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Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Chicks in the City

Posted in Chickens, Miscellaneous, Pacific Northwest, tagged , , on February 19, 2010| 1 Comment »

Spring is here, according to Gladys. After a little more than two months of winter vacation, she began laying her bluish eggs again on February 6. Her eggs are bigger now–almost the size of store-bought Large–so at last we can use them in recipes without worrying about how the cake will turn out. They look so beautiful lying on bright red bubinga shavings that it’s almost a shame to bring them in from the henhouse. But I get hungry.

Odd egg out

Forrest, meanwhile, still refuses to lay. When Gladys is busy laying an egg, Forrest stares at us through the sliding glass door with bored irritation. She spends most of her time chasing birds and squirrels out of the yard. Yesterday she and Gladys kept two crows at bay for half an hour. The crows would perch on the fence staring at the chickens, knowing something really good must be in a yard so well guarded. But every time they dropped down from the fence, there would be a chicken running at them full speed, head low. So they would retreat back to the fence to wait, staring down at the chickens in the small yard, completely ignoring the two acres of undefended land immediately behind them.

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Goodbye to Salinger

Posted in Miscellaneous, Words, tagged , , on January 28, 2010| 2 Comments »

What is J.D. Salinger to us? Catcher in the Rye was assigned reading in high school, presented by the establishment as a fine example of the antiestablishment. And we devoured it. The kids who hated literature loved Catcher. The kids who loved literature sought out more Salinger (and found very little). Moreover, Catcher as a novel and Salinger as a type of writer became cultural touchstones for generations. We remember the descriptions of Robert Ackley with his pimples and mossy teeth, the mysteriously termed throw that Holden can get for five dollars with a hotel prostitute. Most of all we remember the tone of the novel, at once funny, mean, and sad. But even today, as we are surrounded by entertainment that is arguably funnier and certainly meaner, Catcher still resonates with students. Why?

Hemingway famously stated that all modern American literature comes from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. In reality, in the latter half of the 20th Century and I think still today, it would be more accurate to say that all modern American writing comes from Hemingway. Short, understated sentences composed of unsentimental, ordinary words. This is how we were taught to write, how we were taught to edit, and what we were taught to value in the writings of others.

It is in this context that we first read Salinger. And while the vulgarities got our attention, I think it is the exposed emotion of the narrator that was really the most shocking. It seemed almost as if the redacted portions of a story had been published by accident, while the approved and conventional parts were left out. When the same English instructor who taught us to write controlled, straightforward prose assigned Catcher in the Rye, the world got a little rounder. We were learning how to write for success, but Salinger reminded us of the voice inside, of the emotions behind the facts. And if we could not get away with writing like that, or of sharing aloud how we really felt about the adults around us, Salinger did it for us. With their permission, it turns out.

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The Crooked Dead

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged , , on January 20, 2010| 2 Comments »

Passing through the cemetery on a late December afternoon, we see a sort of silver specter in the distance ahead. A ghost would not be out of place here where old settlers of Oregon’s upper Willamette Valley rest for eternity. But this is stranger than a ghost. Less believable. And so we move closer, thinking with each step, It can’t be. It really can’t be.

Duct tape. And this was a case of repair, not vandalism. The gravestone was split almost completely through in a few places and in a general process of disassembly. When all else fails, you can hold your family history together with duct tape.

A more standard method of preservation is reliance on memory, which we call  oral history when it happens to other people. Memory is augmented by a handful of puzzling photos of people we know we should be able to identify. We look into stern eyes and rustic homes and feel a sense of pride. But also a quiet concern that we might be proud of the wrong person. Perhaps a cousin or a family friend. If you played Simon in the early 80s, or have walked into a room and wondered why you were there, or have visited an elderly parent who no longer recognized her own child, you know that the only reliable thing about memory is that it is pretty dodgy.

Go back about 150 years, and you’ll find a sturdy Norwegian fisherman stepping onto a larger boat than he is used to, leaving behind the fjord and snow-smothered fields of his youth to jounce across the Atlantic for a new country and, with luck, a new life. Risk, worry, hope, eased by the occasional sour indulgence in lutefisk and the company of his diaspora. It is a nice story if you don’t mention the wife and children left behind.

Now in South Dakota, the settler finds a new wife, Mary, and with her has children whom he names after those he has abandoned in the old country. This gives him two sons named Thor–one on each side of the Atlantic. But his second wife and his second Thor die. So he finds a third wife, with whom he can extend the family, adding a daughter named Mary (after the second wife) and a new son. The third Thor. That is how my ancestor brought the family name to America. This is the story as I remember it being told to me, and there is a reasonable chance that some part of it might even be true. But it is my memory of someone else’s memory of, most likely, someone else’s memory.

A better method of preserving family history is to write it down. That’s why I know so much more about one of my distant ancestors, William Bradford, even though he came to America 250 years before the Norwegian fisherman. Bradford the Pilgrim, holding onto a new home against the toughest odds, recorded in his now-famous diary accounts of starvation and disease, hurricane and earthquake, diplomacy and law (including a strange case that resulted in the execution of both sheep and shepherd).

But equally important stories from more recent generations are slipping away. Half-remembered rumors, conjectures, delusions. The aunt who swears she was orphaned off in her youth while her siblings insist, No, you weren’t. The uncle who mumbled obscenities through evening prayers and went quietly insane. The sister who committed suicide and was rumored to be pregnant. We bury our scandals and defeats as if their past existence could somehow weaken the family line. A history made up not so much of family, but of a name that stands for a family.

Three thousand miles east of the duct-taped Oregon grave, Boston’s famous Granary Burying Ground holds twice as many skeletons as gravestones. Immigrants and patriots began to occupy the cemetery back in the mid 1600s, lying under fantastic slate stones etched with flying skulls and images of Death dancing with Afterlife. But caretakers in later generations were not satisfied. The plots were strewn about randomly. Hard to maintain and not pleasing to later aesthetic sentiments. So the crooked dead were left in their now forgotten spaces while the stones above them were moved and arranged into neat, straight rows.

The dead are inconvenient. Their stories as crooked as the original plots at the Granary. But if past lives don’t align with how we want to see ourselves, they are still an essential part of our history. What we account for as success, after all, is transient. The homes our ancestors built are mostly gone. Farms fallowed and businesses bust. But their struggle is timeless. The struggle for money and shelter, the struggle for meaning and moments of joy, the struggle to set the next generation on its feet. This is our legacy and it is worth preserving. Even if awkward. Even with duct tape.

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The Curious Alien Farm of Medical Lake

Posted in Miscellaneous, Pacific Northwest, tagged , , on December 24, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Would aliens, if they were to travel across incredible distances to get here, pass right by our lush coasts, our shining cities, our spectacular mountains, and settle in our most barren landscape? The answer is, Apparently So.

Of course, barren is a relative term. If you’ve grown up anywhere along Washington’s western slopes, where it’s green in the dead of winter but you can still see snow on the peaks through the middle of summer, where horizon is mostly a concept useful for people who live in places without so much Douglas fir in the way, well, then barren is pretty much Medical Lake. Driving east from Seattle, you hold your breath for the 200 miles between Cle Elum and Spokane, waiting for trees to reappear. Halfway through, a Chamber of Commerce radio station declares, with no hint of irony, “There is always plenty of free parking in Ritzville.” And then, right at the end of this long stretch, after hours of dust devils and alfalfa and kids arguing and wheat fields and potatoes and more arguing, right at the transition back into trees and hills and curves in the road, is Medical Lake.

It’s here that two brothers from California—following a stint in Wyoming—purchased 21 acres of land along I-90 about five years ago and began filling half of it with bizarre metal and concrete sculptures, most of them manufactured in Asia. You’ll find flocks of dark menacing eagles, statues of naked men with joking signs over their privates, gargoyles, roosters, even the skulls of Texan longhorns tossed into a bin for sale.

But no one comes here for the skulls. And not many come for the naked men. They come instead to see the UFO and its crop of aliens. The UFO and a seemingly friendly alien are easily visible from I-90. If you take the time to stop by, you’ll find more aliens and even alien-inspired chairs, all on sale.

Just act natural

The aliens and UFO are from China. A life-sized replica of Oscar, the resident dog and security system, is from Thailand. Everything except Oscar is for sale. The owner who met us in November said they had started to get a lot of attention recently from people who found out about the location on the Internet and sneaked onto the property to exchange trinkets. “Geocaching?” I offered. “Yes!” He was irritated by the geocachers because they came onto the property at all hours, without permission, and never purchased a single kitchy statue. We were not purchasing on our visit, either, but at least we were not among the hated geocachers. That is, not until we were halfway to the UFO, when my youngest turned around and shouted back, “We love geocaching! We do it all the time!”

The truth is, our visit had nothing to do with geocaching. Traveling along I-90 in recent years, we had seen the UFO and were beckoned by an alien waving to us from the fenceline. And now, as winter approached, the aliens themselves were on sale for half price at $75. Very hard to resist.

We sat in the UFO, looked around at the myriad sculptures, and talked to the owner about his love of this barren land. This land that grows basalt instead of crops. After years in California and Wyoming, he was home. When I asked what the business, this place, was called, he said simply, “The Farm.” The barren stretch from Cle Elum to Spokane was, to him, the best of all landscapes. And I think that if he were to travel east, he would hold his breath from Couer d’Alene to Missoula, suffocating under the relentless trees and mountains and waiting for the horizon to come back.

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Watch for Skateboarding Chickens

Posted in Chickens, Miscellaneous, Social Media on December 10, 2009| 1 Comment »

Forrest shows off

When Peter P. joined the Windows 7 team as a user experience designer, he was given an opportunity most designers can only dream about. There are more than 1 billion PCs in use today, over 90% of them running Windows. If you are looking to change the way people interact with the products in their lives, this is heady stuff.

Just don’t let it go to your head.

There are so many places in Windows 7 for a UX designer to make an impact, from the touchscreen experience to the new ribbons in Paint. But as Peter explained to me at a recent tweetup, users have made one thing very clear: Don’t mess with Notepad.

Turns out, people value the lowly text editing program not for its features, but for its lack of features. The top use of Notepad, especially among developers, is to strip out formatting. The last thing a Notepad user wants to see  is change in the name of improvement.

This is not simply a case of leaving well enough alone. When we watch how people really use products before determining the next feature set and put aside preconceived notions of how a product is supposed to be used, we develop better products. The same principle that has preserved the simplicity of Notepad for nearly 25 years led to significant enhancements to Excel early on when it was discovered that people used their number crunching software to organize text. This is why the very word processing features that have been kept out of Notepad all these years have been added, release after release, to Excel. 

If we look around us with an eye to how products are “misused” today, we can get a sense of where things are going. My son Nick doesn’t have an iPod, so he downloads music onto his digital camera. Considering the storage capacity of his camera, and the mediocre quality of the camera on my iPhone, I think he may be onto something.

Two weeks ago, our verrückten German friends took care of the chickens while we were away in Montana for Thanksgiving. Before long we got a link to a Facebook page with a picture of Forrest riding a skateboard. I’m pretty sure a pair of 8-year-old girls put Forrest up to it, but it is pretty interesting.  I’m not saying that chickens are the next big thing in children’s entertainment, or that sports are the next big thing in chicken entertainment. But just in case, I’m keeping a lookout for skateboarding chickens.

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Kindling

Posted in Miscellaneous, Words, tagged , on November 23, 2009| 3 Comments »

Don't try this with KindleMany people suffer from the misconception that books are just an old fashioned way to share ideas, knowledge, and experience. Books are good for that sort of thing, yes, but before you ditch them for a shiny new Kindle, remember that there are functions printed books perform for us that a Kindle simply cannot duplicate. Consider three of the most important ways a book can be used:

  • To Show Off
  • To Fend Off
  • To Piss Off

A Kindle doesn’t show people how smart you really are.
Imagine what it would be like to have offices without bookshelves radiating intelligence and expertise. A lawyer without law books, an editor without a fat orange Chicago Manual of Style, a marketer without something by Seth Godin. How would you know these people were not rank amateurs? I recently worked with a group of marketers who were keenly interested in taking advantage of Twitter, but they couldn’t be bothered to set up Twitter accounts and talk to actual people. So instead, they obtained free copies of Joel Comm’s book Twitter Power and displayed them on their office shelves like diplomas. That way, people visiting their offices saw the book and assumed they were experts in social media. Brilliant!

It’s hard to fend off strangers with your Kindle.
Surely protection is one of the most important, if unappreciated, functions that books perform for us. When you put a book cover between your face and the people around you, you are showing them why it is better not to disturb you. A good friend of mine brought the following book to his daughter’s soccer practices this year: Richard H. Timberlake’s Monetary Policy in the United States: An Intellectual and Institutional History. The title alone told the other parents that he was morose, aloof, and not even remotely interested in discussing the latest scandal about bikini-clad baristas. I used a similar tactic when I rode the Tube every day as a student back in 1989, in this case wielding Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. This book was doubly effective at keeping strangers away by telling them I was dull and pedantic while reminding them that every breath from every other subway rider could spread disease.

You can’t offend people by destroying your Kindle.
The most grievous of sacrileges in Western Civilization, next to banning books, is burning them. Fahrenheit 451 horrifies us because we equate the burning of books with the annihilation of ideas. If you disagree with an author, nobody cares. But burning a book, now that will get you some attention. The trouble with Kindle is, if the content angers you, you just delete it. If you want to destroy your Kindle, you have to recycle it because it won’t burn. And then instead of offending others, you just look like a good earth-friendly citizen.

Oh yes, and there is one more important way a printed book is superior to any electronic format. Most of us first learned to love books by tearing them apart. I’m talking, of course, about the pop-up book. Long before we learned how to read text, we learned that books sometimes contained pictures that would unfold magically before our eyes when we tugged at the pages. The harder we pulled, the faster the picture jumped up. Until we pulled too hard. And that was when we began to learn about how to be respectful of books and the ideas they contained. You could tug at them a little, fold the corners over if you didn’t have a bookmark handy, maybe write a few notes in the margins. But you were not to tear them, or throw them, or burn them except under extreme circumstances (say, for a blog photo).  You might take care of a Kindle because it is expensive to replace, but not because of the ideas it stands for. After all, the Kindle is as much about deleting old ideas as conveying new ones, so in the end the only idea it really stands for is convenience. And no school or library or despotic little country ever found convenience unsettling enough to ban.

That’s why I’m sticking to books where solid ideas are permanently inked onto fragile paper. Books I can use to keep strangers from talking to me. Books I can use to say, “My Dostoyevsky is smarter than your Dan Brown.” And if a funny picture unfolds when I open the pages or pull a secret lever, so much the better.

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Seldom With Guides

Posted in Miscellaneous, Pacific Northwest, tagged , , on November 13, 2009| 1 Comment »

Sometimes while mountaineering in the Pacific Northwest, you’ll fight hours of  underbrush, punch through half-frozen rivers, and slip your way up maddening scree under sleet and fog. And just when you are the most lost, the most exhausted, you emerge from the clouds and stumble upon other climbers. They are lost too. They are tired. And they are cursing Becky.

Becky guide from 1949, with cramponsThat would be Fred Becky. The man who almost single-handedly defined climbing in the Northwest, who made more first ascents than anyone in recorded history, who will scale a cliff with thousands of feet of exposure more easily than most of us can cross the living room.

When climbers talk about a “Becky Route,” they often mean the hypothetical route which is documented in climbing guides, but seems not to be possible. When they talk about “Becky Time,” they are referring to the mythical  Becky pace that will take you from trailhead to summit to bar in one day. You complain about this pace in the late afternoon when you are still trying to reach the summit, and the nearest bar seems continents away.

Like most legends, Fred Becky has his fair share of detractors and acolytes, but he is still a legend. So when we heard he would be speaking at Edgeworks Climbing in Tacoma, we were in.

For autographing, I brought along his groundbreaking guidebook from 1949, which the Mountaineers had refused to publish. Long before I was born, my uncle kept notes in this very book as he trained to climb Mount Rainier in 1951-52. By the time I climbed the same peaks, half a century later, avalanches and rockfall had transformed the physical landscape. But the Becky routes remained in print, viable or not.

So I made the pilgrimage to Edgeworks to see Becky’s photographs and hear his wisdom. As it turns out, Becky isn’t so much interested in wisdom. If you invite him to speak at your climbing gym, he’ll tell everyone there to get out of the gym and climb in the “real world.” He will show you peaks from Alaska to Mexico, with photos from climbs in 2008 alongside climbs in 1956. But he will  not comment on the out-of-date equipment you see, or the age of the young spry Becky in many of the photos. He is really only interested in the ageless peaks themselves, and the challenge they represent.

After the presentation, I brought him my uncle’s old book to autograph. A book so old it says nailed boots are basic equipment for every climb. But also a book that opens with a statement just as true today as 60 years ago: “Since climbing in Washington is seldom done with guides, self reliance, keen judgment, and the technical competence to climb on steep alpine terrain are  prerequisites.”

I presented this old, first edition book from Becky’s youth to him for an autograph. He seemed not to recognize it. And then a 20-year-old behind me pushed forward and said, “You had a John Muir quote at the beginning of your presentation. Can you tell me how Muir inspired you?” And the 86-year-old climbing legend paused and looked tired for the first time in his life. “I never thought about  it,” he said.

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He Liked to Open Cans

Posted in Miscellaneous, Social Media, Words on November 6, 2009| 4 Comments »

Somebody at Dictionary.com goofed up this week, and it was wonderful. Tuesday’s word of the week was sommelier, which of course is a person who knows how to match the right Malbec with your roast lamb. The correct definition for sommelier was posted online (check 1), and also sent out through Twitter (check 2). But Dictionary.com’s original email notification contained not only the wrong definition, but mixed up the quotations illustrating usage as well (uh oh). To be fair, they caught most of the mistakes and sent out a corrected email later, but the damage was already done. I could not shake this misquotation from my mind:

misquote

When you read the above misquote, three things jump to mind immediately. First, Hemingway will have a hard time going online to check a menu if he dies in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961, long before the advent of Netscape and the first PC. Second, Hemingway is spelled with only one m. And third, he never wrote like this. Never ever.

And it is this last point that is most interesting to me. As soon as I read the misquote on Tuesday, I started thinking about what it would be like if Hemingway and other writers we hold dear had lived in the age of Facebook and Ning and Twitterific. Would they have a Twitter profile?  Henry James and Virginia Woolf, for example, could not condense the striking of a match into a single sentence, much less 140 characters. Hemingway at least is famous for short, simple sentences, such as, “He liked to open cans.” And you could tweet that easily enough. But out of context, it is essentially meaningless, like a keystone which by itself is a crooked rock lying on the ground, but supported stone by stone from each side is capable of supporting the entrance to a whole cathedral.

Social media applications are great for building connections with other people, but not so great for sharing unfamiliar ideas, especially complicated ideas that cannot be grasped in 60 seconds of video or 140 characters. Some things just require more time, more development, more contemplation. You’ll find a lot of funny jokes and recycled wit in social media. You’ll meet people from around the world who will help you when you least expect it.  But you won’t find many Charles Ives ringtones.

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Meet Forrest

Posted in Chickens, Miscellaneous, tagged on October 21, 2009| 7 Comments »

Used to be you could identify the nutcases in your neighborhood by their gangly ham radio antenna towers and gardens with too much zucchini. These people lived within a system of ever-evolving technology, efficiency, and comfort. But they weren’t quite comfortable. With every step forward in evolution, they were haunted by a sense that something important was being left behind. They wanted more control of the things they consumed, whether it was food, information, or entertainment. Today you won’t see the ham radio towers in your neighborhood, but there are other signs. Cars with biodiesel bumper stickers. Kids almost floating off in UFO-shaped balloons. Chickens walking casually around the yard as if they were tabby cats. 

forrest

Forrest

So confession time. We have joined the ranks of crazy suburbanites with chickens.

We have three hens named by my sister who raised them from eggs in Olympia. There is Gladys the Black, Wilbur the Gray, and Forrest the Brown. Forrest was named after a character in a Winston Groom novel who in turn was named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate general and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, which as most people know is an organization of chickens who run around at night instead of day. Forrest in the novel (and subsequent movie) is a simpleton. Forrest the chicken is a simpleton even by chicken standards. Hence the name.

People today need reassurance about their food. Did my beef come from a happy cow? Did my egg come from a chicken free to walk on actual dirt? Did terrorists sneak into the warehouse during a smoke break to poison my food? When you raise your own chickens, you don’t need to fret over these things because you are in control and know all the details. Today, for example, I know that Wilbur ate nasturtiums, pears, and left-over Cheerios. I know Gladys spent her day under the Japanese maple and the Chevy Suburban hiding from rain. And I know that Forrest followed the other chickens around like a hopeless groupie.

Our hens are only a few months old, so we are still eggless in Seattle.  But I can tell you that there is much more to raising chickens than getting fresh eggs every day or an eventual Kung Pao Gladys. We have raised guinea pigs, gerbils, lizards, newts, dogs, cats, two garter snakes, even an orphaned squirrel. Of them all, chickens are the most entertaining to watch. They combine thousands of years of careful domestication with the most primitive of instincts. And when you watch them, you witness both. Chicken life alternates constantly between complacence and panic. Complacence comes from being around familiar company and not having to think.

Chicken panic has three sources:

  1. Another chicken is getting food that should be  mine.
  2. The neighbor dog/cat/toddler is chasing me.
  3. The other chickens have left me behind.

Cats are warm on your lap, and snakes are fascinating when they lunge at a banana slug as if it were really capable of escape. But for sheer entertainment, nothing beats a chicken.  They do stupid things, which is amusing. They coo when you hold them, which is endearing. And they surprise you with their predictability. For now, I watch them and congratulate myself that one day our eggs will come from a pure, natural source, even if the truth is that our eggs still come from a faraway farm, and our hens are living it up without producing anything to pay the rent.

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A Night at the Butcher’s

Posted in Miscellaneous, Pacific Northwest, tagged , , , , , on October 12, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Butcher Shop CafeIt’s not every year you dress up and bring your candles to the butcher shop. But this isn’t like most years. Money is tight. Jobs are scarce. The future is more than just a little hazy. In other words, it’s time to get creative. So rather than go to one of Seattle’s great restaurants on our night out, we opted to go directly to the butcher that supplies the best of them. The Butcher Shop Cafe on Juanita Drive is not exactly your ordinary butcher. You can order everything from kielbasa to guinea fowl and have the chef prepare it right there. This Saturday we had prime rib, which was outstanding. For side dishes we pretty much ate everything available, including baked corn salad, beans with brisket, and sauteed squash and peppers.  The cafe is more utilitarian than pretty, but for some of us, that is much of the appeal. And what you trade off in elegance you gain in more personal ways. It’s a great place to relax with your best friend, chat with the chef while sampling next week’s menu, and indulge in shamelessly generous portions. And if you happen to wonder where exactly the sirloin cut comes from, why there is a diagram right there behind the counter. It is a working butcher shop, after all. And there are only three tables, so if you plan to go there for dinner, it helps to call ahead. The cafe, butcher, and supplier are all available at 425-485-4658.

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