Sundance Shorts - Getting Ready for the Anchorage International Film Festival [UPDATED - AIFF Selections Are Posted]

[UPDATE Oct 15, 2013  8:30 am:  Go here to see this year's selections for the Anchorage International Film Festival.]

It seemed like a good idea to see the Sundance Shorts program at the Bear Tooth tonight as a prep for the Anchorage International Film Festival coming up in December.   Tomorrow the selections for this year are scheduled to be announced.

And tonight's program was even introduced by Tony Shepard (the man in the middle above) the AIFF founder and Rich Curtner*, one of the Shorts Programmer for the AIFF.

The films were an impressive group of shorts - but it's quite possible to have some that fit in that category at the Anchorage International Film Festival.  What impressed me particularly was the variety of styles.  Perhaps the most riveting was 'Whiplash' - that followed a young man into a music class where the teacher turns out to be a tyrannical bully. 

Screenshot from Whiplash Interview Sundance

In 'Skinnengrove', we mainly see the black and white pictures the photographer took in the waterfront village while he discusses how he took them and stories they hold.  Occasionally, we see the closeups of the photographer's face lit by a globe as he projects the photos.  An original and powerful film.  You can see the whole film here.

Old furniture marches down the road in stop motion animation in 'Irish Folk Furniture'.  The old dilapidated pieces' stories are told and they get revitalized.  Charming story with subtitles so we can understand the English.  You can see an Irish television news program announcing that the film won the best short animation.

K.I.T. is a very well made and probably the most comfortably entertaining, but fairly traditional film.  The others all brought something a little different from what we're use to seeing in film.

Here's the list of films we saw from the Sundance website:

THE DATE
Short Film Jury Award: International Fiction
Tino’s manhood is put to the test in front of two women when he has to host a date for Diablo, the family’s stud cat.
(Jenni Toivoniemi, Finland, 8 min)
WHIPLASH
Short Film Jury Award: US Fiction
An aspiring drummer enters an elite conservatory's top jazz orchestra.
(Damien Chazelle, USA, 17 min)
SKINNINGROVE
Short Film Jury Award: Non-Fiction
Photographer Chris Killip shares unpublished images chronicling time spent among the fiercely independent residents of a remote English fishing village.
(Michael Almereyda, USA, 15 min)
UNTIL THE QUIET COMES
Short Film Special Jury Award
Shot in the Nickerson Gardens housing projects in Watts, Los Angeles, this film deals with themes of violence, camaraderie and spirituality through the lens of magical realism.
(Kahlil Joseph, USA, 4 min)
IRISH FOLK FURNITURE
Short Film Jury Award: Animation
In Ireland, old hand-painted furniture is often associated with hard times, with

Irish Folk Furniture Screen shot from You Tube

poverty, and with a time many would rather forget. In this animated documentary, 16 pieces of traditional folk furniture are repaired and returned home.
(Tony Donoghue, Ireland, 8 min)
THE EVENT
Love and a severed foot at the end of the world.
(Julia Pott, USA/United Kingdom, 4 min)
JONAH
When two young men photograph a gigantic fish leaping from the sea, their small town becomes a tourist attraction in this story about the old and the new.
(Kibwe Tavares, Tanzania/United Kingdom, 20 min)
K.I.T.
A guilt-ridden, but well-intentioned, yuppie goes to great lengths to prove she is a decent person.
(Michelle Morgan, USA, 15 min)
Full program = 93 minutes

And here's where they are touring after Anchorage:

October 25-31 Winston-Salem, NC a/perture cinema          www.aperturecinema.com	October 27 Portland, ME Space Gallery         www.space538.org
October 28-30 Albuquerque, NM Guild Cinema         www.guildcinema.com	November 1  Eugene, OR Bijou Art Cinemas         www.bijou-cinemas.com
November 1 - 3 Waterville, ME Railroad Square Cinema www.railroadsquarecinema.com	December 6-12 Denver, CO Denver Film Society www.denverfilm.org

*I'm pretty sure it was Curtner through deduction and google searching.

"so oily I was thinking his nickname should be Valdez."

Twitter offers me to tidbits I might not otherwise see.  And mostly I wouldn't have missed much.  But every now and then there is something juicy that has an Alaskan angle.    I couldn't pass up this quote from a comment on a Washington Post article about Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler.  Here's the whole comment:

Well-said. I met him when he was an instructor at my law school, so oily I was thinking his nickname should be Valdez. He is is the liberal version of Rubio, another sociopath I have had the misfortune of meeting. Both are solely about themselves. Stay far away from both.

This is from a Washington Post article - Maryland Politics section - based on memos the State Police had about Gansler.  Here's the beginning of the article:

Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler regularly ordered state troopers assigned to drive him to turn on the lights and sirens on the way to routine appointments, directing them to speed, run red lights and bypass traffic jams by using the shoulder, according to written accounts by the Maryland State Police.
When troopers refused to activate the emergency equipment, Gansler, now a Democratic candidate for governor, often flipped the switches himself, according to the police accounts. And on occasion, he became so impatient that he insisted on driving, directing the trooper to the passenger’s seat. Gansler once ran four red lights with sirens blaring, a trooper wrote. Another account said he “brags” about driving the vehicle unaccompanied on weekends with the sirens on.

“This extremely irresponsible behavior is non-stop and occurs on a daily basis,” Lt. Charles Ardolini, commander of the state police executive protection section, wrote in a December 2011 memo that said the problem had existed for five years. “Attorney General Gansler has consistently acted in a way that disregards public safety, our Troopers safety and even the law.”

The links in the text go to the memos.


I don't know the internal politics of Maryland.  Gansler is a Democrat.  He sounds like the kind of politician who likes being important and having power that ordinary people don't have.  And abuses it.  We have those here too.   But, as I say, I don't know Lt. Charles Ardolini and his motives.  But from the tone of things, he seems a lot more solid than Gansler. 


Azerbaijan Election Results

And while we're at it, another Washington Post story reported on the elections in Azerbaijan. 

The vote counts – spoiler alert: Aliyev was shown as winning by a landslide – were pushed out on an official smartphone app run by the Central Election Commission. It showed Aliyev as "winning" with 72.76 percent of the vote. That's on track with his official vote counts in previous elections: he won ("won"?) 76.84 percent of the vote in 2003 and 87 percent in 2008.

But the newsworthy part of this report is that these election results were published the day BEFORE the election was held.  And we in the west who pride ourselves on how much more efficient and effective we are than other nations, we can take at least a few hours and sometimes weeks before we know the results.   


OK, this is not the kind of posts I want to be doing.  I put in the first one mainly because it had an Alaskan reference.  But normally I'd want to use stories like this to illustrate a larger point.  For a newspaper that wants to pull in the latest stories, using Twitter feeds can be helpful.  But it isn't real reporting - it's just second hand news.  The recent twitter based post I did was on copyrights, but that was a post with much value added on my part.  That's how I hope to use Twitter in the future.  Not like this post.

I don't plan on making a habit of this.  I don't want my readers to start calling me Valdez.

(Do you think he pronounced it Spanish way "ValDEZ" or the true Alaskan way "ValDEEZ"?)

Who Owns Your Tattoo?

Anthony's arm

This isn't a trick question.  This was the gist of an LA Times article last week.   I was already sensitized to this issue by a tweet from Mark Meyer over the copyright of the Korean War Vets Memorial.

The comments in the article he linked to, made it clear that people have very strong opinions about things they know nothing about.  Well, they are very ready to spout off without knowing any of the details involved.

There are legitimate arguments on both sides of this, and the tattoo example pushes this into serious conflicting rights, but when people start off just saying, "This is stupid," it's not a good sign.  They have a gut reaction - which probably has some legitimacy - but that's just a feeling and they haven't thought it through enough to know if their feeling is appropriate let alone to explain that feeling intelligently to others.  Often, it appears, the feeling was based on ignorance of the facts.

My photo,* not the one in question, which is much better

Below is Mark Meyer's original tweet about the rights to the image on a US postage stamp of the Korean War Vets Memorial.

[*sorry, I had the wrong link to the photo before.]

Such hostility toward copyright—everything that's wrong with the photo business is in the comments here: http://t.co/THulbUV5kC
— Mark Meyer (@markmeyerphoto) October 2, 2013

Mark is a very good professional photographer who lives in Anchorage.  As I read through the hostile comments he mentions,  it became clear to me that there are two key issues here regarding ownership:

1.  Who owns the physical object (a sculpture, a painting, a book, a cd, etc.)?
2.  Who owns the copyright to that object?

This has been an issue for artists.  Someone buys a painting for $1000.  Ten years later, the buyer sells it for $40,000. Should the artist get a cut in the resale value?

There's little debate that the buyer owns the object, but does he then get all the appreciated value of the object as the artist becomes known?  I'm trying to figure out the underlying world views that separate those who think the artist ahouls and those who think the buyer.

The capitalist would say there was a fair trade, and now the object and its potential value goes to the buyer.   After all, the artist had the choice of selling for that price or not.   But did she?  Perhaps her rent was due when the money was offered.  And even though the object sells for $1000, she's only getting, after deducting materials expenses, $5 or $10 per hour.  Of course, it's even much less if we count the time and money spent on her art school degree.

But it's not so easy.  Capitalists also believe in copyrights and patents.  Those rights are even enshrined in the US Constitution.    That's why Samsung and Apple have been in court recently and why (legal) drug prices are so high.  Drug companies argue that all the work that went into developing the drug needs to be recouped or there will be no incentive to develop new drugs.  Though consumers might question how much of a profit and for how long should the drug makers get, especially when they own the patent on the only drug that cures a particular disease, thus leaving some people with the choice of paying (if they can) or suffering or even dying.

Doesn't the artist have the same claim to recoup the investment?  Sometimes, according to the California Arts Council:

Civil Code section 986 (California Resale Royalty Act) entitles artists to a royalty payment upon the resale of their works of art under certain circumstances. 

Those who would put fairness as their highest value would probably argue that the buyer really owes the artist a portion of the appreciated value. The law may give the buyer the right, but human decency requires the buyer to give a share to the buyer. After all, the buyer merely made a purchase while the artist worked hard and long to create the piece.  But that too is an assumption.  What about an artist who pays his lunch bill by drawing a quick caricature on a napkin?  Or an athlete who autographs a ball?  One might argue it's different if it's for free, for a fee, or in payment of something else.  And one could argue that an art dealer, who spends a lot of time looking at art and buys a lot of paintings from a lot of aspiring artists, is making an investment to help the struggling artist, but also taking a risk.  Most of those purchases aren't going to gain value and the winners help pay for the losers.  And that putting the piece in his home or gallery will cause others to notice and buy art from that particular artist. 

Open source advocates offer an alternative to the capitalist emphasis on individual rights and ownership.  While capitalists advocate that competition and personal greed stimulate innovation and the economy, open source advocates argue that sharing and community spur innovation and spread the fruits of innovation better.  They see copyrights and patents and proprietary software as obstacles to human advancement.   This might explain the commenters who felt that the US government use of the photo of the Korean War Vets Memorial (the Post Office had the permission of the photographer) was a use that benefited the general public.  I'm not sure how this argument applies to the tattoo dispute. 

There's an issue here that you might notice underlying all this:  power.  In theoretical capitalism, a fair market is one in which both parties have the power to walk away from a deal they don't think is fair.  A cancer victim doesn't have much bargaining room with a drug company if the company owns a patent on the only drug likely to save his life.  (Though there have been organizations that have bargained for classes of poor patients to get discounts on such drugs.)

And power is an issue when we get to copyrights and patents.  In the case of the artist who created the Korean War Vet Memorial sculptures, according to the comments in the article Mark cited, the US government (maybe the US Park Service, but I'm not sure; it was the Post Office that got sued)  did not include the copyright when they signed the contract with the artist.

And that's the rub for many of the commenters.  They couldn't, it seemed, mentally separate the object from the copyright for the object.  Essentially, this argument says "You own the object for your personal use and enjoyment, but if you then market it to make a profit, I get a share in that profit." Arguments (in the comments) that the govrnment could have bought the copyright when they bought the object seemed to fall on deaf ears. So did arguments that they could have negotiated with the artist before commissioning the stamp. Mention of musicians getting paid every time their music is played didn't sway them either.  The basic response was, if you buy it, you should be able to use it how you want.  Especially the US government, which, apparently, made millions off the image in sales to stamp collectors.

Again, it gets down to power.  How many artists have the power to insist on an extra charge for the copyright and then fight for their copyright, even when they have it?  Only those who have enough knowledge and money to hire an attorney or can get one to take their case on contingency.

Tattoos  

Laotian Dragon Tattoo  Shot With Permission

But what happens when the art is imprinted on your body?  What rights does the tattoo artist have over money you earn because of the tattoo?  What rights do you have over photographers or others who make money off your tattoo?  Legally, it would seem that the same copyright principles prevail, with the warning to make sure they come with the tattoo.  This came up, after I read Mark's tweet, in an LA Times artcle:  

Late last year, for example, Stephen Allen, a tattoo artist, sued video game maker Electronic Arts and former Miami Dolphins running back Ricky Williams over a tattoo Allen put on Williams' bicep. The tattoo appeared on the cover of EA's "NFL Street" video game. Allen claimed that the reproduction and display of the tattoo violated his copyright.
That case was dismissed in April at the request of the plaintiff, but because so many NFL players have tattoos, it got the attention of the NFL Players Assn. NFLPA officials began advising players to get copyright waivers from their tattoo artists. George Atallah, an NFLPA official, told Bloomberg Businessweek that the union recently cautioned its players: We know you love your tattoo artists, but regardless of whether you trust them, regardless of whether there are legal merits to the lawsuits that we've seen, just protect yourself.
 

There are a lot of conflicting values and rights that come to play in this.  The contentiousness is only exacerbated by the commodification of everything.   The sculptor wouldn't be suing the Postal Service if they weren't making millions off his art work.  And the tattoo artist wouldn't have sued if his tattoo hadn't been used so prominently to market the video game.  I doubt I have much to fear about my own use of my own photos in this post - of the tattoos and of the Korean War Vets Memorial - because I'm not commodifying the originals. 

I continue to be amazed at how many people feel the need to voice their opinions so strongly about topics they know so little about. For those who want to be informed when they voice their opinion on copyrights, Mark posted another tweet with a link to an article called, "Why Copyright Infringement is Theft."

Politicians sometimes complain about being targeted by interest groups based on a vote on a particular bill.  They might argue that though it was called the Help Poor Widows bill, there were provisions in the bill that did exactly the opposite.  Like most situations that become controversial, the simplistic first reaction often doesn't take into account the details.  At times, we may have sympathy for the holder of the copyright.  At other times we may not.  It depends on the details of the situation. Unfortunately, in these days of tweets, most people don't get into those details. 

UPDATE: Campbell Creek Bike Trail Under Seward Highway Almost Done

I checked on the Campbell Creek bike trail under the Seward Highway project last night (Thursday, Oct. 10).  My last post on this was Sept. 10.   On Sept. 6 I posted pictures of the unpaved trail and what it looked like in the past when you had to carry your bike under the low bridges. 

It's now paved and almost done.  This morning I called the project engineer Chong Kim who said he's hoping it will be done next week.  In this first photo - from the west side - you can see the fence like structure.  It's designed to deflect snow coming from a snow plow on the road above and keeping it off the trail and off people walking or riding on the trail.  Kim said five more are supposed to go up and they are the last major parts that need to be done. 

This shot is from the east looking west.  There are four new bridges - the east access road, which you see here; the north bound Seward Highway;  south bound Seward Highway; and the west access road. 










The reason you can't really use this part of the path yet is this fence on the bridge on the west side. Once the other

Looking at this fence, turn 180˚ and you see the picture below.

This is looking at the path and bridge from the west. 

Above I'm looking east from under one of the bridges.

Looking up I saw what I thought were lights, but they were strange looking and I couldn't see them quite as clearly as I can now looking at the photo. 

I asked Kim about them.  They are LED lights which use much less energy than regular lights would.  But they're pretty expensive and he expressed concern about vandalism or theft.  I asked if I should post about this.  He said yes and to let cyclists know that if they see anyone tampering with the lights to call the police (and maybe take a picture as well.)  I guess he figured not too many LED thieves read this blog, but cyclists might. 
 


Taking the trail further east - toward Lake Otis - I took this shot of the leaf carpeted trail.

Correcting A Faulkner Gap - The Sound And The Fury Appendix

Despite being an undergraduate English major, I've never read a William Faulkner book.  Looking around at my mom's house Tuesday I found The Sound and the Fury and thought it time I rectify this gap.  A five hour plane trip should give me time to get into the book. As it turned out, the person next to me on the plane had flown that day from Mississippi, the setting of The Sound And The Fury.

As I started reading, I could see why I haven't read Faulkner.  This book is not for the faint of heart.  This is not an easy walk, but a serious climb.  So much so that I wonder if I would have persevered (well, I still have a long way to go) if I didn't know this was considered a great book.  This passage - one single sentence - should give you a sense.

"One day in 1943, after a week of a distraction bordering on disintegration almost, during which those entering the library would find her always in the act of hurriedly closing her desk drawer and turning the key in it (so that the matrons, wives of the bankers and doctors and lawyers, some of whom had also been in that old highschool class, who came and went in the afternoons with the copies of the Forever Ambers and the volumes of Thorne Smith carefully wrapped from view in sheets of Memphis and Jackson newspapers, believed she was on the verge of illness or perhaps even loss of mind) she closed and locked the library in the middle of the afternoon and with her handbag clasped tightly under her arm and two feverish spots of determination in her ordinarily colorless cheeks, she entered the farmers' supply store where Jason IV had started as a clerk and where he now owned his own business as a buyer of and dealer in cotton, striding on through that gloomy cavern which only men ever entered - a cavern cluttered and walled and stalagmitehung with plows and discs and loops of racechain and singletrees and mulecollars and sidemeat and cheap shoes and horselinament and flour and molasses, gloomy because the goods it contained were not shown but hidden rather since those who supplied Mississippi farmers or at least Negro Mississippi farmers for a share of the crop did not wish, until that crop was made and its value approximately computable, to show them what they could learn to want but only to supply them on specific demand with what they could not help but need - and strode on back to Jason's particular domain in the rear:  a railed enclosure cluttered with shelves and pigeonholes bearing spiked dust-and-lintgathering gin receipts and ledgers and cottonsamples and rank with the blended smell of cheese and kerosene and harnessoil and the tremendous iron stove against which chewed tobacco had been spat for almost a hundred years, and up to the long high sloping counter behind which Jason stood and, not looking again at the overalled men who had quietly stopped talking and even chewing when she entered, with a kind of fainting desperation she opened on the counter and stood trembling and breathing rapidly while Jason looked down at it - a picture, a photograph in color clipped obviously from a slick magazine - a picture filled with luxury and money and sunlight  - a Cannebiére backdrop of mountains and palms and cypresses and the sea, an open powerful expensive chromiumtrimmed sports car, the woman's face hatless between a rich scarf and a seal coat, ageless and beautiful, cold serene and damned;  beside her a handsome lean man of middleage in the ribbons and tabs of a German staffgeneral - and the mousesized mousecolored spinster trembling and aghast at her own temerity, staring across it at the childless bachelor in whom ended that long line of men who had had something in them of decency and pride even after they had begun to fail at the integrity and the pride had become mostly vanity and selfpity:  from the expatriate who had to flee his native land with little else except his life yet who still refused to accept defeat, through the man who gambled his life and his good name twice and lost twice and declined to accept that either, and the one who with only a clever small quarterhorse for tool avenged his dispossessed father and grandfather and gained a principality, and the brilliant and gallant governor and the general who though he failed at leading in battle brave and gallant men at least risked his own life too in the failing, to the cultured dipsomaniac who sold the last of his patrimony not to buy drink but to give one of his descendants at least the best chance in life he could think of."  (pp. 11-13)

Reading it slowly enough to type it made this all make much more sense than it did the first time.  This is in a section of the book called "Appendix" which is in the front of the book and gives a history for some of the key characters.  Reading it out loud  as I tried to catch typos also helped to give it more meaning, made it make more sense as you play with where to pause so it sounds right to a listener. 

Violating all the rules that experts give to writing students, Faulkner offers a writer's version of a long single-shot scene in a film.  But the rules are for mere mortals, true writers know when they can play fast and loose with the rules and get away with it. 

It also reminds me of the writing in James Joyce's Ulysses.  

After writing that I felt compelled to check whether I was being simplistic and  seeing a similarity because there were looooong sentences in both, but apparently this connection has long been observed.   But the link says the copyright is 1929 - seven years after Ulysses was published as a book, yet the passage above refers to 1943.  What gives? 

It turns out the Appendix, according to my 1956 Vintage Books copy of The Sound And The Fury,  "was written for the Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley. . ."  For those interested, there's a paper that discusses the writing of the Appendix.

The paper includes this explanation of the purpose of the Appendix:

Written by Faulkner, this note would tell "why and when . . . and how a 17 year old girl [Miss Quentin] robbed a bureau drawer of hoarded money and climbed down a drain pipe and ran off with a carnival pitchman" (SL 202). 

In the passage above, the city librarian takes a photo she has cut out of a magazine that has a picture of the now much older, but apparently still beautiful,  17 year old and shows it to the girl's uncle whose hoarded money she stole.  

Spectacular Views Flying Into Anchorage

Double Click to See the Real Picture

It's been sunny in LA for the almost two weeks I'd been there.  Warm to hot - a few days were in the 90s, even high 80s near the beach.  This morning it was overcast and a little cooler.  But It was a surprise when I got into my seat and looked out the window and saw it was raining.

Here's the overcast LA as we took off over the beaches.  That's Marina del Rey and then Venice Beach above it.  You can compare this to the sun over Venice Beach yesterday.  (Last picture in that post.)







And the clouds filled in most of the trip.

Here it's particularly heavy.













And here there's a break in the clouds.









But as we moved into Alaskan airspace, the clouds began disappear and it was amazing.  To the point where I put my little pocket camera away and pulled out my big new one for some real pictures.  (All of the ones below are significantly and dramatically better if you double click them.  On here it's like without the 3-D glasses.)

That's a pretty good sized glacier coming out from the right across the front.   You really need to double click these to see the real picture that Blogspot doesn't do justice to.  If you're only going to do one, do the top one.  Trust me!

 

I'm pretty sure this is Cordova.

Now we're into Prince William Sound.

We came in a bit north of Anchorage - over Eklutna Lake I believe - and then we did some flight seeing over Mat-su before heading into the Anchorage airport.

 

The mudflats on the Mat-su side of the Inlet with the silhouette of Fire Island.  

This was a non-stop flight out of LA.  Five hours and 45 minutes. 

LA - Parting Shots - Swamp to Golf, Eggplants, Car Door Art; and the Beach

Headed back to Anchorage today (Wednesday).  Got some things done around the house - most significantly got the electric panel for the house updated;  went through her mail;  paid bills; and filed what needed to be kept.  And we spent some good time together.  I'm getting more patient and trying to imagine what the world is like from her perspective.  I ask her and she tries to tell me.  Sometimes she completely there and on top of things, other times she drifts off. 

Here are a few pictures I didn't get to post yet of LA.

 

Penmar Golf course on my bike route to the beach.  As a kid I played in the swampy, hilly wasteland that was here before the public golf course was put in.

[UPDATE Oct. 25, 2014:  The editor of GolfCalifornia asked if they could use this picture on a piece about Penmar (and The Lakes of El Segundo) golf courses.  You can learn a lot more about the golf course itself there.]







Some of the eggplants available at the Saturday Market at Virginia Park in Santa Monica.

The good thing about cell phones is that when you have a long conversation, you don't have to just sit there.  You can go for a walk.  So I was in the middle of a heavy conversation as I approached this house.  My head was mostly in the phone, but my eyes were trying to figure out how this car was parked here in front of this house.  It was only when I got close that I realized this was not simply a car door, it was a "piece of art."

I biked down to the beach one last time this afternoon.  (My heel's been giving me problems so I'm biking instead of running.)  I went north instead of my usual south until I got to the Santa Monica pier.

And my parting shot of Venice Beach at Rose. 

Battling My Way Through The Forest of Redistricting Motions Before The Court

The Redistricting Board website has a page called Pleadings which lists the motions filed with the Superior Court since mid-August.   I counted 51 separate documents since September 13, 2013.  I finally decided I had to copy and paste the list and then go through the documents and note what they are about.  Some are just procedural and won't matter in the big picture, such as the documents arguing for or against the Alaska Democratic Party being allowed to file some motions late.  (The judge accepted them so the motions to accept or not accept them late really don't seem like they could have much future impact on the case itself.)

Basically, what I understand them to be doing is asking the judge to make a 'summary judgment' on this or that.  Wikipedia explains 'summary judgment' this way:

"In law, a summary judgment (also judgment as a matter of law) is a judgment entered by a court for one party and against another party summarily, i.e., without a full trial. Such a judgment may be issued on the merits of an entire case, or on discrete issues in that case. Today, summary judgment is governed by Federal Rule 56 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, derived primarily from the three seminal cases concerning summary judgment out of the 1980s. .  .

"A party moving (applying) for summary judgment is attempting to avoid the time and expense of a trial when the outcome is obvious. A party may also move for summary judgement in order to eliminate the risk of losing at trial, and possibly avoid having to go through discovery (i.e., by moving at the outset of discovery), by demonstrating to the judge, via sworn statements and documentary evidence, that there are no material factual issues remaining to be tried. If there's nothing for the factfinder to decide, then the moving party asks rhetorically, why have a trial? The moving party will also attempt to persuade the court that the undisputed material facts require judgment to be entered in its favor. In many jurisdictions, a party moving for summary judgment takes the risk that, although the judge may agree there are no material issues of fact remaining for trial, the judge may also find that it is the non-moving party that is entitled to judgment as a matter of law."

As I'm going through these, I think that I've already posted the main arguments being made by the Riley Plaintiffs and the Alaska Democratic Party (ADP).  I think.  Actually, I  there are some more ADP motions I didn't cover yet.  I'm still checking.  What I know I haven't adequately done is go over the Redistricting Board's responses and then the Riley and ADP responses to the Board's responses.  Confused yet?  I am.  


So, what seems to be happening is that the Riley Plaintiffs and the ADP are saying to the court,

"Look there are all these problems with how the Board did the plan.  We want you to rule (summary judgment) that these districts aren't compact, economic/socially integrated, etc." 

 And then the Board files a motion saying,

"They're wrong.  We did this carefully and there was no other way to do it.  We want you to rule (make a summary judgment) for us and against them."

Of course, there's more detail than that and I'll try to pull it out soon. 

The only decisions that I see that the judge has made so far (since September) have been on accepting the late filing by the Alaska Democratic Party, setting dates for a hearing if that's necessary, and accepting the Board's request to postpone the trial.  No summary judgments.  But he has talked about an 'omnibus

Waffling With Mom

Waffles were on the menu on Sunday mornings since forever.  After I had moved out in college, whenever I was home on Sunday morning, we always had waffles.  Even last year my mom made waffles for us on Sunday when we visited.

But since March, my mom's legs finally went on strike - her muscles aren't following her instructions and they hurt.  Her mind's basically sound, but it does wander off now and then.  One thing that we can do together is cook up old favorite family recipes.

So I asked Mom if she wanted to make waffles Sunday morning. 

In the summer we made my mom's old Hungarian Goulash and she supervised the whole thing, especially how to mix the ingredients for the dumplings.  We had a lot of fun and a great meal at the end.

The caregiver wasn't too sure about the waffle idea, but I was determined.

Steve:  Where's the waffle iron?
Mom:  In the lower cabinet on the left, wrapped in a white and red towel.


Sure enough there it was.  This waffle iron has to be 40 years old at least.  I checked and found this story at Chow hound about someone with the same waffle iron.  I got out the flour.  There was baking powder, milk.  We used olive oil instead of butter.

Steve:  Where's a mixing bowl?
Mom:  Turn 180˚.

And there behind me on a shelf was the old white mixing bowl with the beaters from the electric mixer.  The mixer was right next to it.  She sat at the table in her wheel chair and guided me as I poured the ingredients into the bowl.  I had to put the baking powder in a little milk and water in the measuring cup and let it do its reaction on the side before adding it to the batter. 

Soon I had a good thick, but not too thick, batter.  I'd already been told to plug in the waffle iron so it would be hot.  But we couldn't find the brush to put the oil on the griddle inside the waffle iron.  I poured a little in with a spoon then opened and closed the waffle iron several times to get it on the top and bottom.

Then I poured in the batter and closed the waffle iron.  The light was on outside.  When it went off, the waffles should be ready.  While the first one was cooking, I remembered we needed chocolate chips.

Caregiver:  We don't have any.
Mom:  Look in the second drawer on the left.  Is there a cookie tin in there?
Steve:  Yes.
Mom:  Look inside the tin.

And there was an unopened bag of chocolate chips.  There's a reason my mom doesn't want anyone organizing her kitchen (or any other part of the house) for her.

I had tried to open the waffle iron to check.  The batter had risen and pushed it open a little, but it was sticking to the griddle.  Would the waffles come loose easily or tear open because they were stuck to the griddle?

The light went out and I tried to open the waffle iron.  It seemed to be stuck, but then the waffle popped loose from the bottom and I was able to pull it off the top intact. It was perfect.

The picture is the second waffle - the one with the chocolate chips.  Fat, crispy, and fluffy inside.

Then we cut some bananas on top and poured some honey and some Himbeersaft onto the waffles.

We both ate way too much waffle.  But it was a delightful morning.  I tried to explain the waffle tradition to my mom's caregiver so she could understand this was more than just a messy breakfast experiment.  It was a tapping into important parts of my mom (and my) brain.  A place where she's still fully mobile and her mind has everything under control.  At one point when we couldn't find the brush to oil the griddle with, my mom forgot she couldn't walk and said, "Let me get it" and tried to stand up. 

Two Common Characteristics Of The Radical Christian and Muslim Fundamentalists

1. Interpretation of their holy books to justify anything they choose to believe.
2. Desire to shut down the US government and cripple our nation

Where is NSA when we need them?