Five Hours - Two Worlds

Five hours from Anchorage, non-stop, to LA.  Actually, it was about four hours and forty five minutes.  After getting the house-sitter settled, we took off a little before midnight Anchorage time.  And we landed just before six am LA time.   The LA picture is actually about seven hours later - after we got the bus, had breakfast, and then were walking the last mile to my mom's.

I hadn't planned on this order of the pictures, but when I looked at them, these two seemed so similar (long flat foreground, looking into the light) that they seemed a perfect pairing.  And a perfect contrast between the two worlds we've been bouncing back and forth between, as we visit my mom each month.

I've always been fascinated by how easy it is today to walk through a door in an airport in one part of the world and walk out another door into another part of the world.  I remember walking through the Brussels airport and seeing (to me) exotic African cities listed at the gates.  And the contrast between Anchorage and LA in January is pretty stark.

I contrast this with the ten days (in my memory anyway) it took to sail from New York to Le Havre in   1964 on the way to spending a college year in Germany.  Or to driving from Anchorage to Boston and back.  Overland (or oversea) one has time to feel the distance.  One's body has time to adjust to waking up closer or further from the sunrise.  One's brain has time to process the land or sea scape.  But planes abruptly fling one from one point on earth to another.  That's one reason I like window seats - so I can, when it's clear and light - get some sense of the topography I'm traveling through.

OK, enough musing.  Here are some shots as we got to enjoy the dawn.  (A positive side of the shorter days in Anchorage is that even people who sleep late get to see the dawn.)

Just off the plane in LAX terminal 6

Still dark waiting for the shuttle to the bus station

Just starting to get light as we get to the bus station

We then slept for half the day.

[Photo notes:I didn't bring the bigger camera on this trip.  Our flights are both in the dark, so no landscape shots, and I'm trying to travel as light as I can.  It would have been nice to have the polaroid filter Joe Blow suggested in comments to an early post, so the Good Bus Karma didn't have all the reflection.  I could have just cropped the picture to that sign, but I wanted the sense of being on the bus as well.  So I stretched the crop to keep the word bus and I included the driver and steering wheel.  The palm trees outside were pretty washed out, so I did play with brightness in photoshop for that part.]

Snow Drought Relief Means Driveway Work

Anchorage got a little snow in the last couple of days.  Not much, but enough.

Having a one car garage and two cars becomes problematic in the winter.  My car is essentially a back up vehicle most of the time and a summer camping vehicle.  But when it snows, it has to get off the streets so the snow plows can clear.  At least we don't get tickets or towed if it is on the street, but it's a nuisance for the plow drivers.  And for the neighbors and us if there's a gap that isn't cleared.  

The snow also gets me some exercise shoveling the driveway.  It's nice to be out with the clean white powder  and the quiet and being able to very tangibly see the impact of one's labor.  And yesterday as I was shoveling, a young moose ran down the street.  No moose today, but I got to say hi to the neighbor as he put his snowboard in his car and headed off.  

We have a driveway with a bit of slope.  That means that if I don't clear it right away, the car tracks pack down the snow which eventually becomes ice and walking up and down the driveway gets treacherous.  So I try to clear right away.  Before my wife backs out of the driveway and starts to make tracks.  It's much, much easier to just clear the fresh, unpacked down snow.  (I did post a picture of the driveway two years ago when we had lots and lots of snow, here.)

But today, there were already tracks in the driveway.  I'm guessing the paper delivery folks drove up the driveway because there were no footsteps, just the truck tracks.  

You can see the tracks, on the bottom where I've already shoveled and then on the left up through the fresh snow.  

And here's what it looks like when I've shoveled the whole driveway, leaving the packed down snow from the tire tracks.  Then I have to get out the ice scraper and scrape off the tracks.  Just one pass on the fresh snow wasn't too hard.  But if a car goes back and forth over the uncleared driveway, the packed area gets wider and wider and harder and harder to scrape off.  And when it becomes icy it's much harder.  For people with flat driveways, this is less of an issue.

So I used the ice scraper.  

Now, if it gets sunny and/or windy and dry, then this will just evaporate and not leave any ice to catch an unwary heel.  But if it rains and freezes, then I have to get out the gravel.  I should have no trouble getting my car up the driveway now for when the snow plow comes.  

Sometimes I wonder why I write posts like this. I think there's value in documenting the ordinary, things that normally don't get noted. It's also because I don't have to think too much to get a post up,   people who don't have snow don't think about these things.    We do have a southern exposure, so when it is sunny and warms up a bit (it's in the teens now) the driveway will get all icy as snow on top melts, flows down, and then freezes overnight.  This is all preventive work, and I'm glad I'm still fit enough to be able to do it.  The body likes being given a workout in the fresh cold air.  

Four Regents Terms Up; Expect New Appointments From Walker Soon

The University of Alaska regents whose terms expire in 2015 include:  (descriptions are excerpted from from the University website bios of the regents.)

[UPDATE Jan 27:  Governor Appoints Four New Regents]

Term: 2005-2015 

Timothy C. Brady of Anchorage was appointed in 2005 by Governor Murkowski and reappointed in 2007 by Governor Palin. Regent Brady is from a pioneer Alaska family. He serves as president of Ken Brady Construction Company, where he has worked in various positions over the past 30 years. He holds a bachelor of science degree from Arizona State University's School of Engineering, Division of Construction. Regent Brady is involved with the Anchorage Downtown Rotary, Boy Scouts of America, American Red Cross, Better Business Bureau, and Associated General Contractors of Alaska.

Every time I look at these, I have new questions.  In this case, it's about why would Brady have to be reappointed by Palin?  He'd only served two years of an eight year appointment.

Term: 2007-2015 

Fuller A. Cowell of Anchorage was appointed in 2007 by Governor Palin. Regent Cowell was raised on a homestead in Fairbanks, attended Lathrop High School and studied biology at UAF. He completed his bachelors of business administration with an emphasis in marketing at National University, Sacramento, California graduating Summa Cum Laude. Cowell completed the Advanced Executive Program at the Kellogg Business School, Northwestern University, in Chicago, Illinois. In 1995, he was awarded the UAF Alumni Achievement Award for Community Achievement. The award was established to recognize outstanding UAF alumni.

I posted about Cowell in more detail when he was the lone regent who voted to retain the president's $320,000 longevity bonus.  

Term: 2007-2015 

Patricia Jacobson of Kodiak was appointed by Governor Palin in 2007. Regent Jacobson grew up in southern Arizona. She graduated in 1969 from the University of Arizona with a BA in Elementary Education, and from the University of Alaska in 1972 with an MA in Elementary Education.  Regent Jacobson taught various elementary grades, primarily gifted classes, for 26 years, 25 of which were in Kodiak. She was appointed to the Professional Teaching Practices Commission (PTPC) by Governor Hammond in 1979. She received the Christa McAuliffe Fellowship for Alaska in 1992.  As a teacher, Regent Jacobson was active in Kodiak and Alaska NEA and is a life member of NEA-Retired. After retiring she worked independently for the Kodiak School District as the village technology liaison, serving all of Kodiak's villages and logging camps, until she was elected to the local school board, ultimately serving as its president.  

She was chair when the president's bonus was approved and supported it strongly when it was challenged.

Term: 2007-2015  

Kirk Wickersham of Anchorage was appointed to the Board of Regents in 2007 by Governor Palin. Wickersham is an actively retired attorney and real estate broker. He is the developer and owner of FSBO System, Inc. a company that provides professional coaching to home sellers, and a former chair of the Alaska Real Estate Commission. Previously, he was an economic development consultant and won a national award for innovative community development regulations.

I'm pleased to see that each of these regents stayed in service for the whole eight years of the terms.  In the past, there has been very high turnover with people leaving well before their terms were up.

Let's hope there are some people with a higher education background in the new group.   

Selma's Garbage Bag Problem

We thought it would be a good idea to finally see Selma on MLK Day.  And it was.  I'm hoping to get a post up on why before long.  But there was one scene that jarred me and I've done a little checking.

MLK and his wife are in the kitchen.  He takes a full garbage bag out from under the sink.  It's a clear plastic bag.  He empties it and then she unrolls a new bag which puts bag under the sink for the rest of the garbage.

What's wrong with that scene?  My problem has nothing to do with division of household labor.  My immediate thought when I saw that was:  No one used plastic garbage bags then.  Especially not clear plastic bags.

In Los Angeles, people used incinerators to burn garbage until they were banned in 1957 in an attempt to reduce smog.  (There's still an old one in my mom's backyard.)

I checked online and here's what I found:

1. Plastic garbage bags weren't invented until 1950 (by a Canadian) and the first ones  were sold to businesses, not households.  The bags were green.
2. The first green plastic garbage bags for the home were sold by Union Carbide - Glad Bags - in the late 1960s.  (The movie takes place in 1965.)
3. Plastic bags weren't introduced to grocery stores until 1977!

I recall putting garbage into paper shopping bags until plastic bags were available.  And paper bags don't really hold  garbage well when they get wet.  

Here are some sources:

http://www.packagingknowledge.com/waste_bags_sacks.asp#history_of_waste_bags

The familiar green plastic garbage bag (made from polyethylene) was invented by Harry Wasylyk in 1950.Harry Wasylyk was a Canadian inventor from Winnipeg, Manitoba, who together with Larry Hansen of Lindsay, Ontario, invented the disposable green polyethylene garbage bag. 

Garbage bags were first intended for commercial use rather than home use - the bags were first sold to the Winnipeg General Hospital. However, Hansen worked for the Union Carbide Company in Lindsay, who bought the invention from Wasylyk and Hansen. Union Carbide manufactured the first green garbage bags under the name Glad Garbage bags for home use in the late 1960s.

Reference: http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blGarbageBag.htm

http://www.bagmonster.com/2011/05/history-of-the-plastic-bag.html

1977
“PAPER OR PLASTIC” WARS BEGIN: The plastic grocery bag is introduced to the supermarket industry as an alternative to paper sacks.[iv] At this point, plastic produce bags had long overtaken paper bags in the produce aisle. The grocery sack market was later, in 1986, described as “paper’s last stronghold” by Mobil Chemical’s marketing manager. [v]
 

Film makers:  If you're doing a film that takes place before you were old enough to remember, but not so long ago that there are still people alive who do remember, show the geezers the film and let them spot the anachronisms.

With technology changing so much faster today, future film makers will have an even harder time.
Is it a biggie? No.  But for people my age,  it's like seeing a film that takes place in 2000 with people using iPhones.

For Anchorage Folks Waiting For Snow

I offer this picture I posted on January 12, 2012 to remind you what winter used to look like.

For those of you reading this from afar, this year there is a thin, raggedy carpet of hard, old snow with dead grass and fallen leaves poking through.

Low Tech Drying

Maybe it's because we never had a dryer at home.  For me hanging up the clothes to dry is restful - even when it's inside.

The clothespin and a line is such a simple design.  And with the low winter humidity inside Anchorage homes, the clothes  dry quickly. I like to think that it helps the humidity, but I'm sure only negligibly.

The simple dollar website cites about 3.3 kilowatt hours per load.  And Municipal Light and Power says 1 kw hour costs me 5.6 ₵.   So I'm not doing it for the money since it only saves about 17₵  per load, and reduces my carbon footprint slightly.  But if one million other folks did the same it would have an impact.

Mindless tasks you can do without thinking let the brain relax and wander, and they're a good break from more concentrated brain work.

I don't want to give the impression I always use the clothesline.  But I feel better when I do.

Why I Live Here - Anchorage Folk Festival And The California Honeydrops

It's a five minute walk to the Wendy Williamson Auditorium.  The folk festival had concerts there Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  And I'm guessing it's one of the last of the free concerts of this calibre in the US.  And the auditorium was completely full.

High Lonesome Sound

We saw several fine acts - Shirley Mae Springer-Staten's group made amazing sounds.  High Lonesome Sound also got the crowd riled up.


I was among those who came into the concerts with no awareness of who the California Honeydrops were.

California Honeydrops

But it took less than a minute to realize how good they were and what a fine voice the lead singer had and how much he was in control of it.  The MC told us that the Honeydrops don't do concerts, they do dance events (I can't remember the exact word he used) and right from the start there were people up and dancing.  It was an exhilarating concert.  I'm always hesitant to put up videos of music from my little camera because the sound is only an echo thrice removed of the original.  But it will give you a sense of the rocking scene Sunday night.   I guess it blended blues and jazz, but you can judge for yourself.  You can hear some of their music with much better audio at their website.







The festival continues through next weekend.  Check out the schedule here.

Saudis Condemn Charlie Hebdo Killings While They Flog Blogger Raif Badawi

The world is complex and we face plenty of challenges.  Unless we're willing to stop accepting simplistic (and often nationalistic) explanations of what's happening, things won't get better.  This post reflects a bit of that complexity by following a few threads from the coverage of the Paris killings at Charlie Hebdo.

From the Guardian:

Arab governments and Muslim leaders and organisations across the world have condemned the deadly attack in Paris, but it was praised by jihadi sympathisers who hailed it as “revenge” against those who had “insulted” the prophet Muhammad.
Saudi Arabia called it a “cowardly terrorist attack that was rejected by the true Islamic religion”. The Arab League and Egypt’s al-Azhar university – the leading theological institution in the Sunni Muslim world – also denounced the incident in which masked gunmen shouted “Allahu Akbar” – “god is great ” in Arabic.

Screenshot from Australian News  with text added

Meanwhile, a Saudi blogger is being flogged as part of his sentence.  His crime?  News.com.au reports (part of Murdoch's News Corp):

His brutal punishment follows his arrest in 2012 after he created an online forum that his wife insists was meant to encourage discussion about faith. Following his arrest, his wife and children Najwa, Tirad and Myriyam left the kingdom for Canada.
Last year, Badawi was initially sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes in relation to the charges. But after an appeal, the judge stiffened the punishment.
The charges related to articles he wrote criticising religious authorities in Saudi Arabia, as well as pieces written by others that were published on his website.
According to Amnesty International, the prosecution had called for him to be tried for ‘apostasy’ (when a person abandons their religion), which carries the death sentence. As well as the weekly flogging, the 31-year-old’s sentence also includes a 10-year travel ban, and a ban on appearing on media outlets.

Here's a video that purports to be of the first public flogging of Badawi.  It's apparently done with a cellphone and I would imagine that the person who filmed it took considerable risk.




It's not easy to see what is happening.  At the end, it appeared to me that the strokes were more symbolic than serious.  But I don't have any personal experience with flogging.  I do know that sometimes what appears to be a slight impact can do serious damage.  But I looked up about how much damage flogging can cause.

 From a 2007 ABC News report:

". . . Floggings in Saudi Arabia typically take place Thursday nights outside of prisons or marketplaces. The accused is shackled and sometimes permitted to wear a single layer of clothing, like the popular Saudi tunic or dishdash.

This flogging clearly didn't take place at night, nor on Thursday.

Screenshots from YouTube video

A police officer administers the lashes with a bamboo whip about 7 feet long. Under his arm, the officer will typically hold a copy of the Koran in order to regulate the power with which he can whip the accused.

It's hard to know whether this is bamboo or something else.  It's clearly not 7 feet long and it appears the flogger does not have a Quran under his arm.  Here are some screenshots from the video.  I tried to get shots that would show the Koran if he had one.  The bottom picture shows his arm out from his body so that a book would have dropped.  I did talk to an official for an Islamic country who has spent time in Saudi Arabia and he said he'd never heard of the Quran being used this way.

"In the sentence a judge will specify three things: One, the amount of lashes; two, whether the flogging will be held in the prison or publicly; and third, what portions are to be administered at one time," Wilcke said. "No more than 60 to 70 lashes are administered at any one time with usually one to two weeks between floggings. Women will get 10 to 30 lashings a week; a man might get 50 to 60 per week."
If a complete sentence was administered at once, the accused could potentially die. Doctors in Saudi Arabia examine prisoners before each flogging to determine if they are healthy enough to withstand the lashes."

It's not at all clear that the person who wrote this description of the rules was accurate or that if he is, where the rules apply, or who enforces them.  I include them and this caveat to remind people that things are more complicated than we assume at first blush, and that we can't rely on the information.

I would note that I began this post yesterday (Thursday) and today it is reported that the sentence  has been referred to the Saudi Supreme Court and this week's flogging was postponed for medical reasons.

The Bigger Context

This situation raises all sorts of ethical conflicts.  We understand that the Saudis are fighting ISIS so their condemnation of the shootings makes sense on that level.  This punishment falls short of a death penalty (though his wife fears the cumulative floggings could kill him).

Meanwhile the US has condemned Badawi's sentencing and punishment  but shortly after that the State Department, according to Amnesty International's Steve Hawkins,  was praising Secretary of State Kerry's relationship with King Abdullah (about 1:30 into audio.)


Our media has framed the Paris attacks as extremist terrorists attacking freedom of speech.  But others see it in a much larger context.  People like Chris Hedges speak bluntly about this:

We have engineered the rage of the dispossessed. The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism. And rather than understand the roots of that rage and attempt to ameliorate it, we have built sophisticated mechanisms of security and surveillance, passed laws that permit the targeted assassinations and torture of the weak, and amassed modern armies and the machines of industrial warfare to dominate the world by force. This is not about justice. It is not about the war on terror. It is not about liberty or democracy. It is not about the freedom of expression. It is about the mad scramble by the privileged to survive at the expense of the poor. And the poor know it.

These are fighting words to the 1% and those who swallow their propaganda.  Notice he didn't say 'capitalism' but rather 'predatory capitalism.'  If the media pays any attention at all to Hedges it mostly will be to label him (not what he says)  disloyal, communistic, anti-American, or traitorous.  If we start to seriously discuss Hedges' arguments (and Hedges is a former Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times  reporter who has spent years reporting from the Middle East, Central America, and the Balkans), lots of corporate friendly versions of the how the world works will start to unravel.

So, it's easy to criticize the Saudi royals, but as I recall, Saudi royals have a special relationship with the Bush family. They were the only people allowed to fly in the US immediately after the World Trade Center attacks.  Which links fairly smoothly to asking what exactly is the Saudi role in the plummeting price of oil?  Merco Press, with a general link to oilprice.com, speculates that the US and the Saudis are in this together to put pressure on Iran, Syria, and Russia.  Arthur Berman, in an interview at oilprce.com doesn't dismiss the political factors, but claims income is the basic Saudi driver.

I don't claim any inside information, except I do know that the world is more complicated than our media present it.  And that Americans (and probably many others) are content with simplistic explanations - so long as they imply, "So go on and don't change anything."  And coverage and reactions are selective.  Why so much more reaction to Charlie Hebdo where 12 were killed, while hundreds, perhaps thousands, are being killed by Boko Haram in Nigeria?   But with climate change and with growing economic inequality both inside the US and globally, those answers won't work for too long.

Do Rich People Deserve To Be Rich?

There are people who see the world as it is presented to us. And there are people who see past the
facade to what's really happening.

 Chris Hedges is one of those folks.  Another is Russell Brand.

Here he interviews George Monbiot about the facade - he calls it myth - that people get rich by working hard and poor by being lazy.

The two assert that it's this myth that helps keep the poor poor and the rich rich.  The start out with Self Attribution Theory (we attribute our good to our own efforts) and go on to look at examples of the wealthy perpetuating the myth, though they themselves were born to wealth.  Monbiot cites a study that says many corporate leaders score high on tests for psychopathy.  He goes on to say,

"If you're born poor and have psychopathic tendencies, you're quite likely to end up in prison.  If you're born rich you go to business school."  [I think he said 'business school' at the end.]

Brand does this with charm and wit and mockery of how most news hosts dress and act.


  

Did anyone watching this, even unconsciously, dismiss Brand because of how he is dressed and how he sits? I'm sure that he is intentionally making the point through his dress and posture that we have been conditioned to give more credence to men in suits who sit or stand up straight.  Even when they say totally stupid things, even outright lies.

[UPDATE 11:30am:  I've added a little to this post.  Nothing to change the meaning, just to supplement what I'd written about the video.]

323 798 8370 - Another Scam Phone Call

I don't know what this guy's angle is, but I've been getting this phone call several times a day for the last three days - including at 2 am this morning.  Fortunately, I was fast asleep.  I recall a dream where the phone was ringing vaguely, but I didn't wake up.



I did call the Anchorage Better Business Bureau and they knew about the Jamaican Lottery scam and one ring scam where people call back to see who called and get changed $19.95 for international call.

I'm checking the FCC website to see how to report this.  But I've got an appointment soon, so I'm just putting this up as a warning.



[Once again, feed burner failed to pick up this post and share it on blogrolls, so I'm reposting it and taking down the original. Sorry for those loyal readers who have already seen the original and thanks for your patience.][That didn't work. Experimenting by shortening the title.] [For those who care about such things, the feed burner worked when I shortened the title.  Was that why it worked?  Don't know.]