Ida Plus Academy Award Nominee Shorts - Docs and Live Action

Picture from IMDB

First we saw Ida.  A beautiful black and white Polish film that I could connect to in a variety of ways.
1960 or so.  Ida is a teenaged sister in a convent.  She's preparing to be a nun.  But first she's told she must go visit her aunt, the one who hadn't bothered to come visit her ever.

The movie is about the relationship between Ida, Wanda, her aunt, and the revelation of their past - her family was Jewish and killed in the woods, except for Ida.  How did it happen?  The aunt takes her to the village they came from to meet the family now living in their old home.  The movie also explores Ida's identity crisis described well by her aunt who ironically asks, "A Jewish nun?"

The village reminded me of the farmland along the East-West German border near Göttingen where I was a student only four years after the time in the film.  And I too searched my mother's parents'' graves in the Jewish cemetery in Köln.  And my step-mother has talked about coming home from the labor camps to find new people in her home and much of the family furniture among the neighbors  In 82 minutes, Ida, which seems to move so slowly, richly fills in the history of these two women's lives.  We feel like we know them intimately.

A remarkable movie.  The New Yorker review gives much more depth than I have time for.  You can see the Ida trailer here.  (Don't be put off by the ad.)  Ida is up for an Academy Award for best foreign language film.


Then we saw the Academy Award nominated short documentaries and tonight we saw the short live action films. (This just means fiction or narrative films.)

There's so much going through my head.  It was good to see the Anchorage International Film Festival's best documentary - White Earth - in the running.  The films were all good, yet I couldn't help thinking, "These are the best shorts in the world?"

I would love to introduce Aya - an Israeli woman - who while waiting to pick someone up at the Ben Gurion airport, is given asked to hold a passenger sign for a few minutes, while the chauffeur who's there to pick the person up quickly moves his car.  She ends up taking the passenger to his hotel in Jerusalem and charming her Danish passenger once he decides she's not going to kidnap him.  I think she enjoy spending time with Wanda and Ida.

I think Universal Love which won the Founder's Award at the AIFF in December, but none of the short film awards, was good enough to fit in with this group of shorts.  But they were all good.  The Phone Call about a woman at a suicide prevention center talking to an older man whose taken enough pills to take care of things and won't give his address would have seemed much better if we hadn't seen real live phone volunteers in the short doc, Crisis Hotline:  Veterans Press 1,  talking to a series of vets the night before.  That was powerful too, but felt more like a promotional film for the hotline. It focused - as a crisis hotline must - on the immediate emergency at hand.  It didn't look, as a movie could have, at the larger political and economic reasons why these soldiers were sent to war zones that caused their suicidal conditions.

There were two more Polish films, both very personal family films.  Joanna was a follows a terminal cancer patient's months of leave taking from her son and husband.  Our Curse gives us a husband and wife grappling with the news their newborn son has Ondine’s Curse (also known as Congenital Central Hypoventilation Syndrome or CCHS) and breathe on his on while  asleep.   They talk through their frustration that the baby is still at the hospital,  their fears for his and their futures, and they struggle with the equipment when he does get home.  These two are powerful films and with two very young grandkids I found Our Curse very hard to watch.  

I'd seen White Earth twice already in December at AIFF.  It stood up well the third time - a beautifully film shot in the oil patch of North Dakota.  Why I picked it my favorite in December was its tight editing, stunning photography, and ability to tell the story through the voices of the people in the film, not through a narrator.  The other AIFF documentaries were all compelling, but needed editing.

La Parka (The Reaper) source

My favorite Monday night was the Mexican documentary about the slaughterhouse worker.  Such an exquisitely filmed movie!  The visual story seemed to be told in reflection and shadows.  Lots of gritty still life geometrical patterns of walls, chains, ropes, floors, amplified with loud crashes and clangs,  We see blurred animals, feet of animals, carcasses, but relatively few whole beasts.  And we hear the slaughterer talk about how he's made peace with the notion that he kills 500 bulls a day.  He doesn't sound quite convinced.  I haven't seen American Sniper, but it might be good to see it paired with La Parker (The Reaper).  

La Parka - screen shot from trailer

The camera sat on this picture as the cat walked from the truck until it was hidden by the steps.  

The film starkly yet subtly raised the ethical dilemmas of slaughter houses.  

La Parka screenshot from trailer

And it paused on the shot below a few long seconds too.  

I'd also like to introduce the character Parveneh to Ida.  Pari is an Afghan woman sewing in Switzerland trying to send money home to her mom to pay for her dad's operation.  Although she's traveled far, she seems as sheltered as Ida was in the convent.  A sweet film.

And as I move to my favorite, I can't skip the most delightful of the films - Boogaloo and Graham.  With armed soldiers walking down the Irish streets in 1978, Dad brings home two baby chicks for the boys.  This was the funniest of all the films.  The only other one that offered some good laughs was Aya.  The boys were priceless.  

Butter Lamp source

Butter Lamp took the honors for me with its original concept and fine execution.  We watch as a traveling photographer takes photos of Tibetan families in front of an ever changing set of backdrops.  Charming.   

But I wouldn't be upset if any of them won- particularly Aya or Boogaloo and Graham.

Below are the two lists with links to the trailers.  

Live Action

• Aya
• Boogaloo and Graham
• Butter Lamp
• Parvaneh
• The Phone Call

Documentary

• Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1
• Joanna
• Our Curse
• The Reaper (La Parka)
• White Earth

The New York Times also has a review (including the animated shorts).

The Fog of Peace

"The trouble began at the end of the Cold War, when the collapse of a bankrupt  Communist ideology was complacently interpreted as the triumph of the market. As communism was discarded, so was the concept of the state as an agent around which our collective interests and ambitions could be organized.The individual became the ultimate agent of change – an individual conceived as the type of rational actor that populates economists’ models. Such an individual’s identity is not derived from class interests or other sociological characteristics, but from the logic of the market, which dictates maximization of self-interest, whether as a producer, a consumer, or a voter."

A friend from the other side of the world sent me a post at Project Syndicate   by

Jean-Marie Guéhenno, former Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping at the United Nations, is President and CEO of the International Crisis Group and the author of the forthcoming book The Fog of Peace: A Memoir of International Peacekeeping in the 21st Century.

The quote above is just an excerpt from the post, and, presumably, from the book The Fog of Peace.

I didn't know what the International Crisis Group was either, so I googled.  Here's part of a post by Tom Hazeldine at the New Left Review who doesn't think much of them:

On the face of it, the ICG represents a particularly successful NGO incursion into geopolitical affairs. A mid-nineties spin-off from US establishment think-tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Crisis Group purports to offer ‘new strategic thinking’ on conflict situations, aided by a global monitoring network it runs across sixty countries, with links to lobbying operations in Washington, New York, Brussels and London. Half of its annual budget of $16m comes from governments—mainly NATO members, including the US and Britain—while corporate donors include RBS, Chevron and BHP Billiton; billionaire financier George Soros is a leading patron. [3]The organization styles itself as independent and non-partisan, but has consistently championed NATO’s wars to fulsome transatlantic praise. Kofi Annan spoke for the entire House when he lauded the ICG as ‘a global voice of conscience, and a genuine force for peace’. The credulous Western media also has moments of sycophancy. The FT praises the group’s ‘hard-nosed realism’, the BBCits ‘masterful’ and ‘essential’ research. The Washington Post likens its ‘excellent reports’ to investor credit ratings for conflict-prone states. Noting with admiration that ‘there is nothing cut-and-paste about the research’, the Guardian enthuses: ‘Long may it continue to thrive.’ [4]
Such commendation would seem no mean feat, especially given the dubious makeup of the Crisis Group board—a rogue’s gallery even by the standards of international politics. Outgoing president Gareth Evans was the West’s principal apologist for Suharto in East Timor while Australian foreign minister. Co-chair Thomas Pickering was a Reagan point man in Central America’s dirty wars, asUS ambassador to El Salvador and one-time intermediary for Contra gunrunners. (This would become a habit: in retirement Pickering sold arms overseas for Boeing.) The Executive Committee includes among its number Mort Abramowitz, self-confessed ‘aggressive interventionist’ and former State Department fire-starter who obtained Stinger missiles for the Afghan Mujahidin; earlier on, while ambassador in Thailand, he had been instrumental in the US policy of backing Pol Pot against the Vietnamese-installed regime.  .   .

Despite the critique of predatory capitalism in the original quote above, Landdestroyer argues that ICG is after helping their corporate sponsors expand around the world.

"To explain why they are so eager to pry their way into sovereign nations, despoil, topple, and rebuild them, one only has to look at ICG's corporate supporters. They include such ignoble organizations as Chevron, Morgan Stanley, and Deutsche Bank Group with equally ignoble intentions that are confidently expressed through ICG's nefarious agenda."

Sourcewatch's report lists lots of people connected with ICG and they all seem to be alumni of high governmental office or international agencies.

This all goes to show what I repeat now and again here - everything is far more complicated than it first appears.  But it's also true that many things are much simpler than people make them appear.  Precisely so they can say, "But, you don't understand.  It's all very complicated."  The Fog of Peace could just as easily refer to all of this rhetoric aimed at confusing everyone.

[For those of you who saw this already, sorry.  Feed burner didn't send it to blogrolls.  I've gotten rid of a lot of junk html that came over with some of the quotes to see if that was the problem.]

Bembo and Smythe: Looking At A Book Closely

I'd just finished the book of poems and read the note at the end about the book making itself.

Smythe-sewn.  That's what got me to look closely at the binding.  

From Lovenotebooks:

Books that are smythe sewn are library quality and are constructed to last. Smythe sewn books are durable and made to be handled a lot and open flat. Smythe sewn refers to the centuries old book binding technique. First sheets are folded into signatures, that depending on size and thickness of the sheet can be anywhere from 4 to 32 pages.  A stack of signatures will result  in a book block. Top and bottom as well as right side of the book block will be cut to create pages. Each signature is then sewn through holes on the center line and to the other signatures of the book block with a single thread. The result is a stitched book block which is then stitched or glued into the hard or soft cover binding via end papers.
This process was done by hand until American inventor David McConnel Smythe invented a machine to sew the signatures together in 1879. Nowadays the stitched together text block is often glued on the spine to keep the thread in place and sometimes further reinforced by gluing a piece of fabric over thread on the spine. Head bands and foot bands made of decorative ribbon are sometimes glued to the top and bottom of the pages to further beautify the binding and hide stitching and glue. Paperblanks are a good example of a smythe sewn journal with decorative head and foot bands. Smythe sewn is the standard if you are looking for durability; Hymn books, coffee table books and text books are often smythe sewn for that very reason.

This is the book in question - for my next book club meeting.  The title poem is also my favorite.  

Now, on to font.

12 point Bembo type







While I must admit to not paying much attention to the font (other than occasionally noting the font mention in the book), there is a world of typographers who take all this very seriously.  They know their types like some people know their football teams.   Bembo is an old font.   RightReading  traces the history of Bembo:

Based on type cut by Francesco Griffo (sometimes styled "da Bologna"), Venice 1495, for use in De Aetna, an account of a visit to Mount Etna by Pietro Bembo; the italic is based on Giovanni Tagliente, Venice, 1520s. A first (1928) effort at an italic produced what is now called Fairbank Italic (sometimes Bembo Condensed Italic, a chancery italic cut by Alfred Fairbank; Monotype considered it inadequately related to the roman. (Morison: "It had the great virtue of all the chancery cursives: it was legible in mass and can easily be read by the page. So much so that, in fact, it looked happier alone than in association with the Bembo roman.")"Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), prominent humanist, poet, and churchman, was closely involved with the Aldine Press from its very inception. The first book issued by Aldus, Lascaris's Greek grammar (see no. 2), was printed from a copy provided to Aldus by Bembo, who had studied with Lascaris. Bembo's own first work, De Aetna (1496), and his editions of Petrarch's Rime sparse and Dante's Commedia were printed by Aldus."Gli Asolani describes a wedding feast at Asola, during which a discussion ensues concerning love. Its subject, whether love is a good or a bad thing, may well have established Bembo as the preeminent philosopher of his generation."The first edition of Gli Asolani has attracted attention in no small part because certain copies of it contain a dedication to the famous and notorious Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander VI, sister of Cesare Borgia, and duchess of Ferrara."--http://lib.byu.edu/~aldine/40Bembo.html

He also notes that type connoisseurs don't much like the digitizing of Bembo.  And the first I landed on - I Love Typography - had a long discussion on the problems with the digitized version.  This book was published in 1978, so I'm guessing it was printed with metal type on a printing press.  Gary Holthaus, the author, was the first director of the Alaska Humanities Forum, among many other interesting endeavors.  He's scheduled to be at our meeting.

There's so much we don't notice everyday.  We tend to look at things based on our habitual use of them, not for what else they are.  Books are to read, not to consider as physical objects.  And few of us would know how to even make a book.  Fortunately between google and youtube, anyone can learn how to make their own book fairly easily.

Not Watching The Super Bowl

I googled "Who Doesn't Watch The Super Bowl?" and only got some lame sites.

I googled "How many people watch the Super Bowl in the USA?"  and got these numbers at Sportingcharts:

The most watched Super Bowl in history was Super Bowl XLVIII (Seahawks vs. Broncos), which had an average total viewership (in the U.S.) of 111.5M. The least watched Super Bowl was Super Bowl II (Packers vs. Raiders) which had an average viewership of 39.12M.

The US Census population clock says there are over 320 million people in the USA.

So, for every person watching the game, two aren't watching.

But I still don't know if there are other common characteristics of the non-watchers?  How many under 5?  And what are they doing?  Reading?  Outdoors?  At work?

I'm at LAX waiting for a plane back to Anchorage, but I wouldn't be watching anyway.  Just not interested.  This is no longer sport in my opinion, it's big business (besides the NFL, all the other businesses that make money from people watching the game)  making lots of money.  This site discusses it, but chops up the report into six pages.  Something I see a lot.  A way for websites to get more page hits.

I've also discovered over the years that the Superbowl is a great time to do other things - nobody is around.  For all the rest of you not interested, Salut.  

Hummel Story Makes LA Times Leads Me To Thoughts About Online News Issues

The headline, "Alaska - Woman named to lead Guard," probably explains the interest.  It follows up with discussion of the sexual abuse scandal.  (I wrote about Hummel's appointment yesterday.)

The article itself exemplifies one of the issues I've been having over online news (including ethics of updating blog posts).  In this case, the online stories and the print stories don't match.
Here's the link to the online LA Times Story.

The first two paragraphs are the same, but the print story capitalizes Department of Veterans and Military Affairs while the online version doesn't.  Maybe I noticed that because capitalization is one of my problems here.

The two seem to be the same until the end of the paragraph that starts "In September . . ." and ends " . . .confidentiality had been breached."

The online version adds that she was a professor at West Point and doesn't mention that she's a Democrat.  Neither mentioned her PhD in geography.

The print version ends abruptly:

"Hummel graduated from West Point in 1982 and served 30 years of active duty.
A Democrat, Hummel ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the state House of Representatives in November."

I find the last sentence interesting because I suspect that a lot of folks will say, "Another unsuccessful politician gets a helped by the party into a cushy job."  But that would be a very wrong conclusion.  First, party stuff is all mixed up in Alaska now that we have an 'independent' former Republican governor teamed up with a Democratic Lt. governor.  But much more than that.

This is a story I know better than most stories.  I met Hummel right after the 80% Republican Redistricting Board rejected her and two other candidates for their Executive Director position - a non-partisan position for which she was exceedingly well qualified.   I talked to Hummel shortly after that - I was so impressed by how she handled herself that I contacted her because I just wanted to meet this well qualified and well-spoken woman.  We kept in contact while she was recruited by the Democrats to run for the state house in her district.  She laughed at them at first, but as she met some of the other Democratic legislators in Anchorage who came to persuade her, she was impressed with them.  They appealed to her sense of duty and public service and she finally agreed. (Really, I know this sounds like a pr piece, but that's really what happened.)   She'd never been involved in a political campaign and was particularly displeased about the having to ask people for money.  But she put herself totally into it and lost to an incumbent by 2l3 votes, less than 1% of the vote.

Is this a cushy job for Hummel?  It's one she's excited about and also a little anxious about.  She's never been in the National Guard and there's a lot of stuff to do.  She also doesn't believe the Adjutant General should be head of the National Guard AND the state head of veteran and military affairs. Because it's a military job, she has to forego her military pension and disability* payment.  Even more problematic is that her husband, who works in the Army National Guard in Alaska, has to resign his position.  But, she told me, he insisted this was an opportunity she couldn't pass up.

But let's get on to other questions, questions I ask myself as I blog, both as a blogger and as a user of online news.  Some differences between online and print and how I feel about them:

1. An online piece can be longer than a print piece so you can include more than you would print.  Print stories should say if there is more online, and some do.   It would be nice if the online story content that was in addition to or different from the print story, were a different color or otherwise marked.  I suspect most print media don't keep such close track of those things and would claim it would be a big burden.
2. You can update an online piece.  You can only print a later correction in print.  I think it makes sense to update and correct only stories, but those changes that are substantive should be marked.  I do that here.  Otherwise, unless someone saves each version or finds a different version cached, there's no way to know whether a story you read - say three months later - is the same story that was there in the beginning.  This has all sorts of Orwellian possibilities.
3. Typos that have no consequence to the meaning should be fixed when spotted and don't need to be marked.  Minor word changes that clarify but don't change the meaning also don't need to be marked, but this hangs on people's interpretation of 'minor' and 'change the meaning.'

I decide it would be prudent to check what professional journalists have to say on this.  There was an article in the April 2014  American Journalism Review about a draft Code of Ethics from the Society for Professional Journalist coming out in September 2014:

The code draft acknowledges a different environment for news by advising journalists to “Aggressively gather and update information as a story unfolds and work to avoid error. Deliberate distortion and reporting unconfirmed rumors are never permissible.”

Well, that agrees with me about updating, but doesn't mention identifying the updates.  Should the story be dated as of the latest update or the original story?  This will matter later when people look back to see when something was known.  And in the competition between news companies, who gets the credit for being the first to report?  

I'd note that I tried to contact Soumya Karlamangla, the reporter on the LA Times Hummel piece.  I originally wanted to ask her questions about the differences between the online and print versions and who makes those decisions.  As I looked at other stories she's written, I was wondering how she got this story.  There was an AP story and and ADN story.  It's unlikely she was writing this as an original piece.  But there is no source identified and it's not labeled an AP story.  What is it that she did to what she found online that changes it from a wire story to one that deserves her own byline?  (I couldn't find an email address for her but I did tweet her.  But didn't hear anything back.  I'm not clear about whether a tweet to her is public or not.  When I saw it in my list of tweets much later, I took it down.  There are too many protocols on too many systems for me to keep up.  OK, I looked it up, only folks who subscribe to both me and Karlamangla would get it in their timelines.  There's a table online that tells you who can see different kinds of tweets.  Here's the relevant information from that table to my question.  It would be publicly visible on my timeline.

click to enlarge and focus

Back to the American Journalism Review article mentioned above that talked about updating online articles.  I went to the Society of Professional Journalists website to see what their revised code looked like and if it had that language.  I couldn't find any language that specifically addressed updating online articles.  Here are the four main principles.  Each then has a list of standards of practice under it.  You can get the Code as a pdf here.

• SEEK TRUTH AND REPORT INGJournalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.Journalists should: 
• MINIMIZE HARMEthical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.Journalists should:
• 􏰀 ACT INDEPENDENTLYJournalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know.Journalists should:
• 􏰀BE ACCOUNTABLEJournalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other. Journalists should:  

Doesn't really address my questions.  

*I asked Hummel during the campaign about what her disability entailed.  On the one hand, it's none of my business, but I suspected that some voters would wonder how she could hold the job of legislator if she was disabled.  Her response was that it was not a payment because you were so disabled you couldn't work, but rather compensation for injuries caused by your service in the military.    She was at West Point ages 18-22 and then in the military until she was 51.  She said hers were mainly orthopedic; "running too many miles with a heavy rucksack and jumping out of too many airplanes."  There is a very specific protocol for doctors to determine the injury and the percent of disability for each injury.  You can see how they calculate it precisely here.

West Point Grad Laurie Hummel To Be New Alaska National Guard Adjutant General

The ADN has a good report on this up already so I'll try to add what I know about Laurie Hummel.

I first 'met' Laurie Hummel when she was interviewed by the Alaska Redistricting Board to be their executive director.  I was so incredibly impressed by how perfectly her background qualified her for the job AND by how well she presented herself and her knowledge.  She was both assertive and respectful.  In that interview she was asked to describe her managerial experience as it related to the job.  It was all impressive and you can see my very rough transcript here.

A part that particularly warmed my blogger heart was when she spoke about confidentiality and public information.  She said you have to set up categories:

"what you have to share, should share, can’t.  Things that have to be shared with the public [you share]  and that’s how it should be.  I come from climate that values ethics.  I hold the highest ethical standards. I see a big difference where there’s an enemy.  Here I see no enemies.  Press and people are not enemies."

I was blown away by Hummel that day and wrote one of the most enthusiastic posts I've ever written about anybody on this blog.

Second Applicant Incredible: Laurel Hummel, Vet and Geographer

When the Board decided not to fill the position, I was seriously disappointed and wrote a two part post exploring possible reasons why.

• How Could Redistricting Board NOT Hire Laurel Hummel? Political Neutrality Appears Ripped To Shreds - Part 1
• How Could Redistricting Board NOT Hire Laurel Hummel? Political Neutrality Appears Ripped To Shreds - Part 2

The last post I did that focused on Laurie Hummel was about her announcement to run for State House.  

Laurie Hummel Announces Bid for State House Seat - Laurie Who?

I was (and still am) so impressed with Hummel that I decided I had to help her win.  People complain about the lack of good politicians all the time.  But there won't be any unless the rest of us work hard to elect those who are willing to run.  It was time for me to get directly involved.

After I became involved in her campaign  I felt I could no longer report on the race.  Sure, I could have declared my involvement and written, but I didn't want this blog to be a billboard for one candidate.

Hummel ran a great campaign and came very close to beating an incumbent in her first race.  
Today I learned of her appointment to be Adjutant General of the Alaska National Guard by Governor Walker.

I called Hummel today to congratulate her.  She told me she hadn't expected this.  Her husband, Chad Parker, is a colonel in the national guard and when the governor asked her to take the position, she decided she'd ask to be deputy.  That's a civilian, state position, that wouldn't put her directly over her husband.  But Chad told her she couldn't turn this opportunity down.  Accepting the position requires her husband's resignation from the Guard.

In October, during the campaign, she'd written an op-ed piece in the ADN on how to reform the national guard. (I'm assuming my readers know about the scandal which played a role in defeating our former governor's reelection bid.)  She listed six steps to heal the Guard, which I'm abbreviating here.  You can read the whole piece here.

1. Immediately hold legislative hearings -- with witnesses under oath -- to independently investigate malfeasance in the Guard.
2. Appoint an independent special prosecutor to address criminal actions not currently enforceable by the Guard’s antiquated, ineffective state version of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
3. The Legislature must create a viable UCMJ. The Guard must advise and guide but the state’s Military Code is a state statute. This is the province of our Legislature. The heavy lifting for creating a meaningful and effective code is done in committee. This would appropriately be accomplished by the House Committee on Military and Veterans Affairs. But again, nothing is happening on that front.
4. Separate the adjutant general (TAG) position from the commissioner, DMVA position. Tom Katkus and his predecessors were dual-hatted as the TAG and commissioner.
5. Fill the existing military legislative liaison position to the Alaska Legislature.
6.  The commander-in-chief (our governor) must demand, receive and embrace unfettered access to Guard issues and take a personal and active part in restoring a culture of transparency. 

She was hoping to work on these as a legislator and these focus on what the legislature and governor need to do.  But now she gets to work on these from the inside and from the top.

Side note:  Hummel will become the first female adjutant general of the Alaska National Guard.  She told me there had been women heads in Vermont and Ohio, but they have left office.  Other states are appointing their heads now as well and she wasn't sure if there would be another woman among them.

As I explore google's offerings on "women adjutant generals national guard" I get
Ohio's Maj. Gen. Deborah Ashenhurst and Vermont's Major General, Martha T. Rainville and Alaska's Col Laurel Hummel in the first five hits.  Moving down the lists there are a number of male adjutant generals whose page mentions "the fine men and women."  


But then up popped up BG Mary Kight who became California's first female, African-American adjutant general in 2010.  Are there others?  If Hummel pops up already, I'm guessing that if there were other women appointed to be their states' adjutant generals recently, they would show up.  But proving there are no black swans is harder than proving there is one.

Charles Townes, Laser Inventor Dead at 99

From the LA Times:

"Charles Townes, the Columbia University physicist who transformed modern society with his invention of the maser and the laser, receiving the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics for his effort, has died. He was 99."

He died Tuesday, January 27, 2015.

Townes (born July 28, 1915) was one of three people born in 1915 that I had in this year's list of people born 100 years ago who was still alive.  The other two are David Rockefeller (born June 15, 1915) and Herman Wouk (born May 27, 1915.)  You can see the main list here and a short follow up post here.

Birthday, Bike, Beach

We visited a relative today on her 93rd birthday (not my mom, hers is next month) and it was a nice visit.  Then we had some errands to run.  When I got home I needed some exercise and rode my bike down to the beach.  Cloudy days are better because the bike trail is less crowded.  This was my turnaround point - about 6 miles.

I'd seen this black something on the beach as I approached, but there it was.  A man with his bike and laptop.  My initial reaction is the computer doesn't belong at the beach.  But on the other hand, he came on his bike and he was here with the sounds of the surf and the setting sun.  Better than being inside.

LA Parking Ticket Follow Up #2 And More LA Driving Hazards

As I was going through my mom's bills and other mail, I found an envelope from the LA Traffic Enforcement Division.  It was dated Jan. 22, 2015.  I had sent in an appeal which the post office tracking system said had  arrived on Jan. 16.  That's six days before the notice.  The notice said my mom's car had gotten a parking ticket that needed to get paid.

So I called the number and after a fair amount of "if you need X, press 1, if you need Y, press 2" runaround, I finally got to talk to Edwin.  I explained the appeal date and the notification date.  He took the violation number and looked it up.

Edwin:  We received your appeal and it was decided and the decision was sent to your out of town address on January 23.  (We came down here on January 24.)
Steve:  I'm in LA now and so I can't see my Anchorage mail.   Can you tell me the decision?
Edwin:  The appeal was approved.  The violation is removed.


Well, that was good news.  The ticket's gone.  Chalk one up for reason and justice.   I'd like to think it's because I wrote a sensible appeal letter.  (Basically what I posted, but desnarked.)  But it might just be the 'Alaska card.'  People tend to be nice to people from Alaska, like they think living there is enough suffering.   Or maybe they're dismissing a lot of violations now because there have been so many complaints and because the City Council is trying to get them to simplify the signs.  Whatever the reason, it was nice.

After my previous posts on this, someone sent me a link to a story about a design student who got a parking ticket in LA and designed a sign that should be easier to figure out - well it takes a minute or two to adjust, but it does look like a much better idea than what they use now.

Then, I opened the next envelope.  It a "Notice of Toll Evasion Violation."

Where was I January 2?  That was the day we drove out to San Bernadino to visit our former Alaska friends.  We used the carpool lane when the other lanes stopped moving.

I went to the website  listed in the notice.   It turns out that some of the carpool lanes are actually toll roads and that you need to sign up and pay ahead and they give you a little transponder to put on your car and it deducts the toll for using the road.  I had no idea.  I did see such things in Singapore  (you can see the ERP signs and a transponder on a dashboard near the end of the pictures in this post from 2008), but I didn't know that they had them here.  As you can see it was pretty dark at the time.  It said you could sign up and get a transponder and pay in advance and the fine would be applied to the purchase.  But I really didn't need one.

So I called them.  I talked to someone I thought said his name was Dorman, but maybe it was Norman.  He listened to my story and my question about buying a transponder and he said, that since I was from Alaska it didn't make sense to buy one and that he'd waive the violation this time.  I'm guessing that happens all the time, though I suspect a lot of times it's rental cars.

I did ask if all the carpool lanes required such a pass and he said no.  Only if it says EXPRESSLANE or FAST TRACK.

The website says it's an experiment and that the grant funding would run out Feb. 2014.  I guess the experiment worked because they're still using it.  But they haven't updated the website to say what happened after the funding ran out.


I can't wait for cars that drive themselves and have all the rules programmed into their computers.

Problem Linking Text in Pages Document In Yosemite - A Solution

[This is for folks who use Mac's Pages rather than Word.  In Mac's Yosemite operating system.]

Here's the problem:  I follow the steps and put in a link but it reverts back to the default apple.com link.

I got so frustrated that I made an appointment with an Apple tech guy to call me and after screen sharing with my computer, he agreed it was a glitch, but we came up with a workaround.




STEP 1: write what you want to link.  I wrote the name of this blog:

What Do I Know?


STEP 2 is to highlight it.  You can see I did that in the screenshot to the left.


STEP 3:  Click on the Insert icon (3rd from the left on my computer) then at the bottom is Add Link.  This window (below) should pop up right under the words you highlighted.  In this case, What Do I Know?   So far so good.












Notice that the link says www.apple.com.  That's the default and where the trouble comes in soon.









STEP 4:  Highlight the www.apple.com and replace it with the url you want to link to.  I added whatdoino-steve.blogspot







STEP 5:  The next obvious step is to click "Go to Page."  But this is where the problem lies.  Instead of taking me to my blog, it reverted back to the apple link.  I got to the page below.

Now this turns out to be a cool page showing different kinds of art that people had figured out how to make on various apple devices.  I even did a  blog post about that link.  But that's not where I wanted to send people.

After much frustration I was talking to an Apple tech who took me through the steps and did what I did and, much to his surprise, ended up where I ended up.  He toyed around with it and finally came up with a work-around.

STEP 5 (the one that works for me):  After you type in your URL,

• retype the words you want to be highlighted in the box.  I know, not very efficient, but do it.  And there's one more step.  There shouldn't be, but there is.

STEP 6:  Click outside the little Add Link window.  Somewhere on the page so the window disappears.  If I just click on Go to Page, without first clicking outside the box, it reverts back to the apple.com link.

STEP 7:  Put the cursor onto the words you just added the link to - in my case What Do I Know? - and click. Here's the window I got:

BINGO!  it's got the right link. No more apple.com.  It has my URL.   Hit "Go to Page" and it should take you where you want to go.


It shouldn't be like this and the tech I talked to was writing it up and sending it in.  If we're lucky, this post will become moot.  But in the mean time, this is how you can do it.

Some other thoughts.

1.  This isn't a problem if the words you are linking are the actual URL that you want people to go to.  That works right away.

2.  There's one other little glitch that can hang you up.  When you highlight the words you want to link, from left to right, you may accidentally pick up a little symbol.  It looks like the INSERT symbol we started this all with.  I think it just shows the end of the line (or return).  If you get that into your highlight, then when you hit the insert icon above to start all this, the Add Link option won't be active.  You can see in the picture on the right.


If you look closely at the words I highlighted (What Do I Know?),  you'll see a little blue symbol after the question mark.  And you'll see that in the dropdown window above it, Add Link is not active.  (It's light grey, not  black.)

If you highlight from right to left, you don't get this little icon.  You need to highlight the words without the little icon so it looks like the first screenshot above (Steps 1, 2, 3)




That's it.  I hope this helps people overcome this design flaw.