Beach Guard Dog

I ran down to the beach the other morning and watched a guy run into the surf.  I looked up on the beach to see this guy was guarding his bud's clothes while he was off in the surf. 

















And he was out in the water, not worrying about someone stealing his stuff. 

[Video Fixed, Sorry] Baseball And Other Value Sources Of State House Candidate Andy Josephson

My goal was to interview pairs of candidates running against each other with a focus on what their personal values are and how those values might affect the decisions they would make if elected to the legislature.  It seems to me their basic values are more revealing than asking questions about current issues.

I thought I'd start with the two candidates running for the House in my district - the new district 15.

Basically this is Northern Lights on the north, Pine and Boniface on the east, Tudor to Elmore to Dimond on the south, and New Seward, MacInnes, LaTouche on the west. 

I thought it would be fairly easy because I knew both candidates.  I've known Democrat Andy Josephson's father, not well, for a long time.   Dick Traini, the Republican, graduated from the Masters of Public Administration program 25 years ago and had been my student.  He's told me that his education has given him a much broader view of local politics and an understanding of the balance of public and private interests than he would have had.  He's also been my local Assembly member for a long time.  (Assembly is a non-partisan office and Dick has been a registered Independent until fairly recently.)  I've voted for him, though in this race I did contribute to Josephson's campaign.  Dick knew that but he agreed right away to participate. I was able to get Andy's done fairly quickly.  But Dick's Assembly obligations got in the way and we weren't able to schedule a time to do the video.  Before I left for LA I let Dick know I was going to proceed without his video, since there wouldn't be enough time before the election when I got back. 

Andy Josephson

Basically, my idea was to probe the candidates to find out what their basic human values were, where they came from, and how they would affect their legislative decisions.

I wasn't going to edit - I would just let it run as they spoke.  That way there'd be no issues about my trying to make one candidate look better than another.  (It also would be a little slower than the video people normally see on television where there are lots of cuts, where the pauses are edited out, etc.)  I did start the interview and then stopped it and started over as the candidate - who is not used to doing video interviews - got a better sense of things.  He was also tapping the table and causing the camera to jiggle.  I've left out the original beginning.  Other than that, this is just what he said.

I've marked different parts of the video so you can jump to topics you want to hear. Click on the dots on the video bar at the bottom of the video screen.





Basically, Andy Josephson's values are influenced strongly by American culture;  by family, including playing baseball (starting about 2:40); and from friends.  His response to how he would decide on legislation starts at about 5:40 and is worth watching. This includes advice from trusted mentors who have more experience in the legislature than he has, the reality of time and needing to prioritize bills by importance, how it affects his district and what his constituents care about.    I asked how he'd handle demands from his party that conflicted with his values. I also asked if there were any dealbreakers - issues that he felt too strongly about to compromise.

So this will be my experiment on this.  I don't have a problem with something being entertainment as long as it's also substantive.  But when doing political videos, editing raises questions of whether I'm tyring to bias the video, so I've left the video pretty much what he said without editing.

I left out, as I said above, his first attempt at this.  The point was for him to feel comfortable and to express himself as well as he could without spending a lot of time.

I'd also say that he hasn't seen the finished product and thus has not approved or disapproved of it. 

Getting New Ideas From Old Pictures and an Old Poem

Book reviews give us glimpses of different worlds and possibilities.  Here are a couple from Sunday's LA Times.  Two are about old photos and one about old documents of US history.    Here's a quote that caught my attention. 

"Sandweiss believes Cushman made a deliberate choice not to become a professional photographer:  "He chose to stand back from the world of professional artists, documentarians or writers like his first cousin, John Steinbeck, whose circles he traveled on the edge of*.  That's not what he was about."

This seemed relevant to add to the collection of possible explanations of what I'm doing on this blog. 

It comes from a review of  Eric Sandweiss' book of The Day in Its Color:  Charles Cushman's Photographic Journey Through a Vanishing America.  How many collections of photography in people's closets and garages could be curated into historically and artistically important archives?  A lot, I would guess if they landed in the right hands.  What distinguished this collection, apparently, was the a) it's one of the earliest Kodachrome collection, the photographer kept track of each slide, and he apparently had an eye for a wide variety of things.


Also reviewed is Ransom Riggs Talking Pictures images and Messages Rescued from the Past. This is a collection of old photos found by the author that had something written on them.  A glimpse into the stories of people's lives. 

"All nations are places, . . .but they are also acts of imagination.  Who has a part in a nation's story, like who can become a citizen and who has a right to vote, isn't foreordained, or even stable.  The story's plot, like the nation's borders and the nature of its electorate, is always shifting."

Jill Lepore is a Harvard history professor and her book, The Story of America: Essays on Origins, takes a new look at historical documents and offers new interpretations.  For example, she argues, according to book reviewer Julia M. Klein, that Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride" written in 1860 is about slavery, more than about Paul Revere's ride.

Among Lepore's other subjects are Benjamin Franklin's frequently misunderstood compendium of aphorisms, "The Way to Wealth"; Tom Paine's brilliant "Common Sense" and mostly tragic life; Noah Webster's initially derided dictionary; Edgar Allan Poe's unabashedly popular, self-parodying horror stories; and the art of propagandistic campaign biographies.

Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemmingsc is also covered.  


*. . .whose circle he traveled on the edge of."  I'm not a grammar purists.  I think some dangling participles sound perfectly fine. I try not to leave sentences like this in the blog.  I would have probably rewritten the whole sentence to avoid this awkward way of saying he was on the outer edge of Steinbeck's circle. 

LA Skeletons, Morning Glories, Gingko, Studebaker, And More

As we walked from the bus stop to my Mom's from the airport, and looked at the huge variation of vegetation, invasive species came to mind.  LA is an invasive species incubator.  I don't know if that's true, but so much grows here.  Of course if they stopped bringing in water from Northern California and the Colorado River, probably most things would just die.  (I looked and it is a big problem.  And animal species too.)

In any case, here some parts of the walk that attracted my camera eye.

Wall of morning glories

Health food store juices

I saw these leaves on this tree and I knew I'd seen them.  I mentioned to J I thought there was a bunch of these on the campus of People's University in Beijing where I taught 3 months about eight years ago.  And she said, "gingko"?  I looked it up when we got home and I'm relatively certain that's what this is.  There's a long description of gingko's at an Ohio State website which discretely says the female tree's fruit can be malodorous.  A forum at Chow is more direct:

the presence of a bunch of old (and quite beautiful to look at) female ginkos kept me from buying a house once, about fifteen years ago, just by the smell) (Boy, can you imagine a backyard full o' ginko and durian?!!!!)

RFGS

By Rich Gould-Saltman on Sep 30, 2004 02:30 PM

The campus where I attended college back east is filled with gingko trees, especially in the quadrangle. At certain times of the year, it was like walking into a sewer. Gingko seemed like a perfect name for a tree that was so "stinko."

By Jack Flash on Sep 30, 2004 03:24 PM

you must be referring to Penn. I went there for undergrad and the smell was horrible from the trees!!

By kelly on Sep 30, 2004 07:37 PM

Yup!

I couldn't resist.  The LA Times Sunday edition endorsed Obama for president. 

From Barry Leppan on the Studebakers Drivers Forum:

According to the Hamilton Spectator, the last Studebaker to be built (a 1966 Cruiser, 283 Chevy V8) came down the assembly line on the morning of March 17th, 1966, in Hamilton, Ontario.

However, some of our local Hamilton Chapter members, who worked there at the time, will tell you it was really produced the previous afternoon, March 16th.

It is most probable that the 16th is correct, and the press release and all the TV, etc. coverage took place the next morning, the 17th!

The placard for the car in the Studebaker National Museum reads March 16th, 1966.

Regardless, it brought to an end 114 years of vehicle manufacture under the Studebaker name.

A post at Cars in Depth by Ronnie Schreiber challenges that:

According to what I’ve read, and this seems to be confirmed in a few places, there’s no question that assembly of CKD Studebakers continued after the shutdown of the Hamilton, ON plant in at least two places, Australia and Israel, as those companies used up their last remaining kits and components. There is some indication that assembly in Israel continued through the end of 1966 and possibly into 1967, which would make them the last Studebakers ever that rolled off the lines.

 He's got some Israeli post cards up as part of his evidence.   In any case, the car above is over 45 years old.  I wonder how it passes the California emissions test.

This appears to be either an unripe persimmon or one that is more yellow than orange.  Or maybe it isn't a persimmon at all.

 

The people in the area around my mom's place go in for Halloween in a big way.  These two life sized skeletons were hanging from a three story house.  There is something more than a little disturbing about this.   I'll do some more Halloween stuff before we get back to Anchorage.  

If You Get High Enough, There's Blue Sky

We left Anchorage just after midnight.  It had been another bright, sunny day and I got some leaves raked and flower beds mulched. 








I worked on my Chinese homework, but crashed pretty quickly on the plane.  It was 4:30 am when we got to Seattle.  Dark and wet. 







But before long we were above the clouds, barely.

And then they got closer. 

 

And then we were in them.

 

And then below them over LA.

Tend days or so to visit my mom with a side trip to SF to visit my son and dil.  Despite the clouds, it's warm - high 60s headed for 70 or more.  My eyes are closing.  Later.

Presidential Race As Sporting Event Part 2: The Computer Game - What if it's a tie?

The NY Times has a little game you can play on your computer to see the different ways the states could fall and how it would affect the election.

I got a tie, by giving Romney most of the 'tossup' states and leaving all the 'leaning' states where they were. (At least the NYTimes uses the neutral term 'tossup' instead of the LA Times' 'battleground' states.)

Click image to see it bigger and sharper - or click here to go to the NYT page

So what happens if my scenario - a tie - is the result election night?  It just turns out the Washington Post asked the same question yesterday.  They say there are 32 different ways to get to a tie.  And they say a tie doesn't look good for Obama.

If somehow, though, we got to a 269-vote tie, the task of electing the president would fall to the House of Representatives — the new one that will assume office in January. According to the 12th Amendment, each state delegation would cast one vote, with the winner determined by whoever wins more states.

Since we don’t know exactly what the House will look like, we can’t say with certainty who would have the edge. But it’s very unlikely that an Electoral College tie would wind up in Obama’s favor.

At the NYTimes you can move the states over to either candidate. Is this sport? Or is this just a clever graphic way of helping people grasp the effect of each state's electoral college votes? Probably a little of both, and it certainly plays into the "Winner - Loser" narrative I discussed in Presidential Race As Sporting Event Part 1.   Are they making equally clever graphics to show how to balance the budget?  As I'm typing that question, I'm thinking, "Yes, they did, and I posted about it."

Bookmark this page for election night.  It will be a handy way to keep track as the votes are counted.

This was not the Part 2 I had in mind, but it seemed appropriate.  I guess there will be a Part 3. 

The Presidential Race As A Sporting Event - Part 1

Anyone else getting tired of the sporting event treatment of the presidential election?

The political season, it seems, has less than a month to go and we're into the playoffs.  There are two basic themes I hear in the coverage:

1.  Who's up and who's down?  There's a sense of the multistage competition of gymnastics or diving.  Each event (from the primary elections to the debates) gives the candidate to gain or lose in relation to the other competitors.  The announcers discuss their strengths and weaknesses and what they are going to have to do to gain points and to avoid errors in each event. But there's also the one-to-one battle of boxing.  Other sports metaphors abound.   Some examples:

San Francisco Chronicle:

"Obama, Romney rematch could set TV ratings records"

Forbes:

"It’s almost kick off time to the second presidential debate. Before we begin, a few things to watch for—

. . . the key for Governor Romney will be to make a connection with the people in the audience who will be posing the questions. If Romney can make the people believe that he ‘feels their pain’, it will be difficult for Romney to be declared a loser tonight, no matter how well the President may perform. For President Obama, it is not just a matter of ‘showing up’, he is going to have to both defend the past four years and, more importantly, lay out a very clear vision for what he has in mind for the next four years. He will also need to find a way to be far more aggressive than his first debate performance without crossing the line into Joe Biden territory

From the Washington Post website:

More from PostPolitics

Second debate: Winners and losers

Chris Cillizza OCT 16

THE FIX | The second presidential debate is history. Who did the best? Who did the worst?

2.  Then there is the addition of fact checking this year.  It's been there in the past, but mostly it was done on blogs.  Now fact checking has gone mainstream.  This would seem to be a positive development.  Someone is paying attention to what people are actually saying, not just whether they look and sound presidential saying it.

But it's mostly "did he say X on this Tuesday and Y on Monday?"   Tuesday night I heard them checking whether Obama had used the word terrorism in his Rose Garden speech after the Benghazi consulate was attacked.  Yes, fact checking is important, and I applaud this addition to the scene.  But often it too becomes trivial.  What's missing are the bigger questions about policy and what it all means.

Generally,  the fact checking is just an extension of 1) - who is up and who is down?  We aren't checking facts in a quest for truth and understanding, but to get closer to determining who will win or lose.

For the media, it probably makes sense to treat elections the way they treat sporting events.  It reduces the election to a contest to determine the winners and losers, not to elevate everyone's understanding of the issues.  It raises suspense.  It doesn't require a lot of research or figuring out how to interpret complicated subjects like health care or the economy.   The hype brings in viewers.  More viewers mean more ad revenue.

And for most of us, it simply doesn't matter.

The candidates have figured out that most people already know how they will vote.  Because the winner is chosen by the electoral college vote and not the popular vote, most states aren't even in play.   Even if a candidate wins by a million votes in California, that extra million doesn't count for anything.

So, the candidates' focus is on the small group of undecideds in a few states.  270TOWin identifies eleven states.  (270 electoral votes are needed to win the election.)

The LA Times, in May, created a map that shows 8 "battleground" (sports announcers love war imagery) states.   Let's look at who the candidates are wooing. 

State- 270 To win list	% undecided	LA Times List	Total Reg Voters	Number of Undecided
Colorado	5	√	2,300,000	115,000
Florida	5	√	8,000,000	400,000
Iowa	5	√	1,500,000	75,000
Michigan	6		5,000,000	300,000
Nevada	5		1,000,000	50,000
New Hampshire	6	√	700,000	42,000
North Carolina	3	√	4,500,000	135,000
Ohio	4	√	5,600,000	224,000
Pennsylvania	4		6,000,000	240,000
Virginia	9	√	3,500,000	315,000
Wisconsin	2	√	2,900,000	58,000
Total USA:	1.4%		137,000,000	1,954,000

HTML Tables

   
According to this, all the media coverage we're getting is about  less than 2 million people, 1.4% of registered voters, who can't make up their minds.  Bill Maher's comment on this situation, summed up from this video, is:

"And that, in a nutshell, is America's celebrated, undecided voter: put on a pedestal by the media as if they were Hamlet in a think-tank, searching out every last bit of information, high-minded arbiters pouring over policy positions and matching them against their own philosophies. Please, they mostly fall into a category political scientists call 'low information voters,' otherwise known as 'dipsh*ts.'"

I imagine that people who can't make up their minds are NOT going to decide whom to vote for based on the issues.  It's going to be how they feel about the candidates.
So,  the candidates are pretty much ignoring the 135 million people who either have made up their minds already or are in states where the outcome is pretty certain and they're  pouring their campaign attention and dollars on the 1.9 million undecideds in the 'battleground' states.

The only thing the candidates want from the rest of us is money and labor to turn those undecideds  and to make sure their supporters vote.  I've heard of Anchorage political volunteers being used to call people in Colorado. 

The media, on the other hand, need all of us to watch or read or listen, so they are using the simplest and most successful story line they know:  a sports battle. 

This is politics as entertainment.  It's not politics as an opportunity for national discussion about our future.  It's not analysis of critical issues.  It's simple, black and white:  who's going to win and who's going to lose?  Foreign policy, the economy, the environment, education, war, and all the other burning issues we face are just tea leaves for pundits to ponder to predict who will win and and who will lose. 

And this probably isn't very different from every other election in our history. A little more divisive maybe, but just as simplistic. 

AIFF 2012: H.P. Lovecraft, Señor Student, Coolio - All Coming to Anchorage International Film Festival 2012: Feature Peek

Screen Shot from Lad: A Yorkshire Story

[UPDATE Nov 11:  I just learned that two features were added - Deadfall and The Falls.  I've updated this post to include them.  Deadfall is scheduled for opening night and opens theatrically in New York, DC, and Cambridge, MA. the next week.]

The 2012 Anchorage International Film Festival begins Friday, Nov. 30. They posted their list of films officially selected to the festival earlier this week. 
 Below is the Features category.  These are the full length (55 minutes or more)  narrative films.  The kind you'd go to the movies to see normally, though few independent films ever make it to local theaters.  Except during film festivals.



There are 15 feature films from eight countries:

• Canada (2)
• Hungary (1)
• Italy (1)
• Mexico (2, one with Spain), 
• UK (2)
• USA (9 - one with Switzerland)

The links are my first quick and dirty looking around at what these films are about.  Some go to film websites, others to trailers, there's an interview with a director (in Spanish), and one or two reviews of the films, and a couple of interesting google translations.  I tried to find something that gives you a sense of the films.  These weren't just the first thing google listed. 

From Shouting Secrets

Features
Title	Director(s)	Country	Runtime
‡Aquí y Allá (Here and There)	Antonio Mendez Esparza	Mexico/Spain	110m
A föld szeretője (The Lover of the Soil)	Zsolt Pozsgai	Hungary	100m
‡Between Us	Dan Mirvish	USA	90m
‡Confine	Tobias Tobbell	United Kingdom	90m
Deadfall*	Stefan Ruzowitzky	USA	94m
El Estudiante (The Student)	Roberto Girault Facha	Mexico	98m
The Falls*	Jon Garcia	USA	90m
‡Grassroots	Stephen Gyllenhaal	USA	97m
Il cacciatore di anatre (The Duck Hunter)	Egidio Veronesi	Italy	90m
‡Lad: A Yorkshire Story	Dan Hartley	United Kingdom	96m
Passionflower	Shelagh Carter	Canada	83m
Redlegs	Brandon Harris	USA	67m
Servitude	Warren Sonoda	Canada	85m
‡Shouting Secrets	Korinna Sehringer	Switzerland/USA	88m
‡Things I Don’t Understand	David Spaltro	USA	111m
Two Hundred Thousand Dirty	Timothy L. Anderson	USA	89m
The Whisperer in Darkness	Sean Branney	USA	104m

[‡= in competition - updated 11/25]

A Föld szeretője

Some bits of info I picked up while checking film links, that might attract or repel movie goers:

Takes place in:
Cincinatti - Redlegs 
Guanajuato - El Estudiante
Seattle -  Grassroots
Winnipeg - Passionflower

Other:

About waiters - Servitude
Won Best Film, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor,  American Indian Film Festival - Shouting Secrets
Stars Coolio and a mattress store - Two Hundred Thousand Dirty
H.P. Lovecraft story brought to screen in 30's black and white style - The Whisperers of Darkness
Director involved in leak that Sarah Palin didn't know Africa is a continent - Between Us
Involves a Hospice - Things I Don't Understand
Director won an Oscar in 2008 for Best Foreign Film - Deadfall*
Two Mormon missionaries fall in love - The Falls *

There are also documentaries, animated films, short films, super short films, and Snow Dance films (shot by Alaskans or about Alaska.)

Screenshot from Things I Don't Understand

I'll post more about the festival as we get closer, but I thought I'd give folks an appetizer since the festival website now has lists of the selected films.  This means that of all the films submitted to the festival, these are the ones that the screeners have selected to be shown at the festival.  The next step is to identify the 'films in competition.'  These are the ones the screeners deem the best and eligible to compete for festival prizes.


[*Were added late, I added them here Nov. 11]



Here's a 2008 festival post that explains the different categories and the steps from submissions to awards.   I still have the 2011 AIFF Tab up above if you want to check out last year's festival.

The Man Who Mistook His Son For A Tax Cap

In the title story in his award winning book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about a patient,

 Dr. P is a musician who had problems with his visual images. He couldn’t recognize things around him, even his face, wife, foot, shoes, etc. Therefore, he grabbed his wife’s head to put on his head, because he thought that his wife was a hat. But, he has wonderful musical intelligence, he can do his activities if he’s singing, but he would forget everything and completely stop his activities when he’s interrupted from his singing.  [From Yuli Rahmawati's Weblog)

I was reminded of Sacks' book when I saw this sign, illegally located in a public flower bed (not maintained) at Lake Otis and 36th.  [Update:  A callback from the Municipality code enforcement said this sign was on a public right of way, but it is on private property.  He said they will only take down signs on the right of way that are a hazard.] 

Click to enlarge

I would recommend against voting for Don Smith - read his commentary about our 'entitlement' mentality and the list of freebies he would get rid of starting with free school meals* for poor kids - plus his opponent, Berta Gardner, is someone I've known and respected for a long time.

But I would recommend reading any of Dr. Sacks' books.

*In Finland,  widely reported to have the best school system in the world, all kids get free meals because they believe it helps them learn. 

Anchorage's Pot Hole Art Gallery

I took advantage of Wednesday's sunshine to go for a run and found an art gallery I'd never noticed before.  The Pot Hole Gallery opened in an alley off of Northern Lights with an Ice Art exhibit created by M. Nature.