May 2013

Guess who’s never met a lawn sprinkler before?

BIGGER.

He reminded me of the joy of running through a sprinkler on a hot summer day. He was totally enthralled by it, transfixed on the motion of the oscillator, periodically lashing out to bite the water. Just look at that big black nose. Lucy beheld this oddity as well. She looked up at me with a most quizzical expression: “Not the brightest bulb on the string that one.”

What a day! 75, bluesky, and nary a breeze.

The trees have leaves, the grass is greening and growing, and our neighbor finished putting in three raised beds on his vacant lot on the south side of our house. One of them is for us. Fresh onions, broccoli, cauliflower, peas, chard, arugula, lettuce, chives and cilantro are only weeks away. If I have a say carrots, beets, and potatoes too. Our contribution to the project is water. I’m extending a second hose line under the deck and through the fence and connecting to a sprinkler. Out of reach of Harry, of course, who nevertheless remains fascinated by these myriad deployments of water.

…

Certain comments to a post at Derk Lowe’s blog the other day pushed one of my hot buttons. The gist of the post concerned an article published in Nature magazine that contradicted the widely held belief that pushing kids hard into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers is wise. Derek agreed with the author that this is really a fool’s errand. I generally agree as well, a position you may find odd — given both Derek and I are scientists you would think we would agree with such an initiative.

But what really got me started was this tangential comment to that post:

#1: Well said. The problem is not fewer scientists, it’s the increasingly dwindling number of citizens who can’t tell a meson from a melon. Re-routing some of that STEM funding into public outreach programs might get you a bigger bang for your buck in the long term.

I replied that not understanding, for example, the theory of evolution or anything about particle physics doesn’t hinder in the least tens of thousands (I should’ve said millions) of people from leading satisfying and productive lives. Another commenter responded and claimed that encouraging children toward STEM isn’t about living a fulfilling life, but rather that scientific literacy is essential (his word) to intelligent decision making in a technological democracy.

A claim, I pointed out, that happens to be false. I provided an example.

Worse, another person chimed in and disagreed with another commenter who said, correctly I think, that a lack of scientific literacy is no big deal for many people. The person disagreeing evidently thought this was nonsense, and offered an example of geology, claiming that without a fundamental basis in theory one couldn’t, for instance, successfully explore for oil and gas, an industry I happen to have been employed in for over twenty years.

I pointed out that his claim was also false, saying he may be interested to know that the largest oil field on the North American continent was found by serendipity, in a formation where the prevailing geologic theory at the time predicted oil would not be found.

I see this a lot, people bemoaning the state of scientific literacy in this country, offering only the flimsiest of arguments for why it should be improved, and worse, when these claims come from scientists, having no basis in fact.

Before:

After:

 

It’s Green Energy. From the brochure:

Firewood is a renewable resource like wind, solar and hydroelectric power.

When wood is burned as a substitute for fossil fuels, the result is a net reduction in CO₂ emissions.

And the motivating reason:

Firewood costs a lot less than the alternatives for people who live outside large urban areas.

I’m in the middle — working my way through the “H'” stack presently — of copying our CD collection to the computer. An apparently asymptotic task; the stacks get shorter but so slowly you feel you’ll never see the end. I wondered out loud at Lileks blog what to do with the original disks once I’m finished: 1) store them in the crawl space for posterity, or 2) get what I can for them at our local used music outlet. A commenter pointed out, correctly I think, that option 2 would, technically speaking, put me in copyright violation. Happy Wife suggested we salve our conscience and give them away for nothing, maybe to some charitable organization. This seemingly endless task is making me pretty nostalgic. All the invisible pits and lands on these discs represent rock ‘n roll, derivatives thereof, music that over the years has been there for me like a good friend when I needed one most. Call me silly but giving all these discs away would feel like betrayal.

Into the crawl space they go, at least for now.

Harry the Kelp Hunter!

BIGGER.

I assume you all know by now that I frequently place a BIGGER link below images. Clicking said link will enlarge the image and greatly increase the awe and splendor of your visualization experience! It must be a terrible thing for people who have lost their eyesight. I can’t even imagine.

See that notch of blue in the clouds? Veteran Alaskans have a special name for that (even though technically speaking this is not really an example of this thing). We call it a sucker hole. Because only suckers think it means the clouds are beginning to break and the sun will shine soon. When spotting such a hole Alaskan newbies, aka Cheechakos, have been known to run screaming and yelling from their office cubicle, rush outside and cheer, “The sun is coming out! The sun is coming out!” A caring Sourdough will quickly come to console this person, wrap an arm around her shoulders, pat her warmly and escort the sucker back inside, “There there, honey, everything is going to be alright.”

The reason this ain’t a real sucker hole is because the clouds were the anomaly today, momentarily drifting through an otherwise bluesky day!

Met a man from Indiana on the beach. None of that twenty insipid questions about Alaska stuff from this guy, no sir. He simply said he’d been to many places in the west but had never seen anything like the grandeur in Alaska. I liked him. We talked for a while. As he petted Harry I pointed to two bald eagles perched high in an evergreen, squawking at each other and carrying on. Out came the iPhone faster than a kid showing off his decoder ring, “I promised my friend I’d get him a picture of an eagle in Alaska.” I grinned and watched him click away. I told him I thought eagles were cool, for sure, but in my opinion the most impressive bird in Alaska is the Raven.

He said he and others had climbed to the top of Mt. Marathon the day before. Impressive, I thought, especially with all the snow still at the top. Even snow free in July it’s a pretty arduous climb. I told him about the man who died last year during the famous annual foot race up and down that mountain. He was familiar with the race but hadn’t heard somebody died during it. Yup, and despite lots of searching the man was never found. This cast a pall on our otherwise cheery conversation.

We talked a bit more, said our glad to meetchyas, and parted ways.

“But empathy will have to yield to reason if humanity is to have a future.”

A sentence you might expect was penned by the Russian Radical, but in fact it was the last sentence in an interesting essay on empathy by Paul Bloom in the New Yorker, subtitled The Case Against Empathy.

The last time this happened this late in May, it was midday and I was standing in the living room of a second floor rental, having recently moved to Alaska and waiting on a house to close, looking out the window while talking on the phone with a woman in California who would years later become my ex-wife. The problem with portents is we rarely recognize them for what they are, very often it is only in retrospect we recall seeing the sign, Bridge Out.

Cliche but true, that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

That was May 17th, 1989.

As expected, I’ve become increasingly stronger with each passing day, and thank my lucky stars that eventually I met Happy Wife, who zapped the chill out of this frosty May morn with her scrumptious preparation of Huevos Rancheros (w/ Hatch Chilies from the Land of Enchantment):

BIGGER.

60 by Tuesday; go figure.

Years ago when talking about how crappy British cars are, a friend asked me, “You know why the British drink warm beer, don’t you?”

“Why no, I don’t.”

“It’s because they make refrigerators, too.”

And television journalists.

There is something — many things really — about that Piers Morgan person that annoy me. I cannot imagine the thinking behind the decision to have him replace Larry King. Especially when he goes prattling on about gun control, challenging his guests who hold a worldview different than his on the matter: “What could possibly be wrongheaded with one more itsy bitsy teenie weenie gun law, sir?” I want to smack him. I want to reach into the TV, grab him by his Jolly Ol’ lapels and say, “Look, if it weren’t for the fact that your bloody ancestors got a bit pissy with mine over a couple hundred years ago, we, modern Americans, may have a different attitude all together about guns in this country.”

Breathe. Just breathe.

….

Happy Wife was gifted with an Impatiens plant on Mother’s Day at one of our favorite water holes:

Not because she’s a mother, not technically, but because the generosity of the day tends to spill over to thanks for aunts and all other women who express maternal qualities.

We’ve been working on the beach house lately, prepping the floor for installation of the wood stove later this month, painting throughout, a new window blind or two, and we’re taking up the dingy carpet and replacing it with wood flooring. Or at least faux wood. There are entire aisles now in the big box improvement stores devoted to faux this and faux that. Why use real wood, stone, or tile when the fake stuff will fool any casual observer. And it’s cheaper and guaranteed for life. Which, now that I think about it, what does that really mean, legally speaking? I mean, who’s life, the buyer of the product? So if I lay the floor and die the following week and the flooring starts to come up, the company can say, “Sorry, dude’s dead. Warranty’s expired.”

Anyhoo, we’re leaning toward installing a faux wood product that we saw in a new brew pub that opened recently in Seward, which has already become a favorite watering hole away from home (Anchorage). Happy Wife loved it, and I have to say it does look really nice, easy to install, inexpensive, and even when you’re told it’s vinyl it’s hard to believe.

Which set me to wondering, in a world of simulated products, what if you wanted to lay, say, a vinyl floor? Is there an aisle, I wonder, at Home Depot devoted to faux vinyl — wood made to look like vinyl? Imagine the permutations.

That’s the sun, our sun, for those of you reading this on other worlds — though I’ve seen no evidence of intra- or extra-galactic IP addresses in my site log. Okay, and technically it’s a representation of our sun, one that looks more like a sunflower…

    

… which I assume is how the plant got its name. I’m not sure I could conceive a better pictorial representation of the sun. Who could blame whoever came up with this one, a yellow hot core encircled by flare and fire, being it was based, I assume, on just a few very short peeks at the sun. This because mothers forever have warned their sons never to look into the eyes of the sun, cautioning us that doing so would lead, like certain other boyhood “activities”, to blindness.

For the record it didn’t, and I don’t mean looking into the sun.

There’s a funny saying up here that I like to haul out while seated at a downtown bar filled with summer tourists, when one of them asks me,

Q: “Oh, so you live here, wow. I hear it’s cloudy a lot?”

A: “An Alaskan woke one spring day, looked into the sky and saw a very bright light, and he knew, from books he had read, that must be the sun.”

We do hear this from time to time: “You live here?” Uttered by some visitors we interpret this as envy, by others, sympathy. For still others it may merely imply wonder, they wonder what it might be like to live and work here. They are genuinely curious. These are the people I’m most likely to want to continue talking with. The trophy tourists, by contrast, the ones who’ll be deplaning by the thousands at our airport in a couple weeks, preloaded with their twenty insipid questions — “How dark does it get; How do you sleep in summer; Where’s Mt. McKinley; etc. etc.” — the ones who come here for a whirlwind week for no other reason but so that they can put push another pin into the national map hanging in their basement back home  — Illinois or wherever — not so much. I am suspicious these are the same people who go to oval track car races just to see the crashes.

I wondered today: on average how many days of sun a year are there in Anchorage? One site boasting the banner “Research News and Scientific Facts,” claimed we get 61 sunny days (65 partly sunny). Taken together, roughly a third of the year. That’s not terrible, until you consider that half the year here is practically winter, and a sunny day during winter, while by no means unappreciated, can feel like a waste of a cloudless day because 1) the sun has less punch in the winter, and 2) does little to increase the ambient air temperature. Assuming these 126 sunny to partly sunny days were evenly distributed throughout the year (and they aren’t — it seems to me we have more cloudless days in winter), that means  about 60 of our 180 non-winter days are sunny to partly sunny, about 1/3.

Based on over twenty years of living in Anchorage that seems high. But everyday we get one I am pleased as punch. (By the way, what does it mean to be Pleased as Punch?).

Anyway, yesterday was once such day, and together Otis I pedaled like there was no tomorrow.

Because you don’t know for sure that there will be.

BIGGER.

Recognize this man?

His bravery at the Battle of Puebla and unlikely victory over french forces there on May 5th, 1862 is celebrated every year as Cinco de Mayo. His name is Ignacio Zaragoza. The same first name of our favorite bartender at Gallos, where Happy Wife and I ventured to on our bikes yesterday, knowing that the carefree imbibition of tequila drinks would leave us unsafe for driving an automobile. Who knew that three of those babies would make even the bike ride home challenging! Happy Wife took a spill in the mud where the trail was in horrid condition, I nearly fell myself. I quickly helped her up, steadied her bike, and reassured her this happens from time to time, even to expert cyclists with perfect sobriety. What she didn’t need was the remark of the little brat further down the trail: Hey lady I saw you fall in that puddle.

In that second I totally understood Scrooge, “Are the orphanages full then?“

Oh, but we had a grand time, and the food was free. And good. And necessary! Ignacio wasn’t there, but other competent bartenders were, masters at fulfilling — and refilling! — Cadillac Margaritas, the means of our self-imposed depravity.

BIGGER.

You’ve got to love a restaurant concerned enough with the safety of its patrons to provide free shuttle service to and from the church parking lot. It was Sunday after all, and what better way to live this one than to leave the car in the lot after service is over, hop the shuttle to Gallos, and commit a range of uncomely behaviors needing forgiveness the next Sunday!

Now, you may be asking, what, for example, do I mean by “uncomely?”

Ahem. Well, for example, see here:

And no, I’m not providing a “BIGGER” link to this — it’s plenty big enough!

Even dogs were welcome — some arrived on the back of motorcycles.

We celebrated on the patio outside, drenched in afternoon sun and so it was comfortably warm, low 50s maybe, but I don’t know that it was this warm:

At least no drafty butt crackage there. More defiance I think: “It’s spring now, dammit, and I’m going to wear my open-toed wedgies and short shorts if it kills me.” And it might’ve, had she stayed there after sunset.

Finally, an argument against government intrusion in private affairs, as if we really needed another argument. If government men serviced Cinco de Mayo celebrations only one kind of booze would be served in faceless tin cans with the single word “booze” on the front, something like that. But turn it over to entrepreneurs and private markets and viola!, you get innovation like this (not our drink, the table next to us):

I mean really, is this inventive or what? A kind of steady IV drip of Corona into your cocktail! Something I’m quite certain would be banned in New York by Bloomberg and the anti-Big Gulpians — after all, who really needs a Corona continuously decanting into their Cadillac Margarita? It’s not about what we need, sir, it’s about what people want, on Cinco de Mayo, in Alaska. It’s how we roll.

You know it’s really spring in Anchorage when…

BIGGER.

… you see your first spring bear. Spotted this one on our way home from the dog walk this morning. And a glorious morning it was, certainly compared to yesterday morning. The bear was rooting for something to eat, a bear can get a mighty big appetite during hibernation, and after an unproductive minute or two thought it might check and see if the onlookers had anything to offer:

BIGGER.