The wind was howling during the night and flags were straining at their harnesses, today. We went to an event in Golden Gate Park. The almost three year old was allowed to take her scooter. This irked the five year old no end. Things that others have seem to become an overwhelming obsession and it lasted pretty much the whole day. Well, there was a period when the scooter wasn't at the top of his mind. When the little one was on the swing. There were two swings and the second one was occupied too. Suddenly he needed to swing. She needed to give up her swing for him.
But grandpa was there to remind him how angry he got when she took the toys he was playing with. His response: "Grandpa, you're annoying."
The wind had toppled this dead tree in the park and there were lots and lots of branches all over the ground. (I'm making an assumption here about how this tree landed on its side. But it looked fairly newly down.)
The five year old appropriated one - about seven feet long - that was a hazard to anyone walking near him. We pointed this out and sometimes he would drag it off the path on the ground. When a young lady walked by and got scratched by the branch, I asked him what he had to say. Nothing. You need to apologize. Glare. "It was her fault. She walked into it." Glare. When you chose to carry the stick where other people were, you took on a responsibility. Luckily she wasn't hurt much. But you still have a responsibility to apologize. Glare.
Fortunately at age five, grudges don't last long and he was giggling soon.
redwood bark in Golden Gate Park
We got back home for the three year old's nap and the older brother went with his dad to a friend's birthday party while the scooter owner napped.
It's still a mystery how birds, like this raven, can survive wearing the same set of 'clothes' at 5˚F below and 80˚F above.
This was yesterday morning walking back from breakfast with friends. If you're dressed right for the weather, it isn't cold.
I didn't post this yesterday because I really wanted people to read the Willie Stark shakedown post, because I think it helps us understand how 'quid pro quo' aren't as explicit as the Trump defense would have us believe. And it also shows how power-hungry people screw over the people who work for them as well as everyone else. Jack most probably shows us a variation of Michael Cohen who ended up doing Trump's dirty work. And it's a warning to Republican Senators that it doesn't matter how often you defend Trump. If you don't show absolute obedience every single day, you'll get turned on. Ask Rep. Gaetz. You can read that here.
People in California couldn't understand why we still live in Alaska. "You're retired. You could live anywhere." And with the temperature yo-yoing above and below freezing regularly during winter, I was starting to even ask myself that question. Ice and 4 months of break up isn't all that great.
But this January is going to be the first month in a couple of years that hasn't been the warmest on record. In fact it's going to be colder than normal.
When I went out to clear the driest, powderiest snow from the driveway, Municipal Light and Power had a man in a cherry picker clearing snow off the trees across the street where the power line was apparently threatened by the heavily laden limbs.
Then I went walking to get a friend a birthday gift.
A chain link fence decorated in snow crystals.
Everything was gorgeous. This was the first day since we got back that the sun came out. It helps.
Another decorated fence.
Later I walked over to the Alaska Public Media board meeting. It's over a month since solstice and the sun was still out at 4 when I got there.
UAA spent between $7-9 million to build this pedestrian walkway, but they couldn't afford to keep the childcare center on campus. This money, plus tuition parents paid, would have supported the child care center far into the future. I wonder how much each passage through this walk way cost? When will it get down to $100 per crossing? But it was beautiful today in the sun and snow.
The folks in LA swearing at the traffic on the freeway, can't understand why I prefer this mode of transportation.
Up early to get the grandkids to school. We bus to meet one school bus in front of the second kid's school. Then walk most of the way back. I have lunch with a student from over 20 years ago who is working on his doctorate and the National Intelligence University in Monterey.
Then back to do kid pick ups. Here are a couple of pictures from the day.
The shot below was on the kitchen counter. I call it Still Live with Monster and Cheerios.
But there parks, large and small, tucked in here and there too.
This is Mountain Lake. The sign began:
"Before you is one of San Francisco's last surviving natural lakes . . ."
It's part of the Golden Gate National Recreational Area where I also took the following picture.
We both got flagged by the security machine at the Anchorage airport. I got a very intimate patting down. "I have nothing in my pockets" "You're wearing Levis. The keep you warm and the machine detects heat." J got the same treatment. But she got a second one as well. Here's my wife the terrorist.
Really, how many 70+ year old American women terrorists have there been in the US? Ones who have a record of recently flying fairly frequently without incident and have round trip tickets, etc.
There are at least two ways of detecting terrorists: One is to examine the person - find out if there is anything in their background or behavior that suggests a problem that needs more attention. That's not what all these airport detectors do. They examine based on the machine. They told me when I pointed out that my wife was a very unlikely suspect that "if the alarm goes off, we have to exam."
This really does feel a lot like theater. Somewhere there has to be a happy medium between ethnic profiling and terrorist profiling. How much time and money does TSA spend on people who have .00001 chance of being a terrorist? I'm sure they have detected plenty of guns with the machines, thrown away lots of pricy water bottles, and someone has sold a lot of scanning machines.
And the Olympic Range was poking out of the clouds as we neared Seattle. So was Ranier.
If you look closely, there's an airplane to the right of the mountain against the clouds.
And walking my granddaughter to school we passed this tree with all its leaves in an almost perfect circle below it.
The school is really wonderful. It's part of the public school system, but like Stellar and Polaris in Anchorage, it requires a lot of parental volunteer work. There's grades 1-6 in two large connected and non-institutional classrooms. Here's a part.
Every child should have access to a place like this. I stayed about 15 minutes. All the kids had stuff to do and were working quietly. My granddaughter was writing in her journal. Then they had a small meeting where they talked about empathy. And about lice - it's that season.
Later, after school, we went for a walk through the woods while she was having a music lesson.
There's lots of other things to write about, but I've been busy.
I woke up early this morning - too early to get up, but late enough that I was awake. So I plugged in the headset for my phone and listened to a Ted Talk. Suzanne Simard "How Trees Talk To Each Other."
No, this wasn't some vague imagining about talking trees. It was based on Simard's childhood and education. She did studies with isotopes to see how they moved from one tree to another through the mitochondria in the soil. And how all this interconnected-ness makes forests more resilient to things like climate change.
This isn't technically 'news' because this talk is about ten years old. And it's based on research she began that's much older. And I've heard hints of this, but never anything so coherent that it made sense to me. But don't take my word for it:
Next up was Jamie Oliver - Teach Every Child About Food
His basic message is that food is the number one cause of death in the United States. He backs it up with this chart. All the ones in red are 'diet-related diseases.' (Heart disease, cancers, stroke, diabetes.)
Jamie is a chef. He talks about power - about fast food and markets owned by corporations and that food now is largely processed and full of extra ingredients, while 30 years ago it was mostly fresh and local. (This talk was given in 2010, so that would get us back to 1980.) He talks about portion size and labeling problems. At home and school kids are eating food that will kill them.
Milk, he says, now has sugar added, though he's talking about chocolate milk. He uses a wheel barrow full of sugar cubes to show how much sugar kids get from five years of school lunch milk. School food systems are run by accountants, not food experts.
Lightbulbs turned on above my head. This isn't new to me in general. I grew up when most food was fresh or lightly processed and fruits were only available in season. Growing up in LA meant we probably had more fresh vegetables and fruits all year than people in colder climates. But he's talking about more than that. He's talking about taking the power back from the big agricultural corporations. And he thinks they should be sued like the tobacco industry was. So, you can understand why this stuff doesn't get much attention on corporate media which makes its money from advertisements from, to a great extent, the food industry - fast food, processed food, soft drinks, beer, etc.
Then came Britta Riley and A Garden In My Apartment
This talk is about hydroponics. . Just growing some of our own food, she quotes Michael Pollen, is one of the best things we can do for the environment. This is what got her started. Listening to experts talk about the food problem, she quotes Pollen further, is precisely how we got to where we are. NASA's hydroponics in space inspired her. She wanted to get into this, but didn't want to copy the food corporations, so she set up a website where they displayed their products and they crowd sourced to keep improving the systems. They have 18,000 people connected through the website. R&DIY - she calls it Research and Development Do It Yourself. Anyone around the world can duplicate these products themselves for free. And this is now a community. We should ditch the term consumer and get behind the people doing things themselves. The website - rndiy.com - isn't working now. Not sure where to find this community today.
Followed by Roger Doiron - My Subversive (Garden) Plot
Doiron took the whole idea of gardens as a way to take back food and make it healthier and fresher a little further. His plot is to radically alter the balance of power, not just in our own country, but around the world. Here's what he says near the beginning: Food is a form of energy, but also a form of power. When we encourage people to grow their own food, we're encouraging them to take power into their hands, power over their diets, power over their health, and power over their pocketbooks. And we're also talking about taking that power away from someone else. Those actors who have power now over food and health. See gardening as a healthy gateway drug to food freedom. Not long after you start a garden, you starting thinking, "I might want to learn how to cook." He talks about Michele Obama's vegetable garden at the White House that he helped on. And the food needs of the planet as the human population grows Plenty to chew on.
Then, finally, I heard Ron Finley - A guerrilla Gardener in South Central LA
He got in trouble with the City of LA because he planted a food court in front of his house on the strip between the sidewalk and the street with edibles.
The city owns that land, he said, but the homeowner is supposed to keep it up. Fortunately he got enough publicity to overcome that obstacle. His job is to spread the idea of growing your own food, and in particularly in neighborhoods that are food deserts. He says that LA owns enough vacant lots to create 20 Central Parks.
The corporate news media today - and that includes to a certain extent National Public Radio - are focused on offering a constant diet of breaking news, with headlines and video, aimed at attracting the most possible eyeballs. We get short vignettes that often disappear and we never learn what happened. Or the opposite, as with the never ending election coverage, where the focus is on the horserace, not where the horses are headed. We only hear about who's up this week, this day, this hour. Every new poll becomes top news. Conflict sells. What we need is cool headed analysis of the policy proposals and how candidates plan to carry them out.
What these Ted Talks suggest to me is there is a lot going on in the US (and the world), but it's not initiated by corporations and it doesn't get much coverage. It's people taking control of their own food, in this case, something that agribusiness, which advertises widely on corporate media, doesn't really want being covered. These people powered activities don't get covered much, unless there's conflict or violence involved - say the Keystone Pipeline standoff last year.
So I suggest you watch and listen to the positive things people are doing all over the country, the innovations that come from crowdsourcing, or in response to the disgust with the hazardous - to the environment, to health, to sustainability, to family finance - offerings of corporate America. Check out the endless options from Ted Talks and go looking for other podcasts that do similar things. There's lots of good news out there. It doesn't need blood covered to be covered by the news.
That's me, like the sun, trying to see through the clouds. 101˚F, chest full of crud. It wasn't quite that bad yesterday when I went to my OLÉ classes. But I did try to sit away from others.
I'm staying in today. I'm not good at being sick I'm drinking lots of hot water with honey. But I'll try to get some stuff done.
The sun has broken through a couple of times. The trees are losing their leaves. I do want to write a bit about SB 91 - the criminal justice reform bill that was essentially repealed this year because that was the main topic of our state and federal courts class yesterday. And also about how our class talked about homelessness (the other class) while waiting for the speaker to come. Actually, it was a good thing we had time to get to know each other better.
If all goes right, we’ll be in Anchorage tomorrow.
Transition is that time where you brain adjusts from one environment to another. I’m still, for instance, ready to say Buen Día and gracias and quiero. I’m still looking at the dinner bill and computing it in pesos and dollars. Invisible membranes reach out from my brain to the many wonderful people we met. How are they doing? Feeling their love and sending back mine.
I'm trying to hold onto Argentina and Chile as long as I can. To be, at least partially there, as I slide through LA reality and into Anchorage reality. I looked through my pictures to find some that never got posted, but should. I’ve got two particular pictures of trees.
Which brought up the name Carlos Thays. It shows up on streets and in parks all over Argentina. But until now I haven’t looked him up. I knew he had designed parks. From his Wikipedia page:
"Born Jules Charles Thays in Paris, France in 1849,[2] Carlos Thays arrived in Argentina in 1889,[2] after he was recommended by Jean Alphand to Argentine pioneer Miguel Crisol, who contracted Thays to design Sarmiento Park in Córdoba.[1] During his time in Córdoba Thays became infatuated with the young country and decided to spend the rest of his life in Argentina. After moving to Buenos Aires he was named the city's Director of Parks & Walkways in 1891.[2] This position gave him significant influence over the design of the city's open spaces, and his legacy is still strongly felt in the city's open spaces today."
Here's the Parque San Martín, in Mendoza. I just couldn't keep walking without pulling out my camera, the vision was so striking.
And yes, this is a Thays designed park. We walked over to this park our first morning of our first visit to Mendoza. (Mendoza was located perfectly to be our starting point for San Juan and then Santiago and back.) And I was struck by how beautiful the trees were and how they were located just perfectly. Here are two pictures from that morning in the park. Mostly, I was chasing all the birds with my telephoto lens - not very successfully - but I couldn't help notice the trees.
I don't know if Thays designed the landscaping for this river that flows through downtown Córdoba, but he did design Sarmiento Park in Córdoba, so if he's not directly responsible for these trees, I'm sure it's his influence.
One of Thays' largest undertakings was the Parque Tres de Febrero,[2] a sweeping area of open land covering several square kilometers filled with thousands of trees, flowers, many fountains, and monuments in the barrio of Palermo.
Well we stayed in Palermo when we first arrived in Buenos Aires and I was struck by the trees there too. Here are a couple of pictures from there.
The Wikipedia page doesn't say anything about Thays visiting Santiago, but I'm guessing, from the parks we saw in downtown Santiago, that his influence reached there as well.
June 4, 1989 is just called by the date in Chinese. Like 9/11. It's 六四 liù sì. It's the date the Chinese army cracked down on the Tiananmen Square (and much more of Beijing) protests.
Here's a new article by the then LATimes Beijing bureau chief.
"From the windows of a deserted coffee shop at the Beijing Hotel, a few hundred yards east of Tiananmen, I could look toward the square and see several hundred soldiers forming lines across the capital’s broad main street. In front of the hotel was an angry and brave crowd of a couple thousand Beijing residents. These protesters were furious at the army for shooting its way into the city center, tanks and armored personnel carriers smashing obstacles, soldiers spraying bullets at crowds blocking its advance. Now I watched as the soldiers periodically fired into this crowd.
For me, what the Chinese call simply “June 4” — a date that fundamentally shaped today’s China — had begun the previous evening.
I was the Los Angeles Times Beijing bureau chief then, and had overseen the newspaper’s coverage of the pro-democracy protests since they began in mid-April. The Times’ team had been taking turns staking out the square, and my shift was to begin at midnight. Before leaving home late on June 3, I learned that the army had begun smashing its way through crowds several miles west of Tiananmen."
You can compare Steven Holley's account with others on the scene at the time in this post I did three years ago about the meaning of the term 'iconic photo' that examines the context of the Tank Man photo, which Holley discusses in this article. Holley's account seems pretty consistent with what I found out doing that post.
I'd note that I arrived in Hong Kong for a year's sabbatical about one month after Tiananmen and was able to talk to several people who had been in Beijing at the time. I didn't get to Tiananmen until May 1990 when I took a group of Hong Kong students for a study tour. We had to go in May because people were worried that something might happen on the first anniversary.
Here's a very different recent China story I found the other day and put into a draft post until I could find some related posts.
"China has reportedly reassigned over 60,000 soldiers to plant trees in a bid to combat pollution by increasing the country's forest coverage.
A large regiment from the People's Liberation Army, along with some of the nation's armed police force, have been withdrawn from their posts on the northern border to work on non-military tasks inland.
The majority will be dispatched to Hebei province, which encircles Beijing, according to the Asia Times which originally reported the story. The area is known to be a major culprit for producing the notorious smog which blankets the capital city."
I was going to just let a day slide with no post. Lots of things to do. But then I looked out the window (it's 9:50pm now and that was ten minutes ago). The camera just couldn't capture the color on the freshly snowed mountains, but this gives you an idea. I ran out and got the picture with a telephoto lens.
I did try the panorama setting on my iPhone first, but the mountains looked much further away than they did in person. That was from the window. But now that I look at it, the tree patterns are kind of nice.
They're a muted grey now as I look outside. But these other two pictures were on my camera and there seemed to be a theme. Well, the second two probably go together better. And no, those trees shouldn't be right in the middle, but I was after maximum pink.
The geranium petals were from a plant that bloomed inside, and then settled on the counter like this.
[UPDATE April 25, 2019 - Based on Barbara's comment, I'm adding this video of suminagashi]
