Meetup.com Anchorage Beach Hike

I haven't been on a meetup.com hike since spring - too busy, too lazy, wrong time, wrong hike, lots of excuses. The concept is great - a website where people who want to meetup for some activity. But walking along the beach near Kincaid sounded just right and the time was fine.











We did ok coming down the steep embankment from the Jodphur parking lot. This big piece of driftwood was at the bottom, on the beach.








































We were eight people and eight dogs, all of whom will sleep well tonight.


















The strong tides in Cook Inlet tend to jumble the sea ice and leave a lot on the shore.

















Doug Van Etten, the mastermind behind the meetup.com adventurer group.






















The clouds were heavy, but there was a break on the western horizon all afternoon giving us a peak of the Alaska Range. I think this is Mt. Redoubt.

Baranof Hotel Gets Cheap Oil

While oil field support executives were running their legislative log rolling scheme from Room 604 of the Baranof, the hotel was already starting to wean itself from petroleum and using its own kitchen cooking oil to heat the hotel. There was a short item in the ADN Money section on Thursday, December 27, 2007. I couldn't find it through Google, but found what might be the source - what looks like a copy of a Westmark Hotel press release on a December 17 Reuters report. Baranof general manager Steve Hamilton said they started using cooking oil because the local incinerator no longer took the oil. They now collect oil from other Juneau businesses

The Baranof creates a mix of 1/2 vegetable cooking oil and 1/2 fuel oil
which is then used to heat the hotel.  The hotel can burn up to 2,000 gallons
of oil in one month and typically uses 10,000 gallons of cooking oil over the
course of the year. By using cooking oil, the hotel has reduced the amount of
fuel oil they use by 9,000 gallons a year.

So, with a little thinking we can find better ways to do things. Instead of paying someone to dispose of their waste cooking oil, they now save the cost of 9000 gallons of heating fuel. How many more clever alternatives are out there? It seems like we generally have to be forced to find them when business as usual doesn't work. Sounds like everyone is coming out ahead.

Environmental benefits from using vegetable oil include releasing fewer
pollutants into the air, recycling of carbon already in the system and a
reduction in carbon output. In addition, businesses in Juneau have found a
reliable way to dispose of unwanted cooking oil without running afoul of
environmental regulations. Employees from the Westmark Baranof Hotel pick up
the oil free at their doorstep each week.

Way to go Steve. And by the way, how come the ADN left out the environmental benefits in their version of the story? Or don't they talk about that sort of thing in the Money section?

AIFF and Mental Health - A Summer in the Cage, Autism the Musical, Body/Antibody, Oil on Water

According to the National Institute for Mental Health

An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.¹ When applied to the 2004 U.S. Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people.².... In addition, mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in the U.S. and Canada for ages 15-44.³

Despite these statistics, we are, as a nation, dismally ignorant about the specifics of individual mental illnesses and the moral and ethical implications of how they work.

I didn't think I was going to write any more about this year's Anchorage International Film Festival, but I was able to borrow a few from the Festival office, and I just watched a powerful piece of movie making - A Summer in the Cage. It begins as a documentary about making a documentary about the basketball players at the Cage in Greenwich Village. But it turns into a film about one of the few white players, a guy named Sam, who takes over the director's life (and vice versa) and gets him to make the film about Sam, who is manic-depressive, also called bi-polar. It all worked for me - the photography, the story, the characters, the music, the lack of resolution. It had the magic.

And that got me to thinking. This was the fourth mental health themed movie that I saw through the AIFF. I guess if we aren't willing to talk about something, we leave it to the artists deal with it. And these films each did in totally different ways. The others were

• Autism the Musical
• Oil on Water
• Body/Antibody

Autism and the Cage were documentaries. For Autism, the movie making was low tech and succeeded because it didn't get in the way of the story. Cage was a very produced movie - it says "produced in association with the Sundance Channel - and it works well. The editor made good use of even the out of focus footage. Both delve deeply into the world of their mental health disorders to give us an intimate look at how the illness affects the individual and those around the individual. Each use the media of film to convey to outsiders what these conditions are like. Both films followed people with mental illnesses, not knowing where they would end up. Autism the Musical had more structure because it was focused on a musical being produced by a group of autistic kids. A Summer in the Cage was more or less a chance encounter that led the director, through curiosity and a growing sense of obligation (well, he told the story so that's what it looked like) to follow along for five years.


The two features were totally different. Oil on Water was ostensibly a feature film about the romance between an artistic young man and a beautiful model/writer. Only toward the end did it become the story of a schizophrenic. I left the theater with the sense that spreading the message about schizophrenia was the purpose of making the movie, and the interview with the producer Elle Matthews on the Writing Studio website seems to back that up.

On the other hand, Body/Antibody seems like a movie in which a character happens to be obsessive-compulsive. There's nothing preachy about the movie, this is not an 'educational movie,' it's just a good, dramatic comedy, that incidentally gives us a glimpse of what it means to be obsessive-compulsive. The director was at the showing and said he'd been fascinated by the disorder and had wanted one day to make a film that featured it. But it's the character who happens to have the disorder, not the disorder itself, that is the focus. However, the audience learns a lot about the disease. How, for example, can someone obsessed with cleanliness have sex? We find out. In addition to sex, it has that other essential ingredient of a successful 21st century movie - violence. Ultimately, I would expect that this movie will also serve as a greater vehicle for educating the world about mental health because it is basically entertainment whereas all the others are films about a mental health issue and they are troubling. This film could easily be released at the mall cineplex anywhere in the US and do well. The others will have a more difficult time getting that sort of audience. Autism, according to its website, will be shown on HBO and Cage was shown on the Sundance Channel.

For anyone who is teaching about mental health, I would highly recommend all but Oil on Water as excellent vehicles for getting the message across. They are real (including the language) and compelling and the basis for excellent discussion on the specific mental health issues they cover. Oil on Water has a more artsy look. I like artsy, but I had problems with the acting and pace in the beginning. It probably would be of interest to those with schizophrenia and their relatives and close friends.

Understanding about mental illness is critical in the United States and the rest of the world. In the US we have a basic story that says everyone is responsible for how his life turns out. Mental illness doesn't fit in that story. We'd rather believe that people are irresponsible, lazy, or evil when they don't behave appropriately. It's their own fault they don't succeed. What scientists are learning about mental health contradicts that story. One day there must be a showdown between our myths of autonomous man and the reality of mental health and illness.

These movies help show how powerfully, good movies can affect people's basic stories, by giving them an intimate window into the lives of people they otherwise would not know.

For earlier posts that touched on these movies see here and here for Oil on Water (I liked it better after seeing some other films), Autism the Movie and Body/Antibody are briefly mentioned in the first Oil link. Autism also has its own post. Body/Antibody should have had its own post, but I saw it late in the festival, so I hope I've done it justice in this post.

Picking the Right Story to Interpret the 'Facts'

Philip commented on the last post about Charlie Wilson's War:

Back through the 70s, I read a lot about the USSR. Current affairs and history, mostly dealing with musical life there. Between knowledge from that and talking to friends who had worked or studied there, I felt that the USSR was already teetering close to the edge before the mid-70s.

Hedrick Smith's _The Russians_ came out in 1975, four years before the Afghan invasion, during the middle of the short Ford administration. The book fairly clearly describes the already existing structural flaws that led to the collapse of the USSR fourteen years later.

It is possible that by forcing the Soviet government to spend more on defensive and counter-offensive weapons during the 1980s the US sped the inevitable along, but I doubt we'll ever know.

I've discussed in previous posts - particularly this one about "a black-hole bully, punching the nose of a passing galaxy" - how humans interpret facts based on the stories in their heads. Those stories - models, theories, narratives, we use many different words - get into our heads in different ways. Which story gets to be the interpreter of any collection of 'facts' at any point in time in any individual's brain, is a mystery. And I would wager most of us aren't aware of the stories we have that compete to interpret the world around us. Some we can identify - though they may not be the real story - others work in our heads without our ever actually articulating them.

Phil does a good job articulating the basis for his interpretation of the fall of the Soviet Union and he may be right - the Soviets were on the decline and, at best, the defeat in Afghanistan just sped that up. But I'm not so sure. The Soviet Union fell when the people stopped obeying. They simply withdrew their willingness to obey. When individual dissidents did that, the government could deal with that. But when the entire population did it, the government simply dissolved. (OK, this is my story, greatly influence by Vaclav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless". Click on the title for excerpts of the essay and here for a discussion that applies Havel's story to the US today.) The loss of young Soviet lives in Afghanistan and the eventual defeat in Afghanistan brought the people of the Soviet Union to the point of being able to withdraw their cooperation with the government. To simply stop cooperating with the regime. Then the radical capitalist crusaders with their "capitalism as the savior of humankind" ideology rushed into the Soviet Union to spread their Gospel. The initial euphoria dissipated as the pitfalls of unbridled capitalism - greed, inequality of wealth, followed by inequality of justice - resulted in a relative few Russians getting fabulously wealthy and the vast majority seeing their physical standard of living fall. Now, they seem to be sliding back into traditional Russian totalitarianism. So, Afghanistan may have made that moment of change possible. Without Afghanistan, things would have gotten bad, but they could have kept the Soviet infrastructure and more carefully adopted aspects of the market, as has China. The point of this post is not to decide who is 'right' but to illustrate how stories help us (for better or worse) interpret what we accept as 'facts.'


On NPR's Day to Day this morning (you can listen to it here,) the real Charlie Wilson says that the arming of the Mujahideen was his greatest achievement and he repeats the final message of the movie - that all we needed to do was fund the schools and infrastructure of post-war Afghanistan, and it wouldn't have left open for the Taliban to take.

But I can't help but wonder. At the end of the film we see Charlie Wilson half-heartedly, and unsuccessfully, arguing with his committee colleagues that they need to just put $1 million into education for Afghanistan. He worked a lot harder for arms than he did for education. I suspect his story is influenced by his own part in it all and his need to feel good about helping the Afghans defend themselves. But if he'd have fought for schools with 1/10th the zeal he'd fought for stingers, surely he could have raised a few million for schools. This "I did the right thing but Congress didn't follow through with schools" story doesn't quite ring true to me. Bringing the Soviet Union to its knees is a better story for Charlie Wilson, than bringing the Taliban to power in Afghanistan and allowing Bin Laden to train Al Qaeda there.

Charlie Wilson's War leads in part to today's war

George Crile's book, Charlie Wilson's War, gives an in depth picture of how things work in Washington DC, particularly how an unimportant Texas Congressman was able to get $100 billion worth of weapons and aid to the Mujahideen to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. The clip gives you as almost as much of the movie as the movie gives you of the book. You only get to hear Julia Roberts on the phone and you don't even get that much of Philip Seymour Hoffman who has the best role in the movie as a not usual CIA agent.



The quote from Congressman Wilson at the end of the movie suggests that it wasn't arming the Mujahideen that led to the Taliban taking over Afghanistan, but rather Congress' unwillingness to fund schools after the Soviets left. Did Wilson significantly speed up the fall of the Soviet Union by spearheading the arming of the Mujahideen? I don't know. I do know that the book should be read by as many people as possible given that the US is once again at war in Afghanistan. The movie also gives a glimpse of a refugee camp, another must see for Americans. The movie is entertaining, but not especially enlightening.

If you're taking a long plane trip, this is a great airplane book. It's really hard to put down. Watching the movie won't spoil the book, anymore than watching my short video will spoil the movie. See also the official Charlie Wilson's War website.

Anchorage in Winter - Downtown and Biker

I went to a meeting at the train depot today. Here's a shot from the third floor looking south towards downtown Anchorage. The big building on the right is the Hilton Hotel.




With the advent of the mountain bike, the availability of studs for bike tires and bright flashing bike lights, and the increasing price of gas, more and more people are discovering that winter biking is doable. Cold isn't the issue - people are outside skiing and snow machining, so why not biking?

The biggest problem is cars. I'm NOT a biker who goes out in the street if a decent sidewalk exists. Claiming your biker's right to use the road is like Timothy Treadwell playing with grizzlies. The cars might miss you most of the time, but all it takes is one to ruin a perfectly good life. (And if you're contemplating suicide, go biking. Maybe it will change your mind.)

But that said, trips where there is a plowed bike path or sidewalk, of less than a mile, are easy to handle. Then start going further. And you can usually find a bike rack or no parking sign to chain it too. And you can always take a bus back - they have room for two bikes in front.

Did I take my bike today? Nooooooo. I don't have studded tires, so don't go out too far, especially on a tight schedule. But I try to use it when I'm going within a mile or two of home and back rather than the car. I never claimed to be perfect.

Retaliation - Will Alaskans Be Required to get Pre-Approval when flying over Canada?

This warning for Alaskans found at Boing Boing while attempting to get follow up information on the Icelandic woman held at JFK.

Many flights from Western Canada to southern Ontario pass over US territory. The US is now making noises that they may require passengers on such flights to be pre-approved by US authorities up to 72 hours in advance. This also applies to Canadian flights to Mexico, Cuba and other points south.

It will be politically impossible for the Canadian government not to impose similar conditions on US flights passing over Canada. This included flights from Alaska to the Eastern US, and most flights from the US to Europe.

It'll be amusing to watch the reaction of some US congressman travelling from Washington to Alaska or Europe, when Canada denies him permission to get on the flight because he didn't book far enough in advance.

I guess the flights to Seattle could veer out over the ocean a bit to avoid this, but will they?

And another reminder that what we do without thinking has long term consequences:

China raised its visa fees for Americans to match what the US charges foreigners. They also require you to come to the embassy or consulate in person as the US does in China. Fortunately, the Chinese did this only symbolically - you can hire someone to take your passport in for you and get a visa if you don't have a local consulate.

Brazil also instituted fingerprinting of Americans coming into Brazil in retaliation for this requirement by American Customs.

Let's hope wiser heads prevail.

Liberty Watch - Reading Lolita in Tehran

Sanaz has missed the last couple of the literary meetings of Azar Nafisi and seven of her best female students. They meet in her apartment to read Western literature. Sanaz comes late into the meeting. Nafisi writes in Chapter 21:

Her story was a familiar one.

I was stunned, after reading her story, to realize that it is a familiar one. I just posted about Eva Ósk Arnardóttir [I've learned it's Erla, not Eva] early Tuesday morning. But first listen to Sanaz' edited story.

A fortnight earlier, Sanaz and five of her girlfriends had gone for a two-day vacation by the Caspian Sea. On their first day, they had decided to visit her friend's fiancé in an adjoining villa. Sanaz kept emphasizing that they were all properly dressed, with their scarves and long robes. They were all sitting outside, in the garden: six girls and one boy. There were no alocoholic beverages in the house, no undesirable tapes or CDs..

And then "they" came with their guns, the morality squads, surprising them by jumping over the low walls. They claimed to have received a report of illegal activities, and wanted to search the premises. Unable to find fault with their appearance, one of the guards sarcastically said that looking at them, with their Western attitudes...What is a Western attitude? Nassrin interrupted. Sanaz looked at her and smiled. I'll ask him next time I run into him... The guards took all of them to a special jail for infractions in matters of morality. There, despite their protests, the girls were kept in a small, dark room, which they shared the first night with several prostitutes and a drug addict. Their jail wardens came into their room two or three times in the middle of the night to wake up those who might have dozed off, and hurled insults at them.

They were held in that room for forty-eight hours. Despite their repeated requests, they were denied the right to call their parents. Apart from brief excursions to the rest room at appointed times, they left the room twice - the first time to be led to a hospital, where they were given virginity tests by a woman gynecologist, who had her students observe the examinations. Not satisfied with her verdict, the guards took them to a private clinic for a second check...

Erla Ósk Arnardóttir, an Icelandic national, purportedly was searched, ask about her last period, not allowed to contact anyone, paraded through JFK airport chained and handcuffed, treated rudely, and eventually held overnight in a jail cell for the minor infraction of having overstayed a visa by 3 weeks, more than ten years earlier.

I had just written that I was reading this book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, but while it was interesting, I was having trouble getting through it. I think I figured out my problems with the book.

1. Each chapter is almost an independent vignette. There is a connection, but one isn't compelled to read the next chapter. Reading it in bed before sleep, I found myself hoping the short chapter would end and I could sleep. This is unlike some books where I had to find out what happened next.

2. The book doesn't challenge what I know. A student once gave me a one-page article and said it helped him understand why he was having trouble in my class. The article said there were two kinds of learning - happy and unhappy learning. Happy learning is when you learn something that reinforces what you already know. Unhappy learning is when you learn something that challenges what you already know. Reading Lolita's author is Iranian, but her perspective is a Western one, and her issues are the ones a Western professor might have teaching under the Ayatollah. They confirm our stereotypes about Iran. That is not to say that I want to read something that says Iran is really a wonderful place to live, but rather I would like to read something that would help me understand the mindset of those who support the regime. How do they think? Are they similar to Americans who blindly support the Bush regime? Or is it a totally different reasoning?

But last night's story gave me a new reason for why Americans should read this book. It illustrates stories of repression, large and small, which we see going on in the US today. That George W. would bring democracy to Iran, let alone Iraq, is ludicrous given that he's already introduced a police state in the no-man's land of airport security - particularly before one gets out of customs - where people have no rights, cannot contact friends or relatives or attorneys, can be held indefinitely without apparent reason. Erla Ósk Arnardóttir's story as well as those mentioned by Naomi Wolf and our own experiences with TSA tell us this. The story was also told in the short film Security that was part of the Anchorage International Film Festival.

A least Nafisi and her students could read Lolita, albeit getting copies was not easy, but it was not illegal as it was in the US not all that long ago. And among some circles in the US the book is still condemned.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a reminder about those who zealously protest their loyalty to America and condemn as traitors those who would criticize the US government. How are they different from the 'morality squads' or the guards who dealt with Arnardóttir?

I would make it very clear, though, that most of the TSA I have dealt with have not slipped over into the dark side. They've tried to do their task with humor and understanding. They've not been thoughtless automatons. Even Erla writes,

another jail guard took pity on me and removed the leg chains.

And they are restrained by their instructions and the lack of resources and by facing irritable people late for their planes. But for the most part I see this as a terribly expensive - in time, money, and degradation of freedom - facade to make us feel like our government is protecting us from the enemy, an enemy that I believe is a lot less formidable than the current administration would have us believe.


Note: I did try to find more on the Icelandic tourist.

• The site I initially found the information on mispelled her name. It should be Erla, not Eva.
• There isn't a lot on this in mainstream new media. I guess for most surly and inappropriate treatment by TSA is not news. However the International Herald Tribune
  

has an AP story:

REYKJAVIK, Iceland: Iceland's government has asked the U.S. ambassador to explain the treatment of an Icelandic tourist who says she was held in shackles before being deported from the United States.

The woman, Erla Osk Arnardottir Lillendahl, 33, was arrested Sunday when she arrived at JFK airport in New York because she had overstayed a U.S. visa more than 10 years earlier...

She was deported Tuesday, she told reporters and wrote on her Internet blog.

On Thursday, Foreign Minister Ingibjorg Solrun Gisladottir told U.S. Ambassador Carol van Voorst that the treatment of Lillendahl was unacceptable.

"In a case such as this, there can be no reason to use shackles" Gisladottir said. "If a government makes a mistake, I think it is reasonable for it to apologize, like anyone else."

Van Voorst has contacted the officials at JFK airport and asked them to provide a report on Lillendahl's case, Gisladottir said.

• Iceland Review Online reports

12/20/2007 | 12:02

US Authorities Regret Treatment of Icelandic Tourist

Iceland’s Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir received a letter from Stewart Baker, Assistant Secretary for Policy for the US Ministry of Homeland Security, yesterday, saying he regretted the treatment of an Icelandic tourist earlier this month.

The letter states that the incident gives the US Ministry of Homeland Security a reason to review work procedures regarding how foreign tourists are being received in the US, Morgunbladid reports.

My First Music Video - Hunting in Winter

I didn't intend to make a music video. I had some pictures from this afternoon's walk at Campbell Creek near Stuckagain. But music sounded like a good idea. Grrrr. Going to have to learn how to use Garage Band so I can make some noises to put on some of the videos. But in the meantime, what can I use without getting into too much trouble? Something winter related.

I found a CD one of my students, Guo Wei, gave me in Beijing. She was an er hu player in the student traditional Chinese orchestra at Renmin University of China. We even got to hear two of their concerts in beautiful concert halls. So I found a piece from the CD

New Melodies of "Si Zhu"
Collection of Traditional Musical Instruments

Conducted by Qin Pengzhang Yang Chunlin

This is part of track 3 - Sketch of Life in the North - fourth movement - Hunting in Winter

Well, we weren't hunting, but it is north and it is winter.






And then, one thing led to another. The pictures had to have some connection to the music. Let's just say, I learned a lot on iMovie today, and I have a long way to go. I really got into the music and wanted to do the whole piece, but I never would have finished that. It's not finished as it is. I hope you enjoy the pictures of Campbell Creek area and the wonderful music.

This is especially for my musician fellow blogger, Phil; Guo Wei; Frank in Beijing; and Des and Lyrica.

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing

When I was at the library yesterday, I picked up 10 Rules of Writing at the new books shelf and proceeded to read it, and finish it, in about 30 minutes. This was tremendously satisfying since I have several books I'm sloooooooowwwwly working my way through. Reading Lolita in Tehran is

beautifully written and interesting, but isn't a book I have trouble putting down. I'm also working my way through We're All Journalists Now, a book on bloggers as journalists. Actually, it's not hard and not long, but after reading 30 pages I put it down and I'm having trouble picking it up again. I'm having trouble with books, because the internet panders to short attention span. I must start working more seriously on my to do lists lest surfing prevents me from doing other things I want to do.

So, quickly, the 10 steps:

1. Never open a book with weather
2. Avoid prologues
3. Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue
4. Never use an adverb to modify 'said'
5. Keep your exclamation points under control
6. Never use the words 'suddenly' or 'all hell broke loose'
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things
10. Try to leave off the parts that readers tend to skip

I'll have to check if I'm following these rules. I'll add some pictures and a few more comments later. Gotta run now.

[Back. Joe Ciardiello's illustrations are fantastic. No exclamation point. Perhaps the main justification for stretching a six year old New York Times article into a book is to share Ciardiello's illustrations. The one on the right illustrates one of the many exceptions to the rules. In this case Rule 5. Elmore writes about exclamation points

If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

The book is so short they had to use the thickest pages I can remember to stretch it into book length.]