'Usual' suggests he reads enough to think that is something I often do.  
• The style and tone are similar to someone who has left other comments over the years 

2.  "Tells us why?"

•     I'm not sure what this refers to.  

3.  The stats on Women and Girls and then the paragraph on Children

• This is detail I didn't present.  I do offer data that covers children, but not women and girls specifically.  As I said in the post "Nothing in depth, just a sampling"  So, the commenter could have positively offered this information to supplement what I'd written.  Instead, I read an accusation that I left this information out, maybe intentionally.  
• "Why did they have to die to make Israel safer?  - A legitimate question he could have added 
• The reference to Anchorage children and those in the classroom where I volunteered is a powerful way to make the point I was trying to convey when I wrote "Remember each person who dies, civilian or soldier, leaves holes in people’s hearts - parents, children, spouses, siblings, fiancées, life-long friends, work colleagues.  Leaves holes in families, at school, at work, in communities."   

4.  ""Approximately 1.16 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes." 

      Really?? What does that have to do with the genocide Israel has engaged in??

• I'm not sure why he thinks this post is focused on "genocide Israel has engaged in."  The title of the post is "People Are Dying, Are You Actively Trying to End The Killing?" implying it's about death.  The first lines clarify the scope of the post: "This began as a protest against war - Netanyahu's non-stop killing of Palestinians and other Arabs, the US-Israeli war in Iran, and the various other wars going on in the world, mostly using Western weapons of destruction and death.  

  But then I looked at other death statistics - worldwide traffic deaths for instance.  A lot more people die of vehicle crashes than war."

  I'm writing about death and I mention Palestinians in the first paragraph but in the context of other wars, not that I'm focusing on Gaza.  Rather, Gaza is an example of war caused deaths and destruction.  And I further clarify that I realized that, as horrible as war is, more people die of car crashes than war.  But Anon somehow wants it to be about genocide, specifically in Palestine.  He should write his own blog.  And maybe he does, but he signs in as Anonymous so we don't know.

5.       "Hey but if it makes you feel better. The usual whataboutism from you."

• The veiled hostility we heard in the first sentence, again.  
•  "Whataboutism"?  Here's a definition form The Merriam-Webster online dictionary, which is almost identical to other definitions on Wikipedia and other online dictionaries:

"whataboutism

noun
what·​about·​ism ˌ(h)wä-tə-ˈbau̇-ˌti-zəm  ˌ(h)wə-
plural whataboutisms
: the act or practice of responding to an accusation of wrongdoing by claiming that an offense committed by another is similar or worse" (emphasis added)

I can see how Anon might think that my saying there are more deaths from causes other than war is an attempt to downplay the deaths of war.  But it ignores the whole context of the post.  First, I'm not responding to an accusation (well, I guess I am here in the comment, but I wasn't when I wrote the post).  Rather I wanted to write about the many unnecessary deaths in the world and first focused on war.  But then realized that there were more unnecessary deaths from non-war causes.  So I wrote about them as well.  The whole point  was to call people's attention to unnecessary deaths and then to challenge them to find ways they can personally work to decrease that number.. But I put that part off to a later post because the original post had gotten long enough.   

Anon seems to have focused on the post he wanted me to write, or that he would like to write, not the post I actually wrote.  He made a few legitimate additions to the numbers I offered and a poignant example of the death toll in Gaza by referring to Anchorage kids.  But underlying everything was a hostility that I don't understand.  I discussed issues he mentioned, but he's taken them out of context.  I'm sorry for the underlying anger he seems to have that caused him to focus on some of what I wrote, but not the whole context of what I wrote.   

After writing this and letting it sit, I read my book for next week's book club - The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathon Rauch.  It's pretty dense and I'm way behind.  But I got to a section that talked about the evolution of the Scientific Method.  It points to an important shift where scientists moved away from talking about the writer and focusing on the ideas.  

That, I think, is what disturbed me about Anon's comments.  They seemed more focused on me, the writer and my motives and less on what I wrote. To my knowledge he doesn't know me, except through what I write on the blog.  If he had something to add or to contest, he could have done that without attacking the person who wrote it.  

 

Why Google, Do You Do This To Me? [UPDATED]

 I’m on Bainbridge Island for a short notice, brief family gathering. 

I don’t think it’s the travel that has made blogging harder.  It’s the general overload of negative stimuli.  There’s too much to write.  Nothing to write that others haven’t covered more than I can, but still not adequately.  

So, my fallback is recent photos.  [And since I’m traveling I took my iPad instead of my MacBook and there’s all sorts of little quirks.  I mastered most of them last fall when I had the iPad with me in Turkey, but I have to relearn them.  Like just now when I clicked to upload photos, it tells me I can’t unless I sign in with my Google account or allow cookie access to proceed.  Well, I already did the google account sign in to be able to start blogging.  And unlike my laptop where it has a button to allow cookie access, in the iPad it has a button for more information.  And the information isn’t helpful.  On my laptop I can go to Safari preferences but doing that on the iPad isn’t as straightforward.  So probably there won’t be a post tonight.  No, let me post this and when I figure out how to get the pictures up, I’ll add them to this.]

I’d add that when I started blogging on Blogspot, it hadn’t yet been bought by google. And Apple shares some of the blame.  The stuff I need is there, I know.  Just in a different place with a different symbol.  

A few minutes later.  I googled again on how to unblock cookies.  It told me to go to apps and then find Safari.  

It was already unblocked.  I blocked it and unblocked it again.  Back to Blogger, and this time it worked.  Grrrrr!

“THESE CHARGES ARE OF A PERSONAL CHARACTER, AND WHILE THEY SEEM TO BE SUSTAINED BY THE RECORD OF THE TRIAL AND THE PAPERS BEFORE ME AND TEND TO SHOW THAT THE TRIAL WAS NOT FAIR. I DO NOT CARE TO DISCUSS THIS FEATURE OF THE CASE ANY FURTHER, BECAUSE IT IS NOT NECESSARY.  I AM CONVINCED THAT IT IS CLEARLY MY DUTY TO ACT IN THIS CASE FOR THE REASONS ALREADY GIVEN, AND I, THEREFORE, GRANT AN ABSOLUTE PARDON TO SAMUEL FIELDEN, OSCAR NEEBE AND MICHAEL SCHWAB THIS 26TH DAY OF JUNE, 1890.

JOHN P. ALTGELD,

GOVERNOR OF ILLINOIS”

The Sunday Solidarity book club is reading Fight Like Hell by Kim Kelly.  It’s a review of people who fought for the rights of workers in the US since the early 1800s.  One section focused on Lucy Parsons and the Haymarket Eight.  

“On May 4, 1886, a mass meeting of workers gathered in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to listen to a handful of local anarchists and labor organizers speak in support of workers at the nearby McCormick Reaper Works, who were on strike for an eight-hour workday and had been viciously attacked by police the day before.  Among the speakers were Lucy’s husband, Albert, August Spies, and Samuel Fielden, three anarchists who were steadfast advocates for the eight-hour workday movement that had been gathering momentum among the city’s laboring classes.  [Albert Parsons spoke] 

Fielden was up next, and as he was finishing his speech, police arrived to break up the rally.  A bomb was thrown into the path of the advancing phalanx, and the cops began firing wildly into the crowd.  In less than five minutes the square was emptied, eleven people were dead, and more than seventy had been injured.  Despite the fog of chaos making it nearly impossible to tell who had done what exactly in the melee, Parsons, Spies, Fielden, and fellow anarchists Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Michael Schwab, Oscar Neebe, and Louis Lingg were arrested and tried for conspiracy and murder.  There was no firm evidence connecting any of the men to the bombing itself, and as one policeman who’d been present told a reporter, ‘A very large number of the police were wounded by each other’s revolvers.’

”An openly hostile judge and jury, along with the public’s distrust of the defendants’ anarchists politics, sealed their fates.  All were declared guilty, with Parsons and Pies among the four sentenced to the gallows.”  (Fight Like Hell 61-62)

The book then mentions there’s a memorial for the Haymarket Massacre in Forest Park, Illinois.  I have good friends who live in Oak Park, the next suburb over.  So I asked them to check out the memorial and send me some pictures for the book club.  And that’s one of them above. Thanks Norma and Lewis.

 

At that Sunday Solidarity meeting after the book club, one of the activities was putting together comfort kits for kids who have had trauma in their lives.  There were small blue fabric boxes that we filled with balloons, tiny stuffed animals, colored pencils, small coloring books, a timer, and other goodies. 

Although I’ve gotten the photos up, they are not responding to the normal controls to move to the left, center, or right.  Below is a picture from the Bear Tooth theater where we saw Argentina defeat Switzerland.  That was Saturday, before the meeting on Sunday, but I just can’t move the pictures around predictably so I’ll leave it here.  

 

Tuesday morning we were on a plane in Anchorage, waiting to take off in the rain.  Not complaining, rain is good and we were taking off on time for Seattle.

We got to Seattle and took the light rail to the ferry.  We were hoping to catch the 3:50pm ferry and we were cutting it a bit tight.  But it turned out that both the 3pm and 3:50 ferries had been cancelled and we eventually got the 4:45 ferry.

   

But because of the two cancelled ferries, the crowd in the terminal had gotten way bigger than normal.

[“A Way With Words”. Metal art by Rob Satterwhite. There’s a phone number, so if you want to buy it, contact me and I’ll get it to you.  At $95 it’s a bargain compared to other art works there.]

There was a small art exhibit in the Bainbridge Island library today and I liked the quote of this piece.  I think you should be able to read it.  

And there’s lots of heather blooming.

And that’s that.  One of the most frustrating posting experiences in a long time.  

Jet Lagged Blogger

We got back to Anchorage Thursday night.  An overnight near the Frankfurt Main airport broke up the flying somewhat, but it's Sunday and we're still dragging.  Our sleeping hours are all screwy.  But there's so much to blog about.  [It’s Monday as I review this one more time before posting, and the jet lag fog is lifting.]

• Lots of thoughts on Türkiye - history, time, human beings, 
• Thoughts on travel in Türkiye, and travel in general.
• Best photos of Türkiye - I'll try
• The Museum of Innocence - the book, museum combo that I listened to and visited to get a sense of Istanbul
• Pico Iyar - An interesting man I came across looking for reviews of the Museum of Innocence
• The case that democracy in the US is lost, the case it's still salvageable
• Anchorage International Film Festival is just a month away
• The Mamdanı phenomenon
• Computer tricks (meaning tricks the computers play on me and the time it take to overcome them)

Like always, I want to write knowledeably and except for minor personal experiences, that takes time.  Some of these will become blog posts, some may become several posts.  Others will fall by the wayside.  

And here’s a picture.  The image was just so poignant.  It’s in the Fener neighborhood or Istanbul. 

It's Time To Catch Up Here - From No-Snow, Yes-Snow, Trees, Basketball, DEI etc.

There are lots of reasons I haven't blogged for a while.  There's so much nonsense flooding social media, I'd like to not add to it.  But there are also terrible things happening that are begging for push back.  But if I blog about them, I want to offer a different perspective than what everyone else is saying, and I haven't been very confident I could.  

But also, we've returned to Anchorage.  Aside from finding Anchorage strangely snow free in early/mid March, there was also a spruce leaning on another tree in the back yard.  (There had been strong winds while we were gone.) I did get a couple of bike rides in on snow free sidewalks/biketrails.  

We've got a tree cutting proposal, but they said the current priority is getting down Christmas lights that are still up.  I think the tree is firmly lodged into the other tree.  Someone - the phone people?  electric people? - cut off the top of the tree which must have looked threatening to the wires along the alley in back.  

But then, finally, the snow came.  

We've been sorting through mail, and just catching up.  I brought the rose bushes in from the garage.   They've already started leafing out.                                                                                      Brought the begonia basket in too.  They began to poke out of the soil in a few days.  

Our internet has been on and off, more off than on.  This morning it was off again but while I was calling Alaska Communications (ACS), I noticed there was a truck up in the alley and a guy on a cherry picker working near the pole.  The ACS tech guy on the phone said they had decided there was a short and the guy at the pole was splicing something.  It still didn't work when he left.  

I went off to school.  The particular kid I'm focused on was out for the third day this week.  He was there Tuesday and it was nice to see each other after our long break.  Our regular routine is:

Steve:  "Good morning, A... how are you today?"

He's supposed to, and generally does, answer, "I'm fine thank you.  And you?"  The daily repetition is intended to get him comfortable speaking in English and it's been working.  But Tuesday he had trouble answering.  I finally figured it out.  It wasn't that he'd forgotten while I was gone.  It was just that he wasn't 'fine, thank you' and he didn't know how to say, 'I'm not feeling well.'

And he hasn't been there since Tuesday.  But that gives me a chance to help out other kids in the class.  I discovered today that two kids couldn't tell me what 2X8 equals off the top of their heads.  Working on ways to help them learn the multiplication of basic numbers from one to ten.  

And while the Trump administration is trying to erase all pictures and mentions of non-white males in US history (see War heroes and military firsts are among 26,000 images flagged for removal in Pentagon’s DEI purge)  the elementary school I'm volunteering in has very recently put up four large murals that feature men and women of note, representing various ethnicities.  

Part of me doesn't really want to bring any unwanted attention to this addition.  This had to have been arranged before Trump's White Nationalist staffers began their crusade to erase non-white, non-males from our history.  The fact that they are taking images of, and stories about, people like these down at the national level shows that the rhetoric about efficiency and cutting the budget are just smokescreen for getting rid of anything that challenges their white male image of the United States.  It costs more to find and delete these images than to leave them up.  And what kind of person feels compelled to erase images of people who aren't white or aren't male?  In my eyes it shows how scared they are to allow anything that suggests anyone else has played a role in making this nation great.  But it's clear that it is white males who are trying to destroy the greatness of the United States.  (Wow.  I'm just writing this to explain the pictures, but what a good segue into the next picture.) 

Went with a friend to GCI (the other phone/internet company in town) the other day where there was a protest against Rep. Nick Begich for speaking to a private group, closed to the public, because he won't speak to his constituents at a public meeting.  Even though the original sponsoring organizations pulled out - the reasons weren't made clear - there were still about 40 folks out with signs about various issues they'd like to discuss - from Ukraine, to fired federal workers, vets,  and the looming wipe outs at Social Security, Medicaid, and the Department of Education.  

I'd note that former US Senator Ted Stevens died in "a DeHavilland DHC-3T . . . registered to Anchorage-based General Communications Inc., a phone and Internet company" on the way to their private remote lodge near Dillingham.

We also got to watch the state high school championship game between the girls' teams from Fort Yukon and Shaktoovik last Saturday at the sports center at UAA.  (It disturbs me that the state underfunds the university and other state organizations so that they have to beg private companies to pay for such things and then plaster the name of the company on the buildings.  I realize most USians probably don't remember when stadiums were not covered with corporate advertising and companies didn't buy naming rights to buildings all over campus, but I do.  Until the 1970s or so, we weren't confronted with corporate branding everywhere we went.  They did name buildings for individual donors* back then, but not for corporate donors.  But then that gets back to issues like cutting taxes continuously for the wealthy and for corporations since the 1950s so that governments have less money and the public has to go to wealthy individuals and corporations to beg for money for public facilities.  So that's why I'm only calling the building 'sports center.')

.

Fort Yukon won in a great game.  Lots of passing and setting up shots.  Though the three point rule tempts people to shoot when they probably shouldn't.  

State Infectious Virus Reports

While my regular posts have been slow in coming lately, I have been posting updates based on the (now) weekly updates to the State's Infections Virus Snapshots.  Those don't show up here among the regular posts, but can be found at the tab up top (under the orange header) titled: Respiratory Virus Cases October 2023    Below the introduction are weekly updates (well, not quite. . . there was a period when they were updating them monthly) with new charts and the numbers for each type of virus.  The State's chart is interactive, but each new chart has updated numbers, the original numbers disappear.  So I capture the the originals and the updates so you can see if and how much the numbers changed from when first put up to a week or two later.  When they were doing it monthly, I could only compare the original and updated numbers for the last week of the month because it was the only weekly set of numbers shown twice.  This is getting way too complicated.  If you have questions leave a comment.  

The charts look like the one below and I add some commentary each week.  

You can also go to the state site to see the interactivity of this chart.  

When I got back from the school today, the internet still wasn't working, and again I called ACS, and again, as I was talking I saw an ACS truck in front of the house.  And 20 minutes after the truck left, I could get email and start writing this post.  

*Individual donors.  Even then, there were tremendous protests that UCLA named the new basketball arena after a wealthy oilman and donor, Edwin Pauley, and not for Coach Johnny Wooden who put UCLA basketball on the map with a string of undefeated seasons and national championships.  Before that, UCLA was scrambling for a court for the basketball team.  They played in the Sports Arena near the Coliseum (next door to the campus of rival USC) when they could get it.  Sometimes at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and even the Venice High School gym.  

Mike from Iowa - How Are You Doing With All That Water?

The title is pretty much the post.  Mike's been a frequent commenter here.  He's warned me about the danger of bears, but his state's been pounded with tornadoes and now flooding from rising rivers.  Hope you're doing ok.  

AI Scraping My Blog?

My Stat-Counter account has been showing this frequent Hong Kong visitor:

Total Sessions usually records how many times the computer has visited, but it says only 1, even though there are five total hits on this one page (of 20 hits) on the Stat Counter report.  It's been showing up frequently for weeks now.

I know, I said five, but they are scattered.  The one on top is one.  Here are three more and there was one more.  

I've had this sort of thing before, but it's been awhile.  In the past, the assumption was they were scraping content.  Now, I'm wondering if it isn't an AI bot gathering stuff for training.  If so, what should I do and how?  From Duda.

"How to Block AI Crawlers from Crawling your Site

Some site owners are choosing to block AI crawlers, such as ChatGPT and Bard from crawling their site in order to prevent it from learning from or using their website content. You can block these AI user-agents in a similar manner as you would block Google crawlers; by replacing the default robots.txt file with a new file that specifies disallow rules for specific AI user-agents."

When I first started blogging, I spent a lot of time learning about (and blogging about) technical aspects of blogging - how to:find out if anyone is reading the blog; to embed photos and videos; how to change the format; how to add an email address; etc.  

Now AI is raising other issues.  Such as how to block AI crawlers from using your site to train its bots.  

This is not what I want to spend my time on.  First the internet is telling me I have to block each crawler separately by adding code to the robot.txt file.  

Should You Block AI Tools From Accessing Your Website?

Unfortunately, there’s no simple way to block all AI bots from accessing your website, and manually blocking each individual bot is almost impossible. Even if you keep up with the latest AI bots roaming the web, there’s no guarantee they’ll all adhere to the commands in your robots.txt file. 

 From Google Search Central:

"You can control which files crawlers may access on your site with a robots.txt file.

A robots.txt file lives at the root of your site. So, for site www.example.com, the robots.txt file lives at www.example.com/robots.txt. robots.txt is a plain text file that follows the Robots Exclusion Standard. A robots.txt file consists of one or more rules. Each rule blocks or allows access for all or a specific crawler to a specified file path on the domain or subdomain where the robots.txt file is hosted. Unless you specify otherwise in your robots.txt file, all files are implicitly allowed for crawling."

That means I have to find the robots.text file and add stuff and hope I do it just right so I don't screw something else up.  But this site also warns:

"If you use a site hosting service, such as Wix or Blogger [That's me], you might not need to (or be able to) edit your robots.txt file directly. Instead, your provider might expose a search settings page or some other mechanism to tell search engines whether or not to crawl your page."

Of course I don't want to block search engines for browsers or only subscribers will ever see my posts.  

So I'm asking myself, is this worth the time it's going to take to figure this out.  Well, someone else asked that too.

"The real question here is whether the results are worth the effort, and the short answer is (almost certainly) no."

Here's another one saying the same thing:

"At the end of the day blocking ChatGPT and other generative AI crawlers is really a matter of choice. Depending on your website’s purpose and/or your business model it may make sense to. But in my opinion the vast majority of sites have nothing to fear from allowing AI crawlers to crawl their site."

For now, I want to agree with this advice.  But then I start thinking that this was written by an AI firm that wants to steal your content.   

And I don't even know if that Hong Kong visitor is scraping material for some AI enterprise.  Maybe it's just stealing content.  

Like your car, your house, your garden, your teeth, everything needs some maintenance to keep it functioning.  Clearly my phone and computer do, and this blog does as well, though I've avoided that for some time on the blog.  

I'm now officially putting myself on notice to pay more attention to AI.  

Blogging Block - Mushrooms And Octopuses

I've got a bunch of started posts, but finishing them gets hard.  Don't want to just be another opinion without strong evidence.  Don't want to post simple stuff that has no meat.  Don't want to say what others have already said.  And it's summer - Anchorage is green and the temperature has crept up to cool but comfortable.  The garden's been taking my time up - I do enjoy seeing everything that's popping up.  Seems most of the perennials have survived the winter.  Also have been pulling up dandelions - first, to get them before they go to seed and second to add the greens to the compost pile.  Still have lots of dead leaves and they need to be layered with fresh greens (and the kitchen compost).

Found a couple of morels had popped up yesterday.   

And getting that picture up reflects one of my obstacles - my airdrop to my laptop stops working after a while and I have to shut everything down and reboot to get it to work again.  

I'm reading David Scheel's Many Things Under a Rock:  The Mysteries of Octopuses for our next book club meeting.  I'm enjoying it immensely.  It's a pleasure to read, I'm learning about octopuses - what they prey on, who preys on them, and how they evade their predators, for starters.  

David Sheel teaches at Alaska Pacific University and has accepted our invitation to join us when we discuss his book.

Sheel writes that "many things under a rock" is a translation of the Eyak word for octopus.

Here's a sample:

"The giant Pacific octopus of Port Graham that had defeated the butter clam mentioned earlier ha taken the heavy bivalve in its suckered arms.  But she was to learn the limits of her strength.  With many suckers on multiple arms attached around both halves of the clamshell the octopus no doubt had tried to pull open this armored prey, perhaps with some patience.  The sucker attachment requires no persistent force, but the octopus has to pull continuously with its arms to pry apart the clam halves, while the clam resists, applying opposing force to hold itself closed. 

Watching an octopus apply this pressure can be a quiet affair.  If the clam wins, this may be a motionless tug-of-war.  With small clams, a giant Pacific octopus quickly and smoothly pulls the clamshell open, sometimes with enough force to break one of the clamshells.  The day octopus opens clams and pries loose prey from their holdfasts on the reef with a series of sharp pulls, its who body jerking until, sometimes with an audible crack, something breaks and the inner flesh is accessible.  The day octopus is very fast, often breaking into its prey or moving on within less than a minute, whereas the gist Pacific octopus my spend a few minutes to tens of minutes opening prey by pulling.  

In its battle with this large butter clam, the octopus tired first.  The clam was too strong, and did not yield to the octopus's strength.  So the octopus tried something else.  On the outside of the clamshell were no fewer than I've separate marks, two marks on one have of the clamshell and three marks on the other side.  The marks were small ovals mea by the giant Pacific octopus.   Each of those was an attempt by the octopus to get through the shell.  

These tiny oval perforations are drill marks.  Octopuses have inside their mouths a radula, which is a rising organ used to break up food.  The radula itself is a ribbonlike membrane  that runs between two muscle groups and lies over and between the posters, two muscularhydrostats.  Our human tongue, as well as octopus arms and the elephant's trunk, are muscular hydrostatic - anatomical constructions that use fluid pressure generated by muscle contractions rather than a rigid skeleton to allow movement.  Inside the octopus mouth, the bolsters can direct the pressure of a bend in the radula ribbon.  Along the length of the radula are rows of micro teeth.  Muscles at either end pull the radula back and forth, rasping it over and wearing away the surface against which it is applied.  

The radula begins the work of drilling, and is sufficient itself to make a hole.  But it cannot penetrate too deeply.  Beyond that, the salivary papillae, also tipped with a few rasping teeth must take over.  The salivary glands secrete enzymes that break dow the shell of prey such as crabs or this clam.  The papillae delivers the caustic secretions directly to the drill site, chemically dissolving the shell, and making it easier for the tooth-tipped salivary papillae to rasp away."

If you are having trouble imaging an octopus radula, here's a picture google says is an octopus radula.  Unfortunately, the link resulted in "Page Not Found."   I don't quite see the rest of the octopus so I'm still a bit confused.  But this helps a little.  

Additionally, I'd note, as I have on occasion that I am still posting about the Respiratory Disease Reports from State every week.  There's one more today.  You can find those at the Respiratory Virus Cases tab above (just under the orange banner.)  You can also go there with this link.  But I'd rather you find the tabs so you can check it any time.  This week COVID cases are up significantly while only one RSV case was reported, and the flu cases are down slightly.

So, many things under a block.  

Taking Advantage of My Air Drop Working Again

 My phone asked me to log in with my Apple ID today.  On a whim, I tried Air Drop after and it worked.  So, in what I hope is a long window, I'll put up some pictures.  

Grow North is the farm in Mountain View where the Refugee Assistance and Immigration Service of Anchorage Catholic Social services grows food for the summer and operates a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) with once a week pick ups and sells fresh vegetables and some baked goods as well during the week.  You can't get much fresher food in Anchorage unless it's from your own garden.  

The garlic and the picture of the farm are from last week.  

This week's box includes:

• Classic cauliflower,
• Crunchy kohlrabi
• Unique malabar spinach,
• Tasty bok choi,
• And some lovely sage for the herb of the week!

From the email that CSA subscribers get:

"Malabar spinach seems like it would retain similarities to that of regular spinach. The plant uses the name spinach in it, yet the ironic part of that the two could not be more different. Malabar spinach grows on a vine, granting it the nickname of vine spinach, whereas regular spinach grows from the ground (like many leafy greens)."  

This Goose Lake as I rode by  The ducks hang out here because its's  spot where people feed them.

On a completely different bike ride, out past Taku Lake, they've had the big blue sign up much of the summer, but the little one just popped up.  If you can't read the small sign (which I'm guessing you can't) it says, "We are upgrading the skatepark!"  It also says the construction budget is $1.2 million. I know we've had inflation over the years, but really?  $1.2 million for curved concrete?  Curious how much profit the contractor, also listed as "Street Maintenance and Grindline Skate Parks LLC" is making.  I realize they may be doing more than just the skateboard park, but it would be nice if there was a watchdog group which gathered all the data on summer construction projects and evaluated how the money was spent.  

In other construction news, the ACS fiber optic team was out on Crescent in Geneva Woods today.  We're on the Lake Otis side, but all this area is getting wired.  That bright orange wire is popping up all around the neighborhoods.  

And it's mushroom season.  Here are some making appearances in my yard.

Don't have time now to research these.  The orange one is an amanita - hallucinogenic and al over Anchorage now.  It can also make you really sick.  Not planning on eating any, though I'm waiting for the King Boletes and the Shaggy Manes.  

But I have started eating the olive bread I made last night.  It came out well.  The one in the back is a dill experiment.  (We got lots of fresh dill from Grow North Farm last week.)

Meanwhile J got off the phone this evening with her long time friend (does 45 years count as long time?) who lives on the Haleakala foothills in Maui.  Her house is far from Lahaina, but there is also a fire up in that neighborhood as well and she's been evacuated and is staying with friends.  If I recall right, Maui has its share of eucalyptus trees, and their oil burns easily.  May the fire be quickly extinguished and your house survive.  

"It's been two months since I blogged. Considering that I am . . ."

From Ursula LeGuin's No Time To Spare:

"It's been two months since I blogged.  Considering that I am on the eve of my eighty-fifth birthday, and that anyone over seven-five who isn't continuously and conspicuously active is able to be considered dead, I thought I should make some signs of life.  Wave from the grave, as it were.  Hello, out there!  How are things in the Land of Youth?  Here in the Land of Age they are rather weird."

While for me, it's only been four days, and I still have daylight between now and 85, I am over 75 and don't want to be considered dead yet.  

For years and years I blogged pretty much daily.  And when I'm engaged in an important story (say Redistricting) blogging does take front and center in my life still.  But I've also given myself permission to take days off.  But don't want to have too many blank pages here.

So here's a list of other distractions:

1.  Technical - Getting photos from my phone to my laptop stopped working

I thought I'd conquered this, but the AirDrop stopped working again and the original fix didn't stick. Photos are an important part of this blog (at least for me).  Monday, when we went for a hike, I took along my bigger Canon so I could use the memory card to get the pictures onto my MacBook.  After two photos the battery stopped working.  

So I reverted back to the phone.  I'd find a way.  I figured I could upload the pictures to Blogspot (the blog site I'm using) on my phone. Easy Peasy.  But I couldn't.  I googled.  Here's what I found on google support::  (Google bought Blogspot long ago as well as other independent apps I've used for the blog)

"If your photo is on your phone, it is probably in Apple Photos. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no direct upload from Photos to Blogger. You must therefore export the image to your phone as a jpg. Then you can upload it into Blogger using the "from device" option in the Blogger post editor.

I do not know how to export the image to your phone as a jpg. But once you copy it into Blogger, you can delete the jpg file."

Or on Apple discussions

"iPhoto pictures no longer upload to Blogger with Mojave 10.14.6 update installed"

I've been thinking I might need to get a more current iPhone and even upgrade my laptop (it's about nine years old and the letters on six keys are no longer readable), but I have pulled out my old Canon Powershot and I'll use that until then.  It has a memory card I can insert into my laptop.  But as I think about it, I'm sure the newer laptops no longer have a spot to insert a memory card.  

2.  Other things - Reading online

Twitter and Spoutible - Despite everything, Twitter still alerts me to important items of (I hate to use this term because it's so overused) 'breaking' news, particularly Anchorage and Alaska related things.  Mainly because I've been careful to pick who I follow, I don't get a lot of garbage tweets. But as Twitter goes X-tinct,  Spoutible is getting more 'useful' Spouters (useful here meaning people who put up things I want to hear about) but I'm still getting too many "Hope you all are doing great this morning!" Spouts.  There's nothing wrong with them, but that's not why I'm on Spoutible.  

Spoutible also got its Android app up and then a couple of weeks later the IOS app was ready.  I downloaded it, but I couldn't type in the login info.  My keyboard didn't work.  Their announcements had said that the iPhone 7 still had some problems, so I deleted it.  When I downloaded it again a few days ago, I could log in.  But the keyboard doesn't work when I try to reply or to Spout.  

I've put Twitter and Spoutible under Reading.  I spend way too much time on these apps.  They were supposed to give me tips for blog posts (and they do) as well as back up information I can use to support my arguments on the blog.  But they are also addictive.  It's like fishing or slot machines, you're always hoping the next one will be good, and enough are, that you keep casting or putting more money in, when you should just walk away.  

3.  Other things - Reading books

I've got the following three books that I'm actively working on:

Boy, I didn't realize how relatively poor the images are on the Canon Powershot compared to my phone.  Demon Copperhead is for my September book club meeting (but I thought it was for August so I started it because it's long). No Time to Spare is the August book.  It's essays Le Guin wrote late in life (as the quote at the beginning of this post suggests) and so far it's focusing on being old.  She's not sugar-coating things.  Blowback is by Miles Taylor, a Republican who worked as a high level Homeland Security appointee in the Trump administration and is using the book to warn people about how crazy Trump is and the kinds of things to be expected in a second Trump administration.  Because Trump wanted to do them (and in some cases did) during his presidency.  But this time, Taylor warns, Trump and the conservative interests that back him, are better organized to make them happen.  Basically like establishing a Fascist regime supporting the wealthy and making life harder for everyone else, particularly those who aren't white, Christian, heterosexual men.  

As I figure out ways I can contribute to protecting democracy in the 2024 election, books like this give me facts to convince non-voters why they need to vote. Non-voters are the key.  But I'm not giving up on Trumpers either though that's time spent doing more work for smaller gains.  

But while people say the hard core Trump supporters are a cult, immune to reason and reality, I know that people leave cults all the time.  Cult-Escape is just one of many websites (not necessarily the best) for people thinking about getting out.  I also know that the Trump cult is reinforced by trolls who spew out misinformation at high volume, whether they do it on their own, for money, or with the support of foreign governments.  They exaggerate the number of people who support the Trump world of lies.  

There are several other books, newspapers that tempt me away from the blog (all in the guise of keeping me informed and giving me material for the blog.)

3.  Other things - local events

I listened in on the Alaska Board of Education hearings on a policy to ban transgender girls from girls sports. (You can find the written testimony here, here, here, here, and here.) While I have lots to say, the anti-ban crowd made many good arguments I don't have to duplicate.  

But what no one mentioned (while I listened in anyway) was the fact that the Board began the meeting with a Christian prayer that ended with "in Jesus' name."  

Here's a government board, holding a public hearing on a policy that is being heavily pushed by Christian Nationalists (and other Christians who would legitimately reject the Nationalist part) and beginning with a Christian prayer, that excludes those who are agnostic or atheists, and members of religions that do not worship Jesus Christ.  I can only think of two reasons for this:

1. To show their power to add their religion into their governmental function - that they can get away with this
2. Because they are so sheltered from the non-Christian world that they don't realize how offensive this is to people who don't see the world the way they do.  

(A PEW Trust study copyrighted in 2021 found that 37% of Alaskans identify as in religions other than Christianity or no religion. That's more than 1/3.  Under 

"Frequency of participation in prayer, scripture study or religious education groups among adults in Alaska"

fully 69% responded "seldom or never.")

If the Board is so out of touch with people who are not devout Christians that they can open this public meeting with a Christian prayer, imagine how out of touch they are with transgender youth!  This is not a representative body of Alaskans making this decision.  Even the Alaska legislature rejected this and the Governor has now asked a body that he's (mostly) personally appointed to do what the people's elected representatives wouldn't do.  

OK, so that by itself is a synopsis of a blog post I've been thinking about.  

There was also Juneteenth and Gay Pride which I didn't post about because I couldn't easily get my photos up.  

4.  Other things - biking and the garden

I took my bike in for a service yesterday.  There's a regular clank sound every time my right pedal is forward. It's been about four years and I've ridden it a lot (for an old man anyway) each summer. As of yesterday I've biked 762 km (473 miles) since April.  Last year my goal was 1000km which I passed and I'm well on my way to doing the same this summer.  I put it down here only because it takes up about five or six hours a week.  But mentally the biking is good for my blogging.  

Reviewing this before posting I realize I left out the gardening part.  I'll just say my favorite gardening book is No Work Garden.  Much of the hill in our backyard is natural - birch, alder, high bush cranberry and other local fauna.  We've focused on perennials which come back on their own. And the front lawn, much to the chagrin of our neighbors (though they've come to accept it over the years) is clover right now along with rock garden perennials along the sidewalk.  Gardening enthusiasm is highest in the spring when the snow is gone and things start poking out of the earth.  I have put in hours of weeding and thinning, and I do just enjoy wandering the yard to see all the daily surprises.  

5.  Other things - Netflix

We're currently juggling The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, Suits, Friday Night Lights, and random other movies or short series that some variety.  After watching several seasons of Suits I've concluded we would all be much better off if we had script writers to help us with our day-to-day interactions.  

Netflix takes a toll in my blog writing time.  

6.  Other things - Tutoring English

One of the more delightful activities this spring and summer has been tutoring a Ukrainian refugee in Ketchikan in English.  His English is good enough to communicate what he needs to say, but we're adding vocabulary, pronunciation (both sounds and sentence rhythms), grammar, and cultural nuances.  We were paired by Catholic Social Services' Refugee Assistance and Immigration Service (RAIS) and it's a great match, pedagogically and personally.  We tend to have a good time even though I work him hard.  Planning lessons and actually doing the lessons take up four to eight hours a week, depending on if we meet once or twice a week.  Twice a week is the norm.  

There are other things as well - the general maintenance people have to do in their lives, paying bills, getting things cleaned and repaired, getting and preparing food (fortunately, my wife has done the lion's share of this in recent years in part because she's not that excited about my cooking), and I'm sure you can add to the list.  

But I'm committed to writing here on important topics.  But I must say, that the local political and legal events I spent so much time on in previous years are being better covered by others now.  Twitter has been a big addition there as well as more local reporters covering events.  That just wasn't the case back in 2006 when I started blogging.  And it took me a while to jump from more mundane blogging to more public affairs blogging.  

Have a good weekend.  We're having more sun and warmth than we did earlier this summer.  But compared to much of the world, the weather has been very comfortable and the air quality good.