Anchorage Nearing Solstice

People frequently ask about the winter darkness in Anchorage.  The shortest (darkest) day of the year in the northern hemisphere is this Friday, December 21. We're actually more than a 500 mile drive south of the Arctic Circle.  And we have a fair amount of light, even on the shortest day. 

Yesterday the Anchorage Daily News said our official sunrise was 10:11am and the official sunset was at 3:40pm, but at this latitude we have very long twilights (if it's clear.)  The sun at noon is very low on the southern horizon at noon. 

Here's my shadow at 1pm today.   Time and Date says the solar noon yesterday was at 12:56 pm and the altitude of the sun was 5.6˚.
See table below for more details.

Here's the southern horizon at 4:45pm, over an hour after the official sunset time.

I remember being in Hawaii with our kids watching the sunset over the ocean and  warning them it would be dark in ten or 15 minutes and they were really amazed at that.

So, even though the official "total daylight" was listed in the paper yesterday as 5 hours and 26 minutes, we had more than an hour of twilight before sunrise and after sunset giving us seven hours and a half.  Of course, that's not true if it's cloudy in which case it gets dark very fast.

I love the soft velvety blue of the winter evening sky.  And even though it was around 0˚F yesterday, walking around in the clean, crisp air was totally invigorating.  (I didn't play with the colors of the photo, it's really that color. The trees a little off white due to the street light tint.) It is helpful to be properly dressed though. 

Here it is as background to this icy birch with the crescent moon caught in the branches.  It's about 5pm here.








Here's a post-sunset view of the Chugach mountains from Rasmuson Hall on the University of Alaska Anchorage campus.  Looking east here through the glass which caused the darker shadow on the upper left. 

The paper also says we lost 50 seconds of daylight Monday from Sunday.  For a while we were losing over 5 minutes a day, but we're slowing down as we get to the end of the earth's tilt and then we'll start to tilt back.  Soon we will be gaining time quickly again.


From Time And Date:

The December solstice occurs when the sun reaches its most southerly declination of -23.5 degrees. In other words, it is when the North Pole is tilted 23.5 degrees away from the sun. Depending on the Gregorian calendar, the December solstice occurs annually on a day between December 20 and December 23. On this date, all places above a latitude of 66.5 degrees north (Arctic Polar Circle) are now in darkness, while locations below a latitude of 66.5 degrees south (Antarctic Polar Circle) receive 24 hours of daylight.

Time and Date also calculates our sunrise and sunset schedule for this week a little bit differently from what the Anchorage Daily News has:

			Length of day		Solar noon
Date	Sunrise	Sunset	This day	Difference	Time	Altitude	Distance (106 km)
Dec 17, 2012	10:12 AM	3:41 PM	5h 28m57s	− 49s	12:56 PM	5.6°	147.204
Dec 18,	10:12 AM	3:41 PM	5h 28m19s	-37s	12:57PM	5.5˚	147.191
Dec. 19	10:13 AM	3:41PM	5h 27m54s	-25s	12:57 PM	5.5˚	147.179
Dec. 20	10:14AM	3:41PM	5h27m41s	-12s	12:58 PM	5.5˚	147.167
Dec. 21	10:14AM	3:42PM	5h27m40s	<1s	12:58 PM	5.5˚	147.157
Dec. 22	10:15AM	3:43PM	5h27m53s	+12s	12:59 PM	5.5˚	147.147
Dec. 23	10:15AM	3:43PM	5h28m17s	+24s	12:59 PM	5.5˚	147.137

HTML Tables

				Data from Time and Date.

Shootings In Context Part 2: What Can We Learn From The Last 61 Shootings?

One trait common to most humans is discomfort with uncertainty and ambiguity which is part of our need for closure.  The question 'why?' seems to be part of our DNA.  Some people channel this need into science.  Others into addictions - alcohol,  drugs, work, television, sports,  reading - anything that allows them to put off dealing with the uncertainties of life.  Others turn to religion to get answers to the unanswerable.  Probably most of us use a bit of all three.  Events like the school shooting in Newtown force us to attend to things that don't make sense to our normally routine worlds.  They force us to attend to the contradictions in our world views.  And we seek explanations that allow us to go back to normal.

I just made all that up.  It's probably not completely wrong, but I don't have anything but my experience and quirky brain to back it up.  Why am I telling you this?  Because I don't want you to do anything more than consider what I have to say.  I'm not writing  'the truth.'  I don't have any conclusions in this post.

I'm just trying to find some facts that are out there that can be used to test people's attempts to bring closure to a mass murder.  We shouldn't latch on to the first explanation that is most consistent with what we believe.  We should clean out our brain's dusty models of how the world works and see if they need some revisions.  We need to see why it's so easy to let go of the murder of 26 people and allow the conditions that allowed it to happen to incubate the next shooting.  It's not easy to let go?  Give it a few days.  How many of the last 61 mass shootings are still haunting you? 

That's the number in a Mother Jones piece I found.  Since 1982.  It maps them all out.  I went looking for numbers trying to find something that might give a clue to what we can do to stop the shootings.  In the previous post, I had found that mass shootings, dramatic as they may be, make up only a tiny fraction of the firearms deaths in the United States. But that post went in a different direction and so this post will share some of the numbers I had left over.

As I mentioned in the previous post on this topic, we can concentrate on figuring out the characteristics of mass murderers, then focus on finding people with those characteristics to stop them.  Or we can focus on those characteristics and figure out how to develop public health infrastructures that prevent the kinds of problems that mass shooters seem to have.  Focus on individuals or focus on what society does to encourage or discourage shooters.

Taking the list from Mother Jones, I made a long table which included the year, date, state, location (of the shooting), and the age of the shooter.  All that information and a little more is in the Mother Jones article, but I wanted to be able to sort it in different ways.

They specifically defined a mass murder as

• one shooter (though there are two exceptions which included two shooters)
• at least four dead, not including the shooter
• the number of dead can include the shooter 
• all but a couple were at one location, though there are a couple of 'sprees' in the list

[I  went back to their site, they've updated and done some of the sorting of numbers I was doing and present here.  I've done it a little differently.]

First I just start grouping the raw numbers.  I wanted to see if there are any things that stand out - such as most of the shooters are white males.  But even though this stands out, what do we do with it?  Even if all shooters were white males aged 37, would we screen all white males two weeks before their 37th birthday?  Not likely.

All the while I was thinking about correlations.  I didn't do anything complicated.  I'm just eyeballing the numbers - are there any relationships?  For instance, I checked the shooting dates against full moons.  There were three within a day of the full moon.  Sixty one shootings is  two months worth and we would expect about two to fall on a full moon. So that means nothing.

Gender and Race

I didn't do race because race wasn't always clear.  They have pictures for many, but you often can't tell race for sure by looking or by a name.   But people who study this say they are predominantly white males.  There was at least one black, a few Asians, and a couple who would appear to have been Hispanic.  Gender was pretty clear:  there was only one woman (white.)

Age

AGE	11-19	20-29	30-39	40-49	50-59	60-69	Total
Number	9*	15	12	20	6	1	63
*Two of the seven shootings in this age group had two shooters.

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The average age = 34.7 years
The modal (the number in the middle of the list) age = 36
The median (most frequent) age = 44 (5 were 44 years old)
If I had added in the Newtown shooting, there would also be 5 for the age of 20.

In the list of characteristics in Shootings in Context Part 1, it said most shooters were in their 20's or 30's.  But this list shows most to be in their 20's and 40's.  

Months

Is there some pattern for when they shoot?  Here's a table with how many shootings there have been per month.

Jan	Feb	Mar	April	May	June	July	Aug	Sept	Oct	Dec
3	7	6	6	3	4	5	5	5	5	6*

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* Does not include Newtown school shooting

A pretty even distribution for such a low number.    I even looked to see if the full moon had any relationship to the shootings.  It didn't.


States

What about the states these events take place in? 

# of shootings	States (population density - people/square mile)	Total
0	Alabama (87), Alaska(1), Delaware(402), Idaho(15), Indiana(154), Kansas(33), Louisiana(103), Maine(41), Maryland(545), Montana (6), New Hampshire (138), New Jersey(1,144), New Mexico (15), North Dakota(9), Rhode Island (1014), South Dakota (10), Tennessee (138), Vermont (66), West Virginia (75), Wyoming(5) Washington DC (9370)	21
1	Arizona (45), Arkansas (51), Hawaii (186), Iowa (52), Michigan (175), Massachusetts (814), Mississippi (60), Missouri (81), Nebraska (22), Nevada (18), Ohio (277), Oklahoma (50), Oregon (35), Pennsylvania (274), South Carolina (135), Utah (27), Virginia (179)	17
2	Conn.(703),  Georgia (142), Illinois (223), Minnesota (61), Kentucky (102),	5
3	Colorado (41), New York (402), North Carolina (165), Wisconsin (99)	4
4	Washington (88)	1
5	Florida (298), Texas (79)	2
9	California (217)	1

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Here's a map I made that shows this graphically:


I'm not sure what this tells us.  30 states have had mass shootings, some more than once.  I was going to check population to see if that could account for California's high number of shootings.  The first chart I found was population density, so I stuck that in instead.  I thought maybe people in low density states might feel less stress or have more room to be alone.  All the states with 15 people per square mile or less are in the zero shooting category.

But the highest density states (New Jersey and Rhode Island) plus the District of Columbia (with the highest density) are also in the zero category.  Plus this is about mass shootings.   When I looked up firearm deaths per capita by state things changed quickly.

The four highest death by firearm states  (DC (31.2 deaths/100,000 population), Alaska (20),  Louisiana (19.5) and Wyoming (18.8), all had no mass shootings.  California (9.8) was 30th in deaths by firearm and high density states like New York (5.1) and Rhode Island (5.1)  tied at 46th and New Jersey (4.9) was 48th.

Looking for numbers I found this Atlantic Monthly article, The Geography of Gun Deaths, by Richard Florida, that does a lot of similar kinds of work on relationships between gun deaths in a state and other factors. (These are all gun deaths, of which mass shootings deaths are a small fraction.)  It concludes:

While the causes of individual acts of mass violence always differ, our analysis shows fatal gun violence is less likely to occur in richer states with more post-industrial knowledge economies, higher levels of college graduates, and tighter gun laws. Factors like drug use, stress levels, and mental illness are much less significant than might be assumed.

I'd say it's worthwhile to check out the whole article - it isn't that long, but full of interesting statistics.   It looks for a lot more correlations than I have and lists which ones are strong and which weak. 

They found no correlation (it only discusses correlation, not causation) between mental health and firearm deaths.  I put mental health as a major issue in the previous post.  But I was talking about mass killings and Florida (the author not the state) was looking at total firearm death statistics.  Mass shooting deaths are only a fraction of a percent of all annual firearm deaths so they wouldn't affect the statistics.

Location of Shooting

LOCATION	# OF SHOOTINGS
Gunman's workplace	25
School/University	11
Restaurant/Cafe	6
Mall/Shopping Center/Movie	5
Concert/Nightclub/Party	4
Social Services/City Hall	3
Place of Worship/Church	3
Wife's workplace	2
Other (train, spa)	2

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These numbers strongly support the triggering events mentioned in Part 1.

"triggering event may be a loss of job, being spurned by a woman, or something similar (usually an economic or academic crisis of some sort)."    

 36 of the 61 shootings were at their workplace or a school.  That says a lot.

While these shooters are clearly way outside the norm and many of them have conceptions of the world that don't come near matching reality, I do believe that many of them have been treated poorly by co-workers or fellow students and that treating others with respect - even when they are behaving strangely, even badly - would go a long way.  Even if it didn't stop these kinds of events, everyone else's lives would be much better. 


Are Things Getting Worse?

People have been asking if things are getting worse.  The chart shows that the 80's had the lowest number of shootings and deaths.  The 90s were the highest.  The 2000s dropped, but this may have been a post 9/11 effect (one shooting in 2001 and none in 2002).  The current teens would set a record if the rate continues. 

Year	# of Events	# Dead	Decade	# of Events	# Dead
1982	1	11	1982-89	7	153
1984	2	48
1986	1	21
1987	1	6
1988	1	11
1989	2	56
1990	1	42	1990-99	22	348
1991	3	61
1992	2	19
1993	4	56
1994	1	28
1995	1	6
1996	1	6
1997	2	14
1998	2	25
1999	5	91
2000	1	7	2000-2010	20	307
2001	1	9
2003	1	15
2004	1	12
2005	2	41
2006	3	28
2007	4	86
2008	3	42
2009	4	67
2010	1	11	2010-2012	10*	218*
2011	3	40
2012	6*	110*

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* Newtown school shooting not counted here

But given that there are over 30,000 firearm deaths a year, these numbers are almost incidental. 


So, I offer these numbers for reflection.  They don't tell us much, but they are probably more anchor than most people have when they talk about the shootings.

And do look at the Mark Follman piece in Mother Jones.  Then look at Richard Florida's Atlantic article.  He takes this much further than I do.  But remember, Flrida's looking at all firearm deaths, not just mass shootings. 

Here's what I've learned the past couple of days writing these two posts:

1.  We may or may not be able to stop these mass shootings.  It probably won't happen by trying to identify individuals likely to explode and stopping them.  Making it hard to get weapons might have an effect, but I'm not sure given how many weapons are already out there.  But making societal changes in general mental health care availability,  teaching people how to interact more respectfully, and preventing school and workplace bullying and harassment would probably, in the longer term, give future shooters less need to shoot.

2.  Probably more important is that the mass shootings are a highly visible, but a relatively insignificant part of the firearm death statistics.   Plain old murders and suicides and accidents with firearms kill 30,000 people a year.  That's where our efforts to stop firearm deaths should start.  The efforts there will, I'm guessing, also have an effect on mass shooters. 

Sufganyot And Other Hannukah Specialities

We were invited to a last night of Hannukah party and since it was less than a mile away we walked over about 5:15pm, just in time to see the last of the pale blue western sky fade and the beautiful crescent moon in the cold crystal clear air. (It's about 0˚F  or  -17˚C) Batches and batches of latkes were being pulled out to be heated as guests arrived (I think she said they'd made 3 or 400, 15 pounds of potatoes.)



Then placed on the table with apple sauce and sour cream.

The dessert table had sufganyot.  (It's ok, I had to ask what they were called too.) These are jelly donuts.  The Houston Chronicle has a recent article about them, including two recipes.  In part it says:

"Kuchenmeisterei" ("Mastery of the Kitchen"), published in 1485 and later translated into Polish as "Kuchmistrzostwo," has the distinction of being one of the first cookbooks to be run off Johannes Gutenberg's printing press. It also contains the first record of a jelly doughnut - "Gefullte Krapfen" - according to "Encyclopedia of Jewish Food" by Gil Marks.

Germans had many names for them, including Berliners. In Austria, they were known as krapfen. In Poland, they were called paczki. In Russia, ponchiki.

"In Israel, however, ponchiks soon took the name sufganiyah (sufganiyot plural), from a 'spongy dough' mentioned in the Talmud, sofgan and sfogga," Marks writes. "Sufganiyot subsequently emerged as by far the most popular Israeli Hanukkah food."

There were also other sweets and people brought lots of the things to taste.  

And when there were enough people there that latke supply had dwindled, they  said the prayers and lit the candles.  Since it was the last night, all the candles were lit.

Shootings In Context Part 1 - Focus, Guns, Mental Health, and Suicide

It's a time for us all to send our good thoughts to the families of the 27 killed in Connecticut Friday.   But what about to the families of the 88* people killed by firearms in the US every day?  Or the families of the 93 people killed in traffic crashes daily in the US?  Shouldn't they get our sympathy too?  Why are these 27 particularly deserving?

Focus

A large part of the credit goes to the media. From all that happens in a day, they decide what is newsworthy. One NPR newsman today said something like, "Americans are riveted to news about the shootings today."  Well, since NPR and other media outlets were spending most of the day focused on the killings,  if people left the radio or tv on, one had little choice.  But why don't the media focus with such concentration on the shooting and traffic deaths that occur every day?  The total dead from those causes on a daily basis is eight times greater than the total in Connecticut Friday.

27 or 28 in one location at one time is easier to cover.  But such coverage distorts our perception of how many people die in the United States of different causes.  We become fearful of things that statistically aren't likely to happen to us, and become casual about things that are more likely - like getting hurt or killed in a traffic accident or by guns we keep in our homes. 

If we focus only on firearm deaths, about 32,000 a year, can we reduce the number of such deaths?  We have several options.  I heard several newscasters talking today about characteristics of mass killers.  Is there a way to identify them before they go on the rampage?

Characteristics of a Mass Murderer

Dr. Tom O'Connor's (Assoc Prof, Criminal Justice/Homeland SecurityAustin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN)  website  offers a long paragraph of characteristics from which I've made this list:  

• almost always male, 
• is probably White, and is 
• in his 20's or 30's.  [data I'll put up in another post soon doesn't quite support this]
• He loves weapons, particularly guns, 
• is a loner with no friends and few acquaintances
• no criminal record or any lengthy history of mental treatment.  
•  has festering "real or imagined grievances, frustrations, disappointments, and outrages done to him by others over a long period of time"
• most . .  are psychotic and probably qualify for a not guilty by reason of insanity verdict.
• motivation is often for no apparent reason at all, or sometimes for an apparent but perverse (often sexual) or private reason.  
• usually not under the influence of any intoxicant during the episode.  They don't need to be under the influence because in their minds, their self is already dead (society has destroyed it).  
• rarely know their victims, but their choice of victims is usually not random or coincidental (at least in their mind).  In their mind, the victims represent people they are envious of  
• triggering event may be a loss of job, being spurned by a woman, or something similar (usually an economic or academic crisis of some sort).    

 Two Different Strategies To Reduce Mass Murders

1. Watch out for potential mass murderers and prevent them from killing. 
2. Focus on factors in society in general and reduce, overall, the factors that increase the likelihood that an individual is going to go out and kill.

The first strategy seems pretty hopeless.  There are so many people who will never go out and kill, but who share many of those characteristics.  Do we try to monitor them like TSA checks all airline passengers?  But many of the characteristics in individuals aren't apparent until after the fact.

The second strategy creates public infrastructures to minimize those factors that lead to mass murders.  This more like a public health strategy.  The classic public health examples of clean public water and sanitary sewage systems did more to improve health than any other health measures world wide. 

In this strategy we'd identify those factors that need to be reduced or increased.  Going through the list above there are some factors that we can't eliminate, like gender and race.

But there are other factors that should be on the table:

• Mental health problems, particularly
• Feelings of isolation, rejection, victimhood, humiliation
• Inability to handle rejection at work, school, or from a woman
• Love of guns

And let's remember that far more people (about 30,000 more) die from other firearm situations than mass murders.  

The Republicans, and many Democrats, have said that talking about guns is totally off the table.  While some who advocate gun-control are probably overly zealous in their cause, not allowing any discussion of guns and ways to limit them seems to say that these 30,000 people who die from firearms each year don't matter.  It's a far different approach from the zero death policy taken for airline passengers.

This was the kind of position the tobacco companies had concerning any control of cigarettes.  Imagine trying to limit tobacco in today's political world.  Smokers' rights would be a major plank of the Tea Party and the Koch brothers would be funding 'research institutes' that pumped out studies proving there was no connection between smoking and lung cancer.  Oh wait, I forgot.  That's what the tobacco companies did.   But they didn't have the talk shows and Fox News to push their lies.

The National Rifle Association website does give a sense of the money and power they have in this area, but the tobacco companies were that powerful once too.  Unstoppable power has a way of outliving its welcome.  We've seen that with the Soviet Union, with Gaddafi, and Mubarak.  The NRA's time will come too.

But in the mean time are there ways to cut firearms deaths that wouldn't affect legitimate gun users (people who don't shoot at people, except as a last resort self defense), but would cut down on firearms deaths?


Firearms Deaths, Suicide, and Mental Health

If we look at the statistics, a number of studies** show (among other things) that

• about half the annual firearm deaths are suicides 
• four times as many men as women commit suicide
• a large percent of elderly men who commit suicide do so with firearms
• people in homes with guns are four times more likely to be killed by guns

Many of these studies conclude that it is necessary to find ways to limit gun ownership.  That option might well decrease the number of firearm deaths and certainly should be pursued.  But given the current political opposition to gun control, I'd offer an alternative that focuses on mental health services, including suicide centers.    Those opposing gun control should be challenged to support the kinds of mental health improvement programs that would reduce both individual firearm deaths (by far the most common) as well as mass murder firearm deaths.

Suicide centers could offer the possibility of assisted suicides to those with painful terminal diseases that would allow people to avoid huge medical costs to keep them alive and to die with some level of comfort and dignity.  They would also assist those who are not terminally ill, but are depressed or have other mental health issues that temporarily make death seem a good option.  Ideally, most people going to those centers will find options other than suicide, but the centers would be available to all those considering suicide and offer support and assistance to get them past the immediate crisis.

General attention to mental health, to constructive, non-violent conflict resolution strategies, anti-bullying programs, and programs that help people understand those who appear unusual, even strange (including for those people themselves) should be developed in schools and workplaces.  Not only would this cut down suicides and firearm deaths, it would lead to greater mental health among the population in general.  But that's only a stopgap measure.  I would argue that most mental health problems are due to people living in a system whose emphasis on efficiency over decency is fundamentally hostile to human beings.  Again, this is a societal public health problem, not an individual misfit problem.


This has gone on in a direction I hadn't anticipated when I started.  Much of the data I was going to present seems somewhat irrelevant to this line of reasoning,  so I'll stop here and offer more in a later post.

Here's the link to Part 2:  Shootings In Context Part 2: What Can We Learn From The Last 61 Shootings?


*Number comes from the Firearm and Injury Center at Penn Resource Book 2003 figure of an average of 32,470 traffic deaths per year, divided by 365. 

** 2003 Resource Book Updated
**The Epidemiology of Firearm Suicide in the United States
**American Society for Suicide Prevention
**Surveillance for Violent Deaths — National Violent Death Reporting System, 16 States, 2009
**NRA Violence Policy Center

Iron Book Head And Other Ceramics

The great thing about art is that everyone sees something else in it.  And this piece at the UAA ceramics sale last Friday leaves a lot for the viewer to interpret.  Since it's a university student piece and there's a book, it might have something to do with the pressures of studying.  But what an iron's pretty harsh.  Ah readers, what does this mean?  Unfortunately I wasn't thinking clearly and didn't get the name of the creator. 

Every year around the first Friday of December the ceramics department has a sale of their students' work.  Since my office was minutes away, I would regularly drop by and pick up something or two.  I'm particularly looking for pieces I can put under potted plants.  Instead of the expensive array of plastic junk sold in box store gardening departments, I could usually find a few items that served this purpose.  There are also a variety of small cup like pieces to use as a pot for plant I want to give away. 





Prices range from a couple of dollars to significant money for some of the artier pieces like the iron head book piece.  If you go later in the day, they eventually start marking things down,  but the selection isn't as good. 

The receipts are split between the students and the Clay Club (I think that was the name)  which helps maintain the ceramics lab. 

This year included more fanciful arty items than I remember.  Mostly it was small utilitarian items like cups, bowls,  plates,  platters, and vases.  This time there were a number of larger sculptures, like the iron head above and these below.

 

Is this one supposed to represent the State of Alaska's harmful oil addiction?

You missed this year's sale, but there's always next year.  And if you are looking for alternative holiday shopping, Out North's Occupy Christmas alternative market has an interesting array of artist made items this weekend.  I'll post some pictures of that soon. 

AIFF 2012: Meet the Festival Director and Alaska's SAG Rep

I got more video taken than I was able to put up during the festival.   First is a short video with Festival Director Teresa Scott in the back of the Bear Tooth theater.  I caught here after the film El Estudiante, eating a taco as part of the Mexican Consul's Reception.  Then on Saturday night, just before the film Alaskaland, I talked to Ron Holmstrom. He is the Screen Actors Guild representative in Alaska and was scheduled to give a workshop on acting in the movies and also to talk about using SAG actors and the fact that for short films and low budget films normal SAG salary rates are waivable. His workshop wasn't in the Festival program and I didn't hear about it until after it was over. But I got to hear a little bit before the film began.

Caller ID Quits - Simple Solution

It took a day or two for me to realize the caller id stopped working on our phones at home.  We've gotten used to this handy way of weeding out solicitations and other unwanted calls. 

It took another couple of days before I called ACS.  They'd get someone on it.  That's all they said.  This morning - several days later - the doorbell rings.  It's ACS. 

"What's the easiest way to get around the back to check your connection to the house?"  (We got a foot of snow in the last two days and I don't clear a pathway to the back.)  He comes back to the front a little later saying it was working there.  Sometimes the filters for internet block the caller id, but that wasn't the case.  And since we got caller id when we got the internet package years ago, it didn't seem a likely solution.

He came inside to check the phones.  Neither got a caller id when he called.  He pulled the moden line out of the other phone jack.  It didn't change things.  He pulled off the inside filters.  No id on our phone. 

"Why not test your phone like you did outside?" 
"Hmm, I don't have the right jack for that.  Be right back."

When he gets back in and checks it, he gets caller id on his phone. 

"So," I ask, "You're saying its our phone?"

"I'm not saying anything.  Never had something quite like this before.  It's always been the filters."

Finally he suggests rebooting the phone.  Just unplug it, wait 20 seconds, and then plug it in again.

It works. 

He seems pleased.  (I like technicians who like to solve problems.)  I suggest he tell the folks who take calls like mine to suggest this to people before they send out a technician.

One more little maintenance battle won.  For the moment.  Still working on the furnace problem, but that's another post. 

Ten Inches And Other Ramblings

We got some real snow overnight. 

Last year it was snowing every few days and I got regular exercise just clearing the driveway.  It was a great training program as the pile of snow I had to throw the snow on got higher and higher.

This year we've only had a few snowfalls that barely covered the ground.  I was getting worried when the temperatures got down to zero and we had almost no snow cover to protect the plants underground.

In fact we had about three weeks of nothing but sunny days.

But that's ended for now.

Here's the tape measure in the middle of the driveway.


Shoveling snow is one of those times during the winter that you get to see your neighbors outside and chat about things.  We noted how the snow plow folks last year were moving the snow onto the sidewalks and into piles that blocked parking spaces.  And how we have replacement mail carrier who is regularly not delivering mail, writing messages on envelopes that the mailbox was blocked.  I've already called the post office about this.  We haven't changed anything in 35 years.  There was one brief period when they told us to move cars.  But we found out they were not allowed to drive over the sidewalks to deliver mail (which they do if there is space) and they stopped complaining.  In the neighborhoods nearby, people have mailboxes on their doorsteps.  And it's not like we don't want to cooperate, but there really isn't any place to park.  We have some duplexes on the street with driveway leaving almost no parking spaces - and they have lots and lots of cars and trucks they park on the street.  Even if I were to put my car in the driveway (blocking my wife's way in and out of the garage) someone else would park in my space anyway. 

So the snow is good.  It gives us time to compare notes on what's happening. 


This cleared space is the width of the shovel.  I tried saying 'hi' to you all in the snow, but it didn't quite work out.

And here's our Mt. Ash tree that tends not to drop its leaves until spring even some years.  The Bohemian wax wings have already been by once. 

Magnetic Finger and Flexible Magnetic Flashlight

Shortly after I dropped my wife off at the airport ten days ago, when I next had to unlock the door to her car, the key pushed the lock into the door.  Luckily there's a passenger side door with another keyhole.








When I got home I first tried my buddy google to see how hard it would be for me to fix it.  Step one is remove the inside panel of the door.  The instructions to do that were formidable.  Don't break the plastic clips.  Disconnect the plug for the power windows.  I called the mechanic my wife uses and took it in the next day.  But after reading about taking off the door panel, I really wanted to watch how he did it and they let me.

I'm glad he did it and not me.  He's got lots of specialized tools and even he had to figure out what exactly to do on that model.  There's a lot of stuff behind the door panel.

He did find the screw that holds the lock in place down inside the door panel, but putting it back in was hard.  I suggested he needed a magnetic finger.  He looked at me and said, "I have one." Off he went and shortly came back with the finger glove with a little magnet on the tip.  It was still to hard to maneuver, and then he realized there was a little hole right where the screw belonged but he couldn't get to it because the window was down.  Once it was up it was easy.  

He also had this very cool flashlight that magnetically attached to the car and could be twisted and turned in all directions.

$100 later, the lock was firmly where it belonged. 


I love it when I discover specialized tools likes these.  Somebody came up with an idea for a way to solve a problem - like the magnetic finger - and then went ahead and made one.  And a magnetic flashlight you just put on any metal that bends to shine the light where you need it. 

AIFF 2012: What Makes A Good Documentary? Cutting Loose and Ping Pong

Jim Parker - AIFF Docs

[This is a followup of the post on my choices for best films.]

Documentaries were the strongest program in the festival this year and as I mentioned in one post,  Saturday they were scheduled so that one could actually see six of the seven in competition.    That shows someone paying attention to details.  That someone most certainly is Documentary Programmer Jim Parker and his programming partner Cindy Franklin. 




I've been thinking a lot about what makes a good documentary this week.  A lot of this was spurred by watching Roadmap to Apartheid. I thought it did a lot of things extremely well, but it also seemed overly one-sided - unnecessarily so.  I'll explain my reactions in detail in a later post.  But it raised for me the question of how fair does a documentary have to be?  After all, shouldn't documentaries 'document'?

So, before explaining my choices for best documentary, I'd like to come up with some criteria.

1. Documentation
   This includes getting all the most pertinent information - both factual and emotional data - that helps the viewer understand the situation covered by the film.  This is probably hardest for reviewers to assess when they aren't knowledgeable about the subject of the film.
2. Truth
   In feature movies the film maker can create her own world.  In documentaries one is expected to present one's representation of the truth as accurately as possible.  This includes the viewpoints of the various sides in any situation.  And if one chooses to present just one perspective of the situation, then this should be stated clearly. 
3. Story Telling
   This is about how good the movie itself is, including such factors as:
1. Story is told as efficiently and interestingly as possible - which means the film moves along without scenes that, interesting or beautiful as they might be, aren't necessary to telling the story.
2. Pace, audio, visual quality are all as good as they can be to keep the viewer engaged.
4. Significance How important is the topic in the greater scheme of things?  While this shouldn't detract a film maker from engaging in something that interests him, if two films are otherwise equal, I would pick the one with greater significance. 
5. The Whole Package
   How it all works together.

Because there were so many good documentaries, I'm going to do several posts on them.  This one focuses on Cutting Loose and  Ping Pong.

Using these criteria, I rated Cutting Loose the best documentary.  Actually, that's not true at all.  My gut reaction was that Cutting Loose was the best and then I started thinking about why.  So this film and Roadmap to Apartheid spurred me to write up my criteria.  My choice is not one I'd fight to defend.  There were a lot of good films and I could argue persuasively for all of them, including Roadmap.   So why Cutting Loose?

Cutting Loose worked because it was the best Whole Package.  Everything worked.  The dilemma for any documentary maker is the conflict between documenting - archiving all the important details for history - and making a good movie.  It's a dilemma I know well as a blogger and my readers would probably agree that I err on the side of documentation, especially when I'm dealing with important public policy issues.

Cutting Loose is about a contest for convicts who work as prison barbers and hairdressers in Scotland.  In another nice touch by the documentary programmers, it was paired with Ping Pong, a film about a very different contest  - the world championships for ping pong players over 80 years old.  There was a similar structure in both films - focus on a few of the  individual competitors before the event, and then showcase the event. 

Ping Pong did more documentation.  We know much more about each contestant.  Its subject matter was both light and important.  While ping pong might not be that important among the world's issues (though it played a big role in relations between China and the U.S.)  the topic of aging is.  We saw people between 81 and 100, who, despite their age and its accompanying physical ailments, were able to perform highly skilled physical tasks.  I would say it was a reminder of the importance of having a goal and hope to make life worth living.

That same message comes through in Cutting Loose, which found the golden mean between documentation and story telling.  The critical message I got from the film was how respecting and trusting prisoners - getting to use the scissors in prison -  gave them a sense of both respect, responsibility, and pride, which was important if they weren't going to return to prison after their release.  My daughter has taught me the importance of hair to one's self image and the movie echoes this with the challenge to the barbers to not mess up the hair of inmates they live with.

This film used just enough documentation to give us an awareness of a world most of us don't know.   And since crime is a major issue in the world and since prisoners seem among the least deserving of sympathy, it's good to be able to see them as human beings who can overcome past mistakes.  And as with the octogenarians in Ping Pong the barbers and hairdressers in Cutting Loose gained a reason to live through what they did.

So, for the sake of getting the message across, we got enough documentation.  Then the film makers took what they had and made a well paced movie with good visuals and music that told the story in 29 minutes.  AND, they probably had the best title in the festival with two words that captured the idea of barbering and getting out of prison.

I'd add that as Francis Duffy walks along the shoreline in his blue and white striped shirt reflecting, I was puzzled by what language he was speaking.  But as he went on, I began to hear some of the words as the ones in the subtitles.  You can get a sense of this and of the whole film in SXSW YouTube trailer below.





My hat's off to the film makers Adrian McDowall and Finlay Pretsell.  I want to let you know that though the festival didn't see fit to award your film, I did.


Sorry that this came out much more academic than I intended.  As I said, I tend to err on the side of documentation over entertainment.