Peace Corps Reunion Portland

This is just a quick filler post.  My Peace Corps group is together for the second time since our official tour of duty ended in 1969 (though some of us stayed a third year and others lingered in the Peace Corps or in Thailand other capacities).  I did manage a break yesterday morning - the hotel has bikes for guests to use - and road along the river and some old routes from when we lived here in Portland in 2003. 


It took me a bit to figure out what Greenland was, but I stopped to snap a picture of Alaska's future.  I think Oregon's ahead on this because they've had more organized medical marijuana sales.

I really haven't had my camera out that much.  I've been enjoying reuniting with old friends, some whom I haven't seen in close to 50 years as well as meeting their equally interesting partners. 


And we're living out the reality of how unreliable memory is.  Some of us remember things that no one else does.  Others remember some parts of our training and others don't recall them at all. 






We talked in the bar, at breakfast, on the shuttle, at the Japanese garden.







Here's a sloppy group picture from our dinner Saturday night.  Some folks are totally recognizable after all these years and others not at all. 

There's a few more than half of the original group who went to Thailand to teach English together in 1967. 

And this morning a bike event is happening outside our hotel window.  I haven't had time to process all this.  Maybe there will be more later. 

Beatrice Does Leather - Your Imagination Is The Limit

As we pushed the stroller to the park yesterday we passed lots of little shops, but one particularly caught my eye.  It had stunning purses on beautiful stands.  Not many.  But exquisite.  I thought, "How much must each one cost to have a store here in San Francisco with just a small selection?"  So I went in to check.

A woman came out from the back, and I noticed there were people back there working.  They actually made the items (there was more than purses) right here.  We started talking about the shop and the process of making these purses.  (The description below is from both our talk and her brochure.)


Beatrice (or Bea) Amblard is from Paris.  She got an apprenticeship at Hermes after finishing a course at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Paris.  Hermes sent her to their new San Francisco boutique in 1987.  After 14 years at Hermes, she went on her own and started April In Paris.




She's also added a school to pass on the centuries old traditions of leather work that she has learned. I understood that she has students who have some difficulties (such as dyslexia) in regular school.  That makes perfect sense to me, because I believe we force everyone into an academic track even though some, perhaps many, would be much better off in some other track, where they use other than academic skills.

Each work is unique.  She said she interviews customers to find out about their lifestyle and how they would use the item that will be made.  Each item should fit perfectly into the customers' lives.  Bea was passionate about her art and what she does.




This doesn't come cheap, of course.  There are lots of hours put into each item.  And she uses only the best materials.  The red alligator purse I pointed to (in the photo above) was the most expensive (of course that was the one I picked) at $15,000.  A bit out of my range.  But San Francisco has lots of people with plenty of discretionary income.  (And lots with none as well.)  And there are customers coming from the April In Paris website as well:  And she sees these as pieces of art, not disposable consumer items.

Her trademark is a play on her name Bea.  And it's on all the pieces. 


I enjoyed talking to her and I only thought to pull out the video late in the process and the rest of my party had gone off to the park so I felt I needed to go.  But here's the short video I made.  While I'm a little amused by most of the cutesy, high end coffee shops and other pretension stores, I felt that this was the real thing.  This was someone maintaining an old craft, maintaining it at the level of an art form and was able to make a living doing it.


Do go visit the website.  There are lots of examples of the work.

And also visit the website for the school.  When she talked about passing on what she has learned to the next generation and preserving the art form that has survived centuries, I thought about the school in the temple in Luang Prabang where monks were taught the skills  [bottom of the post] that would allow them to maintain the art in the many temples in that ancient Lao capital.




'Your imagination is the limit . .'

So is your pocket book, which for most of us won't be made by Bea and her team. But it's ok.  People who buy these things are preserving an old art form. 

San Francisco Shots

There are lots of flowers and greens growing surrounded by cement.  Childhood memories always bring a smile when I see a blooming agapanthus.













This building commands attention.  It's an auto repair shop today.  Fortunately the address is prominent and I was able to find out more about this building.

From part of the description of this building at 3536 Sacramento in The Early Public Garages in San Francisco : 1906 - 1929 - An Architectural and Cultural History by Mark D. Kessler:

"As at Pine Street, all of the implied displacements - both vertical and horizontal - serve to highlight the most vacuous but important part of the facade  - the entrance.  Other facades of brick box garages celebrate entrance through the use of a singular, summary gesture - an arched portal beneath a gabled parapet.  By contrast, the designer of this facade pursues a fine-grained regulation of proportion, composition and motif in order to achieve this end.  This facade is remarkable for the aggregation of small-scale brick details into a unified composition that represents a simple cross-section.  The brick detailing is charming and varied, dense and delicate.  Small-paned windows, gauged brick lintels, corralled verticals, and basket-weave infill impart to this facade a surprisingly convincing residential character.  Located on a shopping street in a residential neighborhood, this building is contextual and striking."

And according to Yelp,  Leonard at Botta's auto shop's service is a good as the architecture.  This review reflects the positive experiences noted in all the other comments, though this one's prose is a little more creative:

"Got my bumper fixed here after a neighbor disregarded my car's personal space. Communication, scheduling, and drop off/pick up was easy and efficient. They communicated with my insurance (USAA) and the rental car place (Enterprise) and I didn't have to worry about a thing.

Picked it up and had a  beautiful fresh bumper (and a clean car- which was an awesome surprise). Unfortunately, another neighbor (I'm assuming it wasn't the same neighbor - that'd be really bad car-ma) must have gotten jealous, because the next morning, there were more scratches :( Ugh, my car is looking forward to moving out of the city.

Anyway, I let Leonard know and since he had leftover paint from my car that was still useable, he had me come by and he touched it up for free, which I REALLY appreciated. Would definitely recommend taking your car here. Great customer service."

The Civic Center BART station.

Jane cafe and bakery.

This was at a driveway at a fitness center.

The doors at the Central Seventh Day Adventist.

I'll do another post on April in Paris where I took this picture.  This is a preview.  Do you see the bee?

Oil Addiction Prevents Alaskan Politicians From Making Good Decisions

Image Screenshot from Video In 2010 Post

Most people don't change their habits unless they have to.

Alaska politicians (and the people who elect them) have been addicted to easy oil money for the past forty years.  The cozy relationship between some of our politicians (i.e.  ex-governor Parnell was a Conoco-Phillips lobbyist (literally, not just figuratively) and two sitting senators are also oil company employees and others get lots of support and advice from the industry) doesn't hurt either.

So our Republican dominated state government (for the last ten years or so) has spent that money like giddy lottery winners.  They didn't listen to warnings of eventual declines in oil revenues from ISER over the years.  It's true, though, that new technologies allowed for oil extraction longer than originally expected and increasing oil prices kept the revenues up even when production started dipping, letting politicians ignore the economists' warnings.

But the politicians in power positions made no serious plans to find alternative revenues or cut spending.  And because oil so dominated the economy, other traditional sources such as timber or tourism would never come close to what oil has brought in.  And as Republicans, they kept new taxes off the table.  And since none of them have the vision,  the guts, or the charisma to inspire the public to new thinking,  they've avoided the idea of tapping the Alaska Permanent Fund for what it was originally intended to do:  supplement the budget when the oil money runs out.  Nor have they been willing to broach reestablishing a state income tax.

And now the oil is hitting the fan.  The oil price decline plus Republican led tax giveaways to the oil companies have put our state budget into crisis.  Instead of planning for the day when oil revenues would no longer pay all the bills like rational, intelligent people do, they've continued to spend until their fingers come up empty when they stick their hands into the state coffers, at least the ones that don't have special locks on them like the Permanent Fund and budget reserve funds. 

OK, some will complain I'm being partisan here picking on Republicans and letting Democrats off the hook.  Democrats certainly have challenged the big tax breaks the Republican majority gave oil companies, but after redistricting, they no longer had the votes to block them.  And even the public was there, losing a ballot initiative to restore the tax by only 4% despite huge oil company spending on the election. And the Democrats have challenged big capital projects like the Susitna Dam and the Knik Arm bridge.  I don't know that Democrats have been particularly better about leading the way to use the Permanent Fund as a trust fund to help support our budget.

But the fact is that Republicans have been in power - both in the legislature and the governorship - and thus we got to our current dilemma on their watch.  So naming Republicans isn't partisanship, it's factual.

All these thoughts came pouring out of my head after reading an AP piece on the impacts of the low cost of energy  in today's ADN.  Oil and coal and natural gas company stock is down, down, down.  And Alaskan's have known for the last year or so that our stock is way down too.  But it didn't have to be if we had looked beyond the short term and prepared.  But we were drunk on oil money and we weren't forced to.


And just the other day we learned that Sen. Murkowski worked to get Alaska exempted from new EPA rules on energy companies that would require them to lower their carbon emissions. 

I get the short term impacts this will have on rural Alaska.  But the actions they would be forced to take would help wean them off the expensive fuels they've continually been using.  And there are Alaskan locations - like Kodiak and villages around the state - who are already breaking their addiction and finding alternative energy sources. Instead, most places, especially in the Capitol building in Juneau, have continued feeding their and our addiction. 

Some addicts just spiral down into self destruction.  Others break from their destructive ways and learn new, healthier habits.  It's what Alaskans need to do.  And we need politicians who have vision and can inspire Alaskans to break from the unsustainable easy way, to the harder but ultimately necessary path.

We are a state of welfare recipients, getting our state budget funded by oil taxes and the federal government, not to mention the actual individual cash Permanent Fund dividend payouts.  We need to think like the wealthy people we still are -  our Permanent Fund has $52 billion and the constitutional budget reserves has another $10 billion - and use the income of our wealth in a responsible way as others have proposed.  We need to supplement that with some sort of taxes - yes, pay our own way, not rely on others to subsidize our schools, state parks, roads, police, health care.  Let's start being healthy, responsible adults. 

How Can People Pay For A Digiplayer When This Show Is Free Out The Window?

Early morning water colors.

Just across the arm to the mudflats of Matsu.  A little after 6 am.

Knik Arm.  We took off about 6:05am, this was maybe ten minutes later.  The official sunrise in Anchorage for today was 5:40am, but with the mountains blocking the sun, it takes a little longer in the valleys.

It was a little misty over the mountains as we flew over.

And then there were clearer areas like over this glacier.

There was thick cloud cover over Prince William Sound.  It was so tight and so low, it almost looked like carpet.  I wondered whether there was any space between the cloud bottoms and the land.

And there were similar conditions in Washington state (this was approximately where the Olympic National Park might be) as we headed for the Portland airport.

Keep Moving

Fish was a big topic this week as we had house guests up here to do video of a Homer based village fish processing organization. 






Now we're back at the airport headed out for my son's birthday and then my Peace Corps group's reunion in Portland over the weekend.  I can't remember how long it's been since we got together last. 

The upside of 6am flights is seeing Anchorage early as it's getting light.  It almost seems like our house sitter belongs in the house and we are the house sitters when we're here.  But after the next few trips south to settle my mom's stuff, I think our hectic pace will slow down. 

"Fewer than 400 families are responsible for almost half the money raised in the 2016 presidential campaign, . .

. . . a concentration of political donors that is unprecedented in the modern era."


In case you missed that sentence in a New York Times article by Nicholas Confessore, Sarah Cohen, and Karen Yourish, which was republished in lots of other papers including yesterdays Alaska Dispatch, you should go back and read it and the article.

This money is going to be used for marketing research and advertising to try to convince enough voters to support specific candidates, mostly Republicans.  And advertising, done well, works.

If you don't believe it, consider these 36 companies that Business Insider reported spent a billion or more dollars in 2011 on advertising.  They believe that marketing works and the fact that you know their names and use their products proves it.  Before going down to the list,  make your own list of ten companies you think will be on that list.

Really.  Stop reading.  Get a pen and paper or a blank page on your computer and write ten company names that you think spent $1 billion or more on advertising in 2011.  The list is at the bottom of this post.  

Ok, now you can keep reading. 


I'm sure you know almost all their names.  There might be a few you don't because their advertising doesn't go for their corporate name, but for products produced by companies they own.  Like Geico or Colgate.

But it's not hopeless.  Awareness of where the money is coming from helps people understand the motivation behind the advertising.  And if 400 families can raise so much money, think what 50 million families can raise, even if their net worth is 1/1000 of the net worth of the 400.  And then there are the folks at Move To Amend, who are working on a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that made all this money channeling into elections possible.  They want

"to amend our Constitution to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights."

It's not hopeless.  The Jews escaped from the Pharaoh, the Soviet Union fell, colonial countries around the world gained their freedom.  In the US, our fight is relatively easy.  We have access to information, we aren't downtrodden the way other people are and have been, we generally don't get sent to prison for speaking out. 

We just have to stop being distracted by all the drivel this nearly $60 billion a year in advertising sends our way (the tv shows as well as the ads themselves), and pay more attention to what's really important:  family, friends, and keeping democracy from being dismantled.

Here's the list:
(And, also, is the list of about 65 people (mostly) who have donated $1 million or more to the 2016 campaign from the NY Times article.  Knowledge is power.) 

From Business Insider List of Companies that Spent $1 Billion or More in US on Advertising 2011
36. Apple	$1 billion
35, General Mills	$1.002 billion
34. Google	$1.005 billion
33. Microsoft Corp	$1.033 billion
32. Sony Corp	$1.041 billion
31. Capital One Financial Corp	$1.043 billion
30. Viacom	$1.06 billion
29. Kohl's Corp	$1.12 billion
28. Honda Motor Co	$1.14 billion
27. J.C. Penney	$1.16 billion
26. News Corp	$1.27 billion
25. Unilever	$1.3 billion
24. McDonald's Corp	$1.37 billion
23. Berkshire Hathaway	$1.39 billion
22. Sprint Nextel Corp	$1.4 billion
21. Anheuser-Busch InBev	$1.42 billion
20. Macy's	$1.51 billion
19. Target	$1.62 billion
18. Sears	$1.69 billion
17. Bank of America Corp	$1.7 billion
16. Toyota Motor Corp	$1.73 billion
15. Fiat (Chrysler Group)	$1.770.9 billion
14. Walmart Stores	$1.89 billion
13. Johnson & Johnson	$1.94 billion
12. Time Warner	$2.051 billion
11. Pfizer	$2.072 billion
10. Walt Disney Co	$2.112 billion
9. L'Oréal	$2.124 billion
8. American Express Co	$2.125 billion
7. Ford Motor Co	$2.14 billion
6. JPMorgan Chase & Co	$2.35 billion
5. AT&T	$2.36 billion
4. Comcast Corp	$2.47 billion
3. Verizon Communications	$2.52 billion
2. General Motors Co	$3.1 billion
1. Procter & Gamble Co	$4.9 billion

Barbara Brown Starts New Anchorage Based Blog - About the Third Third

I got an email the other day.  Could I help with some questions about a new blog she was starting.  It was a Tumblr blog and I said I really didn't know that much about Tumblr and I'd seen people posting pictures there more than text.  For example.

Today's email said she'd switched to Blogger, which I do know about.  I went over to answer a few questions about getting rid of extraneous, font changing html code and choosing gadgets.  I also pointed out the website I use to create quick html tables.

Barbara's a smart lady.  She's done a lot of things including starting  [directing, it was already started before she got involved] Leadership Anchorage, she's had a radio show, and now she's thinking about the last third of her life and how to make it exciting and meaningful.

She's got great graphics too.  (That was one of the questions which got resolved by switching to blogger - how to size and place them the way she wanted.)  The ones in her first post she painted, then scanned.

So, be among the first in the world to check out her blog whose first post is today:  Our Third Thirds.  It begins:

Identity Crisis #314    [She's got a much more out-there font for her titles and I can't replicate it here and she's got those cool graphics too.] 

So what's the Third Third anyway? My mother is 90. So at 62, I'm looking at things in thirds. First 30 years, second 30, and now: the Third Third. Looking at my life, I see a timeline of decisions debated and decisions made. They're like the points in my life where a life can branch off and generate a whole new parallel universe. The kind where I married that other person or took that other job or moved to that other country. I have crowded the world with parallel universes, but I like where I am so even the bumps got me here.  .  .

  PS - give her some time to figure this out and I suspect this is going to be a very powerful blog.  The first post is pretty thought provoking and visually cool already. 

Sam Daley-Harris, Citizens Climate Lobby, and Japan Summer Festival

Today's Citizens' Climate Lobby international phone meeting (that the Anchorage group calls into from UAA) featured:

Sam Daley-Harris, Center for Citizen Empowerment and Transformation

How can we maximize the leverage from the media we generate and other actions we take? RESULTS founder and CCL mentor Sam Daley–Harris will join our August call and coach us on best practices to ensure that our actions have the greatest impact with members of Congress. After 15 years with RESULTS, Sam founded the Microcredit Summit Campaign, which he left in 2012 to establish the Center for Citizen Empowerment and Transformation.

As I sit here trying to write, I realize I'm getting blasé about these really good speakers.  They're all so good and the meetings are so efficiently run - the reasons I kept going to meetings - that this has become the expectation.  If the Alaska legislature were 1/3 as efficient and effective, Alaska would be humming with a balanced budget and serious programs for making Alaska a more caring and equitable place.

As we left, they were setting up the Japanese Summer Festival at the Cuddy Center.

The event goes from 12pm to 5pm today and parking's free.  It's on the west end of campus near the Wendy Williamson auditorium.

These two, apparently had their setting up chores done, and were 'going' at it.

There was a table of Ikebana. 















The dining room at the Cuddy has the bazaar.  There was food in various places, music, folks in various kinds of Japanese dress.

And a great sale on Pocky. 


 As I post this, the Japan Day celebration has three and a half hours to go.  And it's a spectacularly beautiful day. 

Why Wasn't I Surprised That The Guy Who Killed Cecil The Lion Was A Dentist?

It's been a while since I noticed the DDS on the ends of the names of people who have trophy bears in the Anchorage Airport. 

These are only two bears representing two dentists over a 40 year period so let's not jump to conclusions about dentists. Yet.  .  .
Not all the stuffed bears at the airport had their shooters identified, but a couple that did were hunting or fishing guides.


Dr. Walter Palmer of Minnesota, is reported to have said of the death of Cecil:

“I hired several professional guides, and they secured all proper permits,” read a statement from Palmer to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “To my knowledge, everything about this trip was legal and properly handled and conducted.”
He added: “I had no idea that the lion I took was a known, local favorite, was collared and part of a study until the end of the hunt. I relied on the expertise of my local professional guides to ensure a legal hunt. I deeply regret that my pursuit of an activity I love and practice responsibly and legally resulted in the taking of this lion."

Let's remember that most of us know almost nothing about Dr. Palmer and we're filling in the details to fit our own belief systems.  I think we all have a tendency to believe what we want to believe - those of us reading the stories and Dr. Palmer himself..  He wanted a lion and the guys he contacted said they'd get him one.  How carefully did he look into their credentials?  How would an American hunter even check Zimbabwean credentials?  As for the rest of us, many are blasting some version of the evil hunter killing innocent animals.   Others are praising the good hunters and singling Palmer out as the bad apple that gives all hunters a bad rep.

While I'm not likely to let this guy off easily, the real issue to me is: what is it that causes grown men, with a good education to want to go out and kill animals, not for food, but for trophies?  (And a follow up question that I won't explore here, is how this sort of killing connected to killing human beings?)   My representative in Congress is known for his wall full of animal heads and hides. He even missed a key subcommittee vote because he was on safari in South Africa.  I had a student once who explained how hunting was a bonding experience between him and his dad.  I get that, and I'm glad my dad and I bonded over other things, like hiking, books, art, baseball, and movies, rather than killing animals.

Some defend hunting as part of their cultural tradition and point out how hunters help protect the environment where animals live.  I think there's merit to those arguments, up to a point.  There are lots of traditions that modern societies no longer openly practice - like slavery, like beating kids as punishment, like cock and dog fighting,  like burning witches, like exorcising demons, or child labor and child marriage.

I look at that picture of Dr. Eberle and wonder what he was thinking at the time.  I too like to shoot animals, but with my camera rather than a gun.  That allows me a connection with the animal, but allows the animal to go on living and for others to enjoy seeing them too.   What causes grown men to want to kill big animals and display them?  Is it some sort of feelings of inadequacy, of lack of power?  Is it part of the DNA  they inherited from ancestors who hunted for survival?

A New Zealand study, done to help a government agency prepare to manage hunting on public estates, looked at lots of previous studies to try to determine motivations and satisfactions of hunters. 

Decker and Connelly (1989) proposed three categories of motivations; achievement oriented, affiliation oriented, and appreciation oriented.

• -Achievement oriented hunters are motivated by the attainment of a particular goal,  which may be harvesting an animal for meat, a trophy or a display of skill.

• -Affiliation oriented hunters participate in hunting with the primary purpose of fostering personal relationships with friends, family or hunting companions.

• -Appreciation oriented hunters are motivated by a desire to be outdoors, escape everyday stress or to relax.

The study goes on to list a much wider range of specifics, that tend to fall into these categories.  It doesn't seem to get into deeper psychological reasons such as the need to demonstrate power (maybe getting a trophy is the proxy for this) or where these needs come from.  Why some people (mostly men) have such a need to kill animals and others do not.  There's lots to ponder here. 

I'd also note that the Alaska Dental Association strongly opposed the use of dental aides to perform basic dental work in rural Alaska.  Most, I'm sure, believed that dentists would give better care and that aides lacked the extensive training necessary to make critical decisions.  They didn't seem to weigh the benefits of many, many more kids and adults getting very simple basic dental care and education that local aides could provide in an area where few dentists lived.    I think their belief was genuine, but colored by their own conscious or unconscious self interests.  As are most all of our beliefs. One such interest was simply the same as all professional licensing - limiting the amount of competition.  Also dentists could fly out to rural Alaska and see patients and also go hunting and fishing on the side.  That is true of many urban, non-Native Alaskans who provide professional services in rural Alaska.  And my saying it shouldn't cause people to question the motives of people who do such work.  But we should be aware of how such side benefits might bias one's beliefs about what's right and wrong, good and bad.

When it comes to endangered species, there are bigger issues  - like resource extraction that destroys habitat, like overpopulation that impinges on wild habitat for housing and food.  And climate change which is changing the landscape world wide.  We should be concerned with individual abuses such as luring a well known collared lion out of a refuge to be shot.  But the bigger environmental trends are much more impactful and threatening to all living things, including humans.  These are the least immediately visible and seemingly the hardest to fight.  But there are ways and many people are pursuing them.  One just has to look, and the internet makes that easy.