AiFF2025: Witty Youngman, Saturday Thoughts, It's Cold!

 Friday night (really went into Saturday morning) I was too tired to upload my video of Witty Youngman, especially knowing I was getting up early Saturday.  

Witty played after the movie Burt.  She'd been asked to play an original song from the movie Burt but said she got it fairly late and what she got wasn't too easy to listen to, so she made her own adaptation.  

But then she went on to play for another 40 minutes or more.  The combo of her exquisite voice and guitar work was enchanting.  I couldn't help but capturing some of it for you.  (And for me.)  So far, she has been the highlight of the festival for me.  

It's Sunday morning and I dropped our film maker houseguests off at the Alaska Experience Theater for bagels, networking, and the morning filmmaker panel (anyone can go to these.)  Yesterday I stayed because the panel was for first time feature makers and Nikolas and Katrine were on the panel for their

Katrine, Nikolas, Richie, Emelio

film The World Outside (Draußen die Welt) (the ß is a German letter for double ss).  The other two panelists were Richie James Rollin, whose film Crystal Cross plays tonight (Sunday) at 8:30pm at the Museum, and Emilio Miguel Torres, whose film The Ladder plays at the Museum at 6pm.  I think the moderator, on the left, was Joe Burke, who made Burt. 

This link gives more background on all the features being shown today (Sunday).

I have a bit of time to reflect on the Festival so far before I head back downtown.  

1.  This is the coldest festival I remember.  While the temperature yesterday wasn't terribly low - around 14˚F (-9˚C), the strong and constant wind made it feel (according to my weather app) like -6˚F  (-21ºC).  But at one point we took a bus home and waiting in the wind was brutal.  Fortunately Katrine and Nikolas are much younger and enjoyed the adventure of being in Alaska cold.  But I have to say that -6˚F without a wind is not as cold for me as it was yesterday.

2.  So far I haven't seen a movie that blew me away.  I enjoyed  Brut  on opening night very much.  It's quirky, the characters are great. I liked a lot of the images.  Even though views of cars driving along highways are pretty common in movies, there was one shot of the car going along a winding road that was just exactly right.  

 SPOILER ALERT:  The story is one that happens to a lot of people, particularailly older people (not the specific details, but the idea of a scam).  A plot flaw, in my mind, was Sammy's car.  He was supposed to have come to LA for a few days from New York.  It's unlikely he would drive his own car to LA for a few days.  But if he did, he would have had a New York license plate.  And even Burt would have noticed that he had California plates.  

2.  In The Wake of Justice Delayed was a well-made and effective film focused on the impacts of violence against Native women in Alaska.  Survivors  talked about the impact on them  of losing someone this way.  We joined them in their own space to share that impact.  

Remaining Native was another important film that followed the great grandson of a survivor of Indian Boarding schools.  There were two related stories.  The first was about the boarding schools ("No school should have a cemetery.") and how his great grandfather had run away three times.  The third time he ran 50 miles home.  So Ku Stevens decides to set up a 50 mile run for people to remember their ancestors who had been in boarding schools.  The second story was Ku's own life as a long distance runner on his rural tribal land high school, and trying to get the attention of college recruiters.  While the two stories are clearly related, I would have liked to see them better integrated in the movie.  That said, I don't have suggestions so I don't know how to do it better.  

Both these are important movies.  But I'm waiting for the films about what motivated the school teachers and administrators to treat the Native American kids so badly.  And what causes the men to commit terrible violence on Native women?  Because I think those stories would help us understand what motivates people to join ICE, and a lot of the people who support Trump.  What happened at the boarding schools is happening today to immigrants, transgender folk, women,  and everyone else who doesn't support those in power.  And what kinds of childhoods did the men who torture women have that led them to their evil deeds?  

That isn't the responsibility of the filmmakers of In the Wake of Justice Delayed and Remaining Indian, but I'm hoping someone steps up to address those questions.  (Yeah, I know, I should do it.  I'll put it on my todo list.)

3. Drink And Be Merry:  I'm not a fan of movies that feature alcoholics and bars.  I don't drink more than a glass or two of wine and that not very often.  Watching alcoholics drinking and doing stupid things is like watching a kid playing much too close to a cliff or someone driving a car way too fast.  I'm uncomfortable the whole time.  But Nikolas and Katrine thought it would be better than most such films and so we went.  I could have skipped it. But if that topic is your thing, then you might well have enjoyed it.  My cynical self thought, "The Bear Tooth is playing it because people watching others drink will sell more wine and beer in the theater."

4.  Nikolas and I went to the Alaska Experience Theater to watch Fucktoys.  I'd looked it up and thought it might offer us some insights into people's sexual hangups, but I didn't catch any insights.  We didn't learn anything about the motivation of the men who were paying to be sexually hurt and humiliated, for example. And it seems the curse was never lifted.  But then she substituted a goat for a lamb and I'm not sure it was ever sacrificed.  

5.  Finally, the Thriller shorts.  Again, this is not my genre at all and I should have stayed home.  Most, if not all, appeared to be scenes of a future feature film.  None told a whole story.  The acting in Confidential Informant was strong, but I wasn't thrilled watching a female cop coercing a reluctant informant by threatening to place her child into foster care.  It seemed abusive and while that technique may yield some names (it didn't get that far in the short film), it causes a crisis for the child.  Do cops have the moral right to do that to mothers and their children?  Maybe getting people to ask that question will be the point of the feature film if it gets made.  I like Charon because as I was watching I remembered that Charon

 "is the boatman who ferries the souls of the dead across the waters of Hades to the judgement which will determine their final resting place." (From World History Encyclopedia)

6.  I got to talk to Tony Sheppard- the man who started the Anchorage International Film Festival 25 years ago.  He's here until Monday.  I should have taken a picture and if I see him again, I will.  

At film festivals you see so many movies and meet so many new people from all over that time warps.  Already yesterday (Saturday) the opening night movie seemed to have happened a week ago.  And so not having seen my favorite dilm yet isn't a big deal.  It's only been one day plus an evening show.  

But Witty Youngman's guitar and voice stand out as my highlight so far.  

AIFF2022: Busy Saturday Starts With Kids Program, Ends With Recommended French Film - All at Museum

I started thinking about the Anchorage International Film Festival late this year, so I'm not as organized as I have been in past years.  

My sense, from reading the online program, was that there are a lot fewer films, turned out to be correct.  Just 75.  But the positive spin is that none are shown in conflict, so you can see them all.  

Friday night's Turkish film The Last Birds of Passage, was a poignant narrative feature on a Turkish minority group that travels 400 kilometers with its goats and camels to the summer grazing grounds and 400 back.  The migration in the film is faced with lots of obstacles - from within the family and from changes in the landscape they have to cross.  The filmmaker was there for a charming Q&A by Zoom after the film and is scheduled to be in Anchorage Wednesday.

I haven't figured out how to find a page on the website that shows all the films for one day AND when they are playing.  So I've tried to  put that altogether here.  

But here's the Saturday lineup - all at the Anchorage Museum Auditorium

Saturday

10am  Shorts - Kids A Bonanza

Birthday Wish • 

Footprints in the Forest • 

Rain • 

Santa Doesn''t Need Your Help • 

Snowflakes • 

SPIRIT: A Martian Story • 

The Social Chameleon

12pm  Big Crow  -  

"Born in 1974 on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SuAnne had become one of the state’s best basketball players by age 14. By the time of her tragic death in a car accident at age 17, her wisdom, leadership, and determination had made her a household name across the Great Plains. 27 years later, SuAnne’s legacy has proven legendary - everyone you meet on “the Rez” has a story about how SuAnne’s spirit continues to galvanize the Lakota in their fight to reclaim their language and save their culture, embracing what Su called “a better way”. From AIFF website

2pm  Shorts - Made in Alaska

Kakiñiit •  I talked to the director Patrick Hoffman at the opening.  His film is about traditional Alaska Native tattooing.

Sabor Ártico: Latinos En Alaska (Arctic Flavor: Latinos in Alaska) • 

Safe Enough

4pm  Crows are White - Museum

"For over a thousand years, a secretive Buddhist sect has lived in an isolated monastery in Japan performing acts of extreme physical endurance in their pursuit of enlightenment. In CROWS ARE WHITE, filmmaker Ahsen Nadeem is struggling to reconcile his desires with his faith and sets off to the strict monastery in search of answers. Ahsen is not immediately welcomed and the only monk who will speak with him is an outcast who prefers ice cream and Slayer to meditation. Together they forge an unlikely friendship that leads them to higher truths and occasionally, a little trouble. Shot over five years on three continents, CROWS ARE WHITE is an exploration of truth, faith and love, from the top of a mountain to the bottom of a sundae." From AIFF2022 site.

6pm - SHORTS: Different Kind of Love Stories

Burros • 

Honeymoon at Cold Hollow • 

Jelly Bean • 

Lead/Follow • 

Peanut Factory • 

Star-Crossed • 

The Body is a House of Familiar Rooms • T

oo Rough

8pm  You Resemble Me - Museum - This one got strong reviews from people I spoke to.

"Cultural and intergenerational trauma erupt in this story about two sisters on the outskirts of Paris. After the siblings are torn apart, the eldest, Hasna, struggles to find her identity, leading to a choice that shocks the world. Director Dina Amer takes on one of the darkest issues of our time and deconstructs it in an intimate story about family, love, sisterhood, and belonging."  From AIFF website.

Cancelled Wiz Leads To Seattle's Pacific Science Center

 The Wiz was not high on my todo list.  It wasn't even on my todo list.  But when invited to accompany my daughter and granddaughter to see the Wiz, I, of course, said yes!

The ferry into Seattle was jammed with Seahawks fans.

We made our way to the Art Museum restaurant for lunch and while eating my daughter got a voice mail saying that the afternoon performance of The wiz wasn't.  An hour before the show we learn it was cancelled? That's even more bewildering because looking on line today I find this at the 5th Avenue Theater site:

"Masks will be encouraged but optional for audience members at The 5th for performances of The Wiz. We strongly recommend and encourage the wearing of highly effective masks such as N95, KN95, or KF94.  Please CLICK HERE for further details.

Please note, the performances of The Wiz on November 19, 20 and 27 matinee have been canceled."   

If the matinee was cancelled last weekend, why didn't they notify us sooner?  (I suggested to my daughter that they hadn't sold enough tickets and she responded that they'd been sold out.)

Oh well.  Flexibility.   

The Pacific Science Center at the site of the 1962 Seattle World's Fair was my granddaughter's immediate alternative destination.  That meant a short rail ride to the monorail, then the monorail to the Space Needle.  

A walk over to the Science Center and to the laser show.  

I was underwhelmed.  I  expected a laser show in 2022 to be more than lots of moving squiggles and primitive cartoons backed with lame electronic music.  (Note:  I like good electronic music.)

A bathroom break.  This was probably the best surprise of the Science Center.  Most surfaces had great sciencish cartoons.  Though this one leaves a sexist conclusion that lacks some key context.  Did they have this same example in the women's room?  (I think you can click on this to enlarge and focus it, but I won't know until it's actually up.)

Then we engaged in various science activities while waiting for a 4pm planetarium show.  Some time in my favorite spot - the butterfly garden.  

Parts do look like they were built 60 years ago for the World's Fair.  

A four o'clock planetarium show was going to get us to a late ferry back to Bainbridge. And we found out that planetarium had an open house, so to speak, where people could drop in and ask questions.  So we got to visit various planets and moons.  It's been a while since I've considered how amazing and humbling the universe is.  All those stars and planets out there that we only have a tiny inkling about.  

From there, we wandered over to the Space Needle.  It seems the women decided that this was a good opportunity for my  granddaughter to go to the top of the Space Needle since both her parents have separate reasons for not taking an elevator 60 stories up in order to look 60 stories down and Grandpa was a perfect escort.  

It's been 60 years since I went to the top of the Space Shuttle, when three friends and I drove up to the World's Fair in 1962 in a '32 Model A Ford.  My memory of being up there is rather hazy.  

But I remember yesterday pretty clearly still.  There are three public floors.  In the top one you can wander around inside with glass walls, drinks, snacks, photo opportunities, or wander around semi-outside, with large glass walls and benches.  The picture above was from that level.  

I'd point out that if you find the green ferris wheel you can see one of the ferries to Bainbridge and Bremerton right behind it.

Here's another view of that outside top area of the Space Needle.

Then there is a middle level that didn't seem to have windows, but did have bathrooms.  

Finally, the lower level also had windows all around.  And it had a ring of floor, sort of like a ring around Saturn, that was glass and slowly rotated.  That took some instinct erasing to step on.

Then back on the monorail to the light rail and a walk back to the ferry where we encountered the Seahawks fans once again.  You couldn't tell their team had lost.  They were loud and chanting - one person shouting "Sea" and the crowd answering "Hawks."  There also seemed to be some testosterone at work.  Though a women managed to push one of the excited ones back until a security officer took him off somewhere. 

And finally, as the ferry left the terminal in downtown Seattle, we could look back up to the Space Needle - that tall tower just left of the center.  

A long and busy day with two of my favorite people.  

Thank You Vin Scully For Making The World A Better Place

Before the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, my dad and I would root for the Hollywood Stars, a Pittsburgh farm team, at Gilmore Field in Los Angeles, near the Pan Pacific and Farmers Market.  My dad was a very amateur artist and this picture of Gilmore Field was a birthday present the year the Dodgers moved to LA.

From then on it was the Coliseum to watch the Dodgers, and later Dodger Stadium*.  But most times it was Vin Scully over the radio.  I knew I enjoyed listening to him call the game.  He knew all the players' stats, stories of their personal lives, their training, and lots of other baseball trivia,  that he would weave together to make listening to a baseball game on the radio exciting.  And there was that voice.  He was like a family friend.   Many nights I had my radio under the cover to hear the end of the game when it was supposed to be off. And if you went to the game you would hear his voice echoing from transistor radios all around you.  

What I didn't know at the time was how special he was.  That came over the years as I grew up and moved off.  I'd come back and Vin Scully was still doing Dodger play-by-play.  And he was at it, it seemed, forever.  A part of my history kept alive by that voice calling plays.  Even my grandson has heard Vin Scully calling Dodger games live.

So thanks Vin Scully.  You enriched my life and millions of others for so many, many years.  

My main Scully years were all radio and I tried to find some audio to post here, but here's a complication of Scully calling different games on television.  Best I can do for now.  

*The story of Dodger Stadium is not one to be proud of.  It involved the displacement of an important community of Mexican-Americans near downtown LA.  

". . .forced labor camps that were politely called plantations," From Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

As I'm reading Caste I'm struck by so many things I never saw before.  The title quote is probably the most profound.  Of course, plantations with slaves were forced labor camps.  The workers had no choice of anything - when to work, what work to do, how hard to work.  They had no control over their own bodies or their spouses or children.  All those decisions were made by their owners.  And, of course, they didn't get paid.  How come I never thought of that before?  But our history books never use that description.  Plantations are such genteel places with pretty green lawns, magnolia trees,  white columns and mint juleps.  But that was all cover up.  But Wilkerson rubs off the cosmetics our historians have applied to what happened in the United States.  

This is an important book.  I'm not yet finished, but I've already been changed.  This is one of several posts I expect I'll do on the book.  For those who haven't read the book, consider this an appetizer.  

I'll start with some quotes from the early part of the book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.  After researching and writing a previous book, she decided that focusing on race doesn't capture the extent of the conflict that's usually depicted as a racial conflict in the United States.  Race is relevant, but the real issue, she tells us convincingly,  is CASTE.    

"Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone based on their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy." (p. 70)

The rest of the book defines caste, looks at caste systems in India, the US, and Nazi Germany.  Outlines the 'eight pillars of caste' and more.  It's a very thorough explanation of how the hierarchy - with white on top and black on the bottom and shades of gray in between - permeates how we think even if our caste system is not explicit like the Hindu one.  

In this post I want to look at a few quotes from the beginning and relate them to police treatment of African-Americans.

"The slave is entirely subject to the will of his master," wrote William Goodell, a minister who chronicled the institution of slavery in the 1830s.  "What he chooses to inflict upon him, he must suffer.  He must never lift a hand in self-defense.  He must utter no word of remonstrance.  He has no protection and no redress," fewer than the animals of the filed.  They were seen as "not capable of being injured, "Goodell wrote.  "They may be punished at the discretion of their lord, or even put to death by his authority."

"This fact is of great significance for the understanding of racial conflict," wrote the sociologist Guy B. Johnson, "for it means that white people during the long period of slavery became accustomed to the idea of 'regulating' Negro insolence and insubordination by force with the consent and approval of the law."

The vast majority of African-Americans who lived in this land in the first 246 years of what is now the United States lived under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath, subject to people who faced no sanction for any atrocity they could conjure.  

I think these quotes should help us understand some of the videos we've seen in the last couple of years of police beating and killing Blacks who have done little more than ask questions about why they were being stopped, who have hesitated when told to do something by the police.  If you watch many of those videos again, you'll see cops who totally lose it the moment there is any resistance whatsoever by the person they've pulled over.  There is little or no tolerance for the slightest disobedience.  

"He must never lift a hand in self-defense.  He must utter no word of remonstrance.  He has no protection and no redress."

That was the rule throughout slavery and very much the rule in the post civil war South.  Whites expected blacks to be polite, to get out of the way if they met on the sidewalk, to accept what the whites told them without question.  To not even question the change they got from a white cashier.

Studies of why people become police officers show that " social-capital motives (i.e., power and authority, prestige, influence by media & friends)" (from Motivations for Becoming a Police Officer)  regularly play an important role. 

I would argue that for a number of police the authority of the badge and a gun plays a big role.  And for them, respect from suspects - obedience and subservience - is important.  And if these people come from families that have historically expected such obedience from Blacks, then their behavior can be better understood.  

Just watch this video of how these officers speak and act compared to the black man they have stopped.  It's consistent with the expectation that Wikerson says whites had for Blacks during slavery and Jim Crow.  

This is a black military officer who has not actually stopped until he's pulled into a gas station nearby so that there would be light and other people around.  While the cops seem to be reacting to his not instantly getting out of the car, the suspect is clearly worried he's about to be killed by out of control white cops.  

As long as the judge or jury only had the word of the cop versus the word of the suspect (just the word suspect raises questions about the person's truthfulness), officers could pretty much do what they wanted with impunity.  The rapid growth of small videos recorders and then phone cams, changed all that.  And that's where we are today.  

These behaviors and reactions are probably unconscious for most cops.  They haven't been aware that they were treating white and black traffic stops differently.  Or if they were, they believed that the blacks they were stopping were more of a threat and thus justified being tough or pulling out their guns.  

So I urge people to look at the videos - old ones, and ones that will be shown next week and beyond on social media - to see what triggered the cop to become violent.  And compare that, if you can, to how cops treat whites.  

That's the key connection I wanted to make in this post, but I offer some other quotes from this same section - pages 44 or so to 49, where Wilkerson is trying to demonstrate the extent to which Blacks were considered a subservient class, lesser human beings, than whites.  

"What the colonists created was "an extreme form of slavery that had existed nowhere in the world," wrote the legal historian Ariela J. Gross.  "For the first time in history, one category of humanity was ruled out of the 'human race' and into a separate sub-group that was to remain enslaved for generations in perpetuity."

"The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium , the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, soon in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner's debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate.  They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them.  Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil."

"Before there was a United States of America, there was enslavement.  Theirs was a living death passed down for twelve generations."

"The slave is doomed to toil, that others may reap the fruits" is how a letter writer identifying himself as Judge Ruffin testified to what he saw in the Deep South.  

"As a window into their exploitation, consider that in 1740, South Carolina, like other slaveholding states, finally decided to limit the workday of enslaved African-Americans to fifteen hours from March to September and to fourteen hours from September to March, double the normal workday for humans who actually get paid for their labor.  In that same era, prisoners found guilty of actual crimes were kept t a maximum of ten hours per workday.  Let no one say that African-Americans as a group have not worked for our country."

"For the ceaseless exertions of their waking hours, many subsisted on a peck of corn a week, which they had to mill by hand at night after their labors in the field.  Some owners denied them even that as punishment and allowed meat for protein only once a year.  "They were scarcely permitted to pick up crumbs that fell from their masters' tables," George Whitefield wrote.  Stealing food was 'a crime, punished by flogging.'"

"Your slaves, I believe, work as hard, if not harder, than the horses whereon you ride,"  Whitefield wrote in an open letter to the colonies of the Chesapeake in 1739.  "These after their work is done, are fed and taken proper care of."

"Enslavers bore down on their hostages to extract the most profit , whipping those who fell short of impossible targets, and whipping all the harder those who needed them to wring more from their exhausted bodies."

"Whipping was a gateway for of violence that led to bizarrely creative levels of sadism," wrote the historian Edward Baptist.  Enslavers used "every modern method of torture," he observed, from mutilation to waterboarding.  

"Slavery made the enslavers among the richest people in the world, granting them "the ability to turn a person into cash at the shortest possible notice."  But from the time of enslavement southerners minimized the horrors they inflicted and to which they had grown accustomed.  "No one was willing," Baptist wrote, "to admit that they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture."

Slavery so perverted the balance of power that it made the degradation of the subordinate case seem normal and righteous.  "In the gentlest houses drifted now and then the sound of dragging chains and shackles, the bay of hounds, the report of pistols in the trail of the runaway," wrote the southern writer Wilbur J. Cash.  "And as the advertisements of the time incontestably prove, mutilation and the mark of the branding iron."

"The most respected and beneficent of society people oversaw forced labor camps that were politely called plantations, concentrated with hundreds of unprotected prisoners who's crime was that they were born with dark skin.  Good and loving mothers and fathers, pillars of their communities, personally inflicted gruesome tortures upon their fellow human beings." 

"This is what the United States was for longer than it was not.  It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United states that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil.  No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African-Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they had been enslaed.  That will not come until the year 2111."

Another example of this still today, Blacks are considered inferior, less mentally capable, we have this recent story From the AP:  Retired Black players say NFL brain-injury payouts show bias

"PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Thousands of retired Black professional football players, their families and supporters are demanding an end to the controversial use of “race-norming” to determine which players are eligible for payouts in the NFL’s $1 billion settlement of brain injury claims, a system experts say is discriminatory.

Former Washington running back Ken Jenkins, 60, and his wife Amy Lewis on Friday delivered 50,000 petitions demanding equal treatment for Black players to Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody in Philadelphia, who is overseeing the massive settlement. Former players who suffer dementia or other diagnoses can be eligible for a payout.

Under the settlement, however, the NFL has insisted on using a scoring algorithm on the dementia testing that assumes Black men start with lower cognitive skills. They must therefore score much lower than whites to show enough mental decline to win an award. The practice, which went unnoticed until 2018, has made it harder for Black former players to get awards."

Getting Out - Short Hike At McHugh Creek And Watching Birds At Potter Marsh

Went for a walk at McHugh Creek Sunday.  This was our greeting at the beginning of the trail (to Potter Marsh).  That's when I realized that the bear spray was at home.  I figured it was better off in the house than in the car during the winter.  [Of course, when I say something like that, I have to look it up.  There are forums where people talk about bear spray, but not very authoritatively.  But from Mace.com:

" Do not store unit in a cold environment under 32 degrees F (0 degrees C). This may cause depressurization and the loss of effective range."]

Never mind, we aren't likely to see a bear.  

It's still that in-between-time, not white and not green yet.  But lots of light from very early to later and later each night.  But it was a gray - not rainy - day and my phone camera was having trouble getting the colors right.   

 

 We took the trail going up to the homestead, but by the third long stretch of very muddy trail.  Actually, water is using the trail to get down the hill.  We decided to go back down and just stay on the trail that goes to Potter Marsh.

If you look closely, there are spots of green where plants are pushing their way up out of the earth.  

A surprise was the vibrant green and apparent health of the spruce trees.  Lots of trees have been killed by spruce bark beetle in South Central Alaska.  But there were good sized young trees that were doing just fine.  Or so it seemed.   Notice the healthy spruce in some  of the other pictures too.

The nasty spines on the devil's club are even more apparent than normal when the plants are still naked.

And during this still leafless period, the odd shaped trees along this trail are apparent.  

And there were lots of broken trees leaning in odd angles and piles of broken branch debris.  It was about this time that I remembered that our 2021 State parks parking permit was in my wallet and not on the dashboard of the car.  

Unlike the first trail, this one has boardwalks when the water gets to be too much.

The picture below is my favorite from yesterday.  The lower resolution on here doesn't help.  But I just like the texture of the tree covered hill and the various subtle shades of orange to budding green with trunks and branches here and there.  

We are almost back to the parking lot.  

My windshield was free of notices and I quickly transferred new parking pass from my wallet to the windshield.  The view of Turnagain Arm never disappoints, no matter the weather.

Right near McHugh Creek,windsurfers were out.

When we pulled over at Potter Marsh, the photographers were out.  

Soon all the straw colored grasses will be bight green.

There was even a pair of swans guarding a nest.  I'm still battling my camera when it comes to focusing on distant birds.  Eventually I hope to have a truce.  

A steady wind kept the water dancing.

Supreme Court Conservatives Seem Ready To Break NCAA Control Over Student Athlete Pay. Why?

 Background 

If the conservatives on the Supreme Court have been consistent about anything, it's been in support of big business.   Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, at the Amy Barrett confirmation hearings, argued that while everyone focused on abortion and LGBT issues before the court, the real impact of packing of the court with conservative judges was to set up a court that unabashedly sided with big business.  Whitehouse cited 80 cases that were decided by 5-4 rulings along partisan lines.  These cases had four themes important to large corporations:

• Unlimited Dark Money - that allows the wealthy and corporations (yes those do overlap) to control legislatures that make the rules and even to get people appointed as head of federal agencies that regulate them.  Citizen United is the key decision here, but there are many others
• Knock the Civil Jury Down - The powerful can't control civil juries like they can control Congress.
• Weaken Regulatory Agencies - particularly pollutors to weaken their independence and strength
• Voter Suppression and Gerrymandering - making it harder for citizens  to vote for candidates who might vote against big business' interests - Shelby County decision on no factual record against overwhelming support on the other side, that knocked out voter suppression protections and a bunch of states started suppressing the vote.  Same on gerrymandering.  

*You can see the Whitehouse presentation in the Senate below and I recommend that you listen to it.  Whitehouse puts a lot of puzzle pieces together that help us understand the conservative goals of getting Heritage Foundation trained judges onto the court.  Here's another Whitehouse report on partisan decisions at the Supreme Court which divides the cases a little differently.  

Conservatives Question NCAA Lawyers

So I was surprised to see that in the Supreme Court case National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston**, the conservative judges were asking the NCAA lawyers some tough questions.  After all this is about a large monopolistic organization exploiting student athletes for big money.  It would seem a natural for the Supreme Court's conservatives to be protecting the NCAA.  But no.  From the LA Times:

"Justice Clarence Thomas said it was “odd” that the salaries of college coaches have “ballooned,” but that did not destroy the aura of amateur competition between colleges and universities.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the case showed “colleges with powerhouse football and basketball programs are really exploiting the students that they recruit.” Most athletes work very hard on their sports, have little time for studies and often do not graduate. “They are recruited, used and cast aside,” he said.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said he, too, was concerned about the “exploitation of athletes.” This looks like a system “where schools are conspiring with their competitors to pay their workers nothing,” he said, likening the situation to a classic antitrust violation in the business world."

But on further consideration, the NCAA is not exactly a for-profit corporation like Pepsi.  On its home page it tells us:

The National Collegiate Athletic Association is a membership-driven organization dedicated to safeguarding the well-being of student-athletes and equipping them with the skills to succeed on the playing field, in the classroom and throughout life.

We support learning through sports by integrating athletics and higher education to enrich the college experience of student-athletes. NCAA members – mostly colleges and universities, but also conferences and affiliated groups – work together to create the framework of rules for fair and safe competition.

Those rules are administered by NCAA national office staff, which also organizes national championships and provides other resources to support student-athletes and the schools they attend. The NCAA membership and national office work together to help nearly half a million student-athletes develop their leadership, confidence, discipline and teamwork through college sports.

NCAA Core Values    [bold added]

I've left the link to the Core Values there, because it goes to a page that doesn't really mention core values other than being dedicated to to "the well-being and life-long success of student athletes."  Most of it is about who all the members are.  

Also, notice that their sole emphasis is on the welfare of student athletes.  Absolutely no mention of money.

So Why Are The Conservatives Asking the NCAA Hard Questions  

My initial guess - and that's all it is - stems from one of the themes conservatives keep repeating about how universities and colleges are elite institutions full of socialist professors that indoctrinate students in liberal ideology.  (Of course the only colleges that fit that sort of ideological laboratory stereotype are the far right Christian colleges like Liberty University.]   

The NCAA generated close to a billion dollars just from the NCAA basketball playoffs.  They claim that most of that goes to the colleges and universities  From CBS Sports:

"The NCAA Tournament remains the lifeblood of the association's 1,268 members. It is the primary source of the NCAA's income. That $800 million in annual tournament revenue is 72% of the NCAA's $1.1 billion annual total. Last year, $600 million of that $800 million was scheduled to flow back to the schools.

That revenue fills athletic department coffers, provides operating capital for conference offices and provides funds directly to athletes in need."

But does this money help support universities or even cover the costs of college sports?  Best Colleges says no.

"By any measure, college sports are a big business — but that doesn't mean universities are getting rich off athletics. The reality is that most sports programs operate in the red. If the time comes when colleges have to pay athletes to participate, then the financial picture will change even more dramatically."

Some of the largest college sports programs, the ones that get the most back from the NCAA - see the Best Colleges link above for the top 20 and how much they make - might make a profit.  Or maybe not.  It's not clear.  My quick search for information on this leads me to believe that most of the stories are based on information from the NCAA.  I didn't find any in-depth independent studies. But I also didn't look too hard.

So maybe my hypothesis about the conservatives on the Supreme Court is wrong.  Maybe they're big sports fans and so they have more empathy for college athletes than they do for average employees.  Maybe they see the NCAA not as a corporation (it isn't one) but as a cooperative of universities.  Then my hypothesis may be right.  Or maybe they think the universities make more money from sports than they actually do.  That sports help pay for political science programs and affirmative action scholarships.  

Just raising a possibility.  I really don't know what paying college athletes would mean.  The biggest winners, probably, would be the majority of college athletes who will never go on to be highly paid professional players.  

But it's clear that monopolies concentrate power and concentrated power attracts those who want power.  Breaking things up will bring change and quite probably good change.  When they broke up ATT in 1984, we got a revolution in telephone technology.  (I bet some readers don't even know about ATT being a giant phone monopoly that merely leased black dial up phones to every home.)

And if the Supreme Court finds this monopoly problematic, maybe they'll have to take a fresh look at other concentrations of power.  That would be the best consequence.

* Here's the video of Sen. Whitehouse at the Barrett hearings.  He really does a great job of bringing together a number of threads.  

**Shawne Alston was a running back for West Virginia University.

Goodbye Rafer Johnson

One more hero in my life moves on.  The picture below was taken two and a half years before I'd enter UCLA as a freshman.  The legacy of Johnson and C.K. Yang and their great sportsmanship (Is there a non-sexist term?) was one of many attractions UCLA held.  At that time, California students who graduated in the top 12.5% of their high school class, were automatically admitted.  Tuition my first semester was something like $68.  And we lived a 30 minute bike ride from campus so my parents were pleased they wouldn't have to pay room and board.  

From LA Times

The Photo Description:  "Rafer Johnson puts on a weightlifting demonstration for Boy Scouts at UCLA in July 1960 as his track teammate C.K. Yang kneels and smiles.  A little more than a month later, Johnson would edge Yang for the decathlon gold medal at the Rome Olympics."

From LA Times:

"He was something special at UCLA

‘Greatest of all Bruins,’ Johnson remained a regular at many events.

By Ben Bolch

Sixty years after he edged a UCLA training partner on weary legs in one of the most dramatic finishes in Olympic history, Rafer Johnson ’s presence continued to blaze on campus like an inextinguishable flame.

He was a regular at track meets and basketball games and gymnastics meets even as his health declined, always graciously accepting requests to pose for photos with anyone who asked. He was also a confidant to longtime athletic director Dan Guerrero, serving as a special advisor who offered wisdom and guidance that no pricey consultant could match.

Johnson’s legacy as a decathlon champion and humanitarian, not to mention his trusted friendship, made it especially meaningful for Guerrero to be part of dedicating the Betsy and Rafer Johnson Track last year at UCLA’s Drake Stadium.

“It’s not a stretch for me to say that Rafer was the greatest of all Bruins,” Guerrero said Wednesday upon learning of Johnson’s death at his home in Sherman Oaks at age 86.

“When you think about it, apart from his athletic prowess, which placed him in history among the most heralded of all athletes, he passionately and selflessly and humbly dedicated his life to better people and our society whether it was through his work with Special Olympics, mentoring young students or his commitment to civil rights. He was a giant, there was no question about that, and while this description is probably thrown around rather capriciously, in this case it’s true. . ."

 Here's a second article they have titled:  Appreciation: Rafer Johnson was more than a great athlete; he was a great man

And if you can't get into the LA Times, here's the Wikipedia entry on Rafer Johnson.

*I'd note that Wikipedia says that C.K. Yang died January 20, 2007 at age 73 in Los Angeles.  

What's The Difference Between a Memoirs and a Memoir? And an Autobiography? But That's Just The Hook. There's Also Kimani. [Updated]

I follow  Kimani Okearah @theKimansta on Twitter.  He's a photographer for the Sacramento Kings.  Well, that's not exactly right.  He's a photographer for Vox News and he covers the Kings for them.  I follow a number of folks who experience life differently than I do just to keep tabs on worlds I don't know well.  Mostly there's basketball in his Tweets, but also stuff on race, and health, and things I'm not really sure what they are about.  But there's something sweet and decent about him. I've grown to like him.

It turns out one thing we have in common is an interest in film.  He's working on a documentary.  It's called 30 Year Memoirs of a Crack Baby.  He's the crack baby and he has, among other congenital health issues, a seriously problematic large intestine.

But as I read the title I wondered, why is it memoirs instead of memoir?  So I googled.

[UPDATE 8/15/19:  Kathy in KY commented that the boxes for Memoir and Autobiography had the same texts.  (I've corrected that.)  But then that leaves this post without a distinction between memoir and memoirs.  So here's one from the blog Memoir Mind  that seems to make sense:

"Writing about one's whole life is writing one's memoirs, plural. It's more akin to autobiography, in which you tell all about what happened, often with intense detail, the personal version of the kind of research a biographer would do if they were writing a life about you. Memoirs tend to be more informal than autobiography, but still have that life-encompassing feel. Most of the people who write them are well-known - that's how and why others would buy an entire book about their entire life, or multiple books about their entire life.
Memoir, on the other hand, the currently hot trend in writing and the topic of this blog, is focused on a particular time in one's life, or a theme or thread."

And, back to the original post, below is the bigger picture with the corrected illustration.]

The Author Learning Center explains the difference between a memoir, autobiography, and a biography.    And if you look closely in their summary of a memoir, the second bullet offers a brief note on the difference.

Text comes from The Author Learning Center 

Kimani is asking for a lot of money on GoFundMe, but films cost a lot to make.  He's an expert on the topic.  And since it's a memoirs, it will be a "1st person POV" and less "formal and objective" than a memoir. [And since it's a memoirs, it will be about his whole life, not just one time, theme, or thread.]

I'd urge you to go to his GoFundMe page.  Read it.  And if you weren't born to crack addicts and taken from your parents at 6 months and put into foster home and kicked out of that home as soon as you turned 18, you're probably had a lot more 'privileges' than Kimani has had.  So you could share some of your privilege by checking out his site.

And making a donation.  It doesn't have to be a lot.  $5 would do, but if you're going to go to all the trouble, you might consider making a larger contribution.

He hasn't had a contribution for a couple of days.  I think it's because people would rather look away.  But please, overcome that urge, and give him five minutes.  And when the movie is showing (at the Anchorage International Film Festival I hope), you'll know that you helped make it possible.

I'm not putting up his picture.  I want you to imagine what he looks like.  And then go check how well you conjured up his image.  I'm going to check how many people linked from this page to his GoFundMe page.    Yes, I can do that (and so all other websites.)