More Fun Guests

A friend of a friend and her sister arrived last night. This is their first trip to Alaska and they planned something a little different from most first trips. They're headed off to the ferry to Valdez from Whittier today. Then to McCarthy in Wrangle-St. Elias National Park where they will spend most of the time before driving back to Anchorage. Since the road to McCarthy is notorious for causing flat tires, they couldn't rent a car from a 'normal' car rental place and had found High Country which was the first stop from the airport.




The huge full moon had just come up as we rode the rest of the way home in two cars.







I woke up 'early' to find that J had gotten up even earlier and made a nice breakfast for our guests. I told them I needed this picture in case they didn't show up on time and I had to show the police their picture. Fortunately, their sense of humor was as warped as mine. Or maybe they were just being polite guests.


Well, the moon seemed that big. Would you believe. . .

Zaki's Short-Tailed Albatross Picture

Dennis Zaki of the Alaska Report was out on a halibut fishing boat this last week out of Kodiak taking lots of pictures and videos, including this picture of a young short-tailed Albatross. My Guide to the Birds of Alaska by Robert H. Armstrong says:

Immature: Chocolate brown body and wings, conspicuous pink bill and feet. Intermediate plumages between brown juveniles and full adults can be confusing; however these subadults retain a blackish hoodlike area on the top of their head and develop white on their upperwings rather early.

Habitat. Mostly offshore marine waters. On Endangered Species List.

They were 125 miles out of Kodiak when he got this shot. Not an easy bird to see. Thanks Dennis.

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Should I even look? OK, after I wrote that I went and looked. Here's the part that makes me a poor choice. Aside from the fact that I have no idea what a reasonable asking price is.

"You'll receive MUCH MORE Paid Reviews Offers if you choose YES." Of course, because there are a lot of people who don't want readers to know that they are being hustled by the blogger. Well, I promise that won't happen here.

Senungetuk Exhibit and Adding to Alaskan Blog List

We went to Modern Dwellers for the opening of Catherine and Joe Senungetuks show. My camera battery was dead, so these are from the cards that were given out. But the show was water colors, some collage, and ink. Birds. Actually, there were some bigger pieces too that were, Catherine help me, oil?

I think they're magical, but go see for yourself. This chocolate shop - Modern Dweller - is in the new strip mall on the NW corner of Old Seward and 36th.

Peter Dunlap-Shohl was there too. I'd gotten a bit of video of him talking about his animated film at the Anchorage International Film Festival last December. (He shows up about minute 7 on the video.) He has a blog about Parkinsons which is quite good. And a second blog of political cartoons. (Peter was a cartoonist with the ADN for 25 years.) I've linked both in amongst the Alaska blogs.

I also added Henkimaa and OMFGAlaska, both of which I find to be thoughtful blogs that look at their topics in depth and with knowledge. The Alaska Blog box only shows the ten blogs with the most recent posts. So the blogs on there will change as some get replaced by more recent posts. [Update, September 6: I forgot. I also added Alaskan Librarian.]

Update: September 5, 2009 - Since my camera battery was dead, I took some pictures with Joe's camera and he sent some today. Here are a couple:

When Did You Go to Your Last Community Council Meeting?

It's been a while for us, but J suggested that we go tonight and I was reminded of this relatively unique feature of the Anchorage Charter. All, or almost all, neighborhoods, as I understand it, are part of a community council. This is where neighborhood issues are addressed. Zoning changes, liquor licenses, new street lights, etc. need to be passed by the community council before coming into law. It doesn't mean the council has to approve, but their input needs to be part of the proposal. (I'm winging this from memory so assume this is a general accounting.)

In many cases, relatively few people go to CC meetings. Trouble in the area brings our more people. When the community council opposes something an assembly member wants, the assembly people have been known to downplay their significance by saying just a few people go to the meetings so they don't represent the neighborhood. But given the low turnouts for Assembly races, the same thing could be said for assembly members.

One of our assembly members - Elvi Gray (standing in the picture above right) - was there and talked about efforts to have public hearings before making his proposed budget cuts. She also talked about TBOP (Take Back Our Parks) a group set up by someone in our neighboring community council to address problems caused by homeless camps in park areas. It was making me realize how out of touch I've been just reading the ADN. There is also going to be a traffic light finally put in at McInnis and 36th. Something I'm not excited about. It appears that the light cycle for people on McInnis will be longer than they generally have to wait now and traffic on 36th will have one more light to deal with.



Our state legislators both had staff members at the meeting. Noah Henson was there from Rep. Berta Gardner's office and Max was there from Sen. Ellis' office. They also talked about homeless issues. I learned there is a camp somewhere around Post and Reeve called Veterans Ridge and some people have lived there for years. Some sort of task force made up of people from the police and various other departments is looking at the possibility of an urban state campground sort of place where people could legally pay for their space that would be monitored for illegal behavior. The Clitheroe Treatment Center has been reopened at Pt. Woronzov. I think Max said that they've calculated that $4 million was spent for the top 100 inebriates in the city - with all the repeat offenses, etc. That averages $40,000 each. The methadone program is so full the only people who can get in are pregnant women. Do you think there are women who get pregnant so they can get treatment for their heroin addiction?

Our CC chair Sheli Dodson reported on her trip to NUSA - Neighborhood USA - an organization of neighborhood organizations like community councils. She clearly was excited about all she learned in Spokane - four people went from Anchorage - and brought back lots of brochures and ideas. Anchorage's attendance is important because the conference will be in Anchorage in 2011. A committee is forming to do all the planning and get community sponsors to help out.

You can see a map of Anchorage Community Councils and if you're not already on your local Community Council's mailing list you can get that done at their main page.

It's late and I've been reading up on things to do before installing Snow Leopard on my Macbook. I'm following advice which means I've been getting rid of unnecessary files and backing up the disk. It's taking way more time than I probably need to take, but I know having a bootable back up is a good idea anyway. So, don't count the typos in this. One of the coolest features in Snow Leopard - at least as described to me - is the ability to draw Chinese characters with your finger on the trackpad. It would be nice if they had Thai, but there are a lot more people who write Chinese, so they get it first. Plus Thai uses an alphabet, not characters, which are much more complicated on a keyboard.

More Book Stuff: Fugitive Pieces by Ann Michaels

Being in a book club forces me to actually finish a book once in a while. Generally I have half a dozen lying around that I'm part way through. So Monday I was at my second book club meeting to discuss Fugitive Pieces by Ann Michaels.

I hate to give book plots - a key pleasure of a book is discovering a new world without preconceptions. There should be different book reviews for before you read the book for after. The first should tell you enough for you to decide whether you want to read it or not. Ideally, you find a friend or reviewer whose taste is exactly like yours or who knows you so well that you can trust her recommendation. The second would explore what the book was about and how it was written.

This book is less about plot than about how it is told. While it tends to move from the past to the present, it doesn't do it linearly. Jakob is trying to maintain some memory of his murdered-by-the-Nazis-before-his-seven-year-old-eyes family, creating an identity, trying to understand the world. The past is always coming back into the present. His unlikely Greek archeologist rescuer teaches him what he knows - which is a lot. Over and over Jakob learns about memory, maintaining records, clues to the past, whether it is in geography, archeology, poetry, languages, music, weather. And the reader, like Jakob, gets masses of information in no obvious order that constantly builds into - if you are patient and diligent - the story of Jakob. There is a lot of poetic language (Michaels' earlier work is poetry), lots of details, startling images, and pithy statements about life.

I wanted, often, to stop and ponder the meaning of the words. But the urgency of a deadline pushed me along, thinking I might walk this path again and spend more time looking at the remarkable sights along the way. Here's a sampling below. I didn't start writing down notes til I was half way through when I realized I needed to keep some notes.


To be proved true, violence need only occur once. But good is proved true by repetition. (162)

In the afternoons I search Michaela for fugitive scents. Basil on her fingers, garlic transferred from fingers to a stray hair; sweat from her forehead to her forearm. Following a path of tarragon as if carried by long division from one column to another, I trace her day, coconut oil on her shoulders, high grass sticking to her sea-damp feet. (191)

There's no absence, if there remains even the memory of absence. Memory dies unless it's given a use. Or as Athos might have said, If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map. (193)

I know that the more one loves a man's words, the more one can assume he's put everything into his words that he couldn't put into his life. (206-7)

What is the true value of knowledge? That it makes our ignorance more precise. (210)

And while some are motivated by love (those who choose), most are motivated by fear (those who choose by not choosing.) (211)

The spirit is most evident at the point of extreme bodily humiliation. (214)

...history only goes into remission while it continues to grow in you until you're silted up and can't move. And you disappear into a piece of music, a chest of drawers, perhaps a hospital record or two, and you slip away, forsaken even by those who claimed to love you most. (243)

It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent. (250)

A house, more than a diary, is the intimate glimpse. A house is life interrupted. (265)

Sometimes Michaels pushes the imagery a bit too far and I don't think she succeeded as a male narrator.

Google Search Hits and Misses July and August 2009

I started doing these search posts some time ago because I occasionally people used interesting search terms. Then I started paying attention to how well people were directed by Google. So last time round I created the little target images and after all that work I figure I'll keep using them.

From my small sample, it seems that the worst 'hits' are those where google finds all the right words, but they are in different posts, so in fact the searcher really doesn't get to something she was looking for. When you are searching you can tell this if the terms you are looking for are separated by . . . It seems to mean they're on the same blog, but in different posts. There are some examples below. Usually people want the words together. But if Google is going to keep doing this, the least they could do is retrieve all the posts they found words from.

It is nice to know that some people find exactly what they were looking for - some information that I've gathered together, particularly if no one else has it. What's really, really frustrating is when I have exactly what they are looking for, but Google sends them to something else. So here's a sampling of the last two months.

Bulls-eye

Thai word for elephant - Bingo. No, that's not the Thai word for elephant, but it's in the post this person got to about the Thai elephant conservation center. Both in English letters and Thai.


can you leave the senate to become a governor - This went to a post about Senator Murkowski running for the Governorship of Alaska.

what are mimes saying - Since they generally aren't saying anything (audible) this is an interesting question from someone from New Zealand. And, remarkably, he got to a post about mime Bill Bowers who did a performance piece where he talked about being a mime. So this looks like a pretty good fit.


lol in thai - another one right in the center of the target. It got to my post entitled, "lol in Thai." I'm sure there are a few people wondering what lol means in English. (Laughing Out Loud.) The Thai version is much better.

puffins murres in sealife center alaska - This one got to a post with pictures from the sealife center which has a picture of a puffin, of a murre, and even one with both a puffin and a murre.

how much does a director at conocophilips get paid - This query came from a Board of Trade and Industry server in London and got to a chart of top Conoco Philips salaries.

these were one of the most common sights in thailand buffalo replace by tracter - This person probably got exactly what he was looking for. A post about how Thai water buffalo had been replaced by tractors, with pictures of water buffaloes 40 years ago.

Close

meteor shower tonight what time singapore - Well, I had a post on meteor shower tonight and I had other posts that mentioned Singapore. But nothing that combined them. Also had people looking for the same thing in Malaysia.

obama amputates the invisible hand - hmmmm. My post didn't blame Obama, it was just Who cut off that invisible hand? I think my post didn't say what they wanted to hear. Good.

who left u.s. senate to become governor? I had the NPR’s political junkie show on Talk of the Nation in the background and they have a trivia question each week. That week’s question was about Kay Baily Hutchinson quitting the US Senate to run for governor of Texas against the sitting Republican governor. The question was "who was the last US Senator to quit to run for governor against an incumbent of the same party?" Well, my post on Frank Murkowski leaving the Senate to run for Governor didn’t quite answer that question for them. But when I looked to see where the query came from, it was from National Public Radio in Washington DC.

holier-than-thou types - Sometimes I find out that something happened or someone, somewhere said something because I get a rash of searches for the same term. On August 31 I got about ten from various parts of the country for this term, including one from the Naval Command Control & Ocean Surveillance Center in Virginia Beach. I'm not sure why they were all looking for this - I checked the Google search and found nothing that I could connect with this - so I'm not sure if they got exactly what they were looking for, but they did get to a post called Some Context on Holier Than Thou Types.


A Real Stretch

famous people born during solar eclipse - (from New Delhi) I don't think the post on famous people born in 1908 mentioned anyone born during a solar eclipse.


italy visitor center - This was an image search. I get a fair number of people searching images, but I don't usually get to see what search term they used. But I do get to see what picture they got. This person got to Singapore archive pages that has a zillion pictures from Singapore including one post with a picture of the Singapore Visitors Center. This was at least six or seven pages into the search so I guess when the person didn't find what he was looking for on Italy he was willing to look at Singapore. It is a cool picture.

dehydrated spice pills - as it turns out the post on dehydrated beer also contains the words "spice" and "pill."

beer out of cottonwood buds - got to my buds, which included a picture of cottonwood buds, but no beer.

bad feng shui 6 years gap in family ox and sheep - What was this one about? It came from the Philippines. What Do I Know? was #1 out of 868 google hits - my post on the difference between oxen and cows (this is the year of the ox) had every search term except '6' and 'family.'

Supreme Court adjustable microphone - This got to a post on a Karen hill tribe celebration to open a fire break in Northern Thailand. This post highlights the many things they made with bamboo, including an adjustable microphone stand. And then they got the word 'court' from a totally different post about the L.A. County Courthouse. This came up number 4 out of almost 3,000 hits. Note those three dots . . . that separate the different posts.

What Do I know?: Fire Break Ceremony Chiang Dao 3 - Bamboo
It's a fully adjustable microphone stand. There's a smaller piece of bamboo ... Lakers Celebration Traffic on Way to Court · Downtown LA and the County ...
www.whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/.../fire-break-ceremony-chiang-dao-3-bamboo.html - Cached - Similar -

things for german people to do in idaho - Why not? This was from someone in Denver, who, maybe had German guests coming. The post this got to probably saved him a lot of trouble, it's the one that said that Idaho doesn't exist. It did mention Germany in the post and had stuff on philosophy too.



You Missed This One Google


Hindus in Anchorage - This got to a post called Anchorage as an Abusive Family which has the word Hindus in it. But there is also a post about the Hindu temple in Anchorage which would seem much more on point. This is the kind I mentioned above that are so frustrating.

how to grow tamarind seeds and photo - Another example of getting the searcher to the wrong post. They got to a post on tamarind trees with pictures, but I had a more recent one titled "Growing Tamarind Seeds" with a photo. I'm not sure I gave a lot of advice on how to grow tamarind seeds, but I can tell you from sad experience that once they're up, it helps to keep watering. I've got two now that I'm hoping will come back. I’ve added an update and link to the newer post. But too late for this visitor.

Facts about 1500 - This got to the post about my 1500th sitemeter hit. I'm sure that wasn't what the searcher was looking for. But it did stir me to do a new 'contest' to reward the 123,456th visitor.

black&wait sex - Probably not Google's fault. The searcher needs to spell better. My guess is they were looking for 'black and white.' Here's where a human is better than a machine. Here's the Google blurb the person found:

What Do I know?: Robert Lapage's The Blue Dragon in Berkeley
12 Jun 2009 ... We didn't have the stage simply go black and wait as actors moved ... Hunger - and three other movies · Sex in the Sun - Shameless Blog ...

These are totally different posts, so there was no black&wait sex anywhere in my blog.


repetitive beat ordinance - Not sure what they were looking for, but they got to a post that really had nothing to do with it, except it had the word ordinance. Here's what they found on Google.

What Do I know?: Anti-Sanctuary Ordinance Buried Indefinitely
As for my husband's anti-crime ordinance, what don't you understand? ... Personal insults, rambling tirades,repetitive comments will be blocked. ...
www.whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/.../anti-sanctuary-ordinance-buried.html - Cached - Similar -


xray tech murders doctor east los angeles,ca - This was a Yahoo search, not Google. They got this blurb:

yahoo search What Do I know?
Ed Feo Partner, Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy, LLP, Los Angeles CA ... The xray tech said he couldn't interpret for me, but it was pretty clear the ...
whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/?widgetType=BlogArchive&widgetId=BlogA... - 219k - Cached

The words "Los Angeles," and "xray tech" are on my blog, but not together on the pages they linked to.


what does the number 85 mean in a person's life - They got to a post about a sign at the Moose's Tooth. Searching the page there was no 85 at all. A few of the other words showed up in the right column of the blog, but not in the post. This looks like an absolute and total miss. I looked at the Google Search this person got and couldn’t even find What Do I Know? in the search results. So maybe it was a one time mistake on their part.




Does Google Have a Sense of Humor?


Not this time around. They even accused What Do I Know? of being a spam blog and threatened to shut it down. Is it because there's a recent post that talks about spam? Or as one commenter suggested, someone marked this blog as spam?

So many books, so little time

I had a meeting Monday morning at the UAA library and as I was walking out, a book in the staff picks section caught my eye.
It was the Dan Dailey book, but then the old copy of Jane Eyre was cool too.


Then there was the book of the year shelf. These two books will be used in classes across the curriculum. I know. I mentioned to the persona at the front desk that probably it should be labeled "Books" of the Year. Both are by Alaska authors. Milkweed Press which publishes Shopping for Porcupine writes

Shopping for Porcupine by Seth Kantner was recently selected as one of two Books of the Year by the University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska Pacific University. Shopping for Porcupine will be paired with the other Book of the Year, The Whale and the Supercomputer by Charles Wohlforth, during the 2009-2010 academic year at both universities. Together, these books will be used to facilitate dialogue related to the theme "responding to climage [sic] change in Alaska." More specifically, the UAA/APU announcement notes that these texts "reveal many of the changes that have occurred [in rural Alaska] over the past half century and demonstrate what's at stake for rural communities facing the effects of climate change. . . . They call upon both Native wisdom and Western science to address the problems associated with climate change, and they illustrate how profoundly climate and cultural change can affect both people and entire ecosystems."

Of course, Palin fans know that this is part of the liberal conspiracy to end progress and destroy Alaska's economy.

Just before I got to the front desk and the exit, I passed what I thought was the new books shelves. But as I started checking on these books, some are relatively old. Still the variety of different books reminds me how much I have to learn. Here's a sampling of some of the books I saw. Click on the book covers for more info on the book and/or author.


In the case of the fish book, it turns out it was first published in 1987. Maybe this is a new edition. And you can see the ones that had plastic covers didn't come out to well. Sorry.


If you missed it above - click on book images for more info on book/author.



From the London Times review of this book (click on the book cover to link to the whole review):

Though it was domesticated more than 3,000 years ago, as the editors say in their introduction, “hardly any other food plant is as modern as the soybean”. They might have added, “or as controversial”. For, as press coverage has revealed, the clearing both of the rainforests and cerrados (savannas) of Brazil to grow soy, and the building of dams that are supposedly designed to help in its cultivation, are having dramatic effects on the survival of indigenous peoples and on climate change and biodiversity.

In the early twenty-first century, when surgery can be done microscopically and human achievement seems limitless, 2.6 billion people lack the most basic thing that human dignity requires. Four in ten people in the world have no toilet. They must do their business instead on roadsides, in the bushes, wherever they can. Yet human feces in water supplies contribute to one in ten of the world’s communicable diseases. A child dies from diarrhoea – usually brought on by fecal-contaminated food or water – every 15 seconds. . . [for more click on Big Necessity image above]

In her review of Stop High-Stakes Testing: An Appeal to America's Conscience by Dale D. Johnson et al., Luanna Meyer questions the premise that anyone can achieve "the American dream" through education. Specifically, she argues that the United States’ system of public schools and universities does not equal the playing field among the rich and the poor, and, in fact, public schools are just another place that allows poor children to fail. The book authors and reviewer alike sharply criticize the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), arguing that holding schools accountable via student test scores, without addressing fundamental issues of poverty, disparities in health care access, racism, funding inequities, etc., will only reflect what is already known—that children from middle-class and wealthy families will outperform poor children on standardized tests.. . [for more click on the cover above.]

With a title like this, I love to imagine what I would write if I were writing this book. Only then do I open it to see what was actually written. This was published in 1987.

Appadurai’s introductory article, “Commodities and the Politics of Value,” outlines a socialized view of commodities. He argues that commodities may be said to have social lives because they embody value, as created by a society. Moreover, Appadurai stresses that “commodity” is only one possible phase in the social life of an object; as it travels within different regimes of value, it may exit and reenter the commodity sphere. Commodities therefore communicate complex, context-dependent messages operating within a culturally constructed framework. . .

From what I think is the introduction of this book (click cover for link):

Distribution of scarce resources permeates almost all spheres and levels of social life. Scarce resources are not only distributed in the family, but also in the contexts of work, sports, friendship relations, the political arena, public organizations, legal settings, and more. Distribution of scarce resources is a problem affecting society at the micro, meso and macro levels. The micro level includes the family, friendship relationships, school, sport and work teams; the meso level includes work organization, the court, while the macro level includes political bodies, national economy, and others. In the family, for instance, problems with regard to the distribution of household tasks are common. In school, teachers have to decide how much attention to give to each student. On the meso level, public administrators are faced with the problem to determine whether or not to construct a new bus lane (see the chapter by Markus Müller and Elisabeth Kals in this volume) or how to tax different categories of citizens in the municipality for costs for water cleaning. The distribution and redistribution of income via taxation is an example of a distribution issue on the macro level.

You know the drill, click on the picture for more.

Bueker finds that naturalizing and voting are distinct processes. Level of education, income, and length of eligibility, predict both processes, but an immigrant?s country of origin frequently overrides these other characteristics and works differently in each. Immigrants from countries with the highest likelihood of naturalizing tend to have the lowest odds of voter turnout, while those immigrants from countries with the lowest odds of citizenship acquisition are the most likely to vote, once naturalized. Further, country of origin matters as much for how it interacts with other key characteristics, such as education and income, as for the independent influence it exerts on these two political processes.

From the book's website:

In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity's impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us.

In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; what of our everyday stuff may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.

From his NYU homepage:

My research and writing on revolutions, social movements, and terrorism have been motivated by both "real world" events and by debates among scholars. These often pull in different directions: Like many social scientists, I have been attracted to a sociology that tackles the most urgent personal and public issues of our age, but I have also felt compelled to leap into more academic debates about how this might best be done. I first became interested in revolutions in 1979, during the summer before my senior year in college. 1979 was a year of revolution – in Iran, Nicaragua, Grenada – and it was a year that saw the publication of Theda Skocpol’s classic study, States and Social Revolutions, which I quickly devoured.

The link for this is a pdf file. From the School of the Art Institute of Chicago:

To coincide with its 30th anniversary, the Video Data Bank is publishing
FEEDBACK: The Video Data Bank Catalog of Video Art and Artist Interviews (TempleUniversity Press). Founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1976, theVideo Data Bank is a pioneering institution in the media arts movement, and houses anddistributes one of the world’s largest collections of videotapes by and aboutcontemporary artists.
Edited by Kate Horsfield and Lucas Hilderbrand, FEEDBACK is both a catalog of theVDB’s extraordinary collection and an invaluable historical survey of over 40 years ofvideo art. The 360-page volume includes annotated listings of 1,500 titles by over 500artists, from Vito Acconci to Julie Zando, as well as essays by Gregg Bordowitz,Vanalyne Green, Kate Horsfield, and Peggy Phelan that explore the aesthetic,technological, and cultural histories and methodologies of video making as an artpractice and political tool.

This one was published in 1994 and I couldn't find any decent links for it - just people trying to sell copies.


This is becoming a much bigger task than I intended. But I'm getting close.

It’s Okay Mom is the true Alaskan story of Linda Thompson, a parent of three children all with challenges. It begins with life in the wilderness of Lake Clark region before her first son is born. Once baby Erik is in her arms, people want her to institutionalize him. When her twins are born, she faces life/death realities as they present themselves. Her husband’s job slowly draws him away from home when they move to the capital, Juneau, and he becomes the Director of Subsistence under Governor Sheffield. The marriage is slowly crushed. Linda returns to the wilderness of Alaska to be a Bush teacher, raising her surviving boys alone, standing by them, no matter what.

It's getting later and I couldn't find something good specifically about the book. This is about one of the editors, Jefferson Cowie, from Inside Higher Ed:

Everyone knows that rock and roll is all about kicking out the jams: ditching uptight squares, taking long rides in the dark of night, and being a street fightin' man -- or woman. As The Who put it, it's about hoping to die before you get old.
But what does rock mean to a new generation of uptight (if updated and wired) squares, afraid of the open road, who have little fight in them? What does rock mean for a generation that has never been allowed to be young -- let alone hope to die before they get old?


For my students, the answer is simple. Rock and roll is about family happiness.
I discovered this disturbing undercurrent of rock-as-the-soundtrack-of-familial-bliss when I began teaching a college writing class this semester. The undergraduates' first assignment was to assess the personal meaning of any song of any genre. . . [get the rest by clicking the picture]

`

Maybe it was because I thought these were all new books, I didn't realize that I had read this one until I got home. Here's a snippet from a review on booksiloved.com.

The highlight of Daisy's life is when she becomes a garden columnist for a newspaper, and has many fans who write to her, asking about remedies for blights on flowers and other such topics. When she loses her job to a man for no good reason, she never completely recovers from the shame of not having a public identity.

Why would we want to read about the rest of Daisy's existence, which is, for the most part, conventional and predictable, based on filling others' expectations and fighting despair? We read the rest of this fictionalized autobiography because Shields has a way of addressing her character's inner realities with lyrical affection and quiet irony. Because the story is told from many points of view over time, we are offered a complex, historical understanding of Daisy's life. . . [get the whole review by clicking on the book cover photo.]

From the UC Irvine Drama Department website:

Annie Loui works as a director/choreographer and creator of inter-media theater works. She trained with dancer Carolyn Carlson (at the Paris Opera), and studied with Etienne Decroux, Ella Jarosivitcz and Jerzy Grotowski. Original dance/theater pieces have been seen in France, Monaco, West Germany, and in the United States at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, among other venues. She has choreographed for the American Repertory Theater, Trinity Repertory Theater, and off-Broadway for the Signature Theater. Longtime member of the Brandeis Theater Arts Department; she also taught extensively for the Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard before coming to the University of California, Irvine, where she runs the Movement Program for the MFA Actor Training...

From booknews:

This text/reference offers a visual approach to moving target indication (MTI), moving target detection (MTD), and Air Traffic Control Radar Beacon systems, illustrating concepts, relationships, and processes with b&w illustrations, photos, and images, including illustrations of oscilloscope and spectrum analyzer displays, on every page. Early chapters cover radar's history, the role of the professional radar engineer/technician, and the science behind radar. Later chapters cover circuitry and hardware, secondary radar systems, microwave transmission, radar transmitters and receivers, the Doppler effect, and radar displays. Mathematical explanations rely only on basic trigonometric concepts, keeping the information accessible to those new to the field. . .

From a New York Times book review:

More Americans were executed in 1999 than any year since 1952, and the execution rate has gone up 800 percent in just a decade. Over 3,500 prisoners, an all-time record, now await their fate on death row. Strange, then, that Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell should state in the preface to ''Who Owns Death?'' that even as executions soar, the days of the death penalty in America are numbered. They reach this conclusion by a careful study of the psychology of capital punishment among governors, judges, prosecutors, jurors, victims' families, wardens and witnesses. They analyze our society to see if we indeed are obsessed with a ''culture of death,'' as Pope John Paul II has put it. It is a remarkable testimony to the authors' skills and the clarity of their writing that whether one is for or against capital punishment -- and few issues are as polarizing in modern society -- by the end of this book the reader will agree that, for better or worse, inexorable social forces are carrying us to the eventual abolition of the death penalty. . . [Click the photo to get the whole the review.]

Bonsai Jay Gets Prize

Bonsai Jay was visitor number 123,456 according to sitemeter (that counts the visitors who got here once I found and put up sitemeter). So he was the What Do I Know? contest winner. We had a bit of an email exchange to figure out an appropriate prize in which he mentioned a knife collection that didn't have an Ulu. And since he is a bonsai master I threw in some tamarind seeds to see what he can do with those. Here's the picture he sent of his prize. And a very nice thank you email came with the picture. There's also a card with a photo from What Do I Know? (it's the one below the boardwalk) which didn't quite translate in the photo.

Thanks to Jay and all the rest of you.

Epiphanous panoply of flavor in liquid-jewel form. Salesfolk Walking The Extra Mile

I got an email the other day that was a step above the normal spam emails. This one had some originality and a touch of honesty that was . . . can't quite find the word. I'll let you judge for yourself. I thought about posting it with a comment on how he was selling his product. But came to my senses.

But then someone gave us some coffee that was also a remarkable example of the creative (in this case I'm not saying creative is a good thing) marketing. I'm still thinking about both. So I'll let you come to your own conclusions.

First the email pitch:

This e-mail is from salve at xxxxx@gmail.com about a cool website they've found. You can see it at www.xxxxxxx.com. This is the message salve sent. Hi Friend, My name is salve, and I'm an IN YOUR FACE MONEY-LOVIN' LUNATIC. You wanna get rich buddy? Listen up ... Good guys finish last. Dead last. Nobody gets rich being nice. You got that? This is a KILL OR BE KILLED world. Got morals? Join a friggin church. I'm happy on the road to hell if I got a backpack full o' cash! I'm about to show you the dirtiest and deadliest ways to make HUGE MONEY online in no time at all, even if you know jack sh!t about computers. Look, this stuff ain't ethical .. it's definitely not nice ... and some of it is just barely legal. But it works. It works fast. And it makes mad money. Who cares about anything else! You're gonna make HUGE MONEY even if you're a complete newbie to selling online. Whether you're an advanced marketer or your kid just showed you how to fire up a computer last week, absolutely anyone can get filthy rich following my STEP-BY-STEP instructions. That's right .. I'm going to hold your hand like a baby learning to walk and show you STEP-BY-STEP how to put these money-making ideas into practice. So how much money am I talking about? I will personally strip naked and EAT MY SHOE and put the video on youtube if you make less than $2900 your first week. I'm dead serious!! Get started IMMEDIATELY before these techniques get spread all over the internet and lose their power! Time really is short on this one! Click here for more info: http://xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Regards, salve

I like a guy who uses punctuation marks to hide profanity. And then goes on to sell you something unethical and barely legal. Like wearing a suit and tie and speaking polite while he fleeces you. In this down economy I'm sure he has plenty of takers. I didn't even want to try going to the site and didn't want to promote a scheme where I'm sure the only one who might come out ahead is Salve himself. But check youtube for "eat shoe naked."


The Coffee - Someone had a good time here. I guess I'm thinking about the folks who fork over good money for this. A positive spin is that they are rewarding people for going beyond the everyday hype.






OK, this has to be a spoof on snooty wine and coffee connoisseurs. Doesn't it?



Notice that I have ignored the potential Google hit benefits of actually writing the name of the coffee in this post, though as I write this I realize it's on one of the photos.