Visiting the Ainu and Korean Exhibits

After watching the concert for a while at the museum we walked through the Ainu exhibit and the Korean Ceramic exhibits once more. Today was the last day for the Ainu exhibit - breathtaking - but the Modern Korean Ceramics will be around until December 30.

It was something of a cross cultural experience to wander through these Asian exhibits with the Anchorage Concert Chorus singing Christmas music in the background.

Anchorage Concert Chorus at the Museum

After brunch, we went over the the Museum to see the Ainu and Korean Ceramic exhibits once more before they left town. We knew something else was going on because there was no parking near the museum. If it hadn't been around ten degrees, or if we were more warmly dressed, we could have just walked over.

Our timing was perfect, the Anchorage Concert Chorus was four deep up the stairs of the atrium and the director Grant Cochran was just explaining how the chorus traditionally performs in the museum and then walks over to the Performing Arts Center for their concert there. Below is a taste of what we heard.

Brunch at the Sheraton - Great Views of Anchorage

One of the people we've known the longest in Anchorage invited us and some others for Sunday brunch at the Sheraton Hotel. Josephine's is on the 15th floor.

As we get close to solstice, this is about as high as the sun gets
on the southern horizon.The Anchorage Municipal Cemetery is in the foreground.

The table behind the salads is the shrimp, crab legs, and assorted shell fish.

The Alaska Range to the west, gets some morning sun while
downtown Anchorage is still in the shade.

Audubon Christmas Bird Count Tally

The previous post highlights our day riding around counting birds in east Anchorage. Dianne picked us up again at 5ish and we took the new Elmore Road to the Campbell Creek Science Center for the tally of all the groups out counting birds today. 15,248 individual birds and 39 different species were counted. This is down from the last couple of years. But a lot of factors go into this - the weather, the number of people counting, luck....

Two new species (for the Anchorage Christmas Bird Count) were spotted:

• 25 Northern Shovelers
• 1 Brambling [I had "Bramble" but my birder friend Catherine reminded me it's Brambling]
  

The brambling brought the most ooos and aaaahs. Below is a brief video that will give you a general sense of the evening.

Christmas Bird Count - How many canaries are left?

Our birder friend, Dianne, (well, she does other things besides birding) emailed to invite us to the Christmas Bird Count today. The Audubon website explains:

The Christmas Bird Count (CBC) is an organized continent-wide survey that documents every bird seen on a given day from sunrise to sunset. Since the turn of the 20th century, the Christmas Bird Count has contributed to the knowledge base of wintering birds in North America. This information is also important to allow scientists to detect fluctuations and trends of birds over a period of years.

1986: Coal mine canaries made redundant

More than 200 canary birds are being phased out of Britain's mining pits, according to new plans by the government.

Modern technology is being favoured over the long-serving yellow feathered friend of the miner in detecting harmful gases which may be present underground.

The Downey Woodpecker was clear in the binoculars, but not so clear in the camera.




This moose was one of four we saw. If you click on the moose to enlarge it, you can see a white horizontal bar just to the right of her nose. That was part of the wing feather a magpie using the moose as a trampoline.


We do see birds all winter, particularly ravens and magpies which are big and plentiful all winter and their black plumage stands out against the snow. But the little birds flit around so quickly that they are hard to see. But when you ride around for four hours specifically looking for birds, you see a lot more.






When we were in China, I was watching all the birds on campus - an oasis of trees in the increasingly concrete city. Most of my students were surprised when I talked about the birds. First that I was interested in them, second that there were any on campus - they just didn't 'see' them. But coal miners used to take canaries down into the mines because they were affected much faster than people if the air went bad. The canaries were introduced into the mines in 1911 and were phased out in Britain in 1986 according to a BBC story.

Birds and other animals serve as environmental canaries on earth. The counts give at least a rough count of the number and location of birds in the United States. The changes from year to year help identify trends. For instance, today Dianne was upset with the 20 European Starlings we saw, bird not natural to Anchorage, that have been increasing in number steadily, and harmfully to other birds whose nests in tree holes they invade.

Dianne had a regular route for this part of east Anchorage and we saw quite a few birds. I was able to get some pictures of the larger birds (eagles and ravens) and this one unrecognizable picture of the downey woodpecker.



We also got some more exotic birds. Dianne wouldn't let us put them in the official count list, but she stopped long enough for me to take pictures of the flamingos, penguins (we saw one more before these) and the robin.

Outscourced and No Country for Old Men

You'd think after the film festival, I'd be ready for a movie break. But there was a movie about India at the Bear Tooth Monday night and Joan wanted to see a movie today so we went to the one with the most stars in the newspaper.

Outsourced


[I'm still have mixed feelings about videotaping films in the movies. When the Film Festival folks emailed me, I was wondering if they were going to complain about that, but not at all. Since movie reviewers on tv and the radio use clips from the movies they review, I should be able to do the same. I only use a tiny percentage, I don't give away anything that would spoil the movie, etc. But I also don't want my camera to disturb people around me. So if I don't get a seat away from others or I'm not surrounded by friends, I also tend not to take out my camera. Or if I get so absorbed in the movie I forget. Anyway, these two movies I took no pictures. So I'm using the Outsourced trailer. You can see more clips from the movie including the first 8 minutes of the movie at the official site.]

India is another universe. While I enjoyed 'being' in India watching Darjeeling Express, that movie was more focused on the three American brothers who used India as the backdrop for their reunion and bonding. Outsourced gives a more balanced view of both how the American call center guy from Seattle who is dropped suddenly into India feels, but also gives more of an India viewpoint as well. This is not a heavy film, but it gave a good sense of how it feels to be embraced by the world that is India - the smells, the huge crowds, the different rules for doing most everything - in a don't take yourself too seriously way. This guy made far more progress than I think possible in only three weeks, but that aside, it pulled me in that my critic hat fell off and I just enjoyed the movie.

No Country for Old Men

I don't like violent movies, but I was hearing more and more good buzz for this movie, and it was at a convenient time and place, so we went. I am drawn to psychopaths - because they are out there and we need to understand that and them - but this movie didn't give us any real clues about them. We saw one in action, but nothing that helps us understand why. Overall it was a very well made and gripping movie. Again, I was totally pulled into it. And I liked the fact that there was no Hollywood ending, in fact it was left open enough there could be a sequel.

I would note there are long blog discussions about some of the scenes in the movie and apparently a lot of head scratching about what actually happened in the movie. I didn't have that reaction. Not everything was perfectly clear, but neither is life. It wasn't unclear in that the Coen brothers did a poor job of making the movie. A good movie, like a good book, deserves a second look. But Nora Ephraim did write a funny review in the New Yorker, but I'd see the movie before I read the review.

Blog, Blog, Blog

Blogging stuff keeps piling up in my life. Here's two posts in one, first on ADN blogs and then on Quarterlife and Marshall Herskovitz.

Anchorage Daily News (ADN) wants bloggers
At the Alaska Apple Users Group meeting last night, Kathleen McCoy from the Anchorage Daily News announced the paper was soliciting local bloggers who cover a specialized topic - community council news, local horse news, etc. They already have 13 blogs that I counted here tonight from gardening and barhopping to hockey. I got to talk to her a little during the break. Seems as the print version - and the employee base - shrinks, the ADN is trying to fill the void by using the free labor of local bloggers. On the one hand, that's good in a number of ways. It means

• ordinary people are writing about what they're passionate about
• we'll get coverage with different perspectives
• there won't be anyone to force a certain look or perspective
• there will be more room for comments - and maybe individual bloggers can do a better job of monitoring the nastiness of some of the current ADN blogs
• featured blogs will get more attention than they might otherwise
  

But on the negative side it means:

• the inconsistent quality we see online in general
• corporate exploitation of community public citizens - they aren't likely to share any ad revenue and they are cutting staff and replacing it with unpaid bloggers
• hit and miss coverage as unpaid bloggers have to earn a living and miss their posts, decide they don't need to subsidize the ADN with their blogs, and otherwise skip posts and/or drop out

I think the ADN has no choice but to figure out ways to create an electronic presence. Kathleen has been around the ADN many years and I think she's trying to make this work. So far their stance on monitoring the nastiness of some of the regular blog posters seems short sighted to me. I can't find the posts I was looking for, but here is a little after Andrew Halcro quit his ADN blog.I'll hold judgment, though I'm on the wrong side of neutral in my expectations at this point.


Quarterlife

One of the best television programs I ever saw was "My So-Called Life." One of the producers, Marshall Herskovitz, was on Fresh Air this morning, talking about the television industry (the effects of corporate consolitdation and the end of the ban on networks owning the programing) and his new effort - an internet tv program called Quarterlife that has been bought by NBC. Quarterlife has been on the periphery of my consciousness, but the interview brought it front and center. I watched the first two shows today. (You can watch it online at Quarterlife.com- there are 11 episodes so far, all available.)

The show is about a young woman who... you guessed it, has a blog named....did you figure it out yet? Quarterlife. It is very real, very unlike most television. And no commercials. And you won't have any late fees.

I suspect blogs are a transitional genre, and maybe corporate World will end up buying up or otherwise coopting the best - or at least most profitable - but something is happening here. Stay tuned.

[More recent posts at ADN Blogging Policy - 1 and ADN Blogging Policy - 2.]

Infamous Lake Otis and Tudor and the Moon

Worst intersection
in the city. Moon sliver
makes traffic ok.

Warm Anchorage Winter

The sun came out this afternoon, but it's cooler. Still, as you can see from the week's temperature chart, our daily lows have been above the normal average daily highs most of the week. And it's been like that most of the winter. [OK, I know for most of you winter starts Dec. 21. But here it begins when the snow starts to fall, usually some time in October. For us the solstice means it's starting to get lighter each day. That's all good.]











[Temp trend from ADN]

Blogger Law 101

Through the serendipity of the internet, I just found a site called Tubetorial, which has a series of videos on blogger law, or "What every blogger needs to know about the law." I've only looked at the first five minute video, which is just an overview. It says the series will cover:

• Trademark
• Copyright
• Defamation
• Marketing and Advertising
• Miscellaneous

This sounds a little ominous. Will you be sued? Does someone already own your domain name? My sense of the blogosphere is that it is pretty wide open and most of us little guys probably aren't in much danger - if our domain name gets taken away, well, we can make up a new one. But it also seems fairly smart to at least be aware of the law and not do unnecessarily stupid things that might make you liable.

So how did I find this site? I've been noticing in the last week that I'm getting a lot more hits from Google image search. But in sitemeter, unlike the regular Google searches which give you the search terms people put into Google, image searches don't do that. So I was looking around to see if someone knew why and if there was a way to get that. That got me to Pearsonified.com
where there was a post about how to write the code on your pictures so that Google search would find them easier. In the comments there were some other links to interesting sites - getting me further away from what I was looking for, but to things I didn't know I needed to know. Including the Tubetorial site that has the Blogging Law videos.

There were some interesting suggestions about how to put tag words into the code for the pictures. I looked at the code that blogspot automatically sets up for one of my pictures and in the alt section it just has a long number, but I put the name of the picture into the .jpg. [I really have no idea what the alt section is, but I could find it in the oode.] Since blogspot is owned - as I understand it - by Google, you'd think they would do the right thing for us blogspot users. Anyway, I am starting to see the image traffic pick up noticeably.

Oh, I learned a new acronym in all of this: SEO - Search Engine Optimization.