Monthly Archives: March 2008

General

Good To Hear Positive Comments

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29  bar steep rise 30.04 0mph SSW dewpoint 23  Spring

             Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

Walked outside today, no ice on the driveway, sun in the sky.  Felt healthy and limber.  Good.  Ready to be out there.

In these caesuras between one bout of intense concentration and the next I tend to clear out my in basket.  So, I gathered beneficiary forms to complete the living trust work Kate and I did last fall.  I filled in all the upcoming dates on my calendar including Kate’s CME trip to San Francisco and her trip to Denver hoping it will be during the time of Gabriel’s birth.  Filed the property tax papers.  Things like that.

While working on the hydroponics, I remarked to Kate that I can see Asperger’s Syndrome as a magnified version of the typical male.  When I want to get something done, I like to stay with it, put my energy and focus in one place.  One aspect of Asperger’s is the tendency to become absorbed in one thing to the exclusion of others.  I get it.

I had a few days of nice compliments about my work from the China tour on Saturday to the Groveland presentation.  A friend called me a polymath and for a generalist like me that’s a high compliment.  Another, who comes from a long line of farmers, a really long line–over 4,000 years worth–liked my project for the Woolly Mammoth year.  It’s good to hear positive comments, but so easy to get sidetracked by them, too.  These days I’m much better at hearing them and saying thank you.

Time for sleep.  Good night.

Family, Garden, Politics, Travel

Airlines Not Required to Provide Food, Water, Clean Toilets or Fresh Air

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42 bar steep rise 29.71 1mph WNW dewpoint 28  Spring

           Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

We soaked the rock wool seed pellets in 5.0 ph water.  This will neutralize the natural high alkalinity of the rock wool. Tomorrow I’ll sow seeds from a lettuce mixture we got at Seed Saver’s Exchange.  Tomorrow, too, the tomato seeds will got in the peat pots.  Action on the indoor garden and some (the tomato seeds) on the outdoor garden proceeds apace.

The library provided a couple of books on DVD for Kate and her drive to Nevada, Iowa over the weekend.  She’s doing a sort of homecoming/reunion thing.  Meanwhile I’ll celebrate Chinese New Year’s in Lauderdale.

The beat goes on.

In the ongoing journal of outrage at the way things are, this from today’s newswire: 

A federal appeals court has rejected a law requiring airlines to provide food, water, clean toilets and fresh air to passengers trapped in a plane delayed on the ground.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that New York’s new state law interferes with federal law governing the price, route or service of an air carrier. It was the first law in the nation of its kind.

The appeals court said the new law was laudable but only the federal government has the authority to enact such a regulation.

The law was challenged before the appeals court by the Air Transport Association of America, the industry trade group representing leading U.S. airlines.

General

Dying For a Newspaper

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40  bar rises 29.60 3mph W dewpoint 30  Spring

          Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

So, this guy goes out to get his newspaper and slips on the ice.  If you read my obituary early, it may start with the line, Died for His Morning Paper.  After some initial conflict in our relationship–I wanted to be in the city and Andover was stubborn about remaining in the exurbs–I have come to love our land.  All of it.  Except.  The driveway.

It slopes.  Most days in most years this is no big deal.  I drive a car up it and down it.  If it snows, I get out the snowblower and remove it.  On occasion, usually in March or April, snow melt or rain freezes on the sidewalk and on the slope of the driveway creating a downright dangerous condition.  Even more dangerous of course because I encounter it before I’m awake.  Kate often gets the newspaper, but she seems to handle the slope better, or at least, doesn’t talk about her slips. (She’s a Norwegian. Stoic.)

Case in point.  This morning.  I put on my Acorn slippers with their padded plastic soles and went out the front door, down the front steps and onto my @##!  Aside from my dignity, which I have little of in the morning anyhow, nothing serious damaged, but I did go back inside and announce that the paper would be retrieved when “conditions warranted.”

Since Kate was stuck reading Parenting magazine, one of the many free magazine subscriptions she gets just being an MD, I listened to the first few groans, smirks and cries of disbelief at the bad advice, about Parenting, of all things.  This made me head for the downstairs and the plastic bucket in which I deposited my Yak-Traks last years.

Yak-Traks are a fraidy cats dream.  They slip over your boot or tennis shoe and put coiled metal in contact with the ice rather than your slippery soul.  They worked great.  I spread salt on the bad places, got the Tribune, came inside and promptly, you guessed, had a near miss slipping on our tile floor.  Turns out the Yak-Traks create instability on solid surfaces.  Sigh.

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

Rock Wool Seed Blankies

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36  bar steep fall 29.84 1mph SSE  Dewpoint 26  Spring

                Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

Ah.  Hands back in the soil, thinking and doing with plants.  We bought two stems of yellow Plumeria when we were in Hawai’i and I potted them today.  Just the act of finding a pot, putting in some potting soil and adding water immersed my soul deep in the earth. 

The hydroponics setup is underway, too.  Seeds don’t grow well in hydroponic growing mediums, so there’s a prior step that involves starting seedlings in small rock wool blankies, then transplanting them, blankie and all, into the large pebble-sized lava rock medium.  

A seedling needs a couple of critical tools to grow inside.  The first is a warming coil to make sure the temperature underneath the seed pack does not get below 60 degrees or so.  We have those, four of them.  The second is a grow light.  We have those, too. Two of them. 

Tomorrow lettuce seeds will go into the rock wool seed blankies and some herbs as well.  These are all heritage seeds Kate and I purchased at the Seed Saver’s Exchange outside Decorah, Iowa.  Potting soil will go in some small cubes made of molded peat moss.  In them will go a few heritage tomato seeds and anything else we need to have a jumpstart on for the garden. 

The lettuce and herbs will make the transfer into the hydroponics.  We’ll learn how to work with the temps, timing of the nutrient solution flows, the nutrient solutions themselves while growing an easy crop.  The tomato seedlings and the other seedlings will get planted in the raised beds we’ve turned over from flowers to vegetables.

There are still a few more tools we need like an electrical conductance meter, a turkey baster and an aquarium heater or two.  I’ll pick those up on Friday when I go in to do two Weber tours.

This manual labor balances the intellectual work I do and I’m glad to be back at it.  From now until mid-October the garden and our land will take up more and more of my time and happily so.

Politics

Iraq A Successful Endeavor. Dick Cheney

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This is just the first few paragraphs of Hiaasen’s article. He’s the funniest political columnist in the good ol’ USofA.  Click on his name if you want to read the rest.

  

By CARL HIAASEN

On the five-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, President Bush declared that the United States is on the way to winning the war.

He made this stupefying pronouncement in the safe confines of the Pentagon, where it’s unacceptable to question the commander-in-chief, no matter how dense or self-deluded he might be.

If Bush had dared to make the same speech in a public town hall, among civilians, the reception would have been chillier. According to almost every opinion poll, about two-thirds of all Americans now stand opposed to the war in Iraq.

When reminded last week of this statistic, Vice President Dick Cheney responded: “So?”

Bush sent Cheney to Baghdad to mark the dubious anniversary of their costly, misbegotten adventure. What better way to buoy the spirits of the 160,000 U.S. soldiers who are now stuck in Iraq — a surprise visit by The Man Who’s Never Been Right.

True to form, the vice president repeated his dark assertion that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had close ties with al Qaeda, a claim discredited and rejected by every U.S. intelligence agency.

Cheney also described the American effort to bring stability and democracy to Iraq as ”a successful endeavor.” Compared to what — the landing of the Hindenburg?

General

This Just In! Minneapolis-St. Paul Fun Cities

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 Woolly Bill Schmidt found this.  What we knew all along.

We’re Stunned! Most Fun U.S. City Is…It’s not New York, New Orleans, or even Las Vegas. The city where you’ll have the most fun is…Minneapolis.

That’s the word from game maker Cranium, Inc., which commissioned Bert Sperling, who masterminded the ‘Best Places to Live’ feature for Money magazine, to rank 50 cities for their fun factor. This was determined by the city’s number of sports teams, restaurants, dance performances, toy stores, and the amount of the city’s budget that is spent on recreation, among other factors.

And why did Minneapolis beat out cities known for the classic fun factors of sin and sun? According to Cranium, the goal was to find a city that is an ‘outrageously fun experience with something for everyone.’ Minneapolis won because it’s the home of Mary Tyler Moore, four professional sports teams, and the best mall in America. Minneapolis has more theaters than Boston, more parks than Denver, more golfers per capita than any other city in America, and with 10,000 lakes in the state, Minnesota, has more coastline than California, Florida, and Hawaii combined. It even has 15 dog parks. Woof! Cranium CEO Richard Tait said, ‘It’s almost a no-brainer’ to crown Minneapolis the Most Fun City.

Perhaps even more startling than the fact that Minneapolis is No. 1 is that New Orleans is No. 50. Does that mean a trip to the Mall of America is more fun than Mardi Gras? You decide.

Here are the top 50 fun cities, ranked from top to bottom:

Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota
Orange County, California
San Jose, California
Atlanta, Georgia
Chicago, Illinois
Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Washington, DC
Oakland, California
Salt Lake City-Ogden, Utah
Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, Washington
Portland-Vancouver, Oregon-Washington
San Francisco, California
Baltimore, Maryland
Milwaukee-Waukesha, Wisconsin
Denver, Colorado
Detroit, Michigan
St. Louis, Missouri
San Diego, California
Indianapolis, Indiana
Cincinnati, Ohio
Columbus, Ohio
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Sacramento, California
Nashville, Tennessee
Las Vegas, Nevada
Los Angeles-Long Beach, California
Kansas City, Missouri-Kansas
Nassau-Suffolk, New York
Charlotte-Gastonia-Rock Hill, North Carolina
Omaha, Nebraska
Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Newport News, Virginia
Houston, Texas
Cleveland-Lorain-Elyria, Ohio
Dallas, Texas
Memphis, Tennessee
Orlando, Florida
Louisville, Kentucky
Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas
Riverside-San Bernardino, California
Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point, North Carolina
New York, New York
Boston, Massachusetts
Hartford, Connecticut
Austin-San Marcos, Texas
Newark, Newark
Miami, Florida
Bergen-Passaic, Newark
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Phoenix-Mesa, Arizona
New Orleans, Louisiana

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Memories

Cheesy Sci-Fi Movies

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21  bar steady  1mph W dewpoint 15   Spring (yeah, right!)

              Full Moon of Winds

Spent this afternoon and evening watching NCAA basketball and movies.  Watched a medium bad Sci-Fi movie about a blackhole created in a lab in St. Louis.  It’s bad in part because of the acting.  Cheesy sci-fi movies only seem to have enough budget for one take.  It’s also bad because I read the hard sci-fi book from which the concept came and this movie bore no relationship to the very good book at all.  Which is a shame since that book had real science behind it and would have made a good movie.  This one had a beast that came out of the black hole and ate energy.  Hmmm.  So much wrong with that premise, you’d think I’d stop watching, but, no.  I have a low threshold for quality when I want entertainment.

Been kicking around the idea, for a few years, of writing some original theology/atheology, a ge-ology, or something.  The woman who complimented my learning this morning, Lois Hamilton, got me thinking about all this again.  I’ve spent since 1965 getting seriously educated.  In a lot of fields.  I’ve had interesting real world experience in politics, the church, development and working with developmentally delayed adults.  I’ve traveled some, read a lot and learned a good deal about gardening and art.  Maybe I don’t need to anything, but I feel like a bad steward of the work I’ve done and the knowledge I’ve gained if I can’t set it down in some form for others.

Not sure what I want to do, or if I want/need to do anything.  Just pondering, for now.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality

The Movement Attacks the Establishment

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27  bar rises 30.38  3mph WNW dewpoint 24  Spring

               Full Moon of Winds 

“If a man doesn’t delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?” – Sherwood Anderson  (women, too.)

A good quote for an Easter humanist.  This morning I go into Groveland UU (Unitarian-Universalist) where the conversation will focus either on transcendentalism or on my presentation, Thinking Like a Transcendentalist.  I say either because I’m going to give them a choice, listen to my prepared presentation or have a free form conversation about transcendentalism.

Transcendentalism’s connection to UU history tore at the fabric of the Unitarian break with Christianity when it emerged.  Unitarian and Universalist problems with Christianity came from the Enlightenment push of reason against the Trinity on the one hand and Calvinist notions of original sin on the other.  This conflict resulted first in the fracture of New England Congregational churches into two camps, one orthodox Christian, the other newly Unitarian.  Around the same time Universalist churches popped up here and there with a message of universal salvation to counter the notion of total depravity offered by staunch Reformed church dogma.

The transcendentalists were of the opinion that neither the U’s nor the U’s had gone far enough in their challenge to the prevailing religious and commercial establishment.   Terming this solid front of New England rectitude, the Establishment, was an Emersonian pun, in itself an affront to the (false) notion of permanence they claimed.  Against the establishment, Emerson and his merry band of pranksters, whom he called the Transcendentalist Movement, threw charge after charge.  

Theodore Parker, abolitionist and minister of the 23rd Street Unitarian meeting, championed the new higher criticism of the bible just beginning to cross the Atlantic from its birthplace in Germany.  This criticism placed holy scripture under the light of reasoned analysis checking translation against ancient texts, investigating interpolations of meaning from biased authors, making clear the various contradictions and conundrums the texts created rather than “harmonizing” them as was the practice of the time.

Got back from this around 1:30 PM.  They chose the conversation about Transcendentalism.  I gave an extemporaneous capsule of the intellectual history behind transcendentalism, its history and affect on the Unitarian church and its longer lasting affect on American philosophy (pragmatism) and American literature during which we discussed the impact of Emerson, Thoreau, Thedore Parker, Margaret Fuller and Orestes Brownson.

Whitman and Emily Dickinson were our first poets, though far from the last, to observe Emerson’s idea that a poems content should determine its meter and that matter observed in daily life was appropriate for that content.  You can even see the transcendentalist affect in some one as far away from metaphysics as Hemingway, whose stark, realistic prose works hard to recreate the lived experience. 

A primary aim of the Transcendentalists was to create and stimulate an American as opposed to a European literature and scholarship.  They succeeded with stunning results.

Art and Culture, World History

It Is a Privilege and an Honor

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32  bar steady 30.37 0mph WNW dewpoint 28  Spring

                     Full Moon of Winds

I got all didactic on the study of ancient bronzes post and it wasn’t where I wanted to go.  Let me try again.

In one gallery at the Minneapolis Art Institute we have several high quality representatives of an art form that dominated Chinese material culture for 1,500 years.   Imagine if, say marble sculpture or fresco painting or mosaic had been the primary, to the exclusion of most other art forms, art of the West since 500 ACE.  That’s the length of time we’re discussing.  Or the period of time between the birth of Jesus and the colonization of the New World.  That’s a long time in people years.

To see these objects is not only to see the aesthetic and technical prowess of  Shang and Zhou dynasty artisans; it is to see the actual object that they produced.  These very ku, kuei, jueh, ting, lei, tsun and fang i came into the existence through a complex network of Chinese people who lived over 3,500 years.   There were miners, transporters, smelters, mold makers, mold designers, foundry workers who cast the objects and broke them from their ceramic molds.  Other people sold and transported them after they were made and for years, centuries, even millennia in some cases these objects were either used in public ritual or stood by in a tomb ready to provide service in the afterlife.  Think of that. 

Think of the journey that graceful jueh had to take both as a created work of art, then, after that, as an artifact of a long dead culture now thousands of miles from its point of origin.  That it survived all that is amazing, even if it is bronze.

The conceptual world that brought this work into existence, a system of public cults around unseen gods and dead ancestors, a conceptual world had such a profound grip on the Chinese mentality that it stayed pretty much intact for the entire Shang dynasty, then only gradually lost its force in the later Western Zhou.  Those are powerful ideas.  Ideas can be more fragile than any ceramic; yet, these objects testify to the energizing and creative force these ideas carried, not just for a while but for hundreds of years.

To put myself back in those times, to feel the ebb and flow of both the material culture and the beliefs that animated it, is to come alive to the human experience in a way I can’t in any other way.  It is a privilege and an honor to represent these objects and their world to the public. 

Art and Culture

High-Tech, High-Touch

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32  bar steady 30.37  4mph NNW dewpoint 27

                    Full Moon of Winds

Out of the bronze age.  This was a splendid tour and a testimony to the high tech-high touch maxim of Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock.  This was 7 people, four Chinese and three Caucasian, who met through the Meet-Up website.  They had all indicated an interest in things Chinese.  Thus, this was a random group save for their convergence on Meet-Up through their interest in a far-off land.  Amazing.  There we were, more or less strangers, together to study the bronze tradition of ancient China.   So we did.

We moved from the ceramic cases where we discussed the influence of Neolithic ceramic shapes on bronze vessels and the transition from ceramics to bronze as the primary artistic medium, then trekked over the bronze gallery.  There we started with the oldest object in our bronze collection, the jueh wine warmer.  After we identified some of the shapes from the ceramic cases:  hu, lei and ku for example, we dove into piece-mold casting.  This led to a conversation about design and the convergence here between technology and design.    

We followed the t’ao t’ieh mask until it faded in the mid-Zhou dynasty and noticed the birds and more abstract designs that followed.  As the Eastern Zhou began we noticed the change in inscriptions and the shift from public ritual to private artifact until in the Warring States period the bronze vessels no longer had a sacred connotation primarily but had become objects of status. 

To end we noticed the more modest bronze work of the Han and finished in the Sung dynasty ceramics with a celadon ting in miniature.  Bronze vessels had become a treasured objet d’art.