| Mendocino Coast Audubon Society held a "Raptors of the South Coast" field trip today and MAN! was it a good one! This is a great time of year to see lots of hawks on the coast just south of us; the open field especially collect large numbers of Buteos of several species. Often the weather sucks, and the forecast today called for wind, so we were prepared to bail if it got too nasty. But the wind never got really bad, no more than maybe 10 mph, and it was sunny all day... and extremely birdy. Good group of people, including some really expert birders, which helped a lot on some of these birds:
( The List of Raptors )
Good company, decent weather, great birds, just an excellent day.
Tomorrow (Sunday) morning, time for Oak & Thorn on KZYX&Z - which you can get on the Internet with the Live Webstream. Hope you'll listen in! 9 to 11 Pacific time (1500-1700 GMT). | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment   |
| Samhain show successfully cobbled together; playlist here. I managed to remember to turn Audacity on and record it this time, so an MP3 of the show might be available once I get it transferred from the studio computer. Thanks to all who offered suggestions - gives me a lot to look up for future shows.
This was the last Sunday for the outdoor Farmer's Market in Albion, so I frantically bottled cider, then packed up apples and squash and wolfed down the excellent tuna-fish-on-toast ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) loupnoir made for me (with homegrown shallots and celery) and drove back down the hill to market. (Feeling a bit like Harry the Weaver.) Had fun pushing samples of heirloom apples onto customers; King David is now called the Wow! Apple, because that was the immediate response of about half the people on tasting it. Sold out of cider again. That stuff is becoming quite popular and I better start working on a license; at least one restaurant wants to carry it.
Back home, chilled with a cuppa, then fried up some Purple Viking potatoes with dill and turmeric, mixed in chopped grilled kielbasa and moistened with some vegetable stock. Damn fine peasant chow!
Tomorrow: planting out the Chinese cabbage and bok choy seedlings started a month ago. And maybe a little hydrologic modeling. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| Putting together a playlist for tomorrow's Oak and Thorn program on KZYX&Z. Looking for tunes around the Samhain/All Hallows/spooky/ooky theme...
I Am Stretched Out On Your Grave (Sinead O'Connor or Lisa Gerrard version?)
I Buried My Wife and Danced on Top of Her (Dervish)
The Unquiet Grave (LAU, others?)
Stolen Child (Loreena McKennitt)
False Knight (Steeleye Span)
Soul Cakes (Watersons)
Marrowbones (Steeleye; others?)
The Kintail Witches (Robin Williamson story)
The Seal (Patrick Ball story)
Prince of Darkness (Ed Miller)
Dance to your Shadow (Pam Swan)
Wandering Spirit (Baka Beyond)
King Henry (Steeleye Span)
Witch of the Westmorland (Stan Rogers)
Bad Moon Rising/Bad Moon Reel (Battlefield Band)
True Thomas (Danny Carnahan)
Tir na n'Og (Carnahan)
Hmm, lots of songs, need more instrumentals... any suggestions? | | comments: 13 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Tomorrow, Sunday October 18, point your browser to KZYX&Z for a special edition of Oak & Thorn. Roy Gullane, Martin Hayes, Alasdair Fraser, Dougie MacLean, Paddy Keenan, and more, all talking about my show! 9 to 11 AM, Pacific time. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Is it really almost the middle of October already? What happened to September? I was just getting used to the idea of sunny mild days without wind, and now it's about to howl and pour.
Panicked at the impending winter, we half-killed ourselves cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood a couple days ago. Still don't have the shed as full as I'd like, but there might be enough to get us through winter. Tomorrow morning is my last chance to get dry wood under cover before the storm hits. Then it looks like three days of indoors work: preparing for Pledge Drive and researching the geology of the Salton Sea region.
Hope the wind doesn't do too much damage to my apple trees. Many of them are loaded down with fruit, some of which is ripe and will probably get shaken off into the wet grass. Argh. More worried about breaking branches though. Need a good harvest of cider fruit this year, to fill up all the extra carboys we got for free a couple weeks ago. Should have enough capacity for about 100 gallons of cider. I may have to get a winegrower's license (yes that is what they call it) in order to sell cider to a local eatery/watering hole. Might need additional fermentation capacity... and will definitely need better processing equipment.
Good day at the Market, after being gone for 3 weeks in a row it was nice to be back. Sold apples, carrots, radishes, Swiss chard, potatoes, garlic, shallots, summer squash, pumpkins, three types of winter squash, mustard, and cider(!). Overheard: an out-of-towner, after looking at the 'Black Futsu' squash on my table, remarked: "Wow, this is a real Farmer's Market - there's nothing here from Mexico!" Visitors are often astonished to learn that all the sellers live right here in Albion (except one guy who comes down from Caspar).
Today's receipts will probably go right back into the ground, in the form of cover-crop seed. If we get really lucky this storm will be the start of a wet weather pattern and the cover crop will get an excellent start before the ground gets too cold. (If we get unlucky it will be like last year, the early storm wet the ground and germinated the cover crop, but then it was dry for weeks and most of the crop died or got stunted. Last year that hurt the neighbors but not me; sometimes being lazy and slow works out!) I have a couple new areas to open up and prep for next year, one for potatoes and one for squash. Hope to get that started just as soon as the weather allows. | | comments: 10 comments or Leave a comment |
| I generally distrust economists, but some of them are interesting to read; here's one such. He mostly talks about economics of water, where his major theme is that mispricing creates bad incentives which in turn lead to mismanagement. No argument from me there! In this post, he almost casually points out the extremely significant difference between risk (which is quantifiable) and uncertainty (which generally is not). Failure to make that distinction has caused many blunders, some catastrophic - the recent global financial collapse, for example. (The uncertain possibility of low-probability events was left out of risk-pricing models.)
This gets back to some of what Taleb was banging on about. Speaking of whom, there is now apparently a formal statement of the Taleb distribution. One of the really insidious things about such a distribution is that a small sample of data may appear to be normally-distributed (or nearly so) and thus quantifiable. Low-probability events, by definition, don't usually show up in small samples; even in larger samples, they are often disregarded as "anomalies." I can't tell you how often I have seen that word used to dismiss data, without justification, simply because it didn't fit the picture. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| Even the WashPo talks sense.
If anybody reading this is still swayed by the reactionary fears of "socialized medicine," please read the article and think about it. Do you consider yourself an American patriot? Why then are you content to see Americans falling further behind other developed democracies?
The one thing America has that the other countries lack: Elected officials who owe their positions to the financial support of insurance industry executives and trial lawyers. I wonder if that has anything to do with our situation? | | comments: 17 comments or Leave a comment |
| Today was a mixed bag. It started out promisingly: I got the generator we brought back from Oregon running well. Back in late 1999, my Dad bought into the Y2K hype, buying (among other things) a brand-new Makita 5KW generator with electric start. He apparently never used it, though at some point he must have tested to see if it would start - because it had gas in it. This is not a good thing; gasoline does not last 10 years without going bad, depositing gum and varnish inside the tiny tricky bits of carburetors, causing them to function badly. So today I took the carburetor apart, just enough to rinse out the goo, drained out all the bad gas and replaced it with new gas, crossed my fingers and turned the key. To my delight, it ran like a top!
After that I went to the woodshop to cut a zillion little squarish pieces of scrap wood, for to prop up all the winter squashes currently previously resting on the ground. This helps keep rising damp from ruining them. Indications are good for a bumper crop of "Small Sugar" pumpkins, and maybe a decent crop of Buttercup squash as well; the jury is still out on the others.
While messing about with the squash, Deja suddenly started bellering; I looked up in time to see a doe and fawn, who had just strolled in through the open gate, go running off into the orchard. Ack! loupnoir was off in town, so I had to run around opening gates and trying to herd the damn deer on my own. Fortunately these deer aren't very spooky, so it was about like herding a couple of sheep, and they went out without too much trouble.
Things went downhill after lunch. First I dropped and broke a bowl; then when I picked up a jar of pickles, the bottom fell off. Never had that happen before... what a mess! Then I kicked over a beer glass, spilling some of the precious life-giving fluid on the carpet. Oh, the drama of life!
Man, the news really sucks lately. ( Gloomy musings )
Well, that's enough of that. Tomorrow is another day of promise: perhaps the sun will shine again, as it did today, and the runner beans will grow another foot. Perhaps I will get carrots seeded, as I was supposed to do today but somehow never got round to doing. | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| It's my turn to take the 5th Sunday, so tomorrow morning at 9 Pacific time I'll be hosting Oak & Thorn on KZYX&Z. Tune in to the live webstream if you can! I have little idea what I'm going to play and will probably throw a show together in a big panic during Morning Edition, as I often do, and sometimes that works really well.
Today I fixed some irrigation, then picked another big pile of runner beans, sorted the best of them into baskets for sale tomorrow; then picked the 'Butterstick' yellow zucchini; helped pick the Red-Vein Crab; briefly watched loupnoir pick pears; counted and weighed the 'German Butterball' potatoes we dug a couple days ago (115 pounds of spuds, from 5 lbs of seed potatoes), then we pulled, washed, sorted, and bunched about 100 carrots. Dinner was a couple pounds of the German Butterballs diced and fried with some sweet Egyptian Walking onions, while Herself washed spuds for market.
So tomorrow after the show, we run home, stuff some lunch down our craws, pack up the tables and produce and head off to market. If you happen to be on the Mendocino coast in the afternoon, come by Albion between 2 and 4 for the best little Farmer's Market! We'll have carrots (four varieties per bunch), three kinds of potatoes, grey shallots, yellow zucchini, runner beans, sugar-snap peas, garlic, and (if I get up early enough to pick it before going to the studio) Swiss chard. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Writing the bio for my father, and speaking at his memorials, triggered some interest in the family history. My brother and I realized there were big holes in our understanding of the story of how we came to be. So I started poking around on the Net and ran across a post to Ancestry.com that seemed to reference my great-great-grandfather. The thread was from 2002 but I replied in the faint hope that its author would check back... and she did! Turns out she is a cousin, living in Siskiyou County, who knew my father and sent photos of him at her father's 85th birthday party. Of more interest to me, though, she forwarded a scan of an article from the Siskiyou Historical Society, written in the mid-1950s by one of my aunts (or great-aunts; not quite sure yet which generation she was in). That article contained a whole bunch of detailed information about the lives of my paternal great-grandparents, as well as the identity and origins of great-great-grandparents.
We had always heard a story that great-great-grandmother Jane Bray was the widow of a British soldier and came to California after the Gold Rush with her young son, my great-grandfather William J. But I'd never heard g-g-granddad's name or any other details about him. Turns out he was Absalom Bray, stationed at St Lucia, and my g-grandpa was born on Jamaica in 1848! Now I know why I like reggae music so much... and how cool a name is Absalom?
The whole article is fascinating stuff. I'll try posting it somewhere so y'all can read it if interested. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| Via peristaltor, In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition. "The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest."
Via Steve Muhlberger,Brad deLong tells us of The Birther Movement of 1377, with references in the comments to the "Warming Pan Whigs" of 1688; this latter featured in The System of the World by Neal Stephenson. So our craziness is not uniquely American, but a legacy of Anglo tradition. (We just do it more spectacularly, in the great American tradition of overdoing everything.)
In other news, the KZYX&Z one-day pledge drive was successful, though not as spectacularly so as the organizer had hoped. We got 300+ pledges totaling over $27,000. The Lu'au the previous weekend was also successful, netting something like $7,000 for the station. And a matching-grant fundraiser held by a local lumber & hardware store, Mendo Mill, netted $6,100 for the station. Total, about $40,000 in a week! Which, alas, is about one month's worth of expenses...
Tomorrow we head north to the Rogue Valley, land of my birth, to start going through my father's effects and hold a couple of memorials for him. We're planning to have a little fun along the way, stopping at some of the interesting places I've been driving past for years: Arcata Marsh, Big Lagoon, the Roosevelt Elk herd, and some of the giant Redwood groves. Once in the Valley there's a good chance I can get my brother to take me fly-fishing for steelhead in the Rogue, something we used to do together many years ago when I was a teenager. I just hope the heat doesn't wipe loupnoir out. | | comments: 11 comments or Leave a comment |
| Heading out soon to Philo for the special One-Day Pledge Drive on KZYX. Any of you who listen to Oak & Thorn (or other programs) on our live Webstream, consider becoming a member today! You can easily join online - look for the "Join Now" tab. I'll be helping pitch this afternoon between 1 and 3.
Then tomorrow it's up in the morning and off to Philo again for Oak & Thorn.
No Farmer's Market for me this week, or next week (will be in Oregon dealing with Dad-stuff). | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Like many of us, I am dismayed by the increasingly bizarre spectacle unfolding around the idea of health-care reform in Amerika. Of course I had no real hope for radical reform (single-payer), because the entrenched interests are far too powerful and our political system is corrupt; the system has been gamed. What slightly surprises me is how easy it has been to confuse people on the issues - how susceptible ordinary people, even otherwise thoughtful people, have become.
In part, of course, this is just another manifestation of our polarized thinking. Two-party politics has become our religion; Dems and Reps are our Shi'a and Sunni. Political leadership isn't just proposing different ways of working for the common good any more, they are each working against the other, and to hell with the common good. Each side has "believers" who support their party's policies - whatever they might be - as the only viable opposition to the ebil machinations of the other party. (These people tend to shout a lot, and TV producers love that, so that's what you get to see presented as "discussion.")
But in part, with the health-care debacle, it's because we lack the proper language to even discuss the issues. I gather one recent "talking point" is "politicians deciding who lives and who dies." Uh, hello - we all die. Every one of us. Yet when talking about medical procedures, we routinely talk of "saving lives" - as if death could be indefinitely thwarted by a series of interventions. And this is in fact precisely what is attempted; the closer one gets to death, the more medical resources are thrown into the fight against it. Something like 50% of Medicare expenditures are incurred in the last year of life. What exactly is that achieving?
( Long rant on health care and mortality )
Rationing medical care is therefore not only inevitable, it is the only sane approach. Nobody decides "who lives and who dies" (we all die) but somebody has to decide where to spend resources (money, expertise, time) that affect when and how we die. We've entrusted those decisions largely to insurance industry bureaucrats and hospital industry bureaucrats, with increasingly bad results. I don't think we will ever get real reform in this country, unless one of two things happens: the whole system collapses, or we as individuals recognize our mortality and start thinking accordingly. The former seems more likely. | | comments: 29 comments or Leave a comment |
| It's been an eventful week. Art in the Gardens at MCBG last Saturday; radio show and Farmer's Market on Sunday; great visit and beer-fest with name_redacted and pie_queen53 Monday night and Tuesday morning; more beer with them Wednesday evening; gardening and gopher-catching throughout (I've caught 14 gophers in the last 7 days, plus the one Haken caught and ate - noisily - for the benefit of our guests on Monday). Thursday brought news, not unexpected or even unwelcome, but significant.
Thursday morning I intended to call my brother to hear the latest update on the situation with my father. ( TMI about a 93-year-old man's health )
( The end, finally )
( A little bit about Dad )
But right now I need to wrap this up and get out to return a library book, then turn around and head to Boonville to help set up and run the KZYX&Z Luau. | | comments: 10 comments or Leave a comment |
| Point your browser to KZYX and Z this morning at 9 Pacific time for Oak & Thorn, two hours of folk music from Ireland, Scotland, Brittany, and Wales.
After that, enjoy lunch and then head to Albion for the Farmer's Market starting at 2 PM. We'll have baby bok choy, carrots, chard, garlic, onions, potatoes, shallots, sugar snap peas, a few summer squash, and maybe some strawberries. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| The Liberry finally got me a copy of Fooled by Randomness by Nasim Taleb and, in honor of his fanboy iisaw, here is a little gem from it. (I bet some version of this was used as a Puzzler on Cah Tahk sometime... they love this sort of thing)
Suppose your doctor has you tested for some disease, explaining that on average, one person in 1,000 has it. The test itself, however, has a 5% false-positive rate. [5% of the tests come back positive for the disease, when the person does not actually have it.] Your doctor tells you that your test came back positive. What is the chance that you have the disease?
( What your doctor probably says )
Now suppose this is a dangerous disease, potentially fast-acting, so treatment is urgent. But the treatment itself is dangerous - maybe surgery, or chemo, or harmful drugs like Prednisone. From what your doctor just told you, would you be likely to accept his advice and immediately begin treatment?
( How to figure )
This is a real-world example of the nearly universal failure to understand how probability works. The consequences of this failure are everywhere - Taleb cites, among other things, the OJ Simpson trial. Junk science often results as well.
( Extra Credit ) | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| Another good day at the Farmer's Market yesterday. Sold 19 of the 20 bunches of carrots (6 varieties per bunch, including 'Purple Haze' and 'White Satin'), the last of the tiny 'Shelta' cabbages, almost 20 lbs of 'Mountain Rose' potatoes, a few pounds of 'Butterstick' golden zucchini, all 20 giant stalks/leaves of Swiss chard, some baby bok choy, and quite a few shallots and garlic. Oh, yeah, the strawberries and raspberries... they went quickly!
From there we went straight up to town, ate dinner, and saw the SF Mime Troupe performance of "Too Big to Fail." Not quite as memorable as last year's production, but still funny and well worth the effort. Made for a long day though - we were exhausted by the time we got home.
Garden beds are starting to thin - I'm behind on planting. Seeded some of the winter crops today: baby bok choy, Brussels sprouts (about 150), cabbage, kale. Still need to start more Celery, and a whole lot of root crops (beets, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, four kinds of turnips). And lettuce. Also there are 20 pounds of seed potatoes waiting to go into the ground...
Speaking of which, we're enjoying the diversity of the 9 kinds of spuds I planted back in March. The Purple Vikings are a big hit with loupnoir, though I harbor the suspicion that is as much the name and appearance as the (admittedly terrific) flavor and texture. I gotta get some pix of those uploaded. The top producers so far have been Yukon Gold and French Fingerling, at around 10:1 each (10 lbs harvest for every 1 lb planted). No wonder these things are so popular!
( whinging about health care ) | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| Tune your browser to KZYX&Z tomorrow morning from 9-11 for 2 hours of trad & contemporary Celtic music. Focus will be on Cape Breton Island, which is probably in a national state of mourning for the death of their adopted son, the great fiddler Jerry Holland. He passed away Thursday after a 2- year struggle with cancer. CBI music tends to be pretty lively, so don't expect a morose dirge-fest.
Right after the show I have to race back home to pick turnips and chard for market. I just pulled and sorted 20 bunches of carrots; earlier in the week we dug about 35 pounds of potatoes; the shallots dug 2 weeks ago are mostly cured and ready to sell; and loupnoir pulled the last of the radishes and picked a nice basket of sugar-snap peas. So we should have a pretty decent spread, especially for a Radio Sunday.
This afternoon we put up a dozen jars of pickles, using cukes the World's Best Neighbors left on our porch while we were out running around on Wednesday. (Also used dill picked fresh from another neighbor's garden, and garlic from my own. I should have been able to use my own cider vinegar, but I don't think it's ready yet.)
That was after spending the morning in town on various errands. We picked up a junker bicycle for free at the police station - they were having a sort of "yard sale" on unregistered bikes picked up over the year - the tires of which will be re-purposed for a garden cart. Stopped at the liberry to pick up the copy of "Fooled By Randomness" which finally came in.
Had a fun and frustrating Friday, but that story will have to wait - right now I am pooped, and the alarm goes off in 6h 45m... | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Radio | | Time: | 05:41 am |
|
| It's the first Sunday of July - time for the All-American version of Oak & Thorn. Tune your browser to KZYX&Z from 9 to 11 Pacific time... and pray that I don't fall asleep at the microphone.
And if you're in the Albion vicinity, come to the Farmer's Market from 2 to 4 this afternoon for some nice fresh produce. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| Peripheral Canal - another zombie project. You thought it was dead after the 1982 vote? Hah. Water projects never die. They just lie and wait...
"They're going to build this canal whether we want it or not," he said. "The best we can do is fight them until we run out of money."
Marine Life Protection Area process triggers a "Seaweed Rebellion"
“What I see here is a resource grab. The first thing that the corporations want to do before grabbing public trust resources is to get rid of the people who live or subsist on the land and ocean."
What these have in common: Big gov't/Big biz working together for purposes that are not necessarily harmonious with the public good. The Peripheral Canal is yet another in the long history of staggeringly expensive (and environmentally disastrous) Western water projects for the financial benefit of a few people and corporations. The MLPA might well be a resource grab; certainly it focuses on one aspect of marine management (fishing) while ignoring pollution and industrial development. We could have areas where fishing boats are prohibited but oil derricks are OK. Why the seaweed harvesters - who are basically mowing the grass - are caught in this is a mystery to me. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| |
![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/smile.gif){kind=small}
happy