Salmon No Brainer

My mom wanted us to pick up some stuff from Costco near Marina Del Rey on the way back from our bird watching outing (more on that later). I saw the Alaska salmon and then I saw the Atlantic farmed salmon.

When the quality is better and the price is lower, does the shopper even have to think?


By the way, the bottom line on the Atlantic salmon sign says "Color added through feed"

Does Lisa Murkowski's Religious Preference Matter?

I've gotten maybe half a dozen hits here from people googling "Lisa Murkowski Jew" or "Lisa Murkowski Jewish."  These people get to a post about Murkowski courting the Jewish vote.    

[UPDATE: Nov. 8 - I'm still getting people asking these questions. At least now they get to this page. If that's how you got here, please, leave a comment below or email me explaining why you wanted to know?]


Sitemeter offers a lot of information about people who get to this site, but it's mostly about their computer's features and their location, not their motivation.

Today I got someone who asked outright, "Is Lisa Murkowski Jewish?"

Why would someone want to know that?  As a Jew whose grandparents all died in Nazi Germany, I get a bit edgy over inquiries like this.  It seems to me there are two basic categories of people wanting to know:

• Jews  - Like any ethnic group in the US, Jews are interested in knowing about members of their group who are prominent and successful.  Some may even be ready to support a candidate because she is Jewish on the (often erroneous) assumption that she would support issues they support.  But Murkowski is not a name that most Jews would think of as likely to be Jewish.  So my guess is that the people googling "Murkowski" and "Jew" are probably NOT Jews.

• Non-Jews - I really don't know why non-Jews would google "Murkowski Jew."  I'm sure there are good, reasonable explanations.  Maybe readers might offer some reasons to help me out here.  But I also know that there are still a lot of White Power websites out there. 

I do think that a candidate's religion can be relevant in an election.  If some candidates' religions play a strong role in their values and will impact decisions they will face as elected officials, then the public has a right to know this so they can vote for the candidates who most closely represent them.

But a candidate's religion doesn't necessarily predict how they will decide specific issues.  Not every Mormon or Catholic or Hindu follows their religious dictates faithfully.  And there are different factions in most religions that differ on important issues.  One simply can't generalize from someone's religion.  Every candidate is an individual.  We need to see the candidates' records and the stands they take.

So I'm still curious about why someone would google "Is Lisa Murkowski a Jew?"  What would it mean to these people to find out that she is or is not Jewish?  Why not just google something like:  "Lisa Murkowski religion"? 

Just for the record, Lisa Murkowski is NOT Jewish.  If you really need to know what her religion is you can check out her Wikipedia page. 

Welcome to Sunny California

There was some light rain Monday morning and again Tuesday afternoon.  Not really enough to get the soil very wet.  But today is different as you can see in this very short video. 

How About an Anchorage MASSOLIT?

Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita arrived in the mail last spring.   A friend had sent it and I haven't had a chance to start it until this trip.

On page one we meet

Mikhail Alexandrovich Berloiz. editor of an important literary journal and chairman of the board of one of the largest literary associations in Moscow, known by its initials as MASSOLIT.

Berloiz exits, dramatically, at the end of Chapter 3. ("It was the severed head of Berlioz.")  But it's MASSOLIT that piqued my interest and had me fantasizing such an institution in Anchorage.  (Well, as you'll see below, similar in basic concept, but not in actual execution.)


It's not until Chapter 5 that we get more details about MASSOLIT.  It's housed, for instance, in an old

two-story, cream-colored mansion [called Griboyedov's] . . . set deep within a run-down garden. . .

MASSOLIT made itself at home in Griboyedov's in the cosiest and most comfortable way imaginable.  The visitor at Griboyedov's  was greeted first of all by the announcements of a variety of sports clubs and by the collective as well as individual photographs of members of MASSOLIT, which (photographs) covered the walls of the staircase leading to the upper floor.

On the door of room No. 2 there was a somewhat obscure inscription, ONE-DAY CREATIVE TRIPS.  SEE M. V. PODLOZHNAYA.

The next door bore a short but altogether cryptic sign, PERELYGINO.  Next, the chance visitor to Griboyedov's was all but dizzied by the multitude of signs peppering the ... heavy walnut doors:  REGISTER FOR PAPER WITH POKLEVKINA, PAY OFFICE, SKETCH WRITERS' PERSONAL ACCOUNTS . . .


Cutting across the longest queue, which stretched all the way down to the foyer, one could see the sign HOUSING QUESTION on a door that was constantly being assailed by a crowd of people.
Beyond the housing question a magnificent poster opened to view:  a cliff, and riding on its crest a horseman in a felt cloak, with a rifle behind his back.  A little lower were some palms and a balcony, and, sitting on the balcony, a young man with a tidy tuft of hair over his forehead and a fountain pen in his hand, staring off somewhere into the heights with overconfident, overbold eyes.  The legend read:

FULL-SCALE CREATIVE VACATIONS FROM TWO WEEKS (SHORT STORY) TO ONE YEAR (NOVEL, TRILOGY)  - - - YALTA, SUUK-SU, BOBOVOYE, TSIHIDZIRI, MAHINDZHAURI, LENINGRAD (WINTER PALACE).

In short, MASSOLIT is an organization of writers where housing and work and other recreation can be procured in relatively pleasant surroundings. 
But it isn't all sweetness and light.  Although it does have the best 'restaurant in Moscow, and because this fare was served at the most moderate, most reasonable prices"  it also has problems.

Any visitor at Griblyedov's, unless, of course he was a hopeless dunce, immediatly realized how well these lucky chosen ones - the members of MASSOLIT - were living and was attacked by the blackest envy.  And began at once to send up bitter reproaches to heaven because it had not endowed him at birth with literary talent, whithout which one naturally could not even dream of coming into possession of a MASSOLIT membership card - brown, smelling of good leather, with a wide gilt edge - a card well known throughout Moscow.

Now, I'm not fantasizing a Soviet style literary club in Anchorage with its own mansion, but it is nice to fantasize about a private club of sorts for writers of various types with its own building where people would come to plan collaborative projects with others, to find work or at least grant opportunities, and to eat with friends in a good restaurant. 

I'm assuming that MASSOLIT is modeled after a real place, though the story itself gets rather surrealistic.  The translator's introduction tells us:

After the extraordinary flowering of literature in a great variety of forms in the post-revolutionary decade, the end of the New Economic Policy and the introduction of the Five-Year Plans in the late 1920's brought about a tightening of the reins in literature and arts as well. The party's instrument of pressure and coercion at the time was RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) under the leadership of the narrow and intolerant zealot Leopold Averbakh.  And the persecution and pressures applied to writers to force them into the requisite mold succeeded in destroying all but a very small minority which resisted to the end.  Many of the most famous authors became silent or almost silent, either by their own choice, or because their works were barred from publication.  .  .

Bulgakov [the author of The Master and Margarita]  was one of the first writers to be hounded out of literature.  His first novel, The White Guard, the first part of which was serialized in a magazine in 1925, provoked a storm of criticism from party-line critics because it did not portray any Communist heroes, but dealt with the responses of Russian gentry intelligentsia and White officers to the upheavals sweeping the country and destroying all their old values and social norms. 

So, Frank, thanks for the book.  I'd point out that one of the benefits of blogging is that I was forced to go back to the intro which didn't mean all that much when I first read it.  Now I can guess that MASSOLIT might be modeled after RAPP. 

And CS, anything to add?

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.