Total Eclipse

UPDATE 11:12pm - the clouds have shut down the show. At least for now. Maybe they'll just pass by.



[There are five posts showing different stages of the eclipse.]

It's Almost Gone

As it gets darker, my little camera's limits show more and more.  You still have time to go out and watch the moon covered completely and then come back. 


[There are five posts showing different stages of the eclipse.]

All You Have To Do Is Go Outside - Moon's Half Gone

If you are in Anchorage, you've no excuse not to go out and watch this rare wonder as the moon vanishes.  If you are elsewhere in North America, you're only excuse is an overcast sky.  I'm going back out to watch more.  (The pictures are all with my wee Canon Powershot and a tripod.  On this one I used spot focus, about 6X enlarge and pushing the exposure down two stops.)


[There are five posts showing different stages of the eclipse.]

I Know It's Cold, But The Moon Is Disappearing As You Watch

Now get out there and watch the moon disappear!  On the solstice no less. 


[There are five posts showing different stages of the eclipse.]

Go Out Right Now and Watch the Eclipse

Here's the pre-eclipse Anchorage moon about an hour ago.  It should be starting any time now.











It snowed again last night so I took this picture of the deck where I'm headed after I post this and then shoveled the snow.  The moon is visible and bright.

It will be going on for several hours so you have time. 


 From Drsky:

Observers in the western hemisphere will be treated to a great

total lunar eclipse on the night of December 20th/21st.

Total lunar eclipses are some of the most amazing events to view

in the night sky!

What makes this years eclipse so amazing; is the fact that the moon

Will ride very high in the sky and the eclipse will be seen from coast to coast.

Here are some details and links on this most amazing celestial event, as we end 2010!

Go to the drsky link for more info.

Politics Not As Usual - Murkowski Votes To End Don't Ask Don't Tell

Sen. Lisa Murkowski was among eight Republicans to vote to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT), staying consistent with comments she made a couple of weeks ago that she thought it was time to end the policy.   But this must have been a pretty hard decision for her, harder than probably any other of the Republicans who voted against their party position. 

Murkowski lost the Republican primary.  This vote on DADT  ensures that the rabid right of the Alaska Republican party will work hard to defeat her again in the 2016 primary.  While her write-in re-election (close to being settled now in the Alaska Supreme Court) required the support of lots of Democrats and Independents who believe she owes them votes on some critical issues, she didn't have to break ranks with most of the Republicans here.  Perhaps she believes that in six years gays in the military will be a non-issue.  A likely US Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of California's Prop. 7 is likely to keep GLBT issues hot for the 2012 Presidential election and possibly beyond.

Plus Alaska has not been friendly to GLBT issues.  Alaskan voters amended the State Constitution to make explicit that marriage means one man and one woman.  

Can Murkowski win her next Republican primary?  At this point, I would expect her to have some heavy opposition.  Would she run in the primary as an independent?  Six years is a long time in politics, but she must have been thinking about these things when she voted to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell. 

I don't see this as anything but a principled vote for what she believed was the best policy, in the face of her party's general opposition.

Looking at all eight Republicans who voted for repeal, on the surface there seem to be three key factors:

• State support of same-sex marriage or civil unions
• Collins and Snowe of Maine, Scott Brown of Massachusetts
• Gender 
• The only woman of 17 in the Senate not voting for repeal was  Kay Baily Hutchinson (R TX.)  The other three Republican women - Collins, Snowe, and Murkowski - voted for repeal.
• Age
•  Of the male Republicans who voted for repeal all but one were among the 20 youngest Senators.  The exception, George Voinovich, is retiring. 

Here's a bit more on the:

• other seven Republicans who voted to repeal DADT
• three Republicans who were absent
• one Democrat who was absent (no Democrats voted against it)

Republicans who voted for repeal


Scott Brown  (51) (R-Mass.)

Brown won the right to finish Ted Kennedy's term as US Senator, is up for reelection in the first US state to allow same-sex marriage.   


Richard M. Burr (55)  (R NC)

The National Review writes:

Burr said it was not a difficult vote to cast, despite his state’s being home to Camp Lejeune, the largest Marine Corps base on the East Coast. Gen. James Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, had been one of the most high-profile opponents of repeal. “Hopefully we all think independently here and we listen; we don’t have to be lobbied or influenced,” he said.

Burr told reporters that he supported repeal because “this is a policy that generationally is right,” but said he “didn’t necessarily agree” with those who have characterized the issue as a civil-rights struggle.

“A majority of Americans have grown up at a time [when] they don’t think exclusion is the right thing for the United States to do,” Burr said. “It’s not the accepted practice anywhere else in our society, and it only makes sense.”

I don't know enough about North Carolina politics to know how his vote compares to Murkowski's.  He has the largest Marine Corps base in the US in his state and the Marines were the of branch of the military most strongly opposed to repealing DADT.  On the other hand he did well in the 2010 election according to Wikipedia:

Burr defeated North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall (D) on November 2nd, 2010 with 55% of the vote. He is the first Republican since Jesse Helms to be re-elected to the United States Senate from North Carolina and garnered the largest percentage of votes of any Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in North Carolina history.

Susan Collins (R-Maine) (58) and Olympia Snowe (63) (R-Maine)

Collins has been the leading Republican Senator in support of repealing DADT.  She was the only Republican Senator who voted in favor the Defense Bill that had DADT attached earlier in December.  Olympia Snowe joined her when DADT was a stand alone bill.  Both Maine's Representatives (both Democrats) in the House voted for the bill.  I haven't checked, but this is the only state I know of where the whole Congressional delegation voted for repeal.  Maine allows domestic partnerships.

Same-sex marriage in Maine was a divisive issue in 2009: a bill to allow same-sex marriages in Maine was signed into law on May 6, 2009, by Governor Baldacci following legislative approval, but opponents successfully petitioned for a referendum on the issue, putting the law on hold before it came into effect before going on to win the referendum by 300,848 to 267,828 on November 3, 2009. Maine's domestic partnership law remains in effect. [Wikipedia]

John Ensign (52) R Nevada

I'm stretching here, but Nevada seems a little looser on moral issues with long time legalized gambling and prostitution.  Liberace was an institution in Las Vegas.  

The National Review wrote: 

Before the vote, Ensign said the choice for him was a struggle between what he personally thought was the right thing to do, and the circumstantial concerns of various military chiefs.

That’s why, he explained, he had voted against taking up the measure.

But in the end, once the question on the table, it appeared personal conviction won out over political circumstance. “My personal feeling is that it should be repealed,” he’d said before the 65-to-31 vote.

Ensign left the Senate chamber quickly and quietly . . .

Mark Kirk (51) (R-Ill.)

Kirk, a Naval Reserve Officer, moved up to the Senate from the House in a special election to finish out Obama's Senate seat and start his own six year term in January.  In the House he voted "against   Constitutional marriage amendments, he supported ending job discrimination based on sexual orientation and received a favorable 75 percent rating from the Human Rights Campaign on gay rights issues."  [Huffington Post]

From The Examiner.com in Chicago

Is Sen. Kirk really in favor of allowing gays to serve openly in the military?  His past history suggests otherwise.  As a member of the House Armed Services Committee Kirk voted against a measure to repeal DADT as recently as last May.  One suspects that his slim margin of victory in November's senatorial contest may have sensitized Sen. Kirk to the realities of representing the entire state of Illinois, not just the 10th congressional district.  Once Governor Pat Quinn gets around to signing the Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act already sitting on his desk, the state of Illinois will recognize civil unions. A "no" vote on DADT would have put Mark Kirk at odds with a very large bloc of Illinois voters.  It also would have provided potent ammunition for the next Democratic challenger for his senate seat.

George Voinovich (74) (R-Ohio)

Voinovich is retiring from the Senate.  






Republicans who didn't vote

Jim Bunning (79) (R KY)

Bunning, who barely won his last election in 2004, and was named by Time Magazine as one of the five worst Senators, is retiring at the end of this term.



Judd Gregg (63)  (R (NH)

Same sex marriage became legal in New Hampshire in January 2010.

Gregg is retiring at the end of this term.


Orrin G. Hatch (76) (R UT)

Polygamy has a history in Utah, but the Mormon church has been strongly opposed to same-sex marriage and Hatch is an institution in Utah who doesn't have to worry that his absence would harm him in any way. 

The Salt Lake City Tribune reports:

Sen. Orrin Hatch was absent for the vote but registered his dissent from afar. He said November’s election should have shown that voters want Congress to focus on the economy — not try to appeal to their liberal supporters.

“Rather than take part in this cynical exercise in political charades, I am honoring a long-standing commitment I made more than a year ago to attend my grandson’s graduation in Missouri,” Hatch said.

Democrat who didn't vote

Joe Manchin III (63) (D WV) 

It appears that Manchin, newly elected to fill the seat of Sen. Robert Byrd is trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing. He's up for election again in 2012. He skipped this vote and the vote on the Dream Act. He's the only Democrat who didn't vote for repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Woman Bites Off Estranged Husband’s Penis And Stabs Him To Death

OK, I know that's a sensational headline.  It came through my subscription to Thaivisa a website for expats in Thailand that I joined while we were in Thailand.  Here's the first paragraph of the story from the Pattaya Daily News:

A woman who was forced to have oral sex by her estranged husband bit off his penis. In the ensuing fight the husband, a senior official at the Ministry Of Defence, stabbed her in the arm, but she managed to grab the knife and stabbed him in the abdomen. He died from his injuries shortly afterwards.

But I do have a question that I think is worth putting out there (is anyone else asking this same question?)


Why doesn't this happen more often? 

When oral sex is not consensual, a man shows his dominance by putting the very symbol of his masculinity into a potential chopping block.  My question is simply, why don't more women (or men) take advantage of this opportunity to avenge the man who is forcing them into this situation?  Is this the ultimate show of power - to give your subject the opportunity to do you serious harm knowing the subject won't take it? 


Perhaps it happens more often than is reported, but if it gets to police reports, I'd expect it would get publicized, though hospital records wouldn't be as accessible.


Perhaps the mouth (I don't want to assume it's always a woman, or use the word victim, so unless someone comes up with a better word I'll leave it at this) is simply too afraid of retribution.

Perhaps the mouth is revolted by the idea of biting down.


Perhaps the mouth doesn't believe it will succeed. 


Perhaps the mouth has been socialized to not bite.


Would this happen more often if women had penises and men supplied the mouths?  


I'm guessing that men and women react differently to this sort of story, but I'm not sure what those reactions are.  Is there one main reaction for each gender or are there several main reactions for each gender?  


If the facts in the story prove true, should she be charged with anything or just let go?  Will men answer this question differently then women?  


Am I kidding myself that I'm asking serious questions here?  If you think I am, how would one have a serious discussion of something like this?  What are the relevant issues? 

Need a Break? Fireside Books in Palmer This Afternoon

Phil Munger has a post on a book signing this afternoon in Palmer: 

Sunday afternoon, you can go to Fireside Books in Palmer and meet the authors of one of the most honest and authentic books written by Alaskans about the Arctic regions of our state.

You can meet the author/editors, Susan B. Andrews and John Creed.

The anthology is  Purely Alaska: Authentic Voices from the Far North

John Creed reads What Do I Know?  and I met him in Juneau during the legislative session.  He teaches in Kotzebue.   I haven't read the book, so I can only say that others - like Willie Hensley - seem to think this is a good book.  Read more at Progressive Alaska.

If you can't make it to Palmer today, at least check it out when you're in a local bookstore. 

AIFF 2010: Intellectual Junk Food (Exporting Raymond) and a Real Meal (My Perestroika)

Exporting Raymond

Imagine watching a 13 year old savoring his Big Mac and fries, chock full of fat, salt, and sugar.   McDonald's has figured out how to attach taste to nutritionally inert material and deliver it in minutes.  It's like food porn - instant gratification with no long term substance.  And collectively Americans have been seduced into obesity and diabetes, while our fast food habits contribute to environmental degradation, and replace local foods around the world with trademarked exports. 

Most sit-coms have about the same intellectual nutrition as fast food.   I was uncomfortable throughout the movie as I watched this self-centered American (Philip Rosenthal, the writer, director, and star) making what appeared to be his first trip to Russia and complaining about everything he encountered.  It was the same problem I had with Lost in Translation.  A past-his-prime American star goes to Tokyo to make a Japanese commercial and finds everything in Japan defectively 'not like home.'  Japan was a prop to the characters' self-indulgence.  There was no attempt in either film to give a sense of what the Japanese and Russian characters around them were thinking.  It's all about 'me'.  It's like an intellectual std you don't realize that you've contracted from the background conceit that country X (in Translation's case Japan) is full of stupid people who do not indulge my American self-centeredness.

What really bothered me was that several of the people I talked to after the movie, people who I would have expected to get it, didn't.  They thought it was great.  He was only poking fun at himself in an alien situation.  And the official description of the film promotes that:

Lost in Moscow, lost in his mission, lost in translation, Phil tries to connect with his Russian colleagues but runs into unique characters and situations that conspire to drive him insane. The movie is a true international adventure, a genuine, “fish out of water” comedy that could only exist in real life.

Why don't I see it that way?  "Tries to connect?"  I saw the American expert exasperated because they didn't acknowledge his expertise.  "Conspire to drive him insane?"  Well, yes, if you are as self centered as Rosenthal was in the movie, you might think there was a conspiracy to get you.  You might not realize that your problems are self inflicted.  His trip preparations - as portrayed in this documentary - amounted to getting advice from friends to buy K&R (Kidnap and Ransom) insurance. The world is supposed to engage us on our terms, we don't have to do anything but show up and be admired.

I've spent enough time living in other cultures to realize that this movie shows us only the first stage of experiencing a new culture - the stage where one compares everything unfavorably to home.  It is only after learning some of the language and spending enough time to start seeing yourself from the Russian (in Exporting Raymond's case) perspective, that you start to appreciate what the new culture has to offer and see your own culture more objectively.

I'm calling this movie intellectual junk food because like a Big Mac it's full of cheap and easy sit-com type laughs which ultimately make us feel good because the movie reinforces our belief that the US is the greatest country in the world and, like in the movie, if they only would do it our way, the world will be a much better place.

What's wrong with that?  Like junk food, the benefits are short term.  When we eat junk food, we satisfy the immediate hunger without realizing our waistline is gradually expanding (our critical thinking abilities are shrinking) and our aortas are clogging and rain forests are destroyed to raise beef.  This comedy gives us easy laughs while keeping Americans from facing the fact that, while our country still offers some remarkable advantages in the world, other countries are doing better than we are in many areas.  It also doesn't reveal the damage American dominance in the world causes other cultures and other economies.  Ultimately, this movie satisfies with mass produced calories and makes us feel good about ourselves, when what we're consuming is intellectual junk food.

I understand that a lot, maybe most, of the people reading this will shake their heads and say, "Steve, lighten up.  This is just a comedy."   And it was funny.

Let me attempt another way to evaluate the movie.  Let me compare it to another documentary at the Anchorage International Film Festival that featured Russia for 88 minutes (two more than Exporting Raymond.)


My Perestroika looked at the lives of five Russians (in their late 30s I'd guess) who had gone to school together.  One couple are both teachers, a single mom works for a company that rents out billiard tables, there's a man who owns a high end French shirt shop, and a subway musician who dropped out of a famous Russian punk band.  This movie paints a picture of Russia through the stories of these five people who came of age during Perestroika, including old photos and home movies.  We get an image that is in sharp contrast to the stereotypes Americans have of the Soviet Union.   One woman, for example, tells us that as a child she'd see coverage of riots and murders in the US on TV and think, "I'm so lucky to be a Russian."  Ouch.  That's what we thought about being Americans. All of them talk about their childhoods with nostalgia and obvious pleasure.

We're seeing the stories of five Moscow residents who all went to the same school.  We don't see anything about life outside of Moscow, we don't see any families who had members purged.  But we have to consider whether our TV view of Russia wasn't just as biased as theirs of us.  We can't generalize from these five people to all of Russia, but these five people give us insight into a story about the Soviet Union (it was the Soviet Union for much of these people's lives) that Americans rarely get.

So why are these films so different?  Exporting Raymond, though it takes place mostly in Russia, isn't about Russia.  It's about an American who travels out of his comfort zone.  It's about him.  The Russians are just props in his sitcom.   My problem only comes up when another culture is used as the butt of most of the jokes and ultimately made to look bad in comparison to the US, offering no insights other than "traveling abroad is frustrating, but if you're persistent, you can help them save themselves with American superiority."  Sort of like how we are winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

My Perestroika was made by an American woman. Robbin Hessman, who spent years living in Leningrad and Moscow. She even helped adapt a very different American television show for Russian audiences - Sesame Street.  Even though she understands Russian and has lived there for years, she recognizes that there's a lot she doesn't understand. 

The film wasn't about her, but was pursued in an attempt to better grasp the Russians of her generation.  In an interview with IndieWire  she says,

. . . I decided to make a film about my generation of Russians – the generation that I joined, in a sense, when I went to live there for the first time at age 18. They had normal Soviet childhoods behind the Iron Curtain, never dreaming that anything would ever be different in their society. Just coming of age when Gorbachev appeared, they were figuring out their own identities as the very foundations of their society were being questioned for the first time. And then they graduated just as the USSR collapsed and they had to figure out a completely new life as young adults, with no models to follow. Although I didn’t grow up there and have no Russian family history, I shared their journey through the 1990s, adjusting to the evolving Post-Soviet Russia along with everyone else. It put me in a wonderful position to tell their story – as I am both insider and outsider.  After working on other films for PBS as a co-producer, I began to develop this film full time in the fall of 2004. . .

Exporting Raymond is intellectual junk food.  Raymond is easy; no work.  It's a hunger fix, which makes us feel good by massaging our brains with the satisfying conceit of American superiority.

My Perestroika is a serious, fresh, healthy, home made meal.  It takes more work, but ultimately that work helps connect us to more realistic views of the world and our place in that world.

Junk food now and then probably doesn't do much harm.  But we're constantly feeding on the same junk message about US exceptionalism, a message that contributes to why we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan today.


[Examples of Americans writing about another culture critically, but with understanding of why things feel so frustrating, include  Bill Holm's Coming Home Crazy, which he wrote after teaching a year in China and Peter Hessler's River Town about his Peace Corps experience in China.]

"And most days I don't think about the ax."

Catherine Doss Senungetuk's retrospective exhibit opened with a reception at 5pm yesterday (Friday) at Out North.  Lots of people came.









The walls were covered in Catherine's colors.   Most of the words below are Catherine's own from the exhibition brochure.

1971-1974 . . .Without having known it when I started at L & C [Lewis and Clark], Portland was one of the two cities in the US (New York being the other) where the revival of calligraphy was in full swing, thanks in large part to Lloyd Reynolds, who taught at Reed College across the river.  My teacher was Norman Paasche, a kind gentleman who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and walked with a cane, but this didn't dampen his love of letters and books.

Through him I was introduced to handmade books as well as small press books, such as those by Walter Hanady.  For me, it was like falling into a letter honey pot.  All my life I had been fascinated by peoples' handwriting, and here was a chance to actually study and practice lettering through the history of letter-forms, as well as the art of the book.

1979 My brother called and invited me to meet him in Paris, France. . . While in Paris I worked at Atelier Lacouriere, a printmaking studio.  Misch Kohn had given me the owner's name and encouraged me to go and introduce myself.  Misch had given me the location - "Down about a hundred steps from the Sacre Coeur" - but it was still quite hard to find.  The owner, Jacques Frelaut, opened the door when I knocked, he had just gotten back from England working with Marc Chagall, and the master printers in the basement were working on editioning Chagall's plates.  Monsieur Frelaut invited me to work there, told me where to go to get copper (which was in the Paris slaughterhouse district), plus for myself I had to go to Charbonnel for inks.  I did four copper etchings, which I've never editioned.

1987 Joe and I married.

1991 Visited Karlgeorg and Maria Hoefer in Offenbach, a suburb of Frankfurt.  Karlgeorg showed me stacks and stacks of his work - daily alphabets, writing, type design, more lettering.  It was breathtaking.  Maria was a fiber artist and her pieces also hung in their living room.  The next day we went together to the Klingspor Museum, a museum dedicated totally to the book and letter arts.  

2006 In October, I was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer which had gone to my lungs and bones, a shocking and severe diagnoses. As I would find out, it becomes an almost daily question, how to make sense of, and integrate, an illness into ones life, one which cannot be cured according to current medicine.

2010 Had to take a medical retirement from school nursing. Had major back surgery and chemo. Since I was young, I've always had the feeling that life is short, that every day is important. Now, living with an ax over my head, I see it really is. And most days I don't think about the ax.

The ax fell about 4am today.


On the back page of the brochure, after thanking the people involved in the exhibit,  Catherine wrote:

And not least, many many thanks to all our friends and family who pray for me, for us, and keep me in their thoughts for healing.  I believe Spirit is what keeps me alive.  I have also had wonderful doctors, caregivers, therapists and counselors.  Thanks to each of you, I thank my Creator for gracing me with a few more days, weeks, months on this most beautiful earth, and my steadfast husband, who has firsthand experience with "in sickness and in health."  Without him and without God, I would not be.

Previous post on this retrospective. 

UPDATE Jan. 1, 2011:  A Celebration of Catherine’s Life will be held in Anchorage at the Alaska Native Lutheran Church at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, January 14, 2011.  A reception will follow at the Out North Contemporary Art House.  In lieu of flowers, please offer a donation in Catherine’s memory to a charity of your choice.