| Just popping in here to let ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) silverwhistle know that we've arrived in Glasgow and are settled enough to contemplate meeting somewhere for lunch sometime this week. Schedule is busy but mostly in evenings. We're staying in a flat in the Merchant City but will gladly head out to the West End - we need to stop at Demijohns at some point to stock up on Somerset cider brandy, the best alcoholic beverage I've ever experienced. A visit to K'grove is required as well.
Having a great time at Celtic Connections so far - aided immensely by very helpful Press Office, who sorted out some ticket problems so we could make it to the McGoldrick show. Concert reviews are going up on the Oak & Thorn blog page, more or less daily. Should get some photos up on the Facebook page as well; loupnoir has been using her nifty new camera.
Still somewhat jet-lagged; went to bed around 2:30 AM and laid there wide awake, listening to hooligans hollering as the bars emptied out, seemingly forever. Got up about 10:30 after a few hours of fitful sleep. Figured out how to make the toaster work (British toasters operate slightly differently than American versions, who knew?) and had some brown liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike coffee. Catching up on blogs and e-mail, about to head out to the Barrowlands for some weird. Looking forward to tonight's concert, The Jewels of the Ocean, at our second-favorite venue. | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment   |
| | Oak & Thorn this morning will feature some of the many fine acts we hope to see in Glasgow at Celtic Connections, beginning this Friday! Tune in from 9-11 Pacific time on the Live Webstream. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | We had a few pounds of potatoes of various kinds sitting in drawers and cabinets, left from the summer's big crop. Of course they began to sprout and shrivel up, so... what the heck, put 'em in the ground. Not quite as simple as that, but nevertheless, they are in the ground. Dunno if they'll do anything, planted in the middle of winter, but hey - they weren't going to grow in the drawer, were they? So there they are, first planting of the year: Purple Viking, French Fingerling, Maris Piper (?), and some Island Sunshine I bought at the Farmer's Market in Mendocino. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| New Year's Day: Dinner with neighbors, then assemble CDs for radio show. Early bedtime in anticipation of big birding day. Sleep poorly.
Jan.2: Christmas Bird Count in Elk. Meet Chris at 5:40 AM and start calling owls. Bird until dark, then have dinner with all the other birders for the big day tally. (Our little group counted 54 species; the total for the whole circle was 134.) Home at 8:30 PM, in bed before 10. Sleep poorly.
Jan. 3: Up at 5 for the radio show. Come home and nap, gloriously.
The CBC was all kinds of fun, and we met a couple of really neat people, one of whom reminds me of iisaw. He's a self-reliant sort, a professional woodworker, also a seaman and boatbuilder (with a beautiful double-ended rowing dory) and he has the most awesome collection of skulls! We got seriously distracted and had to be forcibly hauled back to the birding. Luckily I had brought some extra jerky and elk-pepperoni (Xmas present from my brother) to share, thereby making a good impression. His wife is also very cool; she has a flock of Gray Jays (probably our best bird of the day) trained to come when she whistles!
Unfortunately while clowning around, I tried to do that British Army jump-step-attention thing you see in the pre-WW2 movies, and felt a slight twinge in my hip. That turned into some pretty bad pain later that night (hence the poor sleep); apparently I strained something on the outside of the femur. loupnoir had almost the same injury a while back, so she's sympathetic, but also optimistic for recovery. I'll be taking my Vitamin I tonight, you betcha.
Tomorrow: Back to the cider press. Six batches going so far, and probably that many more to go. And only 11 days before we leave for Glasgow! | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Point your browser to KZYX&Z for more Clancy Brothers (their version of Jingle Bells, sung partly in Irish Gaelic, is the Best Ever) as well as The Chieftains, Bohola, Horslips, The Pogues, and maybe even Jethro Tull. "Holiday Music" Oak & Thorn style, guaranteed to get your feet moving and bring a smile to your face. Sunday morning from 9 to 11 Pacific time. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Liam Clancy died Saturday, aged 74, of pulmonary fibrosis. Last survivor of the Clancy Brothers. (His longtime collaborator Tommy Makem died last year, too.) Those guys changed everything about the folk music world; they made it a lot bigger, to start with.
So tomorrow's Oak and Thorn show will feature The Clancy Brothers, Makem & Clancy, and maybe even something from a Liam Clancy solo LP. Point your browser to KZYX - Live Webstream Sunday morning from 9 to 11 Pacific time (1700-1900 GMT). It won't be too sad - I regard these passings as a time to celebrate the lives and legacies of such people, not as occasions for mourning. You can bet I'll play "Isn't it Grand, Boys" at some point. Also "Cruiscin Lan" - Liam's version, in Irish. | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| So yesterday I sold produce at the Farmer's Market (where I was the only farmer, so did well). Today we came home from town to find a message on the machine - from a couple of delighted customers who called to say that my Swiss chard was the best they had ever eaten! Do you suppose people in other places call their farmers to gush over the quality of the chard, or is that only an Albion thing?
And I really must get moving on the winemaker's license, so I can legally sell cider. It's getting really quite popular. A French fellow - from Brittany, no less, la vraie terroir du Cidre - bought 7 bottles. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| 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 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 |
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