Dr. Dolittle had Polynesia, Dr. Pepperberg had Alex

One of my absolutely favorite set of books when I was a kid was Dr. Dolittle. This was well before the movies. The stories were wonderful for a little boy who loved all things animal. Of course my favorite character, after Dr. Dolittle, was Polynesia the Parrot. (Well, probably it was Timothy Stubbins, the nine and a half year old boy who 'discovers' the good doctor.) Dr. Dolittle's important gift was his ability to talk to all the animals.


I'm sure Dr. Dolittle was the reason that I was always skeptical when I heard people - even scientists - say that humans were the only animal that could talk. I think Dr. Dolittle must have set my mind to be receptive to seeing evidence that they could. And eventually, even scientists were saying that 'higher' animals, like whales and dolphins and chimps, could, in fact, communicate. People who worked closely with animals always knew that.

So as Terry Gross woke me up this morning interviewing Irene Pepperberg, I was drawn right in. This was a lady who taught her parrot to talk. Not just "Polly wants a Cracker." She did demonstrations that showed the that Alex could distinguish words and concepts:

Fresh Air from WHYY, November 12, 2008 · Although his brain was no bigger than a walnut, Alex the African gray parrot could do more than speak and understand — he could also count, identify colors and, according to his owner Irene Pepperberg, develop an emotional relationship. When Alex died in September 2007, his last words to Pepperberg were "You be good. I love you."

You can listen to the interview at the link above. A couple points stuck in my mind.

• First, was how she was treated when she applied for her first grant to work with Alex. She says that one applicant reviewer questioned what she was smoking. A great example of Thomas Kuhn's discussions on how holders of a paradigm (in this case operant conditioning) reject ideas that contradict the premises of their paradigm.

• Second, was the idea that Hugh Lofting, Dolittle's creator wrote in the passage above (originally copyrighted in 1922, my edition says it's the 24th impression) that animals have their own languages, but we only notice their linguistic abilities when they learn a human language. Which led me to wonder, if people are so smart, how come we can only talk to animals when they learn our language? Well, of course that isn't quite true since horse and dog-whisperers are examples of people who have learned to understand animal languages.

There's more, but I'm heading out to the Alaska Apple Users Group meeting and I need to be going. But I would also mention that when I taught 6th grade in LA the year between Peace Corps and graduate school, I brought in my Dr. Dolittle book to read after lunch to the class. One day, as I was reading to my African-American students, I realized that Dr. Dolittle was about to use a racist phrase. I stopped in mid-sentence. When the students asked about Dr. Dolittle the next day I made up something like the book was due back at the library. If it happened today, I would have used that situation to give a lesson on how we had evolved in terms of racism, but I wasn't that evolved at the time.


The picture of Irene and Alex is from the Fresh Air site. The one of Dr. Dolittle and Polynesia is from the book cover at the top.

Encaustics Poster

It was sunny when I went to my digital art class yesterday at 1. But it was drizzling slightly when I got out. There was a big hole in the sky. And now, it's snowing.




We're moving on from our 'fantasy' pictures where we take four photos and merge them into one picture. Mine is taking longer than I thought, partly because I'm using way more than four different photos. Getting the light to match in each of the merged pictures may be beyond my ability before it's due.

But yesterday we started and finished a new project - focusing on text. Prof. Gonzales' assignment was to go downstairs to the bulletin board in the Art building and find a poster. Then we were supposed to redo the poster so the text and graphics were better. I chose the white one with all the text and one picture on the lower left before the lighter panel.

It's for an Encaustics workshop. I never heard of Encaustics either. So I turned to the web. There were a couple of great descriptions of how to create the encaustics materials on a site called wet canvas (and wet canvas2) but I had to look further for a definition which I got on jocelynaudette:

Encaustic paintings are painted with beeswax, resin, and pigment. It is an ancient process that was used by the Egyptians and Greeks, and examples have been found in Egyptian tombs. Generally, the painting process involves using a hot palette to melt and mix the colored wax, painting it onto the panel using a brush, and fusing the layers with a heat gun. All paintings are on wood panels which provide a rigid and supportive surface. (Like always you can double click to enlarge the pictures.)

So, here's the original poster. It has a lot of details about the class, about cost, discounts, times, places, etc. but it isn't very eye catching. It seemed to me that a poster for an art workshop ought to be somewhat artistic itself. So I googled encaustics images and there were plenty. The workshop poster talks about collage too, so I figured I should have a collage like poster. And as much should be visual as possible. So I got the seven people - all from different encaustics work on line - that was the maximum class size. I found an encaustics picture I could use as the base of the poster - one that had a fair amount of white space I could fill in. The flag is a Jasper Johns encaustic. And the beeswax had to go somewhere since it is the basis of encaustics as I understand it.

I had to leave out a lot of the text, so I put the contact information in a prominent place. We were supposed to then take our printed posters and pin them up next to the old ones. But yellow wasn't working on the printer, so it should get done Wednesday. Fortunately we were supposed to get this done in the 45 minutes left of class so it was 'done' when the time limit was up and I don't have to agonize over it to make it perfect.

These workshops were over in September, but I guess if you're interested you could still go to the website and see if new ones are planned.

Independent, Self Reliant Alaskans and other myths

Sometimes I just can't help myself, and my wife is gone so she can't restrain me.

My apologies to JC because her letter isn't different from a lot of others. This is from today's letters to the Anchorage Daily News.

Alaska has long been the last bastion of individual self-reliance and independent thought in the entire United States. The Daily News endorsement of the man who is the very antithesis of those concepts is exceedingly disappointing. President-elect Obama wants the general populace to become more dependent on government for their livelihood, housing, education and health care. All of which, naturally, will give the government more control over what they do, where they live, how they are educated and what quality of care they will receive.

I look forward to the next election, when this trend toward becoming a nation of grown-up-infants can be turned back and we can continue to become a nation of mature, independent, innovative, motivated and free adults.

-- JC

Homer

The opening sentence really got to me:

Alaska has long been the last bastion of individual self-reliance and independent thought in the entire United States.

The last time Alaska was truly a bastion of individual self-reliance was when Alaskan Natives were living off the land - whether Tlingits in Southeast, Yup'ik and Inupiaq, Athabaskans, Alutiiqs, and all the other Alaskan Native peoples - before the Russians came.

Since the time Russians, and then non-Native Americans, arrived, Alaska has basically been a colony of outside interests. The Russians enslaved Aleuts and others to kill seals and otters to send the furs back to Russia.

The missionaries came to Christianize the Alaska Natives, exploiting the devastation caused by the diseases they brought to the indigenous peoples to 'prove' that the old ways were evil and that the Christian ways were good. Most did their best to ban the local languages and the practice of local traditions. They lived off of contributions from churchgoers throughout the US and the hunting and fishing skills of their congregants.

Then there was the gold. The lifeline was the supplies coming up from Seattle.

Copper, same thing.

Fish. Same thing.

Military - the most successful cooperative living experiment in US history, where everyone sacrifices, income, personal freedoms and choices - location, health care, housing, education, even sacrificing life - for the good of the whole.

Oil, back to resource exploitation by Outsiders (we've all heard repeatedly what kinds of profits the oil companies have made the last few years) and many of the people working up here have come up from Outside, often to leave after making (or not) their fortune.

Federal spending is the largest single source of Alaskans jobs.
[As I understand it, these are the five largest sectors in the Alaska economy and the jobs from oil include jobs paid for by the spending of the PFD checks. Slide from ISER Powerpoint.]

Our self-reliance and independent living comes from receiving (in 2004) the second largest amount of federal expenditures in ratio to tax burden of any state (New Mexico beat us) and from our collective ownership of the oil in the North Slope.

[Map from the Tax Foundation. Double click to enlarge it]

This is a long way from the Alaskan Natives who really lived off the land without supply ships, or even our romantic image of non-Native trappers living in little cabins in the middle of nowhere surviving by their wilderness skills and often their shipped in liquor. Instead we get our Permanent Fund checks, drive our gas guzzling cars and recreational vehicles of all kinds paid for by jobs funded either by the federal government or through using up Alaska's natural resources - more responsibly than in the past only because environmentalists have gotten in a few laws that regulate some of the industries.

President-elect Obama wants the general populace to become more dependent on government for their livelihood, housing, education and health care.

Excuse me. I believe that when Democrat Clinton left office in 2001 our economy was doing well and we had a huge surplus erasing the deficit left by Republican President George Bush I. And as the Bush 2 administration leaves office our economy is in its worst shape since the Depression in the 1930's and we are reeling in debt.

JC, the emperor has no clothes. I'm not sure which world you are living in or who's been telling you what to believe. From my perspective you've bought into the Orwellian Newspeak of conservative attack talk radio - Black is White, War is Peace, Republicans are fiscally responsible, Democrats are not. The words are good, but they are totally disconnected from facts. Is that what you meant by "independent thought"? That it was independent from facts?

What the Bush administration teaches us is that the market is NOT the answer to all our problems. Government may well have grown fat by the 1970's when the tax revolt began, but people had jobs, were living better than their parents, the physical infrastructure of the US (roads, bridges, rail lines, water systems, etc.) was kept in reasonable repair, kids graduated from high school with a reasonable education in most places. Government is NOT the answer to all our problems, but without a strong government, private companies grow larger and more powerful and offer a threat even greater than government.

It's conservative Republicans who have concluded that the market is going to collapse without the help of massive government spending. Or, an even more sinister interpretation, as the Bush administration winds down, they see this as their last chance, for a while, to raid the government coffers.

We need both the government and the market to perform what they each perform best. And in an informed democracy, people can keep their government accountable. But in a brainwashed population that believes myths like "the self-reliant and independent Alaskan" and the "Obama who is about to enslave Americans with big government," we'll do things like elect convicted felons to represent us in the false hope that the money spigot from Washington will continue and we won't have to actually be self-reliant and independent.


Sorry, my wife is out of town and not here to keep me from hyper-ventilating when I read letters like this. Fortunately, enough people in the US have seen through the hype of the last eight years.

JC, I know that the ADN doesn't give you too many words to make your points with, but how about a few references to actual facts that cause you to make the generalizations you make.

Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Dinner

There are quite a few Returned Peace Corps Volunteers in Anchorage, but you wouldn't know it unless it somehow came up in conversation. We don't generally wear Peace Corps pins or have a secret handshake. But we do tend to be a little more cross-culturally sensitive than the average American. There's a relatively small group of RPCV's who meet for dinner when they can - either at a restaurant or at someone's home - and on a low key way they sponsor a number of projects - including helping in the recruiting and giving information to new volunteers. Saturday night we had dinner - the food is always great as people get out recipes from the countries where they served - and then elected new officers for this year.

Anyway, the dinners are always interesting - besides the good food, I love to meet with this group and see what they are doing now that they are back in the US. We also had a couple with us who are headed for Albania as volunteers next spring. BTW the dinners are open to anyone - there's usually a blurb in the newspaper, but you have to look carefully.

This post is going to stay minimalist since I just don't have the time or energy to pick up any of the possible threads this could lead into - the role of the Peace Corps internationally, changes in how the PC is run, why Peace Corps volunteers get significantly more and better language and cultural training than do teachers going to rural Alaska, the role of volunteers once they are back in the US, and on and on. This is just the tip. If you want to dip into some of this you can check on WorldView, the magazine of the National Peace Corps Association - a group made up mainly of returned volunteers and not a government organization.

If you want to see what Peace Corps Volunteers are doing around the world, here's a website with links to Peace Corps journals. Well, that's what it's called. I'm not exactly sure how blogs get up there - since mine is linked too in the Thailand section, which is how I know about this resource. But I think most are actual volunteers and not old volunteers who might write about visiting their countries of service or Peace Corps in general.

And while I'm on this topic, I've added a link to Bangkok Pundit on the right side. You can also get news of Thailand at the Bangkok Post or the Nation. But this is a blogger who tries to go behind the headlines. I'm sufficiently out of the loop on Thai politics these days that I don't know how accurate Pundit is, but it's at least a way to be aware that things are going on - such as the months of demonstrations in Bangkok in protest to the current government, that occasionally come into confrontations with the police or military.

To give you a sense of the blog - below, from tomorrow's post (they are a day ahead of us) he's quoting a BBC report and making comments (where it says BP:) on it:

The article continues:

"The problem of Thai political crisis is a class struggle", says Attajak Satayanutak, an academic from Thaksin's home town Chiang Mai.

"We have a wide gap between rich and poor. The poor did not receive anything from the state for a long time. Then, for the first time, Thaksin gave this opportunity for them."

The affection for Thaksin Shinawatra has held up remarkably well in the north-east, a poor and arid region known as Isaan.

Local people say his populist policies, like universal healthcare and the village loan scheme, brought big improvements to the quality of their lives.


BP: As a percentage of the government budget, both items are rather small - the village loan scheme was initially are a one-off payment (since expanded) and it is has low debts. Actually, the amount of government money spent and the non-perfomring loans is much smaller than all the forms of corporate welfare which is regularly given out.

Good Bye Studs Terkel

I've been pondering how to acknowledge the life of Studs Terkel, who died last week at age 96. I first remember becoming explicitly aware of him when I read the book, Working. As I think about it, he has to be one of the influences on me and some of what I do on this blog - particularly documenting the 'ordinary,' especially 'ordinary' people who I find interesting, but wouldn't normally be featured in the news.

KWMD has played a number of recordings of Terkel interviews all week. NPR has done a few pieces, and "This American Life" today also had some great interviews. So, I'll defer to "On the Media" which did what was, for me, the best succinct overview, and which also has embedable audio. "On the Media's" website says this and then goes to the audio:

The Recording of America
November 07, 2008

Studs Terkel, who died recently at the age of 96, spent the majority of his life documenting the lives of others – very often everyday, working-class people he believed were “uncelebrated and unsung.” From coal miners and sharecroppers to gangsters and prostitutes, every American had a story to tell and Terkel wanted to hear it. Publisher Andre Schiffrin talks about Terkel's singular gift for oral history.

[There's about 45 seconds of intro on the audio, then about 10 minutes of show.]



The episode of This American Life should be available Monday on their site. The Terkel piece is one of several in the show - with some fascinating interviews of people who lived through the depression.
[I've corrected the spelling from Turkel to Terkel. Grrrr. Spelling. Editors do serve a purpose.]

Interesting October Google (and other) Searches

Well, using Google analytics, I've got the last 30 days or so. By far the most popular page was President and Vice President Job Duties with almost 2500 folks going there. It gained renewed interest after Sarah Palin talked about the vice president job duties. It also seemed that a lot of teachers gave assignments on that topic judging from the number of people search vp duties from schools. They got there googling a variety of phrases like:

• "what does the 5 things a vice president of the united states do" Part of me thinks google should have a message that says, "No hits until you fix your grammar." But only if it's coming from a computer using English.
• job without duties (vp) - item without comment

The next highest was Victor Lebow's Complete Original 1955 Article

Some of the unique search terms were:

• "men that are gay having sex whet aman" - That got the person to the Eliot Spitzer post
  
  
• "what do bears know that people don't" - This one got to the posts on wildlife in Anchorage
  
  
• "famous people born on lunar eclipses" - "famous poeple born" get a lot of people to the post on Famous People Born 1908 . Nothing there about eclipses though.
  
  
• "will do what's best for the people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive with the president?s agenda in that position" - from Paris, on a Spanish language Mac - I hope they weren't learning English using Palin's interviews
  
  
• "what do people look like in alaska" - Pale? What sort of answer was this person expecting?
  
  
• "what part of alaska do moose come from?" - Moose Pass?
  
  
• "how do you pronounce teklanika" - They got a bit about Teklanika, but no help pronouncing it. For the record people say Tek Kla NEE Ka. And while we're at it, the 1989 oil spill was near Val Deez, even though it's spelled Valdez.
  
  
• "anyone ever get in trouble for leaving off a dependent to join the military" - from someone in Oklahoma- is this like the new laws about dropping off kids you can't handle?
  
  
• "teeth been sold out" - got to “Bear Tooth vp debate sold out” - from the UK
  
  
• "mccarthy alaska 4th july videos" - Here's a Google screw up. They got an archive page in July, but not the videos of July 4th in McCarthy
  
  
• "tiberius gracchus and obama" - did someone else really make this association between these two folks, or had they seen the post once and were trying to find it again?
  
  
• "governors appointing themselves us senators" - hmmm, wonder what could have spurred this query? Sarah, any thoughts?

Keeping Busy with Leadership Anchorage While J's in LA

Took J to the airport yesterday. Although cloud covered most of the sky, Denali and Foraker where shimmering crisp and clear under a blue sky and in bright sunlight off in the distance. (The battery in my camera was home charging, so no pictures.) Then to my class. (I'm still working on my photoshop picture and will post it when it's reasonably done.) Then I had dinner with K. Jim at Leadership Anchorage invited me to be K's mentor. I think we hit it off well. Today was the mentor orientation at the school district. There are about 16 [20] participants in this year's Leadership Anchorage class. The other mentors who were there were an impressive group including Arliss Sturgulewski (former Municipal Assembly member, State Senator, and who continues to work hard to support the development of our community and good state policy), Eleanor Andrews (owner of the Andrews group, former Commissioner of Administration for the state, and currently working as head of the Anchorage Urban League), Carol Comeau (Anchorage school superintendent) and Michael Carey (Anchorage Daily News columnist, former editor, radio host, whose expertise on Alaska and Palin was featured widely - BBC, NPR, etc.).

This was a great photo opportunity, but I couldn't find my camera on the way out. I did find it when I got home. Always need to put things back where they belong, not just a convenient vacant spot. So, no pictures. But the participants are a varied group working in a wide variety of places from the Food Bank, to Providence, to Municipal Light and Power, and many other places.

There are no age restrictions for this program that started in 1997. Applications for next year's class can be turned in between May and August 2009. This is something I highly recommend for anyone who's interested in leadership training with a focus on community service. Check the Leadership Anchorage website.

No more eating in the kitchen when company comes

"Hold this Thought" this morning, very appropriately, featured "I, too, sing America" by Langston Hughes. You can hear Vivian Melde read this poem at the "Hold this Thought" link. Thanks, Barbara for this and all the other excerpts you've been giving us to think about everyday.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
'Eat in the kitchen,' Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

Election Night Video and Some Results

Here's a bit of video to give you a sense of the evening downtown.

[This is a new version with a short clip added of state house candidate Pete Petersen that inadvertently got left out in the original.)


And here's Alaska's disconnect from the rest of the US (for latest results):

Looks Like Alaska is Electorally Keeping its Distance from the Lower 48

The Obama high for Alaskan Democrats is being tempered by the early returns on the US Senate and House races. After sharing Sarah, if we elect a convicted felon (yeah Ted, I use the old fashioned definition of convicted) and a Congressman under serious investigation, while the rest of the country went for Obama, they may let us secede.











We're back home. I was getting pretty tired. The wifi at Egan was slooooooooooooooow. And J leaves for LA tomorrow.