[sheepman] TWTYTW

In the great tradition of bloviators bloggers everywhere, it's time for the Year in Review post, and I guess I am no exception to the rule. But I promise there will be no "Best [whatever] of 2008" lists and no "clip show" recycling posts from the prior twelve months.


In fact, it's hard for me to get very worked up about New Year's Eve retrospectives at all. I've long thought that outweighing the holiday's merit as truly international and secular - the Gregorian calendar is, after all, an artifact of state and commerce - is January First's totally irrelevance in most arenas most of us attend to. The astronomical calendar and the seasons do not notice it, most fiscal years ignore it, the US electoral system marks it not, the TV season is not based on it, and so on. It's pretty darn arbitrary, when you come to think of it.

The triviality of January 1 is especially true for me. Working in the higher ed system for the past eleven years, I have grown used to using October 1 as my rough marker for renewal. In addition, my personal budget runs from October 1 through September 30, and my birthday is in the beginning of October, so I underwent my own stock-taking, closing of the books, and turning of the calendar three months ago.

This time around, there's an additional reason for not marking the new year with a look backward. In many ways, 2008 could be counted as an annus horribilis around these parts, certainly from Otis's perspective. Not there there weren't any fine and happy moments at all, but there was so much struggle and pain for so much of the year that revisiting it holds little appeal.

So let's look forward instead, with just this briefest of backward glances:

From HKC, 2005-2006:

When we were having our new year's resolution discussion at breakfast yesterday, I didn't mention the one and only resolution that I make every year.

Many people have talked about it in many ways, and each year - each day, really - I hope that I can make fewer statements and ask more questions.

From HKC, 2006-2007:

So I take this moment to reflect and to give thanks for the world I was lucky enough to be born into and for the people I have been fortunate enough to meet along the way. I generally have the same two resolutions every year; this year I add one more:

I will try to talk less and listen more.
I will try to ask more questions and make fewer statements.
I will look at the situations in which I find myself and ask how a little kindness might help.

From HKC, 2007-2008:

This is my third New Year's Day Blog post, and my themes (I hesitate to call them resolutions) for the year remain the same, with some growth (a description that I hope applies to me as well):

Try to make fewer statements and ask more questions.
In each situation, consider what a little kindness might do.

So, I don't know what I can add, so I will merely reduce:

Listen more, talk less.
Ask, rather than state.
Try some kindness.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

[blockhead] Running with scissors

The first look at the first draft of the new, draconian state budget is here, and at first glance it looks like relatively good news for the community colleges, but overall, the situation is pretty damn dire.



Looking at the governor's own highlights, it looks like there will be no COLAs for CC staff for the next few years, that tuition will be increased by five percent, and that the operating budget will have to be cut by seven percent. Considering how our Cascadia Budget Council has been trying to imagine 20% cuts, this seems like a relatively simple exercise in comparison. Not that seven percent won't mean painful dislocations; I still fully expect people I know and like to have less work - or no work - as a result, and the five percent tuition increase will almost certainly mean the difference between access and barrier for some of our students. It's hard times all around.

But I can't feel too good about all this when I look at the proportionally greater cuts to heath and human services. For just one example: 13,000 low-income patients will no longer receive chemical dependency treatment. Those are actual individual people with actual problems who will now not get help where once they did and who will then stress some other part of our society, whether that is their family, the police, or you, when you're walking down the street. The proposed cuts to direct services necessary to balance the budget include many such scenarios of people's quality of life changing substantially.

The governor spared community colleges from some of the burden of cuts apparently because she feels that any economic recovery needs the worker retraining provided through the CC system. That makes sense; we can't live in crisis mode forever and we need to continue to plan for the future. But thinking about the future doesn't make it any easier to make even bigger cuts that effect direct services today.

So, while I feel a little bit relieved by the news, I am far from a good mood.

[sheepman] Early morning snow notes

I've been up for about an hour, after being awakened by some thunder that accompanied the snowstorm that has finally arrived in central Seattle, after three days of waiting and one proactive snowless snow day. It's been a long time since I've made a lazy pre-dawn post, but I've got a fresh cup of Folger's on the table and NPR in the background, so here we go.

So, I'm sort of in the middle of winter break here, and this was going to be a time for imposing little order - or at least the illusion of order - on aspects of my life. My professional life runs on its own rhythm - the tenure process engine is clanking along, still going pocketa-pocketa-pocketa with a full head of steam in the boiler, and the quarters turn in their inexorable path. There's a dire budget crisis looming, with some severe cuts up ahead, but I think I'll come out of it okay personally. It's not the professional life that needs attending, it's my personal productivity.

I've had a bit of a setback physically. After a summer of getting to know the three-mile path around Green Lake, and a vigorous fall of regular running, I pulled up sorta lame few weeks ago. I have been giving my right leg a bit of a rest, trying to allow a mysteriously weakened knee to recover, but this aging anatomy doesn't seem to be quite as resilient as it did some time ago, and people are still noticing a little wobble in my gait. I'm going to give it the ol' community college try again today, but I may have to overcome my reluctance to go to a doctor and actually get this checked out. The early-morning RCAF calisthenics have not been affected, thank goodness, so that regimen is moving into its second year.

Of more concern than my exercise program are my intellectual endeavors, such as they are. Nu, for an English teacher, I sure don't read much! During the quarter, I am so piled with student papers that I find it hard to squeeze in personal reading, and if I do get time to read, I feel like I should be reading the professional literature instead of pleasure stuff. Of course, I usually wind up reading neither. And my writing is languishing as well - this blog hasn't seen any essay for quite a while, my academic "articles" don't seem to advance past bibliographies and outlines, and my fiction has yet to resurrect itself. It's not a compete wasteland - I have been reading articles and pursuing some smaller writing projects - but I have produced nothing substantive to set upon the mantle.

This break was supposed to be a time to get control of those processes, to make some particular headway and perhaps establish some habits that I could take forward. It hasn't seemed to work that way. Right out of the gate, a week ago, I got wrapped up in Otis's art show project. It was wildly successful - check it out - but also consumed a lot of break time right away for preparation, execution, and recovery. The remaining time between then and now has been filled a bit with decompression from the quarter and a bit with plain old indolence. Maybe there's time in the twenty-four days left to the break to slide some accomplishments in with the lesson-planning and portfolio-writing that have to be done.

Gee, this got more ruminative than I thought it would. The cat just came back in, complaining about the cold. The snow seems to have stopped. Let's make something of the day.

[apparatus] I broke my blog

Nu, I was going to mess about with my template, so I saved the old template and everything, just like you're supposed to, and when I realized that changing my template was probably a stupid idea I went to put it all back, and most of it came back, but the blogrolls were empty, so now I have to do them all again. Pfui. If I lost your link or a link you liked, please let me know.

But just so this is more than a completely self-referential, whiny post, here is a death-metal puppy for y'all (but mostly for Soapy).

[jet city] Blog bast #1

Sometimes, you just have to take your ride down to the flats and blow the carbon out of the pipes. I have been absent from the blog for a long time, and the longer it goes, the weightier I feel the next post has to be, so instead of waiting until I (or forcing myself to) come up with a brilliant essay, I'm just gonna blast the intarweb with a lot of little stuff.

A lot has happened around town since the last post, not the least of which has been Otis (and by extension, me) taking on dog-sitting Bailey while Lon and Jules are vacationing in Mexico. Lots of fun adventures in poop-scooping, resulting in Otis's informed observation: cats are a lot easier than dogs. Another few days and the master and mistress will be back, letting us off the leash.

The new D&D campaign got started in earnest. Johnbai is DMing again, with his usual incredibly high level of detail. Otis and Soapy are reprising their old roles, Dingo has joined us (breathing life into a former NPC), and I have revised my character somewhat. Neds couldn't commit to the whole campaign, so she came along as a completely new character specifically designed to join the party, betray them, and go out in a blaze of glory. And so she did.

Farewell, Moloch, you untrustworthy tiefling SOB.



The Thanksgiving Holiday went just fine. The day began with a Pumcake Brunch with just me and the ladies around the table: Dingo, Stella, Trots, O, and JagGirl. Yum-o! Afterward, I joined Otis and Clan Putnam up in LFP for an East Indian thanksgiving meal: channa masala, dal, tandoori, raita, and Robb's Whipped Monkey King Coconut Yams. And let's not forget the tevenberry pie!

There's one more week or so of fall quarter, and then the long winter break begins. I'm sure more adventures lie in store.

[blockhead rhetoric] Blog blast #2

It's as easy for teachers to complain about job-related stuff as it is for anyone else, I guess. It's a bad habit to get into, so I try to avoid it, and in that spirit, I would like to share something that happened today that made me feel good.


In my lit class, we have a workshop day before papers are due, giving the students a chance for some peer review before they hand the paper in (and not incidentally keeping them from writing the entire paper the night before it's due). On each of these days, before we get into pairs or groups, I have each of the students reduce the claim of their paper, its main point, to one sentence - a thesis statement, if you will - and write that on an index card. Using the document camera we look at all the samples, and talk about how complex (or not) they are, how interesting (or not) they are, what strategies would be useful in exploring them, and so on.

We had out third and last workshop today, and halfway through the stack of cards, it struck me: none of them were complete clunkers. Oh, sure, some were more sophisticated and some less obvious than others, but overall, all of the ideas were analytical, specific, and potentially robust candidates for the focus of a lit paper. We had come a long way from out first workshop, which offered some claims along the lines of "this poem is about love".

It was satisfying to see that the class, as a whole, had moved from one place to another. While some students clearly have more aptitude for verbal-linguistic learning, and some individuals are just more interested in things literary, everyone's grasp of the form and conventions of literary analysis seems to have been ratcheted up a notch or two. Whether they will ever be really good at it or whether they will ever really enjoy it, they all know how to do it: what the objective is and how to get there. And in the final analysis, that's all I want.

So, yeah, we'll put this one in the win column.

[men in skirts] Blog blast #3

When winter comes to Seattle, it's time to break out my Workman's model Utilikilt. This durable garment, made of caramel duck cloth (usually known as Carhartt material) is heavy enough to keep out the coolness and dampness of the northwest rainy season. There's just one problem.


Two of the six snaps that hold the kilt closed have ripped from the fabric. The remaining four snaps are enough to keep modesty (and comfort) intact, but it gives the kilt a slightly shabby looks, with frayed holes where the bright silver buttons ought to be.

I'm thinking I might want to get this repaired, but I'm not sure how to go about it. The same thing happened to the first version of this kilt that I bought, within a week or so of wearing it, and I made a temporary and not-very-effective repair with some duct tape (on the inside), but Utilikilts replaced the kilt promptly, so I really didn't have to worry about it. Now, the kilt is out of warranty (as it were), and I'm certainly not in the mood to spring for another new one, so... what to do? Perhaps over the break I can track down a canvas fixer.

[apparatus] Blog bast #4

Since we borrowed the DVD set of Farscape - what, about three weeks ago now? - we have watched about a season and a half of it. Otis is positively addicted - not only does she want to watch it every frelling night, but when we discovered a missing disk, she downloaded the episodes on iTunes and we projected from the laptop!

Okay, I'll admit it, I like it a lot, too. And the ability to watch a series - any series - basically all at one go is really changing how people interact with Story. I'm telling you, there's a doctoral dissertation in there. maybe I should write it.

But that can't be the only junk culture of note that has surfaced recently, can it? Not bloody likely:

Just for Johnbai: hippo fight!

Okay, this video starts out as one of those sweet inter-species friendship stories, the kind that Otis really likes, and then hangs a hard left into Weirdville. Downtown Weirdville, at the corner of Disturbing Avenue and Crazy Street.

Occasionally I have posted games that I thought were cool or fun. This one is just damn frustrating!

I have to find a way to work these old manuals into the tech writing class I'll be teaching next quarter.

---

Okay, that concludes BlogBlast 2008. Maybe now that the tubes are clear, this particular section of the Internet will start flowing again with some quality content. Hope springs eternal...

[4-color ma] The physics of cats and (wonder) dogs

Anyone who reads genre comics - superhero in particular, but including adventure and war and western - gets used to improbable physics, those apparently impossible leaps and lifts and feats and flights. But sometimes the impossible is only unlikely.


Some time ago, Mike Sterling ran a post on Progressive Ruin entitled Adventures in Improbable Physics with Rex the Wonder Dog, in which he looked dubiously at this sequence:

Well, being a community college teacher and all, I figured it might be useful to let some students have a go at seeing if this scenario could indeed happen, at least without violating any laws of physics. So I sent the link to Dr. Burn, who is not a supervillian (although the way I render her name makes her look like one) but our resident math/physics guru. The time was right for her to introduce the problem in her class last week, and she sent me this rumination on the scenario, written while she was in her lair lab, proctoring a test:

I'm thinking about Rex the Wonder Dog. This problem is a bit complicated because of the torsional aspect of the tree branch. On one level, it is acting like a spring, which is a simple analysis. However, the spring force happens because of torque on the branch. As you know from changing a tire and using a lug wrench, torque depends on the amount of force as well as how far from the rotation point that you apply that force. The big cat has more force on the branch because it is heavier than the Wonder Dog. However, Rex is further out from the branch. So, one way to look at this is depending on the different masses, they have the same torque. But then, that wouldn't be good, because Rex would still be holding the branch and stuck in the quicksand.

But wait! The big cat "leaped" on the branch. Therefore the cat has more torque on the branch than just its own weight and a certain distance. What we can use is a conservation of energy analysis and sidestep questions about the springiness of the branch. We can say that the energy state of a closed system is always the same amount. When the big cat is at the highest point of its leap, it has maximum potential energy due being up in the air. The dog has zero potential energy because it is at ground level. The branch has zero potential energy because it hasn't been sprung yet.

At the end of the comic, the potential energy of the big cat is zero, because it is at ground level. The potential energy of the stick is zero because it isn't bent anymore by the weight of either animal (we'll ignore that it is probably still oscillating). The potential energy of the dog is at its maximum because of its height above the ground.

When we do an energy analysis, we also have to think about kinetic energy, but at the moments I am talking about, nobody is moving (at the top of a leap, you are momentarily at rest). So, kinetic energy is zero at these two points.

OK, now the numbers. Potential energy due to a spring has an equation associated with it, but we don't care because of the points we are choosing. Potential energy due to height from the ground is equal to mass*height*g where g is associated with what planet one is on (sometimes hard to determine). So, [mass of cat] *[max height it reached in its leap] is equal to [mass of dog] * [max height it reached on the ledge]. Or, height of ledge = cat to dog ratio times how high the cat leaped.

This is the scenario Dr. B was going to walk her students through. I set up an Excel spreadsheet to run some numbers and found that if we estimate the cat at 200 lbs (top end for a black panther) and Rex at 77 lbs (mid-range for a German Shepherd), and guess the cat's jump was 10 feet, the Wonder Dog could have been thrown 26 feet up to the ledge, bob's your uncle, and it's all not so improbable after all!

But wait! What about the quicksand? I emailed Dr. B to remind her of this niggling detail. She replied:

I used the comic in my class yesterday. It was a great teaching device.

I was trying to ignore the quicksand, but my students wouldn't let me. It is hard to predict the average dragging force due to the quicksand (at least for me). By the way, we can't talk about the sucking force of the quicksand, since there is no such thing as a sucking force. There is only a pressure differential. So, there could be a low pressure situation at Rex's bottom paws. Or, the frictional force could just be the scraping force as Rex gets pulled out by the branch. That is quite a range in terms of possible amount the quicksand will hinder Rex the Wonder Dog.

Frictional force is often just measured and then you know. So, we need to get a panther, the dog, the branch, and the quicksand. We can estimate how far up Rex should go. The amount under that he actually goes tells us the amount of friction. [Weight of Cat] * [height cat jumps] minus [Weight Dog]*[height dog goes]" is equal to [Friction] * [distance in the quicksand] (where distance is equal to the length of Rex's body).

Well, that didn't give me as clear an answer as I wanted. I checked some internet sources on quicksand and found this from an entry on HowStuffWorks: "Quicksand is basically just ordinary sand that has been so saturated with water that the friction between sand particles is reduced." The reason things get stuck in quicksand is that it can't support any weight because it is saturated, not because there is any sucking - a pressure differential doesn't play into it. So, the actual friction of quicksand should not be terribly high and certainly less than being stuck in a pile of regular sand.

So, if we just make the cat a little heavier, and his leap just a little higher, and the ledge just a foot or two lower, we should be able to offset any dragging force from the quicksand, and it is all still plausible.

I pity the fool who doubts the Wonder Dog.

[apparatus] In the meme time

Wikipedia says a meme (pronounced /miːm/) consists of any idea or behavior that can pass from one person to another by learning or imitation. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, gestures, practices, fashions, habits, songs, and dances. Memes propagate themselves and can move through the cultural sociosphere in a manner similar to the contagious behavior of a virus.

I say a meme is a groovy little blogosphere interaction you engage in, like this one, the alphabet meme, that I got from blogging buddy RAB at Estoreal, who got it from Blog Cabins via Movie Chunks. Here are the rules:

1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.

2. The letter "A" and the word "The" do not count as the beginning of a film's title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don't know of any films with those titles.

3. Return of the Jedi belongs under "R," not "S" as in Star Wars Episode IV: Return of the Jedi. This rule applies to all films in the original Star Wars trilogy; all that followed start with "S." Similarly, Raiders of the Lost Ark belongs under "R," not "I" as in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Conversely, all films in the LOTR series belong under "L" and all films in the Chronicles of Narnia series belong under "C," as that's what those filmmakers called their films from the start. In other words, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Use your better judgement to apply the above rule to any series/films not mentioned.

4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number's word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under "T."

5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type "alphabet meme" into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.

6. If you're selected, you have to then select 5 more people.

Like RAB, I'm not specifically tagging anyone, but feel free to jump in with your own list. Here's mine:

Antonia's Line
Bubba Ho-Tep
Crimes and Misdemeanors
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Elling
Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
The General
House of Games
I Heart Huckabees
Joe versus the Volcano
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Little Voice
Millions
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Once
Pieces of April
Quigley Down Under
Run Lola Run
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
The Third Man
Until the End of the World
A Very Long Engagement
The Wedding Banquet
X The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
You Can Count on Me
Zatoichi

As a bonus, here's Otis's list:

Amelie
Bourne Identity Series
Chocolat
The Darjeeling Limited
Escape from Alcatraz
Fargo
The Great Escape
Hero
In America
Joe versus the Volcano
King of California
Lars and the Real Girl
The Man who Knew Too Much
North by Northwest
Once
The Piano
The Quiet American
Rear Window
The Secret of Roan Inish
Thoroughly Modern Millie
Unbreakable
Vertigo
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
The X-Men Series
You Can Count on Me
Zatoichi

Jump in on your bog - just post the rules and the link. Here's the LNTAM index if you need some memory-jogging.

[sheepman] A question of balance

The election is over and all the whoop-dee-do is settling down. I must admit that I am more pleased than displeased by the results, but I also have to say that I am not as euphoric as some public demonstrations have indicated many people are. I am trying to figure out just what I feel.



Pal Wheylona posted this image as part of her own post-election analysis from a European perspective. I have to admit that it speaks to me, capturing as it does the historic nature of this election, the end of a regime which I sincerely feel has not had the best interests of most Americans at heart, and the sense of a populist progressivism that I hope will be evident in the new administration. In my estimation, the single most important advantage to an Obama administration is that is should be easier to pull to the left; I will gauge its success by just how far we are able to do that, because I think that more people will be helped more genuinely by that course than by another.

At the same time, we have to remember that the popular vote in the presidential race was split roughly 52% to 48%, a clear victory but not an overwhelming majority. And no matter how much we joke about it or frequently we kid about it, neither half of the population of this country is going to move away, or secede from the union and become Jesusland or The United States of Canada, or change their minds overnight. We have some serious problems ahead, and it's going to take all of us to fix them. How are we going to do that, especially when some of the differences that divide us appear to be so elemental?

That renaissance man of the intarweb, Ze Frank, seems to have taken one small step forward with his From 52 to 48 with Love project. In his own quirky, bloggy way, Ze wants to start off this new era with reconciliation and community, and has asked people to contribute their own expressions of those feelings. Some of the photos contained in the album are just touching and heartbreaking in their sincerity; the responses to it have, of course, been mixed. But I think it's a great place to start.

I have friends in the 48, people whose intelligence I respect and whose integrity is unquestionable. I think they were wrong in where they threw their support and I think they are wrong in some their fundamental assumptions about who we are and how we work as a country. But I want them to be part of my community and part of my country, and I need to pull them closer instead of pushing them away. This might help with that, a little bit.

As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, We are not enemies, but friends...though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too."

--Barack Obama

[apparatus] Whew!

Well, it has been a heck of a week - I really haven't had much time since Halloween for a developed thought unrelated to my classes. But this is a long weekend for me - not holidaywise, just non-instructional-daywise - so maybe I'll get a chance to focus some neurons on issues other than essay organization and poetry analysis. In the meantime, there's this mess.

That blue lady up there is Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan, a character from Farscape, Otis's latest watch-the-series-on-DVD venture. It seems to be a bit like a mix of Bablyon Five and Star Trek: Voyager with more of an edge, or maybe Andromeda on crank. We've watched a few episodes, and it's holding up so far, although the fairly generic spaceship milieu and the Henson puppetworks wear thin easily. Watching this mostly-obscure little series makes me wonder if anyone else remembers White Dwarf, an ill-considered series from 1995 with a semi-steampunk vibe, described by one critic as "a sort of Northern Exposure meets The Princess Bride on the planet Dune."

Speaking of steampunk, here's a bike to reckon with - The Brass Lion:

This wonderful ride is a product of Steuben's Wheelmen, and I'd love to be tooling down the Burke on it.

More steampunkish transportation news: the rigid airship is back! You wouldn't know it by the headline, which sacrificed accuracy for a little pun, but the zeppelin has returned to American skies. I'm not sure I want to pay five yards for a one-hour ride, but I'm happy to know its in the skies. That's cool.

Here's something else that manages to be totally cool and completely boring at the same time, something that I would not have thought possible before:

Um, yeah. Here's a website that I am sure explains how fantastic this really is, but it's even too boring to read. Not cool at all.

Something that everyone else thought was cool was the cloned dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Sometimes I wonder if I was the only kid who was more excited by Pleistocene mammals than by dinosaurs: sabre-toothed cats and giant sloths, that's where it was at for me! In any case, according to this article, it looks like the mammoths might beat the thunder lizards in the reincarnation race.

And finally, here's a note from the real world, not the sci-fi past or future. Newsweek ran an article with inside information from the political campaigns that is now leaking out; it included this quotation from Barack Obama talking about the debates:

“I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that's green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

Bravo! I love this quotation not only because the voice in it is so authentic and direct about the campaign process, but because Obama is echoing a sentiment about environmentalism that I have held and argued for some time now. Yeah, he's got this.

[jet city] Liveblogging election night (sort of)

Well, the munchies are all out and the bevvies are in the fridge, the news Spectration is on the big wall and Sousa is on the CD player - I guess we're ready for the Election Night Open House that we have planned. I think there may be a lot more folks here than we anticipated, but that's cool. I will check in from time-to-time with updates about how the evening is going, both in the political world and our little social world here.

5:43: We're projecting NBC on the wall (we only get broadcast television) and playing the soundtrack from Brassed Off on the CD player. Otis is upstairs taking care of some business and I am watching our freaky cats and the talking heads (better than talking cats and freaky heads, I guess). Polls in the east have only been closed a short time, and already the projection for Obama is something like 103 electoral votes, with McCain getting 58. They may call this election before anyone even gets here at 6:00.

6:24 Johnbai, Dingo, and Sachet are here eating sandwiches and salads as ABC announced that Obama had Ohio in their projection. That gives him 195 according to them, and Stephanapolous has called it over. Hunh. They've switched to local coverage - we don't expect to really know any results for a few days.

6:49 Hi Lai and Welcome Matt just showed up with cupcakes!

Obama is at 200.

7:24 Outside the studios of ABC, people are holding banners that say "Cassoulet Forever." What is up with that? Is he running for something or do they just like French bean dishes?

7:43 Full swing:


Andres(2), Plus-one, and Yojimbo have joined the party. We have lots of champagne but have agreed that none gets opened until Obama hits 270. He has 207 now, so still some time to go. Our polls aren't even closed yet.

8:02 Wow. As soon as the polls closed on the West Coast, ABC gave the election to Obama. So did NPR. It looks like it's over. It's a little confusing, since they haven't called all the states, and no one is showing numbers yet, just cheering crowds. We'll wait for McCain to concede, I think.

8:45 McCain conceded. The champagne was pretty good. During the speech, we were wondering where the hell that guy had been all campaign - his concession was gracious and inspiring. Now we're waiting for Obama's speech. Even Soapy, our resident libertarian.

9:22 The gang just watched Obama's speech. Good stuff. Makes me want to get rid of reds and blues and just be all purple.




10:53 Everybody is gone; the gang grew to include Toke, Reni, JagGirl, Merry, and Mark I as well as the previously aforementioned folks. We watched the gubernatorial campaign come to a much swifter resolution than anyone expected - Gregoire had a substantial lead and claimed victory, attempting to short-circuit any replay of the long-drawn process from four years ago. Most of the local propositions broke the way I wanted to see them go, and my buddy Jim Jacks down in The 'Couv sailed to a stunning victory. All in all a pretty good night, leaving us with a lot of hope for the future, and the anticipation of some fence-mending and community-building, if any of that is at all possible in the polarized nation we have become.

Personally, it was a night of connection and re-connection, as close friends and acquaintances once-removed alike came together to share this historic event. There's nothing like good company and a momentous occasion to turn an evening into an event - and the coincident visit from an out-of-country pal was the cherry on the sundae. Here's looking forward to more opportunities for celebration and communion.

And snacks!

(EOM. G'night!)

[4-color ma] Just a bit batty

I know that I haven't blogged about comics for a while, but I swear that this Batman post was not designed just to take advantage of the upcoming Halloween holiday. I just happened to run across a couple of Bat-items to share.




I was reading an online WIRED article about old-timey Halloween costumes when I came across this photo:

Click to embiggen and take a look at that fellow on the far left. I don't know what the rest of those folks are supposed to be, but doesn't he look just a bit like a road-show version of a certain caped crusader? Now take a look at the date of that photo: 1924. It's a truism by this point that Bob Kane and Bill Finger had lots of historical and contemporary models for their new comic book character in 1939, but a photo like this makes me wonder just how much a bat-man character was in the public consciousness already. The first real-life version of Batman, in the 1943 movie serial, has a cowl that looks remarkably similar to this one, particularly in the ears:

Or maybe not - maybe that pre-depression dude is just a devil or something, and the ear thing is a coincidence. But this recent costume ad shows that the tradition of goofy bat-ears continues to this day:


In other bat-news, I finally got a chance to watch Batman: Gotham Knight, the recent direct-to-video sort-of anime version of a Batman movie. The draw for this film was supposed to be seeing the Batman story interpreted by six different directors in six separate but vaguely connected short episodes. It was entertaining and fun, but the central conceit just didn't work for me: I found that the six episodes weren't really different enough for the experiment to work. There was no sharp contrast between the interpretations; one Batman might have been a little heavier and another a little techier, but the art styles and character designs were all pretty similar, and Gotham City looked pretty much the same, in all the episodes. This feeling may have been exacerbated by the first episode's being an animated remake of the 1973 comic book story "The Batman Nobody Knows," in which Batman, seen by three youngsters, is perceived as a completely different character by each. Those imagined Batman images really were different from one nother; the "real" Batman in each of the six episodes, not so much.

The enterprise was saved by the overall quality of the films, in particular "Working Through the Pain," in which a wounded Batman, struggling to reach Alfred and the Batmobile, has flashback memories to his time spent in India, where he learned pain control from a mystic. Its closing scene stands among the most poignant uses of the Batman story in any media.

[blockhead] Writing about writing is not a sin

This post has some origins in the lack of recent posts on this blog, but we're not going down that ol' solipsistic road again. No, the absence of posts is merely a symptom of something larger that has come to my attention recently, and that is a lack of writing of any sort.


That this blog is involved at all is only the result of the recent change of format. The Original HKC was anecdotal most of the time, and frequently held collage posts comprised of random, unrelated thoughts. That stuff hardly counts as writing at all. With Walakanet, I have been trying to move away from posts for post's sake and more toward the essai, works that, while still fairly short, are still composed and not merely jotted. We're not aiming at Montaigne here, but the bar has been raised high enough that posts to this blog nowadays could be considered to be legitimate writing.

And it is personal writing of this nature that is the issue here. To be sure, there is no lack of writing in my life, in a technical sense. I am an English teacher; I write syllabi and lesson plans and assignment rubrics and emails all the live-long day, and I will argue strenuously with anyone who does not consider those products "real" writing. At the same time, there is a dearth of that writing that is not task- or audience-driven - or to put an even finer point on it, that writing that is not obligatory but voluntary. There are no short stories, no creative non-fiction, no poems flying out of my word processor. And I don't think that I am alone among my peers in feeling this lacuna.

A colleague from Cascadia volunteers at 826 Seattle, the nonprofit writing center in Greenwood, and attends a regular Thursday gathering of English teachers there. He reported that at a recent get-together, when asked if they considered themselves writers or teachers, six of the eight in attendance thought of themselves only as teachers and not as writers.

Work pal NatDog put a personal face on this issue during one of our recent drives into work together. She was telling me about a friend of hers who'd had an article published in a magazine and asked why she, who was an English teacher and theoretically knew more about writing than her friend, was not writing articles and getting them published. It wasn't a rhetorical question, but I had no useful response for her, and the remaining twenty minutes on northbound Lake City way provided no answers either.

I do have some clues, though. The easy answer is, of course, time. For example, I have always wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo, the write-a-novel-in-a-month project that rolls around every November. Well, I considered it again this year, and then realized that over the first weekend of the month, when I would need to complete 14 pages to be starting out on pace, I will have (conservatively) twelve hours of responding papers to get through as well. I just can't see how I could do both projects. Teaching composition has its benefits in the classroom, but seems to require the most out-of-class time.

But although time is the easy answer, I am not sure it is the compelling one; there are plenty of time-stressed people who still manage to squeeze writing into their days. It has to be something else. I have considered whether being in the "editor" mode (for a gross oversimplification) so much of the time dulls the creative edge. I have wondered whether reading so much bad - or perhaps more kindly underdeveloped - writing just puts me off engaging with writing altogether for periods of time. There might be some merit in these inquiries.

I have recently, however, been taken by a different theory, one related to these avenues but stemming also from this piece by Ira Glass (which I posted on the Original HKC some months back). Glass talked about how creators often have really good taste in their chosen area - video, painting, prose, whatever - which is why they are drawn to that field or idiom. But it is this same good taste which also tells them just how bad their own creative efforts in that arena are compared to what they know is possible; this can stifle the creative urge completely, as the artist is convinced (often rightly) that all they are creating is crap.

I wonder whether the English teacher is subject to an acute version of this syndrome. It probably goes without saying that an English teacher is likely a lover of words and a naturally verbal person, usually well-read with significant writing experience. Fine: we know good writing. But we also know bad writing, and not-as-good-as-it-could-be writing, and missed-it-by-that-much writing; we see it all the time, and we are trained and habituated to respond to it with direction, correction, advice, and assistance. This develops a critical perspective in both the good and bad senses of the word: sometimes I think an English teacher can't read anything without penciling it up.

And that obsession applies to our own stuff as well, creating a vicious cycle. Whatever I write, I'm just going to tear apart, because I know it's going to be awful. My taste is developed enough to know what good writing looks like and my attitude is such that I can't leave unfinished writing alone. I can't turn my internal censor off long enough to produce a sufficient amount of text to gain any traction, so I don't produce anything. Meanwhile, people without this overdeveloped sensitivity just go on writing and getting published, the lucky stiffs.

At least, that's my theory for this cobbler's-kids-go-shoeless phenomenon, of which I am not the only example. It'll do for now, and at least it gives me a strategy for response: working on turning off the censor. I need to believe that it's not just "those who can, do; those who cannot, teach," because if that were the case, I might have to give up teaching.

[pc monk] More like a monkey

It is the middle of the fifth week of the quarter, not quite fully mid-term, and yet I already feel that the summer has slipped away into the misty recesses of the past. And as with so many elements of our lives, I'm not sure that I fully appreciated how good I had it while it lasted.


The school year seems to have come on full force. Don't get me wrong; it's turning out to be (or at least starting out as) a good year. My schedule is fine, my students are great, and my institutional service responsibilities are pretty cool. There's nothing wrong with any of it; I love it all. There's just so much to love.

My first class wasn't until 3:30 pm, but I still got to campus today at 9:30 am. I spent the whole day sequestered in my office, making up lesson plans and grading papers; after teaching, I came home, had some ramen for dinner, and spent another few hours finishing off some more grading.

But this is not a woe-is-me-I'm-so-busy complaint about my job; as I say, I love what I am doing and feel lucky to be where I am. Rather, this is a reflection on what choices I have been making lately in response to the busy-ness.

Back in the summer, I had plenty of time for reflection, for reading books, and for trying to follow the zen practice of just doing one thing at a time. I should have realized how privileged I was - a whole thirteen weeks without work responsibilities, three months to focus on myself. It's really a bit embarrassing to consider how little progress I made in that time; it was almost as good as actually being in a monastery, after all. Now, it seems that I am all about the action rather than the reflection; it's do-do-do, whether for work or for play/chores/stuff when I am not working. I am not making time for stillness. It's been almost a month since my last post in this category; not much monking to share when I've only been monkeying around.

My morning runs help out a little; crunching my way through the dark is comforting and restorative, but as I have expressed before, not totally adequate. And running the path is not quite Walking the Path, at least not yet.

Part of the problem, I think, lies in the very nature of community college teaching itself. It is a very outward practice; a class is a high-energy enterprise, with all my attention focused on my students' needs and very little on my own, and a significant performance element. In that environment, it is easy to lose sight of one's center, to become concerned with the shell and not the core, to let the monkey-brain chatter on and on.

In the end, though, all this is by way of explanation rather than excuse. If finding a new level of self-awareness is important to me, I will find a way to make the time for it in my day and the space for it in my life. I will fish out and finish Natalie Goldberg, request Epicurus from the library and re-read it, and turn off the computer, put aside the stack of stuff to just sit, just be. Those blinds in my office go down as well as up; in six hours of desk time, there must be room for a little meditation, don't you think?

[jet city] Kickin' it old school

Wow - I've got lots of posts percolating, but none of them are fully brewed yet. Since I find myself, as I so often have in the past, out at a coffee shop, laptopping while Otis works, I thought I'd post an old-style "what's up" post just to keep the blog fresh.

So, in the midst of all this end-of-days, Second Great Depression, financial meltdown, failure of Randian objectivism, onset of creeping socialism, worldwide economic crisis stuff, has anyone noticed anything different in our quotidian lives? I mean, my pension plan is in the tank, but my salary hasn't changed, right? How does this affect us in the here-and now? I sure have noticed that my food bills have been going up over the past year - I track a few indicator species and have seen them go up and not come back down - but I don't think that has anything to do with this. Otis seems to have noticed a bit of a slowdown in her business recently, and I wonder if that's related to the psychological effects of all the bad financial news putting the brakes on consumer spending.

Our economics and business faculty up at Cascadia held a presentation Friday on the current financial situation and how it happened and what it all means. I wish I could have attended, but I was in Tacoma for training of a different kind: I attended the conference of the Washington State Community College Humanities Association. It was enlightening to hang out with and attend sessions from literature and history types as well as just composition and rhetoric folks; as I teach more and different classes, this broadening of my professional perspective is useful.

This WCCHA conference was also a nice counterpoint to the training I attended the prior week in North Bend; that session was much more nuts-and-bolts course planning, just as valuable but with a completely different (and more interdisciplinary) approach. This is turning into my Year of Professional Development, and if all the activities are as valuable as these have been, I'll be doing very well indeed.

I could say that the combination of professional education and the piles of grading that my courses generate (such as the one that I should be working on right now) keeps me from writing all the deep and insightful essays that should be filling up this space instead of these random ramblings, but that might be oversimplifying it a bit. There has still been time for fun and diversion as well.

Yesterday, a group of us convened at Johnbai's for a Saturday morning event: the price of admission was some sugary cereal and the main attraction was cartoons! In a fit of wistful nostalgia, the big man decided he wanted to recreate the happy memories of his youth, to wit, stuffing himself with oversweetened carbohydrates while lolling on the couch for hours watching animated mayhem. So that's exactly what we did, although in a sop to "adult" sensibilities, the cartoon of choice was The Venture Brothers, a mostly witty, slightly sophomoric, and sometimes smutty pastiche of Jonny Quest, the classic animated adventure series of the sixties. I must admit, I had to cut the sugar-only diet with a little protein in the form of vegetarian bacon, but I think we kept to the spirit of the event, anyway.

After too-many-hours-to-admit of indolence, the whole crew - Johnbai, O, Dingo, Soapy, Yojimbo, Otis and I - rejoined the human race by taking a nice walk to Volunteer Park in the afternoon. It was a nearly perfect day for taking in the fall foliage and the late-blooming dahlias - sunny and clear, with blue skies and crisp, cool air.

Later that evening, Otis and I watched Shirley Valentine, a pleasant British romance from 1989 about a 42-year-old woman rediscovering the joy of living. It was a nice counterpoint to Judge Dredd, the cartoonishly violent 1995 Sylvester Stallone vehicle (notable only for a rare (to me) action movie performance by Diane Lane), which we saw earlier in the week.

Maybe what I need to do to have a life and a blog is hire a ghost writer.

[sheepman] Blogging about blogging - venial division

In a RL conversation about blogging and this blog in particular, some questions were raised as the the relative opaqueness of some of the category titles I use. One one wag said, "I know four-color ma means comics, but I have no idea why." Here, then, is a bit of an explication that maybe reveals more about my sensibilities and idiosyncrasies than it illuminates the blog itself.

Plainclothes Monk: I think I made the monk part of this title pretty clear in the introduction post, but the plainclothes part might be more obscure. I was trying to get across the sense of my not being a formal adherent to any particular organized practice or, for that matter, not even a very strong practitioner of an individual system - a civilian, if you will, with, at most, some monkish leanings. Truth to tell, I am not perfectly satisfied with this title; I was looking for a dactyl (three syllables with the first accented) to place before monk, to get the euphony of Bulletproof Monk, but could not find a word that matched both the mood and the form.

Four-color Ma: Four-color has often been used as a shorthand for comics; it refers to the old-school coloring process for comic books. Back in the day, comics were printed with four plates, one for each CMYK ink (roughly blue, red, yellow, and black). In the old days, the only variable was how many dots of each ink would be applied, and the degrees of variation were only in 25% chunks. So a 75% blue and 25% yellow would get a green, and a 75% red and 25% yellow would get an orange. You can start tinkering around with the math and see how few colors they actually had to work with; this goes along way toward explaining the universally perceived sensibility of comics, so easily parodied in pop art.

The ma part is a little harder to explain. Ma is a Japanese word that means something like space or gap or distance or emptiness; used in discussing art, the closest equivalent might be negative space, but it's not exactly that. Ma is the sense that a house is not its walls, but the space enclosed by its walls; that a pitcher is not the clay, but the volume that the clay surrounds. It is an important concept in the minimalist/formalist Japanese arts such as ikebana, kabuki, and calligraphy. It resonated with me as an important concept regarding comics, which were called by Scott McCloud "The Invisible Art." McCloud expressed in Understanding Comics that much of the art of comics happens in the gutters - that space between the panels that hold the drawings and the words. It is in that gap, that emptiness, that space, that the reader's imagination completes the art begun by the cartoonist. To me, that sounds a lot like ma.

Disclaimer: As Lou said to Bud, I don't even know what I'm talking about. After I do more (and more significant) research, I may have a whole post just on ma.

Rhythmic Gymnastics with Apparatus: This is a shout-out to my favorite event of the summer Olympics; I am using it here as the avatar for all cool and quirky pop culture. Wikipedia says that this is "a sport in which single competitors or pairs, trios or even more (generally five) manipulate one or two apparatus: rope, hoop, ball, clubs and ribbon. Rhythmic Gymnastics [...] combines elements of ballet, gymnastics, theatrical dance, and apparatus manipulation." What this really means is that you can watch some girl take a hula hoop, throw it in the air with all her might, do a tumbling routine across the floor, and then spring up and extend her arm, without looking, just in time for the hoop to fall right into it, like she was Captain America recovering his mighty shield. There's nothing cooler or quirkier than that.

Men in Skirts: I deliberately chose a title for this category that was provocative in regards to gender constructs, since that is where discussions of kilt-wearing often lead. I wish I could say that it was my invention, but the Metropolitan Museum of Art had a special exhibition some years ago called Bravehearts: Men in Skirts. The museum addressed more than just Utilikilts in their show, but it was also focused on "skirts as a means of injecting novelty into male fashion, as a means of transgressing moral and social codes, and as a means of redefining an ideal masculinity." It seems to fit, and it gets me a lot of hits.

Blockhead Rhetoric: This is the name of my "business" of grant writing, editing, and private writing instruction. It seemed important to be to develop this enterprise when I was an adjunct teacher, but I soon was teaching almost more classes than I could handle, so it fell by the wayside. Now, on the tenure-track, I don't have the time or energy to restart it, but in a year or so, who knows? The name itself comes from a quotation of Samuel Johnson, the legendary writer, literary critic, and originator of the first English language dictionary: No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for the money. I thought it captured my relationship to writing on several different levels: the sense that I am a task- and audience-oriented writer, rather than a creative writer; the connection between writing and commerce (including grants there); and a little bit of self-deprecation (I hope). I don't know if it's the best business name, but then I have never been a very good entrepreneur anyway.

Jet City: Did you know that way back when, in the previous century, the Boeing Company, a Chicago aerospace firm, actually had its corporate headquarters in Seattle? It's true! In fact, before computers, coffee, and microbrews, Seattle was an aviation town through-and-through, a city whose economic and cultural fortunes were tied to the rise and fall of the aeronautics industry. Really! Ask some old folks, they'll tell you.

The Sheepman: This category title is pure pun, the lowest form of humor: idle thinking is woolgathering right, so sheep, wool, sheepman -- get it? Yeah, I know. But it's also a shout-out to one of my favorite movies, The Sheepman, starring Glenn Ford and Shirley McClaine. It's a whimsical little film, with Ford as a reluctant sheepherder and McClaine as the woman of dubious virtue who becomes his ally in a sheep-cow conflict, but it's less about plot and more about character, with fun lines like this exchange between McClaine and Ford:

--Was he very bad?
--Well, let's just say that he wasn't in any danger of getting a headache from the weight of all the gold stars on his crown.

Well, I like it. And its lightweight nature makes it a perfect label for lightweight posts.

Like this one.

[apparatus] Pot shots

Well, it has been a bit of a bleary Sunday. I woke up tired and my cold is still hanging on, so I have been stumbling through an uneventful day, punctuating it with naps. I just finished grading some papers and that took the last of my coherence, so here's a smattering of pop culture updates and new items.

This new functionality of GMail is intended to prevent incoherence of a different sort: it's called Mail Goggles, and in an effort to curb drunk emailing, it requires you to do a few math calculations before you are allowed to send email. I think we can all point to a few occasions, perhaps some recent, when this might have come in handy.

This might seem incoherent, but it's true: individually wrapped slices of peanut butter for convenience in sandwich cuisine.

This might have been more coherent alongside the Flintstones clip from a few days ago, but here's a cool people-powered vehicle. (Related update: another people-powered craft didn't fare so well on its journey.)

Finally, when your crossword puzzle has turned into nothing more than an incoherent collection of letters, you can turn to this handy tool.

Bonus debate: The question arose recently of why Samuel L. Jackson has the reputation and cred that he does, considering that, in the opinion of some, his career has consisted only of overdone performances in bad movies. In order to shed light on this pressing question, I went through the IMDb and put together this list of Mr. Jackson's movies, leaving out his television, video game, and voice work. Take a look and judge for yourself: is this the oeuvre of the gritty Olivier, the finest actor of his generation - or just the resume of hack? Let us know via the poll on the main page and your comments.
Update: poll removed 10/21/08.

Lakeview Terrace (2008)
Iron Man (2008)
Jumper (2008)
Cleaner (2007)
1408 (2007)
Resurrecting the Champ (2007)
Home of the Brave (2006)
Black Snake Moan (2006)
Snakes on a Plane (2006)
Freedomland (2006)
The Man (2005)
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)
xXx: State of the Union (2005)
Coach Carter (2005)
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
Twisted (2004/I) .
Country of My Skull (2004) .
S.W.A.T. (2003) .
Basic (2003)
xXx (2002)
The House on Turk Street (2002)
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)
Changing Lanes (2002)
The Comeback (2002)
The 51st State (2001)
The Caveman's Valentine (2001)
Unbreakable (2000) .
Shaft (2000)
Rules of Engagement (2000) .
Any Given Wednesday (2000)
Deep Blue Sea (1999)
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) .
Violon rouge, Le (1998)
The Negotiator (1998)
Out of Sight (1998)
Sphere (1998)
Jackie Brown (1997)
Eve's Bayou (1997)
One Eight Seven (1997)
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
A Time to Kill (1996)
Trees Lounge (1996)
The Great White Hype (1996)
Sydney (1996)
Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995)
Kiss of Death (1995/I)
Losing Isaiah (1995)
The Search for One-eye Jimmy (1994)
The New Age (1994)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Hail Caesar (1994)
Fresh (1994)
True Romance (1993)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Menace II Society (1993)
Amos & Andrew (1993)
Loaded Weapon 1 (1993)
Fathers & Sons (1992)
Patriot Games (1992)
White Sands (1992)
Juice (1992)
Jumpin' at the Boneyard
Strictly Business (1991)
Johnny Suede (1991)
Jungle Fever (1991)
The Return of Superfly (1990)
Goodfellas (1990)
The Exorcist III (1990)
Mo' Better Blues (1990)
Betsy's Wedding (1990)
Def by Temptation (1990)
A Shock to the System (1990)
Sea of Love (1989)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Coming to America (1988)
School Daze (1988) .... Leeds
Magic Sticks (1987) (as Sam Jackson) .... Bum
Ragtime (1981)
Together for Days (1972)

[4-color ma] Art for Art's sake

I got back home just a little while ago from an author talk at Town Hall here in Seattle by Art Spiegelman. He's on tour promoting his new book Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@*&! (Pantheon). I have never had the pleasure of hearing Spiegelman speak in person before, and I must say I was not disappointed tonight.

Breakdowns: Portrait... is another oversize artifact, similar to Shadow of No Towers. The text includes a full reproduction of the original Breakdowns, a 1977 volume collecting various stories, including the original three-page "Maus." This softcover comic book/magazine is bound within a new hard cover, sandwiched between a comics-style preface and a prose afterward with illustrations. The book falls somewhere between a memoir, a retrospective, and a sampler.

Spiegelman's presentation had pretty much the same tone, overlaid with a generous frosting of formalism. Working with a somewhat wonky Powerpoint system, he moved through various examples of his work - and some from other creators - to briefly outline the history of comics, show the development of "personal statement" comics from "disposable entertainment," cover his own development as an artist, and give a few lessons in page design, panel composition, and image apprehension along the way.

If you have are interested in Speigelman's work or just comics in general, I would strongly recommend taking in one of his appearances if he's coming your way. The Comics Reporter published his tour schedule; check it out for a town near you.

Some highlights from tonight:

Spiegelman didn't smoke during his presentation; he said it was because it was Yom Kippur, but I think it may have been anti-tobacco Seattle that did him in.

I was intrigued by Speigelman's assertion that even working as an artist, he was constantly aware that his finished object was the printed page; the original art means little or nothing. He said that now, working with a computer more and more, there is often no original page, as he compiles pieces of art from different physical sources to make the comics page.

In the Q&A, Spiegelman gave one of the clearest and most succinct explanations of the coloring process for comics that I have ever encountered.

I puffed up a little bit when I heard Speigelman echo my own opinion of Persepolis. Like me, he thought that the movie was actually superior to the book, which he said "didn't engage enough with the grammar of comics to suit [him]." This is what I have said about Satrapi's comics work since I first picked it up: she has some great stories to tell, but doesn't seem to utilize the form in the most effective ways to tell that story. I think in the end, there's little doubt that Spiegelman lives in Scott McCloud's Formalist tribe.

Finally, the dumbest possible way to start off the interactive part of a Spiegelman talk might be to ask him why he used mice to represent Jews, especially if your utterance in toto is "So, in Maus, why rats?" This is even more especially true if his talk has included a pictorial reminiscence of the germination of that very idea. Somebody did this, and the room shuddered with embarrassment for him. Spiegelman declined to answer the question.

[sheepman] Running shorts

When I run Green Lake in the mornings, I almost always run clockwise. Those familiar with the lake know that the counterclockwise route is actually more scenic; because of the relationship of the path tho the shoreline, there are more and better scenic vistas to be had on a counterclockwise journey. Yet, I run clockwise, and save the counterclockwise route for walking.

In this habit, I have come to the conclusion that either almost nobody else runs the lake clockwise, or that these potential runners all run at the same speed as I do. On my circuit of the lake, I encounter a lot of people coming at me, both walking and running, and I pass a lot of walkers heading in the same direction I am, but I neither pass nor am passed by other runners, except rarely.

Encountering people coming at me is an interesting mathematical pattern of its own. If our circuits overlap enough, I meet walkers twice: they cover about one-third of the route in the time I cover about two-thirds, so I can see them once shortly after I start and once shortly before I end. Counterclockwise runners I see only once, unless we happened to have started together and meet up at the finish line from opposite directions, or they are really fast, as fast relative to me as I am to a walker. Both those exceptions are very rare; I see a lot of runners coming at me, but rarely see them again the same day.

Runners moving clockwise, however, are even fewer and farther between. Most of the time, I make it all the way around the lake without hearing the crunch of gravel behind me that speaks of someone gaining; even less frequently do I see any running figure before me to pull up alongside and pass. Usually I think that I am the only person running this particular route, but sometimes I can convince myself there are perhaps six of us, spaced evenly around the lake a half-mile apart, constantly out of each other's sight, even along the open, sweeping curves stripped of their summer foliage. We must be launched like pinballs from the community center walkway at even, mechanical intervals.

Of course, as I was thinking these very thoughts on my run this morning, a blonde woman in a red long-sleeved top and black running tights made a liar out of me, coming up on my left in the slowly brightening morning light and moving effortlessly ahead of me. I recalled having seen her stretching near the very start of my route, and wondered how long a head start she had given me before running me down.

On the occasions when I am passed, I try to pace the person who passes me, not in any competitive way, but in the same manner that mariners would pace their vessels against floating logs: there is no race against the log, just information about the context of the speed of the ship. Sometimes when running I fall into reverie and my pace slows; the crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch of another runner can wake me up, and my 1-2-3-4 mantra of "pick-up-your-feet" becomes renewed and revitalized. Occasionally, I have stayed with my companions for however long our paths overlap, matching their strides and feeling the changes in my lungs and legs in response to the different pace.

Sometimes, however, like this morning, the newcomer is clearly a faster runner, and I just watch as the distance between us grows and grows as their steps eat up the ground in bigger bites than I can take. Trying to match them would be fruitless exercise and counter to my reasons for running in the first place.

I feel neither proud of nor embarrassed by either outcome; we're all just doing what we need to do to walk - or run - our own Paths. Mine goes clockwise, usually alone, and I like it just fine that way.