In China, important dates are referred to by the number of the month and day. So the anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen confrontation is called Six-Four, or Liao-Si. This picture is of my Hong Kong students coming out of the subway at Tiananmen in May 1990.
I arrived in Hong Kong in July 1989 for my Fulbright year. Hong Kong was still a British colony then with eight years before it would be turned over to China. Tiananmen raised fears about what would happen in 1997. Although Hong Kong was a British colony and residents had British Passports, people discovered the words "right to abode" had disappeared when their renewed passports arrived. They were no longer allowed to move to England. There was a huge market for magazines that discussed ways to get foreign passports.
In May 1990, I went with a group of my Hong Kong students on a study trip to Beijing as guests of the China Training Center for Senior Civil Servants. We were careful to arrange the trip so that we would be back in Hong Kong two weeks before the first anniversary of Tiananmen. Nevertheless, at least one of my students was not allowed by his parents to come on the trip, because they thought it too dangerous.
This was a typical street scene in Beijing in those days.
I think this is at People's University.
This is after an official meeting to learn about Chinese Civil Service Reform.
Although 6-4 has been erased as much as possible from the minds of people in China, I do think it is important that we take a moment today to remember what happened.
This item was in the Anchorage Daily News today. We've known this was going to happen a while and it's probably too late to do anything about it. But we should question the logic of moves like this.
I did write about this last year at the end of a post on B Street (It should be Avenue).
Here's what the Municipality Planning Documents say:
(Double click to see this larger and clearer and complete.)
Increased connectivity. Reduced congestion on 42nd. The existing couple of blocks of E. 40th is a sleepy street with comfortable, but not fancy houses, in a hidden, quiet neighborhood. With the explosion of the Providence Hospital complex, their neighborhood has been impacted with streets punched through from Tudor to Providence at Piper and at Dale Streets.
But let's look at what this is about.
The green on the map is the existing E. 40th Avenue. It starts, as a street at Piper (on the left) and goes to Dale (on the right) with a little extra that dead ends at UAA property and then jogs north along Providence Hospital to Providence Dr. The UAA dorms are in the way of extending E. 4oth to the east and there are houses in the way if someone wanted to later extend E. 40th west of Lake Otis. This is simply providing a street on the south border of Providence and API grounds.
To call this an "extension" is a bit of a misnomer. As you can see the new road (the red line) is more than double the existing street. Here's a view from Laurel Street (B on the map above) (another of the new roads going from Tudor to Providence Drive.) We're looking westward toward Lake Otis where the new road will be punched through between the Kidney Dialysis Center and another building. It will be tight to get a two lane road through there with sidewalk and/or biketrail.
Then turning around and looking east, the road will go over (they do have money in there for retaining walls, so maybe they'll just cut through the hill, but then what happens to the buildings on the right of the fence?) this hill and down on the other side along the back of API until it hits the existing couple of blocks of E. 40th.
Is this really worth $20 million? E. 42 Avenue is just a bit further south and already goes through. It's a pretty rough road - two poorly maintained lanes, no sidewalks - but it's mostly apartments, condos, duplexes, and trailer parks. Relatively high density. So it needs a better street with sidewalks. But part of the justification here is to reduce congestion on that E. 42. It is used by some as short cut to avoid Lake Otis and Tudor, but I've never had more than two or three cars in front of me at a stop sign on E. 42. This street is NOT congested by any stretch of the imagination. Why should a street where people moved to knowing there was some traffic be relieved so that a much quieter street with lower density become a bigger through street?
The only reason I can think of: This is what Providence wanted. A $20.5 million dollar street punched through along its southern boundary. E. 42 is due for improvements, including sidewalks, AFTER E. 40th is done.
I would note that we passed this paper signed nailed to a tree on the hill as we walked to dinner.
There has to be some irony when the Mental Health Trust Authority is kicking the homeless off their land and sending them to Brother Francis Shelter. One has to imagine that a number of the homeless have some, at least minor, mental health issues. Is this to get them out of the way of the construction companies due to build the road this summer?
So, why should I write about this if it's a done deal? First, I just want to document a little of what things look like before the changes. Second, there is still time to prevent the order freaks who need every point to be connected to the nearest other point with a straight line from dividing the University land with a road from Tudor to Northern Lights.
They are already busily constructing Martin Luther King Road (just south of Tudor, already wiping out parts of a new beautiful bike trail there). It could easily take people from Elmore to Boniface which goes to Northern Lights already. There's no need for a new road.
If the most densely populated city in the US - New York City, with 23,702 people per square mile (1990 data) - can tolerate a green belt in its very heart going 5o city blocks with only about four cross streets with very restricted hours - then surely Anchorage, with only 133 people per square mile (number 200 and the last city on the list) can tolerate having to go around the university green belt area as well. In the future, when our population has increased, this piece of in-town wilderness, will be cherished in the same way New Yorkers cherish Central Park.
There are already people organizing to make sure this sanctuary is not violated. Personally, the only road option I would not oppose is a tunnel that would leave the land above intact.
Some species of ants are attracted to and feed on the honeydew. Ants will protect the aphids from natural enemies and will actually carry them to new plants when the food source is depleted. Some ants even go so far as to build small shelters for the aphids or to keeping root-feeding aphids inside their own nests. A few species of aphids have become so dependent on their ants that they won't even excrete honeydew unless stimulated by an ant! However, if aphid numbers get too high the ants will feed a few aphids to their larvae. And the ants are better at protecting their aphid herds from some natural enemies (such as ladybugs) than others (such as lacewings or hover fly larvae). No only do they fight off or kill the predators, but they also remove the eggs of some
Perhaps I wiped out this guy's herd and he was looking for strays.
This raises the question for me about how many different flies we have in Alaska and which one this is. But googling flies and Alaska results in webpages of fishing flies.
Turtle Pond has a page on Alaska Dragonflies which identifies this as a bluet and answers:
What's the difference between dragonflies and damselflies?
Dragonflies and damselflies are very similar insects that belong to the same scientific Order-- Odonata. Dragonflies tend to be larger, with thicker bodies. They sit with their wings spread out to the side. The delicate little damselflies usually fold their wings behind their backs when they rest. Spreadwings are the exception. They are damselflies that usually hold their wings out, like dragonflies.
Both dragonflies and damselflies start out life as aquatic insects, emerging from the water as winged adults. Both spend most of their adult life flying, preying on small insects. They are beneficial at every stage of life, never harmful to humans. They are all fascinating and beautiful critters.
Here's the lamium's yellow flower.
AKPetmom thought the early greens I posted earlier were the mountain bluet. But before posting this, I found a picture of a mountain bluet online, and this clearly isn't it. So, this is once again in the mystery flower category.
I couldn't help this newly blue garage when I went on my run yesterday.
And last night we saw the movie 'Fado' at Bear Tooth. An unusual movie that consisted of one song after another, mostly done in a studio, sung by different singers, accompanied by musicians playing guitars and other mandolin like instruments I wouldn't dare try to name. The picture's blur reflects the slow shutter speed, not the film itself. Here's a YouTube of the preview of the movie.
J went in for surgery Friday after new x-rays showed the collar bone wasn't healing well. He's posted a long report with pictures and the police report. If you're interested, you can go there for more details. [On a Mac, the link works much better on Safari than Firefox.] His body's been beat up, he's got broken bones, but he's alive, he's even walking and functioning, and the prognosis is that he will be basically ok when it's all over. I know a lot of people who haven't been that lucky.
And there are all the things roiling through me that I can't put into words.
Linda at Celtic Diva wrote last week that she was being charged $65,706 for her request for public records. She posted the following response she got to her request:
To provide complete responses to the email portions of your request, we will need to electronically search the email accounts of the 71 current and former employees who have worked in the Governor's Executive Offices since December 2006. For that electronic search, we will need the assistance of the State Security Office in the Department of Administration, Division of Enterprise Technology Services (ETS). ETS estimates that each email account retrieval, search, and record production will require 16 hours to complete. The ETS hourly rate is $54.84, so ETS estimates its costs per email account will be $925.44. Based on that estimate, ETS's estimated costs for obtaining records from 71 employee email accounts total $65,706.
I have a search function on my email. I can get the list of emails I've received and sent to someone up in a couple of minutes. Why should it take computer experts so much longer?
I asked someone I know and trust on technology issues. Here's my source's response to the question whether it should really take that long to do such a search:
no. it's stonewalling. it's not impossible that it took 16 hours the first time, if they spent 15.5 hours screwing around, but for all future times, it ought to take 5 minutes.
Aside from that, am I missing something? Let's see:
$54.84 * 16 hours = $925.44
How did they get that? When I do it by hand I get $877.44. When I do it again on a calculator I get the same. If they can't even multiply correctly, how can they be expected estimate the time correctly, or even do the programming they need to find the emails?
But $877.44 is still outrageous and $62,297.24 ($877.44*71 searches) is still way too pricey.
Maybe Sarah Palin is beginning to understand why Randy Ruedrich was so irritated with her when she made ethics complaints against him. Do you think she's apologized to him?
There's been a lot of hoopla about the grand opening of the new addition to the Anchorage Museum. We've been watching the building take shape for a couple of years now. And you can probably tell from the title that I wasn't captivated.
It was a chilly, blustery day, but people swarmed all over the outside and inside of the museum. There was entertainment out in the street and in the auditorium.
And some people were outside eating despite the chill.
Here's where you go in. OK so far. On the left of the front counter you can see the Library and Archive. Unfortunately, that wasn't open yet. Behind me are the Muse Cafe (I wonder how many museums have cafes with that name - [the first ten pages on google only found one at the Palm Springs Museum]) and the gift shop. We didn't look at them until later. But then you go into the museum. Or so I thought.
The first gallery you enter features a four story stairwell. The room is windowless, with dramatic lighting so that you get the full effect of this grand work of art.
The stairwell!! This is positively and totally avant garde. And you thought we were some hicktown whose museum would feature items of local artistic and historical significance. No way. Our grandest new work of art, with a four story gallery all to itself. is an homage to Anchorage fitness - a stairwell. No wimpy escalators for us.
The second floor galleries were closed off still. Who needs a gallery when we have this incredible stairwell?
There was a traveling Gold exhibit on the third floor to the left. But fortunately, the tickets had all been given away so we didn't have to get off the stairwell.
It seemed a bit strange that they had such a nicely printed sign to tell us this. If they knew in advance, why advertise it in the newspaper? It wasn't just this sign, there was another one behind the front desk that said it was sold out and that sign wasn't one you could easily get reprinted the last day.
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Looking away from the gold exhibit, you could see these frosted windows. When we got to the fourth floor, we got a possible reason for the frosted windows.
The stairwell ended on the fourth floor. I think there was another closed gallery to the left as we reached the top of the magnificent stairwell. To our right we saw that the fourth floor windows were clear.
Looking at the view - the roof of the existing museum building, a roof that doesn't fit the glitz of the new addition - offered a possible explanation for the opaque windows below. How about a roof garden? I know, I know. All these clever ideas cost money. And if I donate $5 million they would be happy to put in a roof garden with my name on it.
But there was a small gallery on the fourth floor. Appropriately, it was dedicated to the new addition to the museum.
And here is where my sense of the importance of the stairwell was confirmed. There, in blood red, was the stairwell marked out on the sketch of the museum. It is the centerpiece, the masterpiece, the piece d resistance, of the addition. I always allow for the possibility I'm wrong. But what else could that red zigzag be?
In this gallery you can learn about the architect, David Chipperfield, stairmeister.
Unfortunately, all these descriptions are in the laudatory tone of book jacket covers. Usually museum curators are more objective, but I guess this is their baby, not their exhibit.
Now really what does this actually say? I'm starting to feel bad now. I sat next to the author of these words at the Tuesday Dr. Brokenleg breakfast. It's much easier for me when I don't know the people I write about. I wish, though, that I'd seen the museum before the breakfast. Then I could have asked the director some questions. But these words could be written about any museum anywhere. There is nothing specific about Anchorage or the building here.
Function, in the shape of a stairwell, absolutely drives form, but they don't mention that. And now back to the centerpiece of the new addition. This stairwell isn't just on the left and the right, part of it goes up the middle too.
There was also a choice of an elevator. An elephant sized elevator. I understand they need a giant elevator to get crates with large pieces up to the galleries. Probably there was another elevator somewhere. I didn't see it. But no one would build a wing with just one elevator for four stories. I know we Alaskans are tough and will want to only take our magnificent stairs to get to the galleries. But some of the tourists are a little older and they might appreciate an elevator. But if there were only one, how long would they have to wait?
Once we got back down to the bottom and marveled anew at this spectacular new piece of functional art, we wandered to the old section of the museum and into the theater where we were just in time to hear Gabriel Ayala of the Yaqui people of southern Arizona. The video is short, and the audio is from my pocket Canon Powershot, but it will give you an idea of how sweet his sound is.
We then went back out the new main entrance. On the way we checked out the new cafe. There were about five items for eating and about five pages of wines, beers, and other alcoholic beverages. There was no shortage of $40 and up bottles of wine. When we finally got to order, it turned out they were out of what we wanted. No problem. This was their first day with real people and will probably be the busiest day they will have for the next five years at least.
I got the basic overview of the new addition and the park from the fourth floor gallery. I've added a bit to help flesh it out. I was really looking forward to all the birch trees, but at this point there's nothing there but dirt. Somewhere I read it would be landscaped this summer.
OK. I'm a bit taken aback by what's inside the museum. I recognize that the second floor and fourth floor galleries aren't open yet and we couldn't get into the Gold exhibit because the tickets were snapped up already. And presumably there will eventually be art pieces in the lobby. But to walk into a room that has nothing but a giant staircase left me feeling flat. There's an awful lot of space taken up by stairs. And there is nothing to see from the stairs. No view outside, no overview of a gallery. You really have to hike a bit before you ever see anything that resembles art (ok, it is a very nice staircase) or history or science. And today, if you didn't have a gold ticket, there was no art to see in the new building, unless you count the drawings of the building on the fourth floor. A little history in there too.
Unlike the last museum addition which is human scale and whose stairway (on right) complements the room, the new stairwell exists in isolation and the size dwarfs humans. I'll withhold further judgment until the other galleries are opened up, but I still don't see how they will get around having this giant stairwell at the center of the new addition.
The outside of the building looks fine. Though this picture of the Figg Museum in Davenport, Iowa shows that Chipperton used leftover ideas in Anchorage.
The life cycle of most species is rather complex. In Wisconsin aphids spend the winter as eggs. When these hatch in the spring, they produce only wingless females that give birth to live young (without mating = parthenogenetic reproduction). Each female aphid reproduces for a period of 20–30 days, giving birth to 60–100 live nymphs. The nymphs look like the adults but are smaller. The nymphs mature and can produce offspring within a week when temperatures are high. Eggs within these females start to develop long before birth so that a newly born aphid can contain within herself not only the developing embryos of her daughters but also those of her granddaughters which are developing within her daughters. This 'telescoping of generations' means aphids can build up immense populations very quickly. Under ideal conditions, one cabbage aphid could produce 1,560,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 offspring by the end of a growing season. (Obviously this doesn't happen, since natural controls – such as weather and predators – eliminate significant numbers of aphids.)
From Backyard Nature, a little more on the life cycle of the aphid:
An "average" aphid life cycle would be something like this:
In spring an egg hatches, producing a wingless female aphid who soon begins parthenogenetically producing new wingless females. Generation after generation of wingless females survive one another until hot weather comes or maybe the plant on which they are living dies and then suddenly some of the females grow wings and fly off. At the right you see what a winged aphid may look like, though they come in many colors and shapes. This new generation of female winged aphid very well may at this time find a plant host of a completely different species from that on which their spring generations have developed. For instance, Green Peach Aphids overwinter as eggs on peach and related trees but in spring they move to various weeds and agricultural crops, and then still later they move to potato crops, only in the fall returning to peach and related trees.
Typically late in the year when it's time to move back to the plant species on which the aphid overwinters, finally some aphids develop into males as well as females. Sexual reproduction then takes place and when the mated females return to the winter plant-host they lay fertilized eggs. Then next spring the females hatch from the eggs and the cycle begins again, with no males in sight.
Last year I didn't clean these guys off frequently enough and they seriously stunted the growth of the Thalictrum and its flowers. So I just keep wiping or hosing them off.
In China, important dates are referred to by the number of the month and day. So the anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen confrontation is called Six-Four, or Liao-Si.
Although 6-4 has been erased as much as possible from the minds of people in China, I do think it is important that we take a moment today to remember what happened. 
