RG's 20 Second History of Alaska Politics

I ran into RG over a month ago and when he told me his 20 second history of Alaska politics, I just had to have him do it again on video.  But we decided to wait until the various memorials for Ted Stevens were over before posting it.  The time seems ok now. 

Out North Previews Their 2010-1011 Season

Here's another catchup post.  This was the Sept. 16, 2010 Season Preview at Out North Theater.  They are housed in the old Grandview Gardens Library building.  The evening began with a silent auction in the art gallery.  The exhibit was touchable art.

This bowl even has braille!

People were milling around the auction items, keeping an eye out for other bidders marking up the bid. 


















Republican House candidate from Spenard, Thomas Higgins was there. 

One of the auction items was this collection of Sarah Palin pins. 

Then the event began.  Out North has brought a lot of - I'm struggling here for the right adjective, like edgy, but that isn't enough cause it is generally provocative in a very substantive way raising important issues other venues aren't willing to touch - performances.  After tumultuous beginnings, Out North has managed after 25 years to become established as an important part of the Anchorage arts and theater scene without losing its daring.  Gene and Jay should be pleased that their baby is in good hands and growing up well now that the parents have left home. 

I was  impressed with the line up of coming events as well as how it was all presented.  It began with local Hmong kids dancing and playing the khaen - a wind instrument I came to appreciate while living in rural Thailand long ago.  But at first it had the same noise quotient as bagpipes have.  And there was a good deal of genuine and funny clowning around.  Just about at the end of the event, Scott pointed out that what he was reading his notes from was an Out North I Pad.


Here's a bit I caught on video - unfortunately it only includes Scott Schofield, the new Executive Artistic Director whose abundant energy and enthusiasm and imagination suggest an exciting year.  Two types of events he mentioned were particularly intriguing to me.  He's scheduling some new, even unfinished films and plays, that will include Skype linkups with the directors and playwrights so the audience can give them feedback.  All this technology allows Anchorage to be both far away and right in the middle of things.  

Maybe Marijuana Does Have Serious Negative Long Term Effects

From Mark Leibovich's ten page New York Times Magazine article on Glenn Beck:

 He calls himself a “recovering dirtbag.” There were many days, he said, when he would avoid the bathroom mirror so he would not have to face himself. He was in therapy with “Dr. Jack Daniels.” He smoked marijuana every day for about 15 years. He fired an underling for bringing him the wrong pen. And, according to a Salon.com report, he once called the wife of a radio rival to ridicule her — on the air — about her recent miscarriage.[emphasis added.]

There's a dilemma here.  Conservatives who fight hard to keep marijuana illegal and who love Glenn Beck have to confront their belief that marijuana has harmful long-term effects.  And the legalize marijuana lefties have to reconsider their stand that grass is harmless. 

But this case probably doesn't prove anything about marijuana. Growing up with a divorced alcoholic mom who has an abusive boyfriend probably had something to do with his distorted view of the world before he started inhaling.

Look, there are lots of people who have to overcome difficult childhoods and I'm rooting for them all to find ways to become happy, centered human beings.  But I draw the line when people use their self-hate (“I hated people,” Beck wrote, waxing pop-psychological, “because I hated myself.”) to lash out against others and to lead others into hatred.   I can't blame Beck for doing things that make him millions of dollars a year.  Human beings tend to repeat behaviors that are rewarded.

My concerns are not even with troubled people like Beck who might see something of themselves in him and thus feel better about themselves because they see him on television making lots of money.

My concerns are with those people and organizations that reward this sort of behavior because they can make money off it.  It's like the old freak shows at circuses.

LA Rain for Hospital Visit

We got up early (for me anyway) to take my mom to St. John's for minor elective outpatient surgery.  When I looked outside I saw the street was all wet.  We've traveled by car in the last two weeks from Alaska to Vancouver, spent almost a week in Vancouver, and now we're in LA and it's raining.  We did have a bit or rain in Canada, but this is sunny California!  Well, they need the rain here. 


St. John's hospital is pretty close to where my mom lives and turned out to be a very nice hospital - it looks as good if not better than Providence in Anchorage.  We had to drive up to the front door to let my mom out and the parking there was valet parking.  No time to argue or go look for a space on the street, just relax and enjoy it.

It was all easy and efficient and people were very helpful and friendly.  I had my iPod touch with me and there was free wifi so when the doctor explained stuff I could look it up and see all the details of what they were going to do.  We got to be with my mom in the prep room and then between there and the post op waiting room was the dining room where we got breakfast and waited for them to call. 

They are doing construction - seems the old building was torn down - but I couldn't hear any construction noises. 



They gave us little cards and papers with instructions and explanations.  In the post-op waiting room they have a monitor with color coded information about where your patient is in the process.




I got in to see my mom in the post op where she was already joking with the nurse and then I went out to wait to talk to the doctor. Things went fine he said. I got some hot soup for my mom in the cafeteria and she drank it (she hadn't had any breakfast) while we waited outside mostly covered from the rain for the valet to bring up the car. Now we're home and and I've just checked on the LA weather report:

So, by Thursday or Friday we might be back to Vancouver weather. 

Learning a Second Language as an Adult - Thoughts Inspired by Dr. Patricia Kuhl at UAA

[I have a few unfinished posts that needed more thinking and editing before posting.  This one was in that pile.  I've done a little more work on it and I think I better post it before I forget about it altogether.]

Here's what the UAA website said about the talk we went to at the end of August.  

Dr. Patricia Kuhl is a renowned expert on early learning. She will give a free public lecture in the Wendy Williamson Auditorium on Monday, Aug. 23, at 7:30 p.m. titled “How Infants Crack the Speech Code:  Exploring Minds in the Making Using the Tools of Modern Neuroscience.” 

Dr. Kuhl is doing research on how babies acquire language by testing kids and their performance on tests of sound recognition and brain scans.  I want to focus on some things she said about the difference between infant language learning and adult language learning which I have experiential knowledge of both as an adult language learner and through teaching English in Thailand.  I talked to her briefly after the talk and want to follow up with an email, so partly this is to get my thoughts down.  You can see her specific research here.

Several times she contrasted infant and adult language learning and had data to demonstrate it.  Basically, language learning ability was high to about 7 years old and then nose dives according to her graph.  There were interesting data about infants getting maybe 15-20 hours of interaction with a very expressive Mandarin speaker and then showing that they can recognize unique Mandarin sounds that other American kids the same age can't recognize.  Even more interesting, she showed that kids who did the same amount of Mandarin, but on television instead of with a live person, had no benefit.  So social interaction, she believes, is very important in language learning.

But I had a bunch of questions based on my own experiences learning German and Thai as an adult, as well as playing with Cantonese and Mandarin with less intensity.  Some questions arose:

1.  When comparing child and adult language acquisition, were the adults learning the way children do - in a total immersion program where their old language wasn't allowed?  My experiences are that the immersion - a year as a college student in Germany taking classes in German and having to do the papers and discussion in German as well as doing everything on the side in German, and a similar situation in Thailand - meant that such immersion makes all the difference in getting to a fluency level where you speak the other language without thinking and you dream in the other language.
   
   I asked her this afterward and she said, "No" when adult language learning is compared to that of kids, the adults aren't usually in a learning situation comparable to a child learning a first language.  They are in classes not in an immersion situation.
   
    
2. What exactly do you mean by learning a language?  Most of the testing she discussed had to do with acquisition of sounds that don't exist in your native language.   So, if you are talking about learning to speak a language accent free, then my personal experience supports that adults can't do this as well as kids can.  But if you are talking about learning how to speak the language at native speaker levels of vocabulary and grammar, I know way too many people who learned English as adults who speak fluently, if not accent free.

I got reasonably fluent after a year in Germany.  I had had two years of high school German and one year of college German before I went to Germany.  While my parents were native German speakers, I did not grow up learning German at home.  And my pronunciation didn't suggest any benefit from hearing it as a child.   But, after a year in Germany, I had a basic ability to speak without thinking - that is without translating from English, just naturally responding to what others said to me.  What I needed still was to grow my vocabulary and improve my grammar.  If I had stayed in Germany for three or four more years, I'm sure my German would have gotten significantly better.  I also think of African students I met in Beijing who came to China with no Chinese and were then good enough to take college classes in a couple of years.  

So, why do most Americans think that learning a second language as an adult is so much more difficult

It's a good excuse for why they don't know a second language.  But that's not really fair, because the idea permeates the US.   Also, English is the main universal language in the world today.  Even if one travels, one can get by with English in most places. 

I think adults appear to be poor at learning second languages for a number of reasons:

1. Adults don't learn languages in immersion situations where they have no choice but to speak the new language.
    
2. Adults don't have doting parents giving them lots of attention and praise every time they utter a new word. 
    
3. Adult language classes focus on learning through logic and rules instead of speaking and mimicking native speakers. My Thai and Chinese students (in those countries) could read and write much better than they could speak.  Speaking happens in a different part of the brain and their classes all focused on reading and writing, not on speaking.  (Often because the teachers couldn't speak English fluently either.)
   
4. Many adults don't want to look foolish, so they don't say anything.

I think the key issue is how we're taught languages.  I studied Spanish in junior high school and high school and German in high school.  It was pretty much focused on reading and writing with limited spoken language in class.  The Spanish that we had to say every day at the beginning of class, I can pretty much still recite today.  That should be a clue where this is going.

My German didn't really come together until I was in Germany and had to actually use it to buy my food, to find directions, to do everything.

I learned Thai in Peace Corps training and while living in Thailand for three years.  Our Peace Corps language training was 50 minute sessions, one native speaker teacher, and five or six students, for about eight hours a day.  That doesn't include out of class studying so we'd be ready for the next day.  And we learned by memorizing dialogues - dialogues which turned out to be pretty useful idiomatic Thai that were immediately useful when we arrived om country.  Enough so that people thought our Thai was much better than it was.  Once we got off the dialogues we were in trouble.

But the dialogues were preceded by exercises where a Thai speaker would repeat sounds and first we had to be able to distinguish whether the two sounds were the same or different.  This sounds a lot like what Dr. Kuhl is doing with the infants to test their ability to hear sounds.  Then we had to reproduce the sounds.  First we just listened to Thai tones.  Then we listened to Thai vowels and consonant sounds that are significantly different from sounds represented by English letters.  (Most Thai sounds have a close relative in English - the r sound might not be the same as an English r, but they'll understand you.)

We learned with a phonetic alphabet so that helped free us from thinking a Thai sound was the same as the English sound.  While it would have been more difficult at first to learn the Thai alphabet, I think it would have been preferable in the long run.  If we could learn the phonetic alphabet, we could have learned the Thai alphabet.  It took me a lot longer than necessary to learn to read Thai  and writing is still painfully slow.

I think the problems I have with Dr. Kuhl's comments about adult language learning are based on:

1. The  experiments she presented focus on learning to recognize sounds of a foreign language that don't exist in the native language.  I agree that adults don't learn sounds like kids do, but learning to be fluent in a language doesn't mean you become accent free.   It does mean you can understand most of what you hear and can respond so native speakers understand you.
    
2. Comparisons of child and adult language acquisition don't really compare the same things.  Children learn in total immersion situations and have lots of reinforcement for each new word.  They also don't have any other languages to use to get what they want.  Adults usually learn in relatively short breaks (classes) and then go back to their native language environment.  And often, even in class, the basic language spoken is the native - not the new - language. 

I think Dr. Kuhl's research is very interesting, but I think she falls into standard 'common wisdom' mistakes when she talks about adults learning second languages that her research doesn't really address.  

Mom's Sunday Waffles

Waffles were our Sunday morning breakfast growing up and when I come back to visit it's the same. 

Here's my Mom's 200 year old waffle maker.

I took a break from my chocolate chip waffle to take this picture. (It's on a clear glass plate.)  In a world where so many things change constantly, it's nice to have some things stay the same. 

Vancouver to LA

It was cloudy when we got up Saturday morning in Vancouver, after almost a week of mostly sunshine.  And it was sunny again when our plane was ready to take off. 

This picture is for Donal who lives in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island and has been following the trip to Vancouver.  We've just cleared 10,000 feet here and we're headed over the southern tip of Vancouver Island.  You can't be too far away. 

On the left is Washington State, USA.    On the right is British Columbia, Canada. 

The Olympic Mountains in Washington State.

 

 

I think this is the  Sacramento - San Joaquin River Delta.

 A sometime reader from the Oxnard area confirmed on another trip to LA that these were the Channel Islands.

Fog is starting to roll in over the LA beaches as we bank inland.

The Goodyear blimp.  I think it was at the Coliseum where a USC - U Washington football game was soon to start.  And to end with a last minute come-from-behind victory for the UW Huskies. 

VIFF 2: Pink Saris and The Arrivals (Les Arrivants)

Photo from VIFF website

I felt like I was just dumped into rural India when the film started Thursday.  I remember (as opposed to what actually happened first) a woman yelling, and there's another, young woman who's boyfriend is in jail because he abandoned her after she became pregnant.  It seemed that was the reason he was in jail anyway. The movie goes on like this as the very outspoken Sampat Pal takes no crap from anyone as she fights for a series of young women who seek her out.  These highly confrontational scenes are interspersed with views of cityscapes or rural landscapes that allow us catch our breath.  Most of the problems stem from untouchable class women being involved with men of higher castes.

Just as I was starting to think of Sampat Pal as a rather pushy and righteous woman, on screen her companion accuses her being arrogant and overly concerned about publicity. (This companion is a higher caste man, though she never divorced the husband her parents married her off to when she was about 12.)

[Video from Women Making Movies at Youtube.]

When I left the theater I started thinking - how can you tell a story like this?  India is too big, there is so much the rest of the world doesn't know that needs to be filled in.  Why not do what Kim Longinotto, the director, did?  Just jump in almost ethnographically and let the viewer sample first hand, Sampat Pal at work?  


There is a story there - Indian woman, married out as a child and abused by her in-laws, grows up and works to protect other girls/young women facing the same situation.  That story tells itself.   Being there as she fights for justice is probably better than an 'even-handed' movie that might interview various people who have had dealings with Sampat Pal.  You just fall right into the middle of things that would lead any reasonably intelligent person to want to know a lot more. 

This is a woman with no real formal education who  says, "This is unjust and I'm going to do what I can to help some of the victims."  She's flawed, but no more than any of the rest of us.  What makes her stand out is that she isn't willing to put up with the injustice she sees around her.  

The movie should make everyone look at themselves and ask, "What suffering around me can I alleviate?" 

You can listen to a CBC interview with Pink Saris director Kim Longinotto here.  Scroll down to the Pink Sari segment.


This is an issue affecting women of all classes in India.  The book Ancient Promises by Jaishree Misra  tells the story of an educated middle class New Dehli girl's marriage to a man from her family's home state in Kerala which tells a similar story.  

In the afternoon we saw the French movie, The Arrivals.  It takes place in the Paris office that processes immigrants seeking asylum.  It follows an Ethiopian couple, an Eritrean woman, a Mongolian couple, a Sri Lankan family, and the French officials that cope with their problems and the limits of the bureaucracy they work for.  This film is not as raw as Pink Saris and we see the social workers' perspectives too. 

photo from VIFF website

There's so much mindless debate about immigration in the US and Europe today that seeing real people caught up in the red tape surely would help remind people that these are human beings, usually fleeing from difficult if not dangerous situations, trying to have a better life - like most people who now live in the US.  


These aren't necessarily easy movies to watch - though they aren't dry and certainly are as absorbing to watch as most reality shows.  If people watched just one movie of this type for every ten Hollywood films or two hours of video games they pay, we all be a much more informed world.  I'm not saying these films tell the whole stories - they couldn't.  But watching films like these, rich in detail that we normally don't see, on a regular basis will raise questions in people's minds and help replace some of the ignorance based prejudices we all have about things we know so little about.  








[Video from HAPPINESSDISTRI. The copy at the festival had English subtitles.]

NOTE:  The Vancouver International Film Festival has a great grid of all the movies by date, time, and place with links to more info about the movies.  I found it somehow, but can't find it again from the main website.  It's probably right there and easy to find, but if anyone else has trouble finding it, it's here.

VIFF 1: Vancouver International Film Festival Day 1

It just happened that the VIFF started yesterday and so we took advantage to go see a couple of films since we're here.  Get my juices flowing for the Anchorage International Film Festival in December.  Coincidentally I got the a message  this morning that the Anchorage Festival submissions are in and the official selections will be announced before too long.

This post will be mainly pictures and I'll try to get up some comments on the two movies we saw yesterday - Pink Saris and The Arrivals. 


This is the 11 am line at the Granville Venue for one of the first films to show in the festival - Pink Saris.

 

The theater was, maybe 1/3 full for this Thursday morning offering.

 

Since it was such a spectacular day, we picked at 4:15 movie as our next event and walked over the bridge to Granville Island.  That gave us 3 hours outside walking around.

Our tickets for The Arrivals - a French film that follows asylum seekers in the Paris office - were definitely low tech.

And as we made our way to the SkyTrain, we passed the main theater again which had a long line for the evening shows.

 

Burnaby Mountain 4: Wet Roses Part 2

Happy Birthday J!!!

This is my favorite birthday rose surrounded by all the lesser flowers.