Equinox, Termination Dust, and Temple Bells

Rain Monday. Wind gusts all night. On the mountains the rain was white. The equinox was Tuesday morning according to National Geographic. If you go to the link, you'll see that they have someone who disputes the idea that on the equinox everyone on earth has the same amount of day and dark.

But don't be fooled by the notion that on the autumnal equinox the length of day is exactly equal to the length of night. The true days of day-night equality always fall after the autumnal equinox and before the vernal, or spring, equinox, according to Geoff Chester, a public affairs specialist with the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

In any case, as of Tuesday every place south of Anchorage gets more light than we do until next spring.



Their video doesn't mention this though. They too found the magic music source that showed up on Dennis Zaki's moose film. But it also has the omniscient voiced narrator who tells us "The Truth." (This sort of music and this sort of narrator are so ubiquitous in nature movies and documentaries that we take them for granted. But once you start to hear them for what they is - a totally human artifice added to movies to give them the ring of 'truth' and authority - you can't help but smile. Ah, you think, another cliche movie soundtrack trying to sneak its message into my consciousness.)





Our backyard is changing colors. The chaise lounge, barbecue, and sweet peas are still out, but fall is on the way in.

















Birch (and a few red mountain ash) leaves cluster on the edge of the driveway.










While the pansies act as if nothing has changed.











After my Thai lesson I listened as the wind rang the bells at the Wat.

(I used YouTube today because Viddler took so long, YouTube was up first even though I uploaded at Viddler much earlier.)




In the afternoon the termination dust was easier to see. It's a bit late for the first powder on the mountains, but no one is complaining.

Holy Hullabaloos - Picking Books for a Book Club

This was only my third time with this book club. I volunteered to host because I just don't know what my schedule is going to be like and I figured this one would work. The host is supposed to have some food that is connected to the book. This book is a law professor's road trip to the locations of the dispute in key Supreme Court cases on the separation of church and state. There wasn't a lot of food in it - there were some animal sacrifices in a Santeria religious group in Florida (Church of Lukumi Babalu Ave., Inc. v. Hialeah) which included killing and then eating a goat among other animals. There was a lot of beer. There was Limburger cheese in Wisconsin (Wisconsin v Yoder.)

I was able to find some goat meat at Sagaya and J got it really tasty and stringy by today. We also had some Wisconsin cheese, but couldn't find any Limburger in Anchorage, which is probably just as well.


I'm spending a lot of time on the food, because the book was disappointing.

Jay Wexler says he was inspired by a couple of road trip books to write this book the way he did. Despite (or perhaps on account of) being a Boston University Law professor and former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg, his attempts at making this a 'fun' book for dim law students didn't work. He came across as socially perceptive as the Forty Year Old Virgin.

The book's concept was to give the reader the key separation of church and state issues by highlighting the important Supreme Court cases on this topic AND by describing his road trips to towns where the cases took place. Ideally this would give us insight both into the law and into the actual impacts on the communities where the events took place. I found the law coverage is pretty sketchy - there's not even a list of the cases, they aren't in the table of contents, there's no index, and some times I couldn't even find the case name - and the visits are pretty superficial. And he regularly paints himself as "the creepy liberal academic from Boston" who is something of a doofus:

"Luckily for me Meg had asked me before to write up a list of questions . . . it saved me from having to think too much during our conversation." (140)

Surely, Ginsberg's law clerk wasn't trying to convey himself as walking into a meeting with the Chaplain of the US Senate without any preparation. Was this supposed to be a joke? I didn't read it that way at the time and only now see this the only possible explanation. After all, fourteen pages before he told us that he'd printed out and read the previous six months of sermons. This attempt to dumb himself down, to not look like a wonk. just doesn't ring true. He's trying too hard to be one of the guys. He isn't. The frat jocks this seems to be aimed at are more likely to remember the part when he got drunk in an Austin bar than they are to remember any of the court cases.

While his road trip stories fill in some background for the cases, his interviews, at least as portrayed in the book, are pretty superficial. They add some sepia tones to the cases. There were some better parts - like the discussion of the emergency room doctor who sued to get 'under God' taken out of the pledge of allegiance - but I can't find them now to cite them because the book is so badly labeled. The chapter titles were chosen, apparently, for alliteration rather than illumination. (Hasidic Hallabaloo, Santeria Skirmish, Amish Agitation, etc.) Since he makes references to cases and people in each chapter that aren't the main topic of the chapter, and there's no index, and no list of cases (I know I'm repeating myself, but these are serious omissions, especially if he wants these used in law school classes) it's hard to use this as a reference book to the cases. I got the sense that he rushed to finish this and that his editor didn't spend a lot of time on it either.

The parts that illuminate the main court cases in this 238 page book could have been covered in 40 or 50 pages at most. You can get a lot of the basic ideas of these important cases online in a few minutes.

This link gives you a list of the key Supreme court decisions on separation of church and state with a brief synopsis of the precedents set.

And here's one with a synopsis of the principles the court considers in deciding separation of church and state cases.

We do get a little bit more discussion of the cases than these lists. But even his interviews with people involved in the cases are too shallow to add much value. Maybe the jokes work better in a classroom where you get feedback from the students and can adjust.

One member of the book group defended the book on the grounds that he learned about separation of church and state Supreme Court decisions and that the author, though a strong advocate for separation and a self-declared atheist, urged people to be respectful of those advocating the other point of view. And I agree that I learned something from the book. But we can say good things about a lot of books, but with so little time and so many books, I want to read books that are brilliant, or at least very good.

The disappointment of a number of us in the group led to a discussion of how to pick better books. One person said it was all about the subject for him. Another likes good writing and how the story is told. I feel that there are so many books out there, really good ones that we will never have time to read, that I'd prefer to have great books - that teach me new things and change how I think about the world and that have interesting, if not exciting, writing and structure.

So how do we pick such books? Do we just go with prize winners? Nominated books? I can pick them for myself by hanging out at the bookstore or library and reading enough to get sucked in or turned off. But even then, if I'm wrong, I can stop reading. But if a whole group is reading, you have to plow through.

So, from the American Booksellers Website, here's a list of different book awards as a start for coming up with a list of seriously good books. (The first two categories are children's books.)

The Randolph Caldecott Medal

The John Newbery Medal

Booker Prize for Fiction

National Book Awards

National Book Critics Circle Awards

Nobel Prize for Literature: 1950 to Present

PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

The Pulitzer Prize: 1950 to Present

The Quill Awards

The American Book Awards / Before Columbus Foundation

Awards from the American Booksellers Association

Indies Choice Book Award (2009 - current)

Book Sense Book of the Year Award (2000 - 2008)

American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) Award (1991 - 1999)

Checking out the Indies Choice Book Awards above there I found The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski which won the best author discovery award for 2009. You can start reading it at the link. It didn't take long for me to decide to suggest it for our book club.

[Update: Here's what Jay Wexler posted on "Holy Hullabaloos: The Blog" today:

September 22, 2009
"as socially perceptive as the Forty Year Old Virgin"

Here is a guy who really did not like Holy Hullabaloos!

I have to give him credit for being a good sport for linking to this post. In an Aug. 27 post he praises Ketchikan, Alaska whose library stocks Holy Hullabaloo (Loussac doesn't) and whose newspaper reviewed the book.

I came across a review of the book in the Ketchikan Daily News! That's right, the two newspapers that have reviewed my book are the Boston Globe and the Ketchikan Daily News.

You can also see him in a bit of video at a book store trashing his own work.]

Frank Schaeffer on Evangelicals - Max Blumenthal in Anchorage Next Weekend to Tell us Personally

Frank Schaeffer:

"In the early 1970s the evangelicals like my late father and James Dobson decided that the our society had fallen so far "away from God" and so far from "America's Christian history" that it was time to metaphorically decamp to not just another country but to another planet:. In other words virtually unnoticed by the media and mainstream political operatives, a big chunk of American society seceded from the union in all but name.

What they did is turn the white race-based in "Christian school" movement of the 1950s into a countercultural phenomena. As tens of thousands of new Christian schools opened, it was no longer just about "protecting" white kids from minorities and African-Americans. It was about protecting your children from Satan in other words the United States government's long reach through the public school system. The generation raised on the belief that the US government is illegitimate because it is trying to "impose" non-biblical laws on people has hit the streets. . .

Ah, helps make sense of all the people who didn't want the president talking to their school kids. GW Bush was ok because they believe he is one of them.

These are the people who grew up indoctrinated into an alternative reality. Today they are out there waving signs of Obama dressed as Hitler. They are buying weapons and ammunition. Some are in the growing and revived militia movement. They are Dick Armey's foot soldiers. People like Armey and Beck can count on the ignorance of their dupes. It's against their religion to read a real newspaper, watch anything but Fox or go to a real school."

Linda at Celtic Diva has been running some pieces on the religious right that help explain some of the craziness that is going on in the US today. The quote above and those below are from a long piece Linda posted by Frank Schaeffer, the son of a well-known evangelist. Schaeffer has left the movement, but not before being among the architects of various evangelical campaigns including anti-abortion. He apologized publicly for his role in Dr. Tiller's murder.

Basically Schaeffer's saying that the Evangelical right has pulled its kids out of public schools for home schools or private evangelical school and has indoctrinated them into a theocratic mindset where people who do not believe in their God are evil. Their interpretation of the bible, not the Constitution, are their law.

Evangelical Red Guards

Over the last 30 years Evangelical fundamentalists have managed to do what Chairman Mao failed to do with his Red Guards: indoctrinate a whole generation of evangelical people to see their own society as the enemy and act like subversives from within the culture. These people are more anti-American than Al-Qaeda. The "Christian Reconstruction" movement is working for theocracy. Reconstructionism (of which Gary North is one leader) says that the law given for the political and legal ordering of ancient Israel is intended for all people at all times.

He warns that kindly liberals - Obama included - who want to rely on reason simply do not recognize what they are dealing with. These folks, according to Schaeffer, play by totally different rules. He gives the example of being ahead in a chess game and thinking you are winning when your opponent pulls out a lead pipe and beats the crap out of you. Different rules about winning.

I was born in the United States because a man named Adolf Hitler mobilized a demoralized German youth and many of their parents after the humiliations of post World War I Germany. The most scientifically and culturally advanced nation in the world succumbed to pure emotional hate and pride in fatherland. The rational, educated Germans didn't believe that Hitler had a chance. My mother barely got out of Germany before World War II broke out. This was a real event in my family. So I've grown up understanding that the US was not immune from this sort of thing. There are structural differences between the German government then and the US government now that make the US less vulnerable. But 'less' doesn't mean invulnerable.

Schaeffer's narrative makes the people we've been seeing on television and here in Anchorage understandable. They're denial of facts, their black and white approach to good and evil, their hatred of the government. They see the world as differently from us as do Islamic fundamentalists. But they look and sound just like us (on many topics) so we're apt to overlook the warning signs. They are the product of years of schooling in this. (Note: I know that school, all schools, turn off a certain number of the students, so not all graduates of such schools turned out that way. But enough to make good footage for Fox News and other television news programs who need some action footage to keep viewers. And they are devoted. Wait til we see the first Evangelical suicide bombers in this country.) Schaeffer calls this the enemy within. We can't make the same mistake the reasonable Germans made in the 1930s. The Bible is much more powerful than Mein Kampf.

I understand people's doubts. This is the United States, we're different. Yes, so was Germany, so was every once-great nation. We aren't outside of history. I heard Schaeffer a while back on Fresh Air. You can listen to the Schaeffer interview and judge for yourself whether this guy is credible.

More immediate for us in Anchorage though is Schaefer's list of people who have got it right:

The real story of the Religious Right and their power to destroy is told by Max Blumenthal in Republican Gomorrah, and Jeff Sharlet in The Family and by me in Crazy For God. What our books have in common is the understanding that you can lose in the political system but still "win" -- according to your destructive agenda -- if your agenda is non-political but rather religious and apocalyptic in nature.

Max Blumenthal will be in Anchorage next weekend to talk at a couple of venues.

This poster [double click to enlarge and read it better] comes from Phil Munger [Update 9:30am: see Phil's clarification of the poster source in comments] who is helping to arrange for Max's trip to Anchorage. I learned as a college student that going to hear people tell their stories live is one of the most powerful ways to learn. I urge everyone to attend these events so you can judge for yourself whether you need to rethink what is going on. You can even listen to him on the radio

Saturday afternoon
The Shannyn Moore Show 5-7pm AM radio 700.

You can also make contributions to help pay for Blumenthal's visit at Progressive Alaska.(Upper right corner PayPal button.) A later post there gives a lot more information about Blumenthal.

Blumenthal's book Republican Gomorrah is currently #15 on the New York Times non-fiction best seller list.

UAA - Saturday September 26
8pm UAA Arts Building 150

Anchorage Unitarian Universalist Fellowship -
Sunday 12:30pm-2:30pm

Gout

Gout is a kind of arthritis that has been known since ancient times. Hippocrates called it “the disease of kings” because of its association with a rich diet. In reality, there are a number of factors that can lead to gout, and diet is part of this larger picture. [Gout.com]

Why am I telling you this? Because I spent yesterday not being very royal with a toe so sore I didn't get out of bed. I'll spare you the photo, but my left big toe is much bigger and redder than my right big toe.

So, how did this happen? Well, it did happen once about five and a half years ago when we were in Portland for six months. That time I suffered much longer (I'm assuming the meds will kick in by tomorrow and now it only hurts when I walk on it or bump it) because first I had to find a doctor, get an appointment, etc. This time I knew what it was and I have a great doctor who is extremely responsive and helpful. But why did I get this? From foods to avoid on gout.com

• Meat items that are particularly high in purines include beef, pork, lamb, and “organ meats” (such as liver, kidney, and brain), as well as meat extracts and gravies.

These foods are almost never on my plate, so they're not the problem.

• Reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption, especially beer.

Again, very rarely. This is not it.

• Reduce your use of oatmeal, dried beans, peas, lentils, spinach, asparagus, cauliflower, and mushrooms.

Hmmmm, I eat oatmeal almost every day. And last week I had more than usual amounts of spinach and mushrooms.

Another 2004 study did find meat and seafood to increase the chance of gout in men. But

In this specific study, though, not all purine-rich foods were associated with an increased risk of gout. There was no increased risk associated with a diet which included:

* peas
* beans
* mushrooms
* cauliflower
* spinach

Even though these foods are considered high in purines. Choi's team also found that low-fat dairy products decrease the risk of gout and overall protein intake had no effect. Ultimately, diets shown to be connected to gout are the same kinds of diet linked to cardiovascular disease.

Gout.com goes on to suggest:

Dietary and lifestyle changes may also help:

* Maintain a healthy body weight and a well-balanced diet.
* Avoid alcohol, especially beer.
* Exercise regularly.

Well, I already do all these things. I recall, but can't find, an old Mark Twain quote. He was recommending various vices like smoking and drinking because, he said, when you get sick and the doctor tells you to give them up, you'll have something to give up.

Ongoing Mac Problems

[Update Oct. 3 - see this later post for what the Snow Leopard problem was for me. Doesn't mean it will work for you, but it seems to have solved my problem.]

My relationship with Stephen at the Apple Help Desk is growing much closer. It's all due to installing Snow Leopard. I have his direct line and his email. My black screen continues to show up. When it was at the MacHaus, they never saw the problem and their hardware diagnostic was negative. After a day at home, it came back.

So, what could it be? I've been trying to isolate factors.
1. It happened after I installed Snow Leopard. It seemed to go fine after Stephen walked me through resetting the parameter ram and the SMC.
2. But after I added Rosetta (I'd left it off when I installed Snow Leopard) it started again.
There's one other factor that I'm pretty sure of:
3. It only seems to go black when I'm plugged into my Mac adapter. I don't think it has gone black when I've worked on battery only. And at the MacHaus, they didn't have my adapter and they never had the problem.
4. It doesn't happen while I'm working on the computer, it happens when I stop for a while - go to get a phone call or do some other errand away from the computer. A few minutes away is enough.

It went black a couple of times yesterday and after I rebooted twice, I decided to leave the cord unplugged except when I needed to recharge the battery, but if I was going to get up I unplugged the cord. Stephen had me reset the SMC and parallel ram again yesterday afternoon, but it went black again. I left a message. (He's in Dallas and it was after he left work.) But I didn't plug it in again and it was good overnight and today. When Stephen called today about 1pm, we reloaded Snow Leopard, but he had me plug into another outlet to see if the outlet was a problem. I went to pick up J and when I got back it was finished installing, and the screen was black and unresponsive.

So I'm battery again now and we'll see. He said if it went down again, he'd send a new power adapter.

Meanwhile I did find out my friend does NOT have lung cancer. Now, that is very good news. And J's back. Also good news.

Making salads for Rosh Hashona dinner with friends.

The Hills Are Alive . . .

Seeing the Chugach Mountains from town is one of the perks of living here in Anchorage. The changing light and seasons mean that the familiar always has a different look and while waiting at a traffic light you can look up into the wilderness and now it's close by.
This was Tuesday on the way to a meeting, waiting at the Glenn Highway and Bragaw. (Yes, sometimes I drive if the places I'm going are too far apart to get to on a bike, or if I have to carry something that doesn't fit in my backpack. Or the weather or roads are dicey...)

This was after lunch today at the Thai Kitchen.
The golds and reds are starting to show.

Dennis Zaki took his video camera up to Powerline Pass (about 20 minute drive from downtown Anchorage) the other night and got these great shots of bull moose hanging around, waiting for the mating season to officially open.

The Magnificent Moose from Dennis Zaki on Vimeo.

After I watched the video, I emailed him to say I thought the video was great, but that the music was kind of cheesy.

"As many times as I've been up there," I wrote, "I've never heard any music."

He wrote back:

"Yes it was weird, the music just started playing as soon as I got there!"

So, yes, Rogers and Hammerstein were right.

Where's Political Music of the Bush and Obama Eras?

After posting the video on Mary Travers in the previous post, I realized that while there was a reason I posted it, lots of people would have no idea of the significance of Peter, Paul, and Mary and the many other musicians of the sixties. Just posting it without saying anything would mean little. I realized I needed to supply a little context. So here it is.

In the early sixties we had the civil rights movement which overlapped with the anti-war movement which came a bit later. Both these movements were accompanied by an incredible musical score. I almost said background music, but while it was ALWAYS in the background, there were times when it was front and center stage.

Peter, Paul and Mary (Travers of the previous post) were part of this musical rhetoric that kept people inspired through difficult times. They were just a part of a whole army of musicians supplying strong, melodic, and uplifting anthems. So I supplemented my memories of those days with a Google search. Ask.com says:

Civil rights would have been won without the participation of blues, gospel, and folk singers and songwriters, but the participation of musicians and the effectiveness of sing-alongs certainly helped an incredible amount.

The songs on this list don't even begin to capture the hundreds of tunes that have been written about civil rights in America (and around the world), but if you're looking to learn more about music during the civil rights movement, this is a good primer for your journey. [Go to the ask.com link for their list of most important songs.]

PBS had a fund-raiser documentary on Freedom Songs of the Civil Rights Movement with a three CD box set. It looks like it will be on at 10:30 this Saturday night (Sept. 19) in Washington, DC at WETA and again Monday night.

The point though, is that there was an incredible musical back up to the movements. Folk songs were big in the mid-60's and there was something called the 'hootenany' which was folk song singalongs. There was even a hootenany television show.

"MTV Unplugged?" Nope, it's Hootenanny, the ABC-TV series that capitalized on the popularity of folk music during the early 1960's. If it's remembered at all today, it's as the show that blacklisted Pete Seeger, a last gasp of McCarthyism that led to a boycott by Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul & Mary; The Kingston Trio - practically every folk act that meant anything to the masses.

But when Hootenanny appeared in March 1963, it held a lot of promise. Each segment was taped at a different college campus, the audience consisting of students. Shows ran for a half-hour on Saturday night, and featured four acts. The music was literally non-stop. Host Jack Linkletter (eldest son of Art) would quickly introduce each artist or group, and they all took turns after doing a song. During the thirty minutes a "headliner" act did three or four songs, two supporting acts did two songs apiece, a third act (usually a soloist) did one song, and everybody joined in for the closing number - usually something simple like Goodnight Irene or "Little Liza Jane."[Michael J. Hayde writes More at tvparty.com about many of the acts that appeared - he says his dad audio taped all the shows. ]

As the Vietnam War began to heat up in the sixties, some of these artists crossed over to the anti-war movement and their music, along with the addition of rock and roll protest songs, were important inspiration.

Which raises the point - where are the stirring anti-war anthems of today? Where are the folk songs that call the health care victims to the streets, arm-in-arm? I'm the first to admit being out of touch with today's pop music, so I'm sure others might be able to jump in and tell me where to find it. Clearly rap taps into the kind of urban frustrations that Pete Seeger tapped into, but too often rather than pointing toward ways to overcome, it turns into violent, misogynist rants. It's not that there aren't rappers who have a more positive message, but in the sixties, there was no one in the US who didn't know Blowing in the Wind and We Shall Overcome.

If that kind of music, with that kind of reach and power, exists today, I don't know about it. And we need it. To lift our souls through the nastiness of today's politics, just as the music lifted us above the nastiness of racism and the politics of the Vietnam War. Racism and war? Hmmm, We're still embroiled in those fights today. Where's the inspirational music of today?

Good Bye Mary Travers

YouTube from adelfred.
[Update: I've added some context to this in the next post. And if you follow the link to Blowin in the Wind, you can see Peter, Paul, and Mary 30 or 40 years earlier, singing one of the most important anthems of the civil rights movements.]

What happens to your trash?

I was getting ready to go to bed but first I had to take out the trash that's collected tomorrow. But then there was the NY Times in my email. You know how going to bed at ten ends up going to bed at 2am.

According to the NY Times:

Through the project, overseen by M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory, 3,000 common pieces of garbage, mostly from Seattle, are to be tracked through the waste disposal system over the next three months. The researchers will display the routes in real time online and in exhibitions opening at the Architectural League of New York on Thursday and the Seattle Public Library on Saturday.

The MIT site tells us:

TrashTrack uses hundreds of small, smart, location aware tags: a first step towards the deployment of smart-dust - networks of tiny locatable and addressable microeletromechanical systems.These tags are attached to different types of trash so that these items can be followed through the city’s waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualizations.

I couldn't find where online the garbage is being tracked. At least I can track most of our summer, raw, kitchen vegetable scraps. They go about 50 feet to the compost heap and then get scattered onto our various flower beds after the worms and other bugs take care of them and the leaves and our neighbor's grass clippings.

But it would be interesting to find out where some of the other stuff goes. I hope not out to the trash island floating in the North Pacific.

The Seattle Public Library, which is one of the partners in this, will have an event Saturday, Sep. 19, 2009, 11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.:



But I have to take the trash out now.

Krestia on Goldberg

I cringed when I heard that Jonah Goldberg was coming to talk to UAA students. It's not that he's a Conservative columnist, it's his style. My sense is that he's Rush with an academic veneer. His columns seem meant to anger, to distract us from real issues. Bring up Conservative columnists and Liberal columnists, but ones who bring their biases to what they study to illuminate and raise questions that cause us to rethink something we think we already know, or to start to grasp something we're scratching our heads about.

But I did think I should at least go and hear what he had to say, but I completely missed it by not keeping track of when it was supposed to be.

Fortunately, the Press went, and Krestia at the Anchorage Press wrote an interesting review of Goldberg's talk. (I say 'interesting' because I don't know how accurately he reported the talk, but what he wrote was interesting.) The basic point he says Goldberg made was that these are great times to be a journalist. I don't want to say much more since I wasn't there and you can read Krestia's column yourself at the link above.