Our Lady of the Lakes

Kerry Washington reads Sojourner Truth

2009-06-17T09:58:00.001-04:00

Cookie LaRue sings "Killing Me Softly with Islam"

2009-04-13T02:01:00.001-04:00

This is really something. really, really something.

Painting photos

2009-02-09T22:08:00.005-05:00

So the lighting's all wrong, and I still have to repaint the trim and hang some of the wall decor, and maybe put on another coat of red if it doesn't 'cure' in a more even fashion, but this gives some idea of what the redecoration is all about.

2009-02-07T01:23:00.005-05:00

So, more fun with color. These are some of the shades I'm thinking about . . .

For the living room and kitchen:

For the bathroom:

For the office:
For the bedroom, to contrast the new turquoise wall:

Here's the whole palette with notes:

Color achieved

2009-02-07T00:46:00.004-05:00

So, I settled on the even more saturated version of what I was looking at:

Painting underway . . . and photos to come as soon as it's dried and I can find my camera!

Longing for color

2009-02-05T19:43:00.005-05:00

I don't know if it's the cold weather or what, but I'm thinking a lot about home decorating lately. And I'm really getting the itch to do a little painting in my house. Though it was the living room I was really wanting to do before, my new area of particular interest is my bedroom. My idea is to do a bold turquoise wall behind my vanity to create a fun, relaxing space for dressing and getting ready in the morning.

So I've been poking around, I stopped in town to look at paint chips, and this evening I looked for some examples of bold turquoises I like. I once had a scarab that my elementary school friend Lisa brought back from Egypt, and this is kind of the color I'm thinking about, to contrast dramatically with my deep red comforter.

I like the idea of using non-toxic paints, so I'm leaning toward Mythic, and I think I'm mostly settled on Island Magic, below. It would probably be more sensible to take time and think about it, and consider the other shades a bit more, and bring home chips to look at in different light, but I'm feeling like doing something whimsical, and buying a quart of bright paint to color a wall seems like it could be just the thing.

Conference preparations

2009-02-05T13:53:00.005-05:00

Well, conference time is coming up fast -- four presentations in the next couple of months. This is exciting and nerve-racking, both. I still have some writing and work to do on the papers themselves, and I want to prepare Powerpoint presentations with the images I am talking about, for sure.

I'm going to have a fun toy to aid me, the Targus Voice Recording Presenter with Laser Pointer, which I found refurbished for a nice fat discount. It will give me the flexibility to change the slides while moving around, which I definitely like to do. And I ordered some reasonably cute professional clothes, a chocolate brown pinstripe suit and a red double-breasted suit, both of which I think I can wear with the Born shoes I got on sale in New York, so I won't look totally sloppy.

I submitted my request for funding for the one in Scotland in March, and I've got my fingers crossed. Oh man, I guess I had better get my passport renewed!!!

Kittens on a Roomba

2009-01-31T21:38:00.001-05:00

OMG, this is SO PAINFULLY CUTE AND HILARIOUS. Kittens on a Roomba. /dying

2009-01-30T14:15:00.003-05:00

The photo above, from Amazon Watch, is a human banner created by indigenous persons demonstrating at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Brazil, to raise awareness about the deforestation of Amazonian rainforest.

Living deliberately

2009-01-30T12:57:00.004-05:00

My neighbor had me over for coffee this morning, which was just so lovely. She's a really interesting, creative, generous person, a gardener and a baker, who thinks deeply about things and does lots of engaging activities, and is always a source of joy and light in my world. A recent retiree from Ford, she has a really different set of experiences from me, but a similar world view in many ways, and it's fascinating to talk with her. We talked about singing, about death and loss, about her involvement in the threshold choir, about the nature of leadership, and most of all about the inauguration. We shared pannetone and her homebaked ginger and coconut cookies over the coffee and I played with her cats. I could see this being a wonderful regular Friday occurrence when I'm hiding out in the cottage reading about Native American and Aboriginal Australian child policy for my social work prelims.

I have a new toy, which I love. I was inspired when I saw that my favorite aesthetician in Ann Arbor believed in it. Wow. My face has never before felt so soft and clean.

It continues to snow and snow. The icicles are giant out here.

I haven't the slightest idea how I can catch up, I am so behind from being away for a week so early in the semester. I guess I'll buckle down this weekend and see what I can do.

Talking Heads

2009-01-29T01:01:00.000-05:00

THIS is both frightening and strangely fascinating. And makes me think about Fight Club all over again.

Luke Bergmann, and what practicing anthropology and social work really looks like

2009-01-16T10:27:00.004-05:00

I can't begin to say how proud I am of my colleagues, how incredible I think their achievements are and how grateful I am to share an intellectual space with them. Luke Bergmann is an exemplar of what we do best, and what I aspire to achieve. He's an inspiration to me of how knowledge from anthropology and social work can fuse into something quite new and remarkable, a radical way of approaching the world to understand the experiences of other people, their beliefs and challenges, and to address their suffering in powerful and uniquely sensitive ways. Luke continues to live and work in Detroit to help improve the conditions in the city where he spent three years living and studying the lives of drug dealers for his doctoral dissertation.

Luke's dissertation-turned-book, Getting Ghost, circulates and receives rave reviews. He's going on a book tour this month that includes the Bay Area , Portland, Chicago, and Ann Arbor.

Below I'm pasting the event description for the Berkeley event. If he's coming to your town, I highly recommend going to check out the event.

Wednesday, January 28, 7:30 PM at First Congregational Church of Berkeley

LUKE BERGMANN

Getting Ghost: Two Young Lives and the Struggle for

the Soul of an American City

While some American cities like New York have recovered from the depths of their urban decay in the 1970s and 80s, Detroit is admittedly not one of them. A city pockmarked with ever more abandoned neighborhoods, empty lots, and vacant factories, Detroit is where sociologist Luke Bergmann connected in a juvenile detention facility with Dude Freeman and Rodney Phelps -- two teenage petty drug dealers facing profoundly uncertain futures. Following Dude and Rodney, Bergmann spent three years embedded on the streets of northwest Detroit, living side by side with its residents, and from these experiences comes Getting Ghost, an unforgettable portrait of two young men and of the troubled city they call home.

A tour de force of original analysis and powerful storytelling reminiscent of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and Sudhir Vankatesh's Off the Books, Getting Ghost chronicles Dude's and Rodney's lives, tracking their attempts to get by however they can in a city betrayed by broken promises of urban revitalization, where the drug trade is so ubiquitous that entire families are involved. Bergmann portrays the lives and work of young African American drug hustlers not as the product of some exotic inner city jungle that we can't possibly relate to, but rather as an often seamless part of the everyday reality of the larger African American community.

Luke Bergmann was a postdoctoral fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and an associate research scientist at the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley. He is now a research director at the Detroit Department of Health and Wellness Promotion and a faculty associate of the University of Michigan. He lives on the East Side of Detroit.

Color

2009-01-10T13:59:00.005-05:00

I am contemplating painting my cottage living room . . .

I'd been thinking about it for a long time, but part of my inspiration, I think, is the deliciousness of Caffe Trieste, where I spent many mornings during the break eating sumptuous pastries and savoring perfectly prepared lattes. This photo is of the yummy Italian yellow I am interested in emulating, though it doesn't really do the cafe (or the color) justice, because of the poor light.

The thing is, though, the colors I admire other places always seem more mustardy than I feel prepared to explore in the house. I wonder what it would be like to dare to go that direction. My room in Ann Arbor ended up being more lemony than I think I want to do here by the lake, if I do decide to paint.

The boundaries of suffering and honor

2009-01-08T05:46:00.004-05:00

This article in the New York Times on the Purple Heart is fascinating to me from an anthropological point-of-view. The ways that Americans are grappling conceptually with mental illness and the ways that veterans' health problems in recent wars challenge our existing categories of pain and suffering would be a fascinating dissertation topic, if I didn't already have an area of study carved out. It needs further investigation, too, in light of how shamefully neglected our veterans often are. The bureaucratic nightmares facing veterans and their families that I heard about on NPR on Veterans Day brought tears to my eyes.

It's not a novel argument for me to point out that medical advances in past decades allow many persons to survive physical injuries that would previously have killed them. How we come to terms with the person who lives on, though, and what unique needs and challenges s/he experiences, is something we are only beginning to scratch the surface of. But why must we culturally delineate those forms of suffering from the ones of those who cannot return to everyday life for other reasons? This is such a complex question, and so evocative to me of how intuitive it is for us post-Enlightenment beings to separate body from mind.

John E. Bircher III, director of public relations for the Military Order of the Purple Heart explains: “You have to had shed blood by an instrument of war at the hands of the enemy of the United States. Shedding blood is the objective.”

Winter break with parents

2008-12-17T02:36:00.004-05:00

Mom (edge in voice, looking at 3/4 empty bottle of organic red wine from Italy): Did you drink all that wine tonight?

Heather: Nooooo.

Mom (visibly relaxing)

Heather: Tether drank it.

Mom: (chortle)

. . .

. . .

I'm so glad we've come to an understanding here.

Roma and lead poisoning in Kosovo

2008-12-06T12:56:00.000-05:00

Another heartbreaking story from Europe.

Anti-Roma Violence and Hostility in the European News

2008-11-24T13:48:00.003-05:00

So if I keep my eye off the international news for even a few minutes, I always regret it. The news from Europe for Roma is . . . not good.

First off, there's the situation in Italy. We'll be talking about that in a panel at U of M on December 10 at noon. I haven't seen information go out about the event yet, but if you're interested, let me know and I'll keep you in the loop.

Then, in early November there was a killing of Roma in northern Hungary, probably ethnically motivated. It got a brief mention in the BBC News and the International Herald Tribune.

Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, according to the European Network against Racism, "At a march organised in the town of Litvinov in the Czech Republic on 17 November, about 500 demonstrators linked to the far-right Czech Workers’ Party chanted anti-Roma slogans and threw stones, firecrackers and petrol bombs with the intention of attacking the Roma community." From all accounts and images, including CzechNews, and the BBC News video footage, the incident looks terrifying.

And the nastiness spills over into the virtual world, too, with racist facebook groups organizing ethnic violence on the popular networking site.

It's never seen the sun, it only comes up when the moon is on the run

2008-11-23T13:43:00.004-05:00

I was just reading in Martha Stewart's delicious holiday issue all about amaryllis flowers, and now Park Seed has more than a dozen different varieties on their site . . . I think I've fallen in love with their Cherry Nymph.

LIFE magazine's historical photograph collection

2008-11-22T12:46:00.004-05:00

Wow, this is great. Life Magazine has just made its collection of historical photos available online in an archive hosted by Google. Only about 20 percent of the LIFE collection is currently online. The entire archive, comprising about 10 million photos, will be added over the next few months. Above, an image from 1938 of a family living in a rural shack in Poland. Below, a family in a British industrial area. For those of us interested in poverty and its photographic depiction, this is a goldmine.

Oh, the joys of being a graduate student instructor

2008-11-19T08:26:00.002-05:00

You know, I find that being in grad school this many years has really changed my approach to dress when I get up in the morning. Instead of, "Do I look cute?" the questions become:

"Is my body covered adequately?"
"Will I be unbearably hot/cold?"
"Have I avoided looking like an ENORMOUS freak?"
"Is the odor of the clothes I have taken off my bedroom floor minimal enough not to cause offense?"
"Can I be REASONABLY confident that I've done everything to avoid that when my undergraduate students run into each other in the bar, at a frat party, or in the ladies room, they won't be conversing about my body and clothes?" (I know some of them will, no matter what I do.)

sigh. I wish I had the time and money to buy a new wardrobe, lose 30 pounds, reliably use my anti-acne, anti-psoriasis, and anti-aging skin treatments and go to the gym.

But today, at least I am showered and no one can see my ass crack.

That's something, at least.

Guns, burning crosses, angry white men, and other stupid shit.

2008-11-09T14:55:00.004-05:00

Along with all the people who are celebrating a new era in American history, are those who are terrified that their grasp on power is loosening, and are pulling all kinds of stupid shit in response to the election.

Like, for example, the people who thought it was a good idea to burn a cross on an Indian-American guy's lawn in New Jersey because his wife had created a banner congratulating President elect Barack Obama on his victory.

And, for instance, the angry, violent gang of white men who, encountering a high-school-aged Liberian-American Muslim on Staten Island on election night, shouted "Obama!" and proceeded to beat him with a baseball bat.

And then there are those who are just threatened by the possibility of change they embodied in President-elect Obama, even though some of them nominally support change. There's something a little terrifying to me about the fact that America is arming itself with record speed even though Obama confirms our right to bear arms. Glenn Parshal, a gun retailer in Las Vegas says, "One of the strangest things that I've had happen the past few weeks, is I've had a lot of people come in here wearing Obama buttons and Obama t-shirts, in here to buy guns, they tell me they're in here to buy 'em before he bans 'em."

I need to follow this up with a photograph from the country road I take home from Ann Arbor. The local resident there initially set up a wooden, spray-painted sign informing passing motorists that "SOCIALISTS ARE THIEVES." Now, he's added two more, including one warning us to "LOAD UP ON AMMO."

2008-11-07T12:15:00.003-05:00

My horoscope today tells me: "Be smart by rejecting anyone who has a negative and self sabotaging attitude. These people will only pull you down to their sad and lonely victimized level." This is funny to me, in light of the past week.

vlad and friend boris presents 'Song for Sarah' for mrs. Palin

2008-11-04T09:31:00.001-05:00

corruption within

2008-11-04T01:00:00.002-05:00

main hall, originally uploaded by vivid tangerine.

an image i've always wondered about, and never seen . . . my friend writes about it beautifully here.

Preparing to make history

2008-11-03T22:15:00.003-05:00

I just got all fixed up for voting tomorrow, identifying the candidates who will be on my ballot in my wee little town. I had thought I'd probably get more information in the mail, like I did in the past in California, but all I got was from the GEO at University of Michigan.

It took a while to figure out who was running for congress and for the house in my town. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there is just a Republican on the ballot for state representative here.

Anyway, I'm ready. Now just nine more hours to wait. Hopefully the lines won't be too crazy first thing in the morning here. I'm inclined to agree with folks who are arguing that states that don't allow for early voting are effectively doing the same as charging a poll tax for people who want to vote in person, if you have to stand and wait for several hours to cast your vote.

Ah, a friend just sent helpful information -- there's a website that will show you your ballot ahead of time if you're a Michigan voter, and links to lots of information. It's PUBLIUS. I'll never get over the whole romanticization of ancient Graeco-Roman civilization as the original seat of democracy in light of its profound inequalities, but never mind the name. It's super useful.

I just love killing those animals.

2008-11-02T10:56:00.002-05:00

"Yes, yes, I understand, we have the equivalent of Joe the Plumber in France, it's called, 'Marcel, the guy with bread under his armpit,' oui," says the Quebecois comedian Sarah Palin believes to be Nicholas Sarkozy.

Bubb Rubb and Lil Sis

2008-11-02T10:20:00.005-05:00

You s'posed to be up cooking breakfast or something, by then, so that's like an alarm clock: woo WOO!

And the REMIX VERSION, hilarious but with some nudity involved, just as a warning.

It's coming . . .

2008-11-02T09:37:00.001-05:00

So soon, so soon. Are you as nervous and excited and hopeful and distracted as I am?

Yes We Span campaign

2008-10-20T11:29:00.002-04:00

Yay! My American expat friends in Hungary made Yahoo News.

2008-10-19T20:02:00.004-04:00

I'm reading and thinking about families and domestic space in ancient cities. I started with Ancient Sippar (c.1750-1595 B.C.) in Babylonia, and now I'm reading about families in the height of ancient Rome (200 B.C.-A.D. 200). . . There's a reason I'm not an archaeologist, but I have to admit that some of this stuff is fascinating. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill's article on Domus and Insulae in Rome sent me to Google when I read the line that the Antiche Stanze exhibition was of an extensive area of housing that emerged in the late 1940s when the new metro station was being installed in front of Termini (Wallace-Hadrill 2003:10), and that it had been demolished and all that is left is the photographs and private notebooks of an archaeologist. And sure enough, there's an online Powerpoint presentation with a few photographs. . .I love the interwebs.

Fall pleasures

2008-10-08T22:30:00.004-04:00

I think I'll be able to harvest my sweet potato plant pretty soon! I'm not sure what really to expect, since it's the first year I've grown sweet potatoes. But I love them, and I'm pretty excited.

The drive home from Ann Arbor is prettier every day. Despite the gray. I don't know if I'll ever quite get used to the breathtaking beauty of the autumn in the East, having grown up on the West coast. Or, for that matter, to the delicious smell of the air in the fall. It's . . .pregnant.

2008-10-04T00:55:00.003-04:00

I just harvested all my remaining basil leaves from the plants in the garden and made a whole huge thing of pesto, a slight variation on this recipe. My house smells completely amazing.

I also have huge pots with my pineapple sage and lemon verbena, and also a little pot of cinnamon basil that I've just rescued from the garden in anticipation of our first freeze of the year.

I did some internet research on winterizing the herb garden and hope that I've prepared adequately with layers of cloth over many -- though not all -- of the plants. I'll see tomorrow how everything looks. Perhaps I should have clipped all the parsley too, but I'm hoping that a couple layers of cloth will be sufficient for the night.

I have discovered a couple quite nice low-sulfite wines they sell at Trader Joes now for under $6. Which is pretty awesome for someone with a sulfite sensitivity, because up until recently, the only drinkable bottles were $11-13, which meant that I didn't drink much wine. But tonight I brought a bottle over to my friend A.'s house after teaching and taking care of a few quick items of business at the university, and we visited for a bit, drank some wine, and ate some cheese before I came back to my cottage. We might make it a Friday routine. :)

Good news to report, I've been very productive in my work recently, and I'm finally getting back to being on top of things. After a very difficult year, that's a huge relief. Now I just need to get a handle on my dissertation project and get some grants written convincingly enough to get support for my research abroad . . . no small feat. (fingers crossed)

Fall has settled in here in Michigan, and it's stunningly beautiful. The air is crisp and fresh, and when the sun is shining it's glorious to be alive, with the leaves turning and the foliage thinning just enough to give an even more spectacular view of the river when you drive Huron River Drive. I transplanted most of the zinnias in my garden so I now have a charming and cheerful pathway lined with pink blooms and a profusion of mint that leads to my cottage. I ate the most tart, crisp, delicious local apple this morning while I took a break from gardening.

Somehow I don't even mind I have almost 30 papers to grade. It's nice that they're about literature . . . it's a welcome change to be thinking about Pushkin and Lermentov for a semester.

Bipartisan Approach to Hotness

2008-10-03T11:16:00.001-04:00

Hah!!!

"The Other Hawaii"

2008-10-02T18:39:00.002-04:00

Interesting stuff about Hawaiian independence movement.

Media pics

2008-09-28T10:42:00.003-04:00

James Hill of the New York Times has just created an interesting photo essay about Russia and the way of life of rural farmers, called "Russia: The Land". It's a bit romantic at times, but the images are beautiful and give a picture of Russia we don't get to see much anymore in the West.

I also highly recommend the SNL parody of an interview with Sarah Palin. Brilliant.

2008-09-26T10:36:00.003-04:00

Oooh, a film that walks the line between fiction and reality, dealing with contemporary French teenagers. MUST SEE . . . . (I had a dream last night that I moved to New York that involved corruption and time travel and a whole lot of baggage. . . sometimes I so wish I could be in the place where things always happen first. . .)

Lazyman's paradise

2008-09-15T16:20:00.002-04:00

YAY! A simple program to put my Google Calendar into my system tray. Even works for me with the dreaded Windows Vista. And Yahoo Widgets, hooray.

Battles over democratic citizenship in Europe

2008-09-15T14:49:00.004-04:00

The European Commission has come to the bewildering decision to support the mass fingerprinting of Roma in Italy, a decision which the European Roma Rights Center and the Open Society Institute Justice Initiative have challenged the EC to defend.

I am so disturbed by this whole situation in Italy.

(See also EU Roma Policy Coalition.)

Anthropology of the Web 2.0 -- Michael Wesch on YouTube

2008-09-13T15:29:00.003-04:00

Michael Wesch, Assistant professor of Anthropology at Kansas State University, has created another fascinating contribution to YouTube, this time a lecture to the Library of Congress integrating video into a highly informative and thought-provoking multimedia presentation about the social world of YouTube. I spent my rainy Saturday morning watching the whole thing, and apart from the fact that I can't get the song "Numa Numa" out of my head, I'm thrilled that I did, because it makes me really excited about how anthropologists can engage Web 2.0 in new ways to guide our products as well as our research design.

Celebrating Barack in Hungary

2008-09-13T12:33:00.006-04:00

I'd been waiting a long time for someone to make this pun! Finally, Americans in Hungary for Obama are hosting the "Peachfest" in Budapest. Barack in Hungarian means peach, so Obama's first name has lovely sweet associations for Hungarian speakers, if a bit funny. Oszibarack is peach, sargabarack is apricot, kopasz barack is nectarine. Mmmmm, Barack.

2008-09-09T22:56:00.004-04:00

New Czech blog about integration in urban space in Europe. Hmmmm. Could be interesting.

Saakashvili speaks with Al Jazeera - 15 Aug 2008

2008-08-17T13:18:00.005-04:00

I've been frustrated by what I've heard in the media here on what is happening in Georgia, which tends to be repetitive, shallow, and lacking a sense of historicity. Georgia is a place I haven't paid a lot of attention to up until recently, but any changes in the role of Russia in the lives of its neighbors to the west attracts my interest. So this lengthy interview with President Saakashvili was quite fascinating to me. So was this BBC report about Ukraine extending a technological helping hand to the West, presumably for potential future Russian "adventures" (to use Sakashvili's language).

For a blogger recap of what's been going on, check out Shashalnikya on livejournal.

The latest episode of Italian xenophobia

2008-08-17T11:19:00.003-04:00

"The reaction to the death of these children goes beyond anything that has happened before. The incident has exposed a long-held social realism in our country: that many working-class people think the Roma no better than animals, and the government is using this xenophobia to win votes and popularity. People are ashamed. The deaths of these girls has come to represent something more, perhaps a battle for Italy's soul."
-- Francesca Saudino, a campaigning Naples-based lawyer with Osservazione, a Roma rights organization, quoted in The Observer in an article on the recent (non)reaction in Italy to the deaths of two teenaged Romani girls on a beach in Naples

2008-08-12T11:03:00.002-04:00

Oh man, this is funny, and so very clever . . .

The larger point, though, is really quite scary.

Livescribe Smartpen

2008-08-08T12:07:00.002-04:00

Oooooh, I want it . . . .

. . . and I've been coveting my friend's Nokia internet tablet, too.

Russian troops in Georgia

2008-08-08T11:57:00.001-04:00

oh shit. i hope my friend doing work in georgia is going to be okay.

Prisons, Torture, and Mental Health

2008-08-04T12:43:00.003-04:00

For those of you in Michigan, there will be a rally and teach-in on Wednesday, August, 6, in Lansing, in commemoration of the 2-year anniversary of the death of Timothy Joe Souders. For those of you who are not familiar with this story, Liz Spikol gave a clear and poignant picture of the story on her blog a couple years ago.

The emphasis of the upcoming march on Lansing is prison torture, and the deeply problematic continuing practices of prisoner segregation, restraint, and water withholding. These are very important issues, but Timothy's case also highlights the obvious need for improved attention to health care, especially mental health care, both in the United States at large and specifically in the justice system. I encourage you also to explore the information at Mental Health America, which promotes the advancement of mental health policy and education in our country, and will facilitate your active involvement as a concerned citizen.

2008-07-22T00:07:00.003-04:00

Today, I taught about the history of European colonialism in Africa to two African-American freshman athletes, taught about the nature of Athabaskan, American, and Nepali notions of reciprocity through a discussion of Velma Wallis's book Two Old Women with a group of Korean and Korean-American eleven- and twelve-year-olds, and searched the archives of a Pakistani newspaper for urban development articles in the early 1950s.

I got completely drenched in the rain cycling back and forth on my way to tutoring, and managed to get through the course by changing into my "Consent is Sexy" t-shirt I happened to have hiding in my pickup truck, which looks, without question, like there is a hobo living in it. Luckily I also had my wonderful kelly-green University of Bemidji hooded sweatshirt to wear over it so I didn't scandalize the poor kids.

Riding back home along Huron River Drive tonight, under the cool, green canopy of trees, I saw two pairs of deer and a muskrat or river otter (I was going too fast to tell for sure).

I had a simple supper of tomato soup, lush salad with walnuts, blue cheese, dried cherries and balsamic vinegarette on baby greens, and rotisserie Amish chicken, and then amused myself while reading my email afterwards with the knowledge that 9/10 of the secret anti-aging foods Martha Stewart recommends are things I eat nearly daily.

There's no doubt that this life, however crazy it is, is a full one.

Animal sightings around the house

2008-07-20T01:42:00.004-04:00

I never did share this photograph of a little friend I saw beside my door one day in June. I hardly would have noticed him if he hadn't rustled the leaves as he was making his way through. I think I scared him half to death trying to capture him on film.

Planting, Ranting

2008-07-20T01:26:00.002-04:00

So, I've done a bunch of work in my garden that I can't wait to tell you about, even though the photos won't really do it justice until tomorrow. I was feeling headachey this afternoon and didn't feel like sleeping yet, so I went to the garden to work instead. I spent hours out there!

This first one, though blurry, gives the nicest sense of the color of the new plants, lovely bright native plants I found by the roadside and transplanted to this spot across the way, which up until yesterday was a mess of buckthorn plantain (Plantago lanceolata), crabgrass and other weeds.

Now, though, it's got butterfly weed, wild phlox (I think that's what that pink one is), black-eyed susan, echinacea (in the back toward the top, not blooming yet), lilies (some orange variety), and a variety of succulents I haven't identified. I also planted seeds for lupines and from some kind of deep bluish/purplish flowering plant Umlud and I came upon on a walk in one of the Ann Arbor parks, in the area between the echinacea and the other plants. We'll see what the mystery plant is eventually if the seeds take. Perhaps Caryopteris? I do love a good mystery.

I've been painstakingly transplanting the lilies from farther back on the garden plot, beneath a lilac tree, in an area so overrun with mosquitoes, it's impossible to be back there to enjoy them. They're not happy with the transition at this point, but I think I'll have beautiful blooms next year, once they've had a chance to settle into their new locale.

The succulents have been growing down my neighbor's rock garden on the other side, and creeping into the bed beneath, so I'm transplanting them from there and from where it's taking over chunks of the lawn. There are three different kinds, apart from the purslane (more on that below!)

I also planted morning glory along the chain-link fence a few days ago, along with sweet-pea. If I have my way, the whole place will be exploding with blooms pretty soon, and the exposed metal fence will be a distant memory. I already see the morning glory rising out of the earth and spreading its leaves like little green angel wings. Tomorrow I'll get some more shots of them, and the amazingly quickly growing zucchini plants, and the sweet-peas that are starting to pop up on the other side of the garden.

Below, with the terrible lighting of my camera flash, you can see the pattern of the rock garden with succulents that I've started, dangerously into the territory of the 40-foot area zoned for our subdivision's road, but probably safe unless two cars meet on our gravel road and are in too much of a hurry to take care. There's a margin of at least a couple feet between where the actually used road ends and the little rocks & plants start. But, folks around here in the country have a tendency to drive onto the edge of the lawn without a great deal of concern, when there's not room for the two SUVs on the small gravel roads. One of the oddities of this part of the country. Anyhoo, below, that's what I've got on the side.

And below, this is what I've done in the upper area, leading toward the chain-link fence.

Unfortunately that little wooden retaining wall is coming apart; I'll have to mention that to my landlords and see if they want to do anything about it. It's not holding back a lot of soil, so they may not be too concerned.

And, I've been doing a lot of thinking about weeds and weeding. So I wrote a dogmatic little piece tonight.

Purslane: Weeds, Food, and the Politics and Ethics of Nomenclature

2008-07-20T01:22:00.005-04:00

THINKING ABOUT WEEDS, READING ABOUT WEEDS, DIGGING ABOUT WEEDS
Now that I've been gardening more, I've also been reading a ton online about plants and gardening.

Today I was reading more about weeds, which I've been thinking about a lot lately, as I become more familiar with the plants native to Michigan, the ones that are invasive, and the ones that are introduced but are not considered problematic.

WEED IDENTIFICATION RESOURCES: IMAGE GALLERIES, DATABASES
One thing I've been exploring a lot is the various weed databases that are around. Rutgers University has a really handy weed gallery with thumbnail photographs of the plants, helpful if you aren't as familiar with botany as some databases require the researcher to be. (The Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research weed identification tool, for example, though it is also very useful, asks you to specify the characteristics of a number of plant features to conclude what your weed is, which may overwhelm the neophyte gardener.) For Michigan, there's also a common weed seedlings gallery, which is, interestingly, much more comprehensive than the noxious and restricted weeds list for Michigan. (Ergonica will help you find your way to a similar list for your region, if you aren't local to MI.)

THINKING MORE IN-DEPTH ABOUT WEEDS
Today I came upon this fabulously interesting reading on weeds: course notes from a weed science course taught by Dr. Alan York at North Carolina State University. Although from an anthropological perspective, the idea of a plant "interfering with human activities" calls for some deconstruction and consideration, what's really great about the information he presents is that he deals in much more specific terms about the particular problems weeds pose to human populations than most sources I've come upon: "health hazards," "water management," "safety issues," etc. His detailed, quantified explanations of the reduced crop output of crops given particular levels of weed interference are particularly helpful for understanding the problem of weeds from his perspective.

THREATS TO BIODIVERSITY
Similarly, as someone generally concerned about the diversity of life on the planet, and with the conservation of (relatively) uncultivated land and its species, I'm chilled when I hear the Michigan State University's Invasive Species Initiative has to say about garlic mustard: "Garlic mustard is an exotic invasive plant from Europe that invades woodland habitats in North America and impacts forest biodiversity. In some woodlands, dense stands of garlic mustard in the spring threaten showy spring blooming ephemerals like spring beauty, trilliums and trout lilies. Other research points toward potentially negative impacts on timber species and forest health. Many land managers consider it to be one of the most potentially harmful and difficult to control invasive plants in the region." (See more on the Garlic Mustard Initiative, including photos, here.)

PURSLANE: THE PROBLEM OF CULTURE
But, to get back to what I mean about the deconstruction needed in thinking about weeds "interfering with human activities" (in Alan York's language), consider the example of purslane. (Thanks very much to Scrumptious, my dear friend who blogs about her CSA adventures in San Francisco, for pointing out this problem to me!) Purslane is called a "severe weed pest in vegetable crops and newly seeded turf" by the Rutgers University Agricultural Experiment Station. It gets a similar rap from most folks in the American mainstream. Yet, according to the organization Annadana, it was cultivated over 4000 years ago, and has been eaten for at least 1000 years by people in the Southwestern area of the United States. It's used by healers in the Andes, was used by Mayans in the Yucatan, and is grown as a vegetable in Africa. The Australian Naturopathic Network indicates it has been used also by Australian Aborigines, peoples in India and the Middle East.

As Rosemary Barron writes for the Weston A. Price Foundation for Wise Traditions in Food, Farming, and the Healing Arts, "the FDA lists purslane as a pervasive weed (the 7th worst, worldwide) but to those of us who love its earthy, slightly acidic flavor and crisp, succulent stems and leaves, the word ‘weed’ hardly seems fair." She explains further, "Medieval herbals describe purslane as ‘cold,’ meaning that it was considered a cure for a ‘burning’ (or malfunctioning) heart and liver. Greeks call it a ‘blood-cleansing’ herb. In Mexico, purslane is considered good for diabetics. Recent research has confirmed that purslane is one of the best vegetable sources of omega-3 fatty acids, as well as carotenes and vitamin C."

The CSA folks and naturopaths are clued into the human benefits of this plant. It's gotten the attention of medical researchers as well as the New York Times food and dining section. So why does the FDA still classify it as a weed? What exactly are the human activities with which it's interfering? Stretching green lawns in front of our domiciles that offer nothing to humans or beneficial animals in the way of foodstuffs?

Moreover, why does the American Heart Association not mention purslane anywhere in its omega-3 recommendations? Given the rising cost of food and devastating environmental problems leading to concerns about transportation of food, it should be much more widely publicized that the plant most Americans are trying to weed out of their lawns could actually help save their lives by reducing their risk of coronary heart disease, without paying a single penny to a pharmaceutical company.

Promoting the home cultivation and consumption of this omega-3-rich vegetable could also circumvent the problem that the recommendations for twice-a-week fish consumption, if it actually could be afforded financially by everyone in the population (a BIG if in a society -not to mention a world- with such great wealth disparities as ours has), would so much further contribute to overfishing that it would destroy the world's fisheries.

People. It's time to think about sustainability seriously, and not to treat it as something outside the purview of health sciences. We need to think seriously about how we live, if we want to continue to do it on this planet.

SOME RELEVANT HEALTH RESEARCH:
Ezekwe, Michael O., Thomas R. Omara-Alwala, Tadesse Membrahtu. "Nutritive characterization of purslane accessions as influenced by planting date." Plant Foods for Human Nutrition. Sept 1999 v53 i3 p183(9).

Guil-Guerrero, Jose L., and Ignacio Rodriguez-Garcia. "Lipids classes, fatty acids and carotenes of the leaves of six edible wild plants." European Food Research and Technology A 209.5 (Sept 1999): 313(4).

Purslane eyed as rich food source - US weed has beneficial nutrients
Agricultural Research, Dec, 1992, by Sean Adams

Simopoulos AP. "The omega-6/omega-3 fatty acid ratio, genetic variation, and cardiovascular disease" ASIA PACIFIC JOURNAL OF CLINICAL NUTRITION. 2008;17 Sup.1:131-134.
Simopoulos AP, Norman HA, Gillaspy JE, Duke JA. Common purslane: A source of omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidants. J Am College Nutr. 1992;11:374-382.

Simopoulos AP, Norman HA, Gillaspy JE. Purslane in human nutrition and its potential for world agriculture. World Rev Nutr Diet. 1995;77:47-74.

Simopoulos AP, Salem N Jr. Purslane: a terrestrial source of omega-3 fatty acids. N Engl J Med. 1986;315:833.

Simopoulos AP, Gopalan C (Eds). Plants in Human Health and Nutrition Policy. World Rev Nutr Diet, Basel: Karger, vol. 91, 2003.

Zeghichi S, Kallithrka S, Simopoulos AP, Kypriotakis Z. Nutritional composition of selected wild plants in the diet of Crete. World Rev Nutr Diet. 2003;91:22-40.

Simopoulos AP. Omega-3 fatty acids in wild plants, seeds and nuts. Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2002;11(S6):S163-S173.

Simopoulos AP. Omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidants in edible wild plants. Biol Res. 2004;37:263-277.

I have questions, I have answers.

2008-07-19T12:51:00.010-04:00

What would I do without the internet? It's such an integral part of my life. I have so many questions. It has so many answers. Like this morning, in the midst of my preparations for a 3-week cleanse and my course planning for my tutoring job (one of the 4 jobs I've got now), my curiosity and work bring me these directions:

How do I make Turkish coffee? Why, by boiling water in an ibrik and following these simple directions, naturally. (Coffee with cardamom and a little brown sugar is so much nicer than plain when you're drinking it without any cream or milk, and I prefer to keep the spices out of my Moka [where I usually make my coffee] to avoid always having to drink flavored coffee.)*

What are The Chronicles of Prydain about, and would it be appropriate reading for my challenging literature & ESL class of 11-year-old Korean girls, once we've finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone? Hmm. Maybe, maybe not.

How can I teach that same class about the Vietnam War in a way they'll understand and get something out of it? They had many questions about it as I tried to explain "hippies" and the context for The Bridge to Terabithia. I'm sure Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried would be too sexually sophisticated, Michael Herr's Dispatches too full of vulgarities for this group, who titter at the word "damn" or the word "sex," even in the sense of the distinction between male and female. Yet they're SO BORED by almost everything I bring in, except Harry Potter. I came upon this wonderful article by Peter Filene from 1999 about teaching Vietnam to children of Vietnam war vets & protestors (unfortunately, available in full only through institutional access through JSTOR). But for 11-year-old girls raised with a foot in Korea and a foot in the United States, Filene's observation that for his students, "the war has very different meanings: it is both further away and closer" is true in rather a different sense. Maybe I can take a look at Wanda Miller's book, Teaching U.S. History Through Children's Literature: Post-World War II (Through Children's Literature) to find some more ideas. And maybe the book Teaching U.S. history as mystery by David Gerwin and Jack Zevin may help, too, since it sounds good and sounds like it's got a case-study on Vietnam. Of course, since I'm not paid for prep and this is far from being my primary job, the question remains too exactly how much I can put into this . . .

Could I teach Hesse's The Journey to the East to my group of soon-to-be 6th graders? Am I reaching too far in wanting to teach them Hesse and Thoreau in my anthropologically driven English literature course on nature and survival narratives? (So far we've read Jack London's "To Build a Fire", Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat", and Athabaskan (Alaska native) writer Velma Wallis's Two Old Women, and next up is Jon Krakauer's article "Death of an Innocent" [a shorter version of the story on which his book, and the recently released film "Into the Wild" is based] Maori writer Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider.)

Would a nectarine tree grow in my yard? Hmm, probably not to be hardy or fruiting from a stone of fruit from COSTCO grown who-knows-where. If I spent a bit on a tree, a special cultivar called "Flamin' Fury", probably so.

What should I do with my cabbage from the Howell farmer's market? Why, make raw sauerkraut and linguine with sauteed bacon, onion, cabbage, coarse sea salt, fresh-ground pepper and nutmeg, and garden-fresh tarragon and thyme, inspired by Katrina of Daily Unadventures in Cooking, of course. This is cheating a bit, because I actually found these recipes in the past and have been meaning to make them for some time. Now if only I had a 50-gallon barrel for sauerkraut, instead of the modest brown ceramic crock I found at a garage sale and bought for this purpose (but instead have been using for a year to hold my alliums and potatoes)!

Just when am I going to stop playing and start working on my archaeology paper? Oops, that's one the internet can't answer for me. Perhaps I should go explore the question off-line.

*By the way, though, that recipe above doesn't call for NEARLY enough coffee. Very weak for a Turkish coffee, and I don't think there was even a full cup of water in my pot, since my ibrik is very small, like this one. I think THIS RECIPE looks better; I'm going to try it now, since the food coma is setting in since I ate all the pasta. Mmmm. What a lovely lazy day at home.

Garden Planting List

2008-07-18T10:27:00.012-04:00

TO BUY SOON AND PLANT THIS FALL
Scarlet Runner Beans
Painted Lady Beans
Nero di Toscana Cabbage
Bull's Blood Beets
Detroit Dark Red Beets
Fava Beans
Clover?
Bulbous Fennel
Parsnips
Kale (Russian red/Ragged Jack)
Kale (Blue-curled Scotch)
Dwarf Siberian Kale
Radicchio, Verona Red
Filderkraut cabbage
Wormwood (as garden border, to prevent animals)
Check Washtenaw Conservation District native plant sale
Butterfly weed
Hydrangea (Hydrangea macrophylla; hoping for bluish lavender. . . did you know the color of the blue/pink ones depends on soil composition? aluminum and a slightly acidic pH makes blue; some interesting info on organic gardening of hydrangeas here)
Hydrangea Anabelle
Red hydrangea

SOONER?
Warm weather greens
Peppers

NEXT SPRING
Amaranth
Vietnamese Red Amaranth
Rhubarb
Joe Pye weed
Tickseed (Coreopsis)
Showy Sedum
Bee balm (seeds)
Trachelium
Catchfly
Delphinium
Matuncana Sweet pea
Pentas kaleidoscope
Penstemon
Achillea
Red hydrangea
Annabelle hydrangea

WISH LIST
'Boule de Feu' Hibiscus
Clematis
Hosta?
Lantana
Irises
Daffodils
Tulips
More Lilacs
Trellis
Blueberry bushes
Raspberries
Dragon heart geranium
Columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris) 'Tower Dark Blue'
Cyclamen
Red Spider Lily (Lycoris radiata)
Bicolor butterfly bush
Peony: perhaps Buckeye Belle or 'Burma Joy' something pale pink like Madam Calot, America,
Gardenia
Park's Peony Poppy Flemish Antique (Papavar somniferum paeoniflorum)

And so much more . . .

Tools & implements wish list
~~Soaker hose~~
Mosquito head net
Composter (I use a heap right now, and it's a challenge to turn when fighting the mosquitoes) or manure fork
Garden hose reel
bow rake
pointed shovel
rain barrels
bat house

2008-07-18T00:33:00.002-04:00

Oh! Vienna Teng is coming to Michigan again, to the Riverfolk Festival. Oh goodie, oh goodie. Anyone game? If you don't know her, listen to a couple of her incredible songs on my "Letters from Home" mix from several months ago . . .

Isn't it ironic, don't you think?

2008-07-16T12:46:00.001-04:00

My horoscope for today gave me a bit of a chuckle.

"Emotional security is essential for the soul and financial security is necessary for peace of mind. Not many people understand Cancers need to feel secure in life.

Yours Spiritually,
Universal Psychic Guild"

Week 2: A long day's work in the garden.

2008-07-08T12:07:00.011-04:00

I'm being rewarded with my first big bloom on a plant I bought with no sign of flowering: a deep orange-colored flower on the Maltese Cross I planted (above).

The other plants in that bed are doing fine, growing slowly but surely.

At the end there (above), you can see the cilantro and parsley are holding their own. I think they're not liking the hot days we've had intermittently, but I spread the bed with a bit of compost and manure and cocoa bean mulch after taking these photos, so I hope that will help all the plants along.

In the front of that bed, the phlox and zinnia seeds I planted seem to slowly be peeking out:

Also pretty happy is the hydrangea plant, and beside it, the butterfly bush, below:

The purslane bed on the right is doing splendidly:

The one on the left (below) is still growing up from tiny little plants.

In that same bed, the mint is much happier:

Behind them, the eggplants are growing slowly. I saw a little purple bloom on one of them, but sadly I knocked it off after I took the photo while I was watering.

The tomatoes seem to be growing slowly. I hope the compost/manure mix and mulch will help them a lot too.

The herbs generally seem pretty happy.

The only one that really doesn't look too happy is the lemon verbena, there between the basil plants and the variegated sage above. I'm not sure what is going wrong there.

The pineapple sage and horehound above seem to be growing steadily, and the chocolate mint is thriving.

My fight with the "lawn demons" continues, though. Since they weedwhacked the best bed of mint I had, below, I surrounded that one too with a ring of rocks (below). I would have done before, but they got to me before I had a chance to, while I was in Ann Arbor at the end of the long power outage. I'm mad, but I know that the mint will come back, probably even hardier than before.

I'm taking similar precautions along the border, where I've also planted mint. Now I'm experimenting with other kinds of materials, including tree branches and broken pottery, since I'm not sure I have quite enough stones to cover every boundary clearly.

Despite their best efforts, the mint still is growing nicely there, and I don't think it will be long before I really do have a nice (edible) border covering that ugly PVC.

That other variety of mint is also thriving in the little bed at the front of the walkway:

The walkway is also improving in appearance as the purslane and that other succulent fill in a bit. Some are still pretty small, but I expect that they'll grow in time. Their older siblings are already looking nice and bushy.

And despite my having thinned it considerably, the purslane is still growing in in patches of grass where the sod is thin.

In the garden plot, I know I have some more work I ought to be doing. Things are dry, and I know they want more organic material to thrive. It's hard, though, because the mosquitoes have been so thick over there, and every time I start working the soil, they're on top of me and I have a couple dozen new bites almost immediately. The peas, especially, have been suffering.

Still, there's been some growth. The okra plants below are shooting up.

And the vines of the squash and melon plants are moving along.

The melon plants have begun to flower.

The beans are growing (below), though I think a rabbit or other critter may have gotten to one of them.

After taking the photos, I did a ton more work, adding compost/manure almost everywhere, working it into the soil where I could, and adding topsoil in some places too, and cocoa bean mulch in some. I also did a BUNCH more planting, including Oriental poppy, larkspur, sunflower, more zinnia, marigold, black-eyed Susan, purple cornflower, snapdragon, lettuce, spinach, carrot, radish, zucchini, redbud, strawberry, sweetpeas, and mixed wildflowers.

I'll update ASAP to show how things are getting along.

2008-07-08T09:51:00.003-04:00

Wow, this narrated tour of the human heart as seen in a CT scan is pretty amazing. (Just click on the video on the left of the article.)

2008-07-05T10:12:00.002-04:00

Considering birthday activities. The 30-mile 'fun ride' component of One Helluva Ride? The Michigan ElvisFest? Maybe a bike tour of Detroit (if their scheduling cooperates)? A nature hike at the Washtenaw County Farm Park? Something else? Of course there's also the variety of free fun things Ann Arbor businesses offer for birthday celebrations.

Dancer in the Dark

2008-07-04T10:20:00.004-04:00

Oh, the summer storms. There are some oak trees that have been ripped right out of the ground in some spots around the area. My power was still out when I went home yesterday, so we emptied my fridge of any perishables, did a little tidying, and collected some things so I could spend a few days away from home. Oh, bother.

Many local folks don't seem to know that you can look at a frequently updated map of the Detroit Edison power company service area that gives information about the extent of the power outages in your particular zip code. It doesn't give address by address information, although you can check the status of a previously reported power problem through their "Storm Center" on their website. But the map does at least give you some information, about whether there is an outage problem or not. They update it every half hour.

What I really wanted to do (since I can't book the next flight to Cali to be with my family) was hide out at home, clean my house, work in my garden, do a little swimming, and work on my archaeology paper. But we're going to hit some barbecues this afternoon, to celebrate our status as, in the words of the wonderful Miki, "the greatest democracy in the world." Luckily my friends have a sense of irony; drinking the afternoon away at a "4th of July Proud To Be An American Imperialist BBQ and Slip and Slide Party" sounds like something I can handle, I guess.

Well, Umlud and I are off for a bike ride around A2.

Living "sturdily and Spartan-like"

2008-06-29T20:45:00.009-04:00

Well, I spent nearly the entire day in the garden, which was exhilarating, and also a bit exhausting. I'm having a blast with it, remembering the joy of working the soil, interacting with plants, and getting a bit of exercise, sun, and fresh air.

It's also both rewarding and humbling, seeing the landscape transform with your labor, and also seeing how much depends on time, weather, and so many other factors you have no control over. And, realizing how, even if you push yourself, there's only so much you can do in a day. It cultivates a sense of acceptance of both my strengths and my limitations that feels very healthy, very connected to what I feel is fundamental to being human.

I am sitting here after my long day's work and a simple supper of fresh salad, homemade rye bread, olives, and salty Bulgarian feta cheese, and I just poured myself a cup of Moroccan-style tea made with green tea my brother carried home from Taiwan and fresh mint I clipped just moments ago in the garden. It smells positively glorious.

As far as the garden work goes, the biggest part of the labor was the process of ripping up grass and weeds out of the area of the pathway (this is what it looked like before). I was inspired to try to expand the purslane planting into this area, to see if it would cooperate as a groundcover. Given that the soil is very shallow and comprises more compost than real soil, it's not a fabulous place for planting. But since the purslane had already started cropping up there a little bit, and since the plant only develops a fairly shallow root system, I thought it might be worth a try to get more to grow between the paving stones.

I almost finished; I just have a few more weeds to pull, and I obviously need to clean off the paving stones and compost the remaining grass pullings.

Above: Here's one spot of the newly replanted purslane, which I was hunting all over the garden amidst the sad, anemic, dry grass today.

While I was at it, I also transplanted some succulents from a patch at the far end of the lawn into the entrance to the path (above), and into the bed beside it, with the Moroccan mint plant (below). I also marked this little bed (below) with stones, once again against the lawn demons.

And, also, between the bricks outlining the herb garden (above and below). I thought if they got covered a bit by succulents, perhaps it would look a bit prettier. I don't love the delineation of the space with the bricks, but it prevents misunderstandings with the lawn maintenance guys who have a tendency of getting on the riding mower and destroying everything in its path.
Finally, I also did some weeding in the purslane bed next to the steps. I think I'll harvest a portion of the largest plants already in the next week to encourage root development on the plants. And to try my new crop! Hooray . . .

Tagging web images dynamically with roll-over labels -- where's the software?

2008-06-29T11:19:00.007-04:00

I've been wanting to edit those photos to dynamically identify the plants rather than just list them. So, I'm looking all over for simple freeware software that allows me to identify items (objects or persons) in a photograph and tag them, as is done in Facebook (much to our chagrin, sometimes, after a bad hair day gets captured). And somehow, it doesn't seem to exist. The idea is a good one, and I'm sort of amazed, given the pace of Web 2.0 development, that it isn't possible to do yet.

You can tag whole photos with thematic tags (that relate to the whole file), and you can geocode photographs to identify where they were taken on a map (the basis for the fun of Panoramio, the map features of Flickr, GoogleEarth, as well as the images connected to Googlemaps). The latter is also, obviously, a label (or, if you prefer, piece of metadata) that applies to the whole photograph. Labeling component parts still seems out of reach outside the context of applications for Facebook.

I found an Eastern European-developed software called TagHim 1.0, but it's impossible to download. Their own website has, in fact, been suspended. Perhaps it's because they spammed most software review sites with the exact same content (in noticeably non-native English), including reference to Facebook. Or, maybe they violated the terms of use for their website host. I'm not sure.

TagHim even has a YouTube video of the developer demonstrating the software with his charming Slavic accent and misspelling of "Mickey" in his process of tagging a photograph of Mickey Mouse and Pluto. It looks, effectively, like exactly what I want. Simple, free, fast, effective. What's the holdup, folks? Does anybody know anything about this?

Ice cream ball

2008-06-28T23:37:00.001-04:00

Oh no! I want one.

Garden Tour: Week One.

2008-06-28T21:01:00.018-04:00

Looking at vegetable garden advice is getting me so excited, and wistful. I wish I had planted even more in my garden: carrots, lettuce, beets, broccoli, potatoes, kale, spinach, chard, peppers, zucchini, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cucumber, more green beans, bigger tomato plants, fava beans, and rhubarb. I think I can still add some of these, for a fall/early winter harvest. But next year I'm going to be prepared by spring, seriously.

Anyway, I promised more photos of my garden. I'm going to try to be be annoyingly diligent about keeping track in my blog of how it's growing, so be prepared. Complete identification of the plants to follow in an edit tomorrow.

WEEK ONE.
Here we are, after a week of planting. From what I remember now, I bought the plants two weeks ago tomorrow, on June 15, and started planting on Saturday the 21st, starting with the herbs and perennials. I moved onto the beans, eggplants, and tomatoes early this past week, and finished up planting the rest of the vegetables today.

Above: The herb garden, clearly delineated to protect it from idiotic landscapers who weedwack everything that's green. From the back, going in concentric clockwise circles from the outside, there's chocolate mint, sweet basil (ocimum basilcum), French tarragon, thyme, oregano, sage, dill, mother of thyme/creeping thyme (thymus serpyllum), rosemary, horehound (marrubium vulgare), pineapple sage (salvia elegans/s. rutilans), basil (variety unknown; Thai, maybe?), more sweet basil, more tarragon, Russian sage "Taiga" (Perovskia afriplicifolia), salvia, lavender "Munstead" (Lavandula angustifolia), Sonata carmine cosmos, rosemary, variegated sage 'tricolor' (salvia officinalis), lavender, English lavender, and German chamomile (Matricaria recutita). I also sowed in seeds for phlox and zinnia, along the borders, that obviously aren't visible yet, though I thought I saw a little sprouting already today.

Above: The path leading to my cottage, along which I've planted mint borders. You can see a little patch of it there beside the light on the right side, and smaller plants on the far side, beside that black PVC piping they seem to think makes for neat borders beside lawns here in Michigan. To my aesthetic, it's just ugly.

Above: Another patch of mint of a different variety from most of the other stuff, at the very beginning of the path on the left side. I think it is Moroccan mint, but I can't remember: I bought and planted it in the garden plot last year.

Above: To one side of my door, here, I've got the eggplants, and in front of that, a new little bed with mint and purslane.

Above: Close-up of the eggplants, week 1. They're the Japanese variety.

Above: Close-up of the mint, which I transplanted from the far side of the garden. I'm pretty sure it's standard spearmint.

Above: The other side of my door, where I've got another bed of purslane and a little more mint.

Above: Close-up of the purslane. I've been digging it up from ALL over the garden and transplanting it into these beds to cultivate consciously since Scrumptious kindly pointed out to me that it is rich in nutritional content. Since then I've also been reading rather obsessively all about it.

Above: The tomato plants, which I fit in on the other side of the door, behind that other bed of purslane and mint.

Above: Being out in the garden inspired me to cut the dead growth off the butterfly bush (to the left). Now it looks so pretty next to the hydrangea (to the right).

Above: Some of the perennials I planted. From left to right, they're Maltese Cross 'Molten Lava' (Lychnis x haageana), summer sun (heliopsis), Columbine 'Music pink and white' (Aquilegia), Beard tongue (penstemon dwarf hybrids), and Blue Queen salvia. I also planted flower seeds -- a kind of daisy, California poppies, zinnia, and phlox.

Above: In that same bed, there's Italian parsley and cilantro on the far end to the right.

Above: My raised beds on my garden plot across the way. They aren't tidy or pretty, but I hope they'll do the trick.

Above: From back to front, on the left: Something I lost track of the label for and can't identify, but I think may be okra, garlic, butternut squash, and acorn squash. On the right, Blue Lake beans, sugar snap peas, cantaloupe, and a sweet potato.

Above: Some close-ups of the veggies.

Above: Sunset dappling the herb garden with light. You can see the lake in the background. So very peaceful here.

After snapping all these photos, I went for my first swim in the lake this year. It was simply glorious, alternately warm and cool, so refreshing, so fresh against my skin. I breathed deeply and looked up at the sky and felt somehow more human than I have in quite a while.

2008-06-28T15:49:00.001-04:00

Ohh, I want a puppy and a flock of sheep so they can fall in love with each other . . .

Grad student life in Michigan -- the highs, the lows.

2008-06-28T12:56:00.008-04:00

There's a new yoga studio in the area. I was excited to see that, because up until then the only one I knew of around Livingston County was Yoga Center for Healthy Living in Brighton, which is a bit on the pricey side. Unfortunately, this new one in Pinckney doesn't offer that many classes, and no morning yoga. Boo.

Why isn't there full cooperation from the rest of the world for my dream life of weekend days of sun, yoga class and farmer's market in the morning followed by a smoothie and coffee while catching up on the news, whole grain baking and organic gardening, a little reading and writing, a little country bike ride, and a swim at sunset?

I did pretty well in realizing my vision today, though -- I biked in the snippet of sun after our downpour this morning, came home and made a blueberry/strawberry/nonfat milk/Vanilla protein smoothie and some coffee & milk, took care of a little personal business, and made another new version of quick rye bread, this time including buckwheat and quinoa flour, sesame and sunflower seeds, to complement the rye & molasses. I'll let you know how it turns out . . . it sure smells good in the oven, though. :)

The mosquitoes are really bumming me out -- I'd like to go back to the garden and do some more work, and I think I'll brave them anyway. But even covered from head to toe and hovering close to two citronella candles, I get divebombed without a mosquito net covering my face. And I don't have a mosquito net, unfortunately. I'm resisting DEET products, though I did order some Avon Skin-so-soft bug spray to see if that does the trick. Gwen's suggestion of vanilla was clever, but it didn't work for me, nor did citronella essential oil. I've been so itchy the past few days, I can hardly fathom exposing myself to more bites right now. . . never mind the diseases they can carry . . .

I'm thinking now about the rest of my day. Some house cleaning, I think, a closet reorganization operation, a bit of gardening, some work on an archaeology paper, and maybe a house party and some visiting with friends this evening. That is, if I get paid on Monday. I need to drive to Detroit first thing in the morning for a job interview, and my gas tank is (as usual, lately) running low, along with my bank account. If I can't buy gas on Monday morning, I actually can't afford to go anywhere at all between now and then. Oh, if only I could afford to buy a more fuel-efficient car. If only housing were more affordable in Ann Arbor. If only gas prices weren't so damned high.

I have several jobs potentially in the works, a few hours here, a few hours there. Three tutoring gigs, a research assistantship, and a research analyst position. (I've applied for others, but some didn't come through, and I gave up on the baking job when I heard that fifteen people had interviewed for that one full-time minimum wage position starting work at 5 am.) It's so confusing I've created a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. But if I get one or both of the ones I'm really hoping for, I'll be doing fine for the rest of the summer. Otherwise, I'm just going to have to turn to prostitution to fill in the gaps between tutoring gigs so I can make rent for August and September, until I start my next GSI position at U of M, and get my first paycheck at the very end of September. Just kidding. Mostly.

Oh! My bread is ready, and I'm already devouring it with ripe avocado. MMMMMmmmm.

Baking details HERE in the Kitchen Empress.

Trans-american children

2008-06-27T23:23:00.004-04:00

I tuned in partway through the rebroadcast of Barbara Walters' 20/20 report last year on transgendered children and their parents tonight.

Watching the report was interesting to me in part because it reinforced the point we try to nail home for the anthropology 101 students about gender as a social construction, and how gender is enculturated. It's amazing how attached parents are to the ideas of what a boy is, or what a girl is, and that they can mourn the loss of that boy even when they still have the transgendered child who is alive and well and insisting that the world recognize her as a girl. I'm not meaning to dismiss the pain that these families experience, because it is real, but I just mean to say that culture is a profoundly powerful force in building our understandings of the world and the way it ought to be.

Maybe this was out of context, since I tuned in late, but I was also struck by the fact that Walters initially seemed stubbornly to return to the pronoun that anatomy declared rather than the one the child -- and, in most cases, the families too -- used for himself or herself. This shifted over the course of the broadcast, and by the end she seemed generally to use the pronoun used by the family.

Another thing that I can't help but notice in American journalism is the isolationist kind of approach to the subject of gender, as if the US is the only country in the world where this could happen*, and that given the biologically driven theories that many people currently believe, there's no room for talking about culture. Even the explanation Walters offers of this theory belies the American cultural framing of science, where anatomy = biology. She explains that many believe that a hormone surge during pregnancy results in "the wrong gender" for these children. Why "wrong"? Because a penis necessitates male gender identity, a vagina female gender identity? The orientation is puzzling to me, for sure. We know that dark matter populates the universe with far more than we know how to identify in cosmology; why is there the popular assumption we have biology all figured out?

I've seen the interesting film No Dumb Questions a couple of times in social work classes taught by Liz Gershoff, which also deals with children and their conceptualizations of gender and gender identity, but from the point of view of children watching their relative transition from being Uncle Bill to Aunt Barbara, rather than a child experiencing a transgendered identity himself or herself. Though it's rougher in its production, I think it's somehow more intelligent in certain ways than Walter's piece, because its absence of an omnicient narrator leaves more room for interpretation and self-discovery, rather than pronouncement.

One thing that Walters does do really nicely, though, is capture (ethnographically) the parents' varied reactions to their own children's declarations of alternate gender, and given the large audience of its mainstream broadcast, it has the potential to have a huge impact on people who share exactly the same assumptions that she herself falls into at times in the documentary. As she claims in the final moments of the one-year-later broadcast, there has been an enormous rise in the number of trans-identified children participating in conferences since the initial airing of the episode, and there's been a great deal of attention given the show by internet readers as well as schools.

Even with the faults in the program, I'm thrilled to see this topic being talked about in mainstream media with a fair amount of sensitivity. Hooray for Barbara Walters.

*The wonderful French film Ma Vie en Rose (1997) deals with just this topic from the child's perspective.

The "espresso" book machine

2008-06-27T10:43:00.003-04:00

An intriguing development at the University of Michigan library.

I always say that the three things I really miss about University of Texas, being a student at U of M, are the weather, the IT department and its advanced spam filters, and the incredible library system, including a Gutenberg Bible in their special collections. Well, I believe this is finally one interesting thing our library has got on the Longhorns.

Outrageously beautiful (Busby Berkeley) dreams

2008-06-26T14:29:00.008-04:00

It really changes my feeling of being in the world, putting my hands into dough and soil. I can't explain it, exactly, but it's profound. Like when I was walking up to campus from the Hill Street parking lot the other day, I was interacting with every landscape choice actively, looking at the plants, their maintenance and care, the selection, their health. . .

I haven't felt this way since I lived in my cottage in Austin, and had a garden of native plants I propagated there.

My dreams of the lakeside gardens here grow greater and more vivid. They involve a massive vegetable garden full of squash, kale, beets, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, garlic, peppers, chard, rhubarb, and everything I can think of; lilacs, scarlet runner beans, thornless blackberry vines, and everbearing raspberries, heavy with fruit, covering every inch of ugly chain-link fence; a goat, a sheep, and perhaps a cow taking the place of the inept gardening service for trimming back the anemic lawn; lilies, bleeding hearts, delicate ferns (like maidenhair and dryopteris), and oyster mushrooms encircling the trees and crawling the hillside down to the lake; window boxes bursting with red geraniums; containers filled with jade and Mexican sage surrounding a wrought-iron table and chairs on the deck overlooking the water; and California poppies, Texas bluebonnets, zinnias, columbine, and phlox exploding with blooms in the beds beneath my neighbor's rock garden laced with succulents.

I can't wait to have a real job, to be able to settle down for real . . . .

In the meantime, though, my yogurt from yesterday is glorious with muesli for breakfast. Yes, breakfast at 3 pm. It is summer, after all.

Plant Mystery, continued.

2008-06-24T18:27:00.008-04:00

I've tried comparing my little sample against the list of weeds offered by the Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research, but I haven't found a match. I've done a less comprehensive search on the British site Find Me Plants and the Ladybird Johnson native plant database (Oh, how I miss the wonderful Wildflower Center in Austin!)

I'm inclined to think that it is some kind of herb that I did plant last year, though I still have not a clue which. In part, because it doesn't appear anywhere besides the one spot where it is. It seems very healthy and robust, but it is definitively situated where it is, unlike most weeds that have a tendency to spread all over the damned place, like Creeping Charlie (which covers most of my garden plot, sadly), and Purslane (which likes to hide everywhere else).
Above: Creeping Charlie and Purslane, two of my most pernicious weeds here in Livingston County, Michigan; photos from the Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research.

So . . . tonight I planted both my Blue Lake beans and my Japanese eggplants, despite the fact that I was being dive-bombed by mosquitoes, and was half-drunk on beer from my growler from Grizzly Peak. Now I just have a few more veggies to put in the ground. I wish the bugs would go away for long enough. . .

Another beautiful sunset.

Mmm, simple pleasures.

Garden mysteries on early lakeside morning

2008-06-24T10:36:00.010-04:00

An early-morning shot of my new herb garden. More to come in evening, in brighter light, with a virtual tour of the varieties of herbs.

The benefits of waking up early are so numerous. Here it is, 10:40, and I've listened to BBC world service streaming for two hours, having already finished planting the mint borders in my garden, transplanted the oregano/marjoram (I still can't tell the difference) and thyme, prepared more than a quart of yogurt (which will incubate and be ready this afternoon), and put another big loaf of quick rye bread into the oven.

Yogurt, so very easy. Just heat the milk, cool it a bit, add a hint of yogurt culture, and cultivate it in containers.

The bread is also a breeze.

Here, a couple shots of the mint I've been planting as a border to the path to the cottage. I've been irritated by the ugly black PVC dividing the sod from the path since I moved in, so my concept is finally to cover it with mint. I hope the walkway will be a lot more attractive as it inevitably fills in.

. . . So now I am puzzling over one plant in my garden. It looks like it could be a variety of thyme, because the placement of the leaves, the color, and the stem formation look very much like thyme. But it doesn't taste like thyme, from the tiny bit I tasted, and the tiny, thin needles don't look much like the leaves of most thyme plants I know.

It also grows in a pattern that is unlike other types of thyme I know -- it grows a bit like a groundcover, very close to the ground, and spreading outward from its central root.

Anyone familiar with it? I'm wondering if it might be summer savory. Or, it may just be a big, hardy weed.

Dawn on the lake

2008-06-24T08:44:00.002-04:00

There was a time when I thought there could hardly be anything more beautiful than sunset on my lake. But lately, I have been thinking that dawn is far more magical.

Summer on the lake. . .

2008-06-23T17:51:00.005-04:00

A strange summer thus far. I'm trying to settle into it a bit more, now that my GSIship in Slavic has ended for the spring term. And, so, I'm madly looking for work, because I won't get another paycheck from U of M until the end of September. Rent still has to be paid, food still has to be purchased . . . It's a little scary, really. If I'd gone abroad this summer, I would have been able to get some funding from the university to support the research. But nobody ever wants you to include your expenses in Michigan in your budget, so where the money for rent ($850/month), cable internet/TV/phone ($70/month), car insurance ($40) and inevitable small utility bills, are supposed to come from remains mysterious.

I'm opting instead to stay in town to rest and work on some old papers, since I have some incomplete work leftover from past semesters when I felt pressured into taking on 5-7 classes at a time, knowing that it would be unworkable. But the financial situation isn't really any saner being in town.

Entertainment has to be the free or nearly free kind. And I'm trying to limit my trips back and forth from Ann Arbor, too, since the cost of gas has gotten so bloody high. I've been hanging out a lot with a friend in town, baking quite a bit, and watching lots of streaming internet TV (Bones is my new obsession, thanks to Ms Scrumptious.) Now that the water has warmed up, I'm about ready to start swimming the lake. Umlud was also kind enough to pump up my bike tires, and I'm also ready to take it out for a spin now and see if the rust on the gears is bad enough to need professional work, or if I can ride it as-is, so I can hit the road on the nice easy bike trails around here. And, hoping to generate some produce at the end of the summer and enjoy some flowers and herbs in the meantime, I am finally planting the lovely selection of perennials and herbs I got at the farm stand the other day. Gardening should be a fun diversion in the evenings, if I can find a way to keep the mosquitos at bay.

(A bit later. . .) My muscles are comfortably sore from hours of hard work today. I have effectively planted all the flowers and herbs; now it's just time to find space for the vegetables tomorrow. I opted to move my herb garden to the space right in front of the cottage instead of the plot across the way, since the hose isn't really long enough to comfortably water over there, and I get to enjoy the plants more when they're right outside my windows. Also, after my previous "gardener" debacle, I feel protective of my plants, and I feel irrationally that having them closer to the house will make them more likely to be preserved by the folks who come to work on the lawn.

The more demanding work, more than planting the new plants, was transplanting some of the old ones. I uprooted a sage plant and two hardy tarragon plants (straggly though they may look from being weedwacked by the supposedly more competent gardener) and brought them over to the other side. The hardest part, though, was my work to bring over the mint. I'm planting it all along the border of the path to the cottage, so that it will grow to fill in and mask the ugly black plastic piping along the sod line, as well as the artificial fibers of the fabric beneath the path itself. I'll finish up the job and show photos tomorrow! I plan to move my marjoram and thyme also, so I'll have the raised beds exclusively for veggies.

I'm going to do some internet research to find out if there are any deer- and rabbit-resistant plants I could plant around my herb garden, especially the parsley and cilantro, so I can keep them for my own harvesting. :)

Today turned out to be a beautiful day, with morning meditation after a bit of coffee, hours of gardening, and a successful job interview for a tutoring gig in Ann Arbor. I talked to my Mom on the phone, saw a stunning sunset over the lake, and had a coffee date with Umlud. Tomorrow I have two more job interviews, for another tutoring job and a full-time baker position. And more fun in the garden!

Punchy anti-racist retorts in television

2008-06-17T20:07:00.003-04:00

Bones just keeps getting better and better. Cheekier, punchier. Like today, in episode 2.5:

Angela: What you thought were teethmarks, Dr. Sorion, turned out to be Chinese characters, engraved along the side.
Hodgins: What do they say?
Angela: (sigh) They say, "What make foolish man, think I speak Chinese?"
Hodgins: I thought you were half-Chinese.
Angela: And I think you're half-Swedish. Let's hear some Swedish!

Canadian Goslings on Huron River Drive

2008-06-15T17:59:00.015-04:00

There's a family of Canadian geese who've made their home beside Huron River Drive in Ann Arbor, and I get all giddy every time I drive by the little goslings, in all their cuteness. This drive-by cell phone camera photo doesn't really do them justice, but you get the idea.

Umlud initiated me into the delights of Sunday brunch at the Aut bar today. An outdoor patio space so peaceful and lovely with the dappled sunlight under green trees and the sounds of Billie Holiday crooning, I was reminded of lazy Sundays in Budapest. Lots of really darling kids out with their families, in honor of Father's Day. I was grinning despite my intense dislike of the holiday.

Ms Scrumptious has gone home after a delightful almost-week-long visit to Michigan. I always like the quiet self-collected feeling I have after time with a dear old friend. And though it's been rather a rough couple weeks, I mostly have great memories of the time, with my guardian angels K & J keeping me company out at the cottage last weekend, and Alice woven in here and there amidst her prelim craziness.

A lingering legacy of L's visit is a minor obsession with Bones, even despite its terrible science, and a delight in seeing an anthropologist depicted on TV. I wish season 2 were on Hulu, because the low quality of Surf the Channel and the Chinese subtitles there interfere with my viewing pleasure, and they only have the first season on DVD at the video store here. No hope for the library on this one, and it's not worth it to me to start up Netflix again just for this.

I bought lovely herbs, veggies, and perennials this afternoon at the Alexander Farm Market on Whitmore Lake Road, which I'll plant tomorrow after I finish this round of grading for the Central European cinema course. I'll take more photos and identify everything when I do. Below, though, you can spy some salvia, beans, and German chamomile.

It's positively beautiful weather out here, 80 degrees and no humidity, and the intermittent thunderstorms have been keeping the dust down. Stunning. I hope it's like this all summer. It's just about time to start swimming in the lake again, finally.

As I was getting back home today, the son of the older couple next door was clearing some dead needles out of the pine tree in their yard and the ladder broke a foot underneath him. The whole family was out there around him, and several other neighbors were out. We saw him fall almost as if in slow motion. Luckily it wasn't so far, and it was onto a relatively soft patch of grass. Nonetheless I'm concerned . . . They've been visiting all afternoon, though, so I guess he must be all right.

I feel a sense of accomplishment from having finally taken care of a little personal business and, especially, for having tackled the puzzling task of setting up my computer to sync with my Palm Treo 650. Vista doesn't seem to like the device very much, but I managed to get it to work with Bluetooth. Hooray! Now, if only Virgin Mobile or Tracfone would allow the SIM cards for their prepaid service to be used with an unlocked GSM device, I could start using it as a smartphone again, instead of as a Palm pilot and camera.

The fresh hope of spring is finally yielding to the lushness of summer. Not a moment too soon, I think.

Summertime, and the living is easy . . .

2008-06-14T09:55:00.002-04:00

Hmm, nothing like reading the small town papers for the hippest events to attend. Laura Moehrle of The Courant raves about the "touch of Germany" you can enjoy at end-of-the-month Saturday summer picnics at German Park in Ann Arbor. Mmm, spaetzle and lederhosen? I think I'm there.

Other local summer fun includes, of course, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, with the frustratingly out-of-reach ticket prices (no student rates) for main events and the Top of the Park, with free concerts and movies in front of the Rackham Graduate School building on East Washington St.

Naturally, even though it's more than a month away, those of us living in the area can all undoubtedly feel Art Fair coming, like a runaway train.

2008-06-09T19:57:00.001-04:00

ohhhhh, cat love . . .

2008-06-06T23:09:00.003-04:00

I had a whole series of anxiety dreams last night, one involving a police car parking in front of my house, presumably to take me away for something that I'd done. And the other, a very involved dream about filling up the bed of my pickup truck with piles and piles of garbage to dispose at the community dump.

I'm ready to get rid of the garbage.

Today was just fine.

2008-06-02T17:55:00.002-04:00

Avoiding my work. Blogging on Kitchen Empress. I was sad to realize it had been months since I'd updated there. Things got busy, my computer crashed, and my camera was acting fussy. . .

There is much to be nervous about. Too much work, not enough money, and many other things. . .

I am tired.

I heart the interwebs -- alternative news round-up

2008-05-30T11:50:00.011-04:00

One thing I like about reading my news from a custom-designed list that makes use of RSS feeds of a variety of international sources (NPR, New York Times, Al Jazeera, BBC, etc. . ) is that I'm able to see a lot more variation in the top stories than you do if you read the top US newspapers. It's even more interesting than the days when I read the World Press Review magazine.

Case in point: Although the New York Times is reporting on the German dairy strike, the US seems oblivious to the fishermen's work stoppages in Spain in protest of rising fuel prices: "'Compliance is total. The entire Spanish coast is at a halt," Jose Caparros, of the fishermen's co-operative in the major northeastern port of Barcelona, said." Apparently Portugal has already seen similar action and Italian and Belgian fishermen are expected to follow suit, according to Al Jazeera and the BBC.

Of course, I personally am interested to see social work and anthropology and Eastern Europe in the mainstream news today, and Roma in the international press.

First off, social work: The Supreme Court has ruled that child welfare workers in Texas overstepped their bounds in their removal of the children from the polygamist compound outside Eldorado last month.

Next, Eastern Europe: Croatia has jailed a war crimes general following his conviction in the Croatian court. As the BBC reports, "The UN war crimes tribunal's decision to transfer the case to Zagreb was in recognition of the progress Croatia had earlier made in dealing with war crimes investigations, the BBC's Balkans analyst Gabriel Partos said."

And finally, anthropology gets its five minutes in the spotlight. The secret to Stonehenge finally been uncovered (and now reported all over the mainstream press). My favorite commentary on the recent discoveries at Stonehenge has to be the interview with Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap.

Meanwhile, in northern France, archaeologists are "seeking to uncover a suspected mass grave of hundreds of Australian and British troops from World War I."

Also, there's also been yet another "uncontacted tribe" 'sighted' in the Amazon by Brazil's National Indian Foundation (Fundacao Nacional do Indio, whose website was down last I tried). True to the form of salvage ethnography, there are folks convinced we need to save them.

CNN reports:"'These pictures are further evidence that uncontacted tribes really do exist,' said Stephen Corry, director of Survival International. 'The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct.'" I just wonder how long it'll be before they send in a translator to communicate with them.

On the other hand, in the international press, there are some new, disturbing reports on Roma. One of the oldest Romani populations in the world, that of Istanbul, is experiencing dislocation due to urban renewal in Sulukule. Human rights advocates are very concerned for the Romani families who have been living in the neighborhood for centuries. There are allegations that illiterate families have been asked to sign papers they don't understand, and that "tenants in Sulukule were left on the streets as the houses they resided in were sold and then destructed by the municipality."

In Italy, meanwhile, schoolchildren's drawings are telling a frightening tale of xenophobia and violence underlying the recent firebombing of a Romani camp outside Naples, according to the Daily Mail.

"Burning the houses of the Roma is justified," wrote some children. Another said, "They steal babies and use them for begging or sell their organs for transplants." The frightening messages of hatred communicated without filter through the words and images of children give startling insight into the dangerous social situation for Roma in Italy.

Milk song

2008-05-25T11:48:00.003-04:00

I had been wondering, ever since I moved to the countryside in Michigan, why I couldn't find anyplace around here that sold milk, although fresh eggs are readily available. You often see signs by the roadside out here on the country roads, and if you stop you will more than likely find that the egg sales work on the honor system, with just a little mini-fridge with boxes of eggs and a sign that says "Eggs $1.50 per dozen - leave money in the bottom-left drawer. Thank you". But milk is nowhere to be found, it seems.

I had suspected the regulations were just more stringent for milk, especially when I found out that part of the reason the Leopold Brothers were moving to Colorado from Michigan was for a more amenable system for distributing their house-made spirits. Well, today I confirmed my suspicion, when I followed some farming links from an enticing article on cheesemaking in Mother Earth News. I found, first of all, a handy directory of farms in Michigan that have pastured products. There's one farm here in Livingston County called Garden Patch Farm. So I finally found my way to Our Farm and Dairy in St. Johns, Michigan, which makes milk consumption possible for individuals through an innovative Cow Share Program!! (In the process of all this clicky-clickying, I discovered Lake Village Homestead, a farm cooperative in Kalamazoo that I definitely want to visit someday, since their unique educational programs sound rather similar to the ideas I have for if I ever voluntarily exile myself from academia.

In the process, I had a sad little chuckle as I happened upon Joel Salatin's book, entitled "Everything I want to do is illegal: War stories from the local food front". It does make me rather sad as an anthropologist, as I learn and teach about so many different adaptive strategies the world over, when I hear how constantly bogged down in government regulations local food producers seem to be. I want to live dangerously and eat raw-milk cheeses! (Like the Decemberists sing, "We are like vagabonds, we travel without seatbelts on, we live this close to death". . .) Given the nonchalance of the US government to allow citizens to be exposed to any number of frightening toxic chemicals in our air and water, I find it amazing how much they seek to control what we choose to put into our mouths . . .

So, when I can afford to do, I may purchase some cheese cultures and try my hand at the next variety of dairy products, having already happily created ricotta and yogurt that are incomparable. Oh, and I'll also replant my herb garden, since the cad my landlords hired to mow the lawn destroyed my giant tarragon and sage plants, along with the lavender and winter savory. Sigh.

And now, just for strange entertainment value, a video of Korean children advertising the benefits of drinking milk.

Update: Ask and ye shall receive! The lovely folks at Garden Patch Farms pointed me to a local goat herder at Heavenly Dairy in Pinckney, and an organic bovine dairy in Cohoctah Township called Dairy Delight, both also in Livingston County. :) In the words of Kris Unger of Dairy Delight: "We disasterized the food system," she said. "How dare the government tells us we can't drink raw milk."

Gary Kasparov and the Flying Penis

2008-05-20T10:55:00.003-04:00

I really wish this had subtitles. Russian chess champion and political dissident Gary Kasparov is giving a presentation that gets interrupted in a highly unexpected way:

Apparently, according to one blogger,

After the security guard [has] swatted it to the ground, Kasparov says, "I think we have to be thankful for the opposition's demonstration of the level of discourse we need to anticipate. Also, apparently most of their arguments are located beneath the belt." Someone in the audience shouts, "Finally the political power shows its face!" Kasparov quickly replies, "Well, if that's its face..." to laughter from the audience.

Baking bread, breaking bread

2008-05-20T10:43:00.006-04:00

Last night I baked my third yeasted loaf since I got out the Tassajara Bread Book again after years of it hiding in my boxes and/or cupboard. This time, since I was running low on almost all the flours, and need to restock, it was a weird hodgepodge of things: buckwheat, spelt, and regular (white) bread flour, 9-grain cereal, and cornmeal, with leftover sweetened condensed milk, a few eggs that needed using, a bit of leftover brown rice, a little lowfat milk, some almond oil, and of course sea salt, yeast, and filtered water, with raw sunflower seeds on top.

I was getting toward the end of the second rising when Katie and John arrived in the evening, so Katie helped me knead and shape a couple of the loaves. And then I baked it, while we sat back and chatted and enjoyed the smell of freshly baking bread. And it came out . . . brilliant! The uncooked cereal and cornmeal gave a great crunchiness throughout the loaf, but the overall texture was soft and delightfully chewy, with a lovely crust that was notably crusty without being "painful" like some crusty breads, as John pointed out. We ate almost a whole round loaf together, straight out of the oven, with organic butter and organic strawberry jam, me and my companions. . . :)

My camera batteries need replacing, but maybe I can get one more shot out of them to add here . . .

Notes on Central European Cinema

2008-05-19T14:40:00.015-04:00

The clip above is from the beginning of Daisies by Vera Chytilová. As our film technician pointed out to me the other day, it's hard for most people really to grasp how completely innovative much of the technique was that Chytilová used in making this film in 1966. Apart from the incredibly subversive content of the film, both in terms of the private lives of these two wacky characters, but also in terms of the film images of explosions and other signs of broader social critique, the film is also pretty amazing in terms of the images she managed to produce on film in the absence of digital technologies.

. . .For those of you who didn't know, I'm teaching a Central European cinema course with a professor at U of M this term. I am bracing myself for the upcoming films, Adoption (Örökbefogadás) by Márta Mészáros* and A Woman Alone (Kobieta Samotna) by Agnieszka Holland (better known in the US for her Holocaust film Europa, Europa).

Adoption (see first image above) isn't quite as painfully depressing as Holland's devastating film (see second image above), but both have a kind of unnerving, creeping loneliness that penetrates you as you're watching them. If they weren't genius, I don't know that it would be bearable.

For our other films about gender and women under state socialism, we watched Milos Forman's wonderful 1965 film Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky; see image above), Dušan Makavejev's Man is Not a Bird (Covek Nije Tica; 1965) and Vera Chytilová's masterpiece Daisies (Sedmikrasky; 1966; see the clip above!) in the past couple of weeks, since we finished the unit on Holocaust film.

* See the entry on Mészáros here, too, if you're interested, and more on Makavejev here. For a discussion (in Czech) of Loves of a Blonde that includes lots of stills from the film, check this out. For some more discussion of women in Polish women filmmakers' films, check out this discussion in Kinoeye.)

Writing this little entry is getting me really excited about seeing some of these directors' other films, like WR: The Mysteries of the Organism, the film that got Makavejev exiled from Yugoslavia for its sexual-political content (see image below), and Mészáros's Eltávozott Nap, the first feature-length film made by a female filmmaker in Hungary. Oh, and Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which I somehow never managed to see before!

Below is a little clip of Mészáros's Eltávozott Nap.

By the way, in an only distantly related vein, one of the stranger pieces of news from this part of the world recently is that electricity seems to be nothing more than a game of cat and mouse in Albania. No, really. I wonder if I might be able to use this piece of contemporary trivia to my advantage in convincing a friend of mine to watch Emir Kusturica's bizarre and hysterical film Black Cat, White Cat (Crna Macka, Beli Macor; 1998; see below) with me. (Of course, when I refer to a 72-hour blackout in a European capital as "trivia," that is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, perhaps drawing on the older meaning of trivia -- that is, etymologically speaking, a crossroads where three roads meet).

One Semester of Spanish - Love Song

2008-05-17T13:19:00.002-04:00

La la la la da . . .
Me gusta la biblioteca,
Vivo en la casa roja,
Yo tengo dos bicicletas,
Muchas gracias y de nada . . .

Ride to Remember

2008-05-17T11:32:00.005-04:00

One thing about Livingston County that sometimes mitigates the magical joys of the natural environment here is the rampant knee-jerk conservatism of most of the people who live in the area.

I was impressed to see the effort of close to 200 motorcyclists honoring the soldiers from this county who have died in Iraq in the Livingston County Ride to Remember on the local TV broadcast, and had a moment of wishing I'd been present for that. But the spin always turns the public attention back to war support and patriotism instead of merely a celebration of the lives of the men and women who served -- or a somber reflection on the losses of their families.

I can see on some level why this happens; if you come to the conclusion that this war is unjust then you have to accept that they effectively died in vain (at best), or in the service of an administration promoting an imperialist and highly counterproductive agenda abroad (at worst), and it makes the loss of these young people all the more tragic and difficult to accept.

But it makes it hard to stomach going to such an event, even though my heart goes out to those families, because I don't accept that such a display is really "about patriotism". I would love to go there and show my support for the families without that gesture shifting into a vote of confidence for the mess that this administration has made in Iraq, Afghanistan, and therefore the world over (because of the anti-American public opinion emerging as a result of our foreign policy).

I guess that I'm always going to be a bit of a black sheep here in this "red" county -- which I suppose is okay. I never actually thought it would be a permanent home.

2008-05-14T12:33:00.005-04:00

Sometimes I wish I were more of a geek. I'm trying to geek out with my old Western Digital 500 GB My Book external hard drive that began to make the "click of death" that I wasn't informed enough to recognize about six months ago, and which just stopped working altogether about a month and a half ago. (Apparently, I learn now, WD drives have a pretty bad reputation among some folks -- See Markwilson and even Wikipedia. Of course they had great reviews when I shelled out the grant money for it back when I thought it would be a reliable place to keep my data.)

I've gotten as far as pulling the plastic casing away and I have lots of screws and screwdrivers and pieces of sticky foil tape and cables and green electronic plates all around, thanks to my own prowess and some guidance from Ransackery.

But here I am with the core metal box of the external drive now, and a whole lot of questions about SATA, and not enough confidence to open up my brand-new Dell desktop to make an internal connection between my computer and this second drive. I think I will have to shell out for a data recovery specialist, and hopefully they will be able to get at all the material contained in this little thing.

I have a similar set of issues with my old wireless router, which served me well for several years, but which I started a small fire in last week when I accidentally connected the AC power adapter for the Vonage telephone adapter to the router. I blew out the lapping flames inside, and the smoke subsided, and when I plugged in the correct cable, I had a surprising and exhilarating moment of the power lights coming up before the whole thing went completely dead. So, with the help of a friend, I opened up the thing, and he identified the one single part that got fried in the process, and it's possible that I might be able to solder a small piece of lamp wire into the thing to get it up and running again. But alas, I have no soldering iron (yes, even this daughter of an engineer), and so will probably end up ordering another unit, perpetuating the coal-fueled consumer goods industry in China that my mother says is the biggest culprit behind Bay Area air pollution (thanks to the winds across the Pacific). And this thing, which may have only a half-inch of "problem" will likely end up in a landfill.

Yeah, that thing I said earlier about the losses and gains of modern life . . .? Dealing with compatibility issues and data loss, consumption, pollution, and the world system always brings me back to that set of questions. Now where'd I put my antidepressants?

2008-05-14T11:28:00.000-04:00

Oh, the rain on the lake. It's so. . . very . . . lovely.

Loungechair anthropologist philosophizing

2008-05-14T10:41:00.005-04:00

I'm convinced that working with your hands is fundamentally nourishing. As the Shakers said, work is a gift to the person doing the work. Why turn it down? When you knead bread, you're kneading all the channels and acupuncture points in your hands. Whether or not you call that a spiritual benefit or just a physiological one, doing something with your hands is just incredibly invigorating to your whole body. -- Edward Espe Brown

Since I've had a bit more time at home with the end of the crazy winter term, I've taken up baking yeasted breads again, something I hadn't done by hand in years, maybe since I was living in San Francisco.

I bake my yeasted breads mainly from a second-hand copy of the Tassajara Bread Book that my mom bought at an estate sale at the home of the then-recently-deceased artist Susan Seddon Boulet. Apart from the simple joy that Edward Espe Brown always brings to me, there's something added in baking from Boulet's old cookbook, complete with age and water spots, an unexplained hole punch through the front cover, and a recipe for "Homegrowen Chocolate-Hazelnut Torte -- Chronical - Nov. 92" penned into the last page in what I assume is her own handwriting. There's something so intimate and human about it that only enhances the already earthy experience of handling dough on a wooden board and participating in its transformation over the span of several hours.

Baking, like anything else, has a remarkable way of serving as a microcosm of life, and a vessel of wisdom that often seems obscured by the strangely anti-quotidian life we seem to lead in the fast-paced, sanitized, convenience-oriented world of the metropolitan United States. When I clip fresh thyme and marjoram from my garden plot or toast up a fresh slice of spelt-wheat-buckwheat bread I produced myself, I can't help but wonder whether the gains really outweigh the losses in the way we've established our lives here.

There's a funny sense I have right now that my life has opened up its arms to me in a newly gentle and loving way recently. Is it the friends who are dear to me? The quiet beauty of waking beside the lake in the morning? The lilacs in bloom all around? Spying rabbits, turtles, fish, snakes, and deer around the place I call home? I'm not sure -- and I don't know what it means. But yesterday, on a solitary walk through the woods beside the Huron River at sunset, I became newly aware of the depth of my gratitude, even in the absence of certainty.

2008-05-14T10:22:00.002-04:00

Mmmmm, I want to try Red Sea Ethiopian Restaurant in Ypsi.

Oooh girl . . .

2008-05-11T15:03:00.001-04:00

Let's try to be realistic, girl . . .

2008-05-06T16:15:00.002-04:00

f-ing dell. my computer order has been delayed, so it won't even be shipped until the 12th. ARGH. i really want to be able to work at home.

2008-04-30T12:45:00.007-04:00

If I owned my cottage, instead of just rented, I would totally want to add a few feet of chain-link fence and a gate to my garden area and bring in a goat, a sheep or two, a cow, and a chicken or two. I don't know if it's allowed in our subdivision, but I'm just fantasizing anyway, right?

I've been thinking this for a while, since I haven't been able to find anybody out in my area who sells local milk, though there are lots of eggs available. And then I saw a Gourmet special on New Zealand that really got me thinking . . . and then of course there was the "Interview with a Goat" I read this morning.

I'm in such a good mood this morning. I was having a crazy craving for red meat last night, so I bought grass-fed Michigan beef at Arbor Farms and made an astonishingly good burger last night with cheddar and sauteed onion on a gorgeously soft, sweet toasted bun from Avalon bakery and washed it down with a few beers. It had been such a long day of work (I woke at 5:15 and spent a few hours reading a fabulous essay on gender and social welfare systems in Gal and Kligman before I went to Ann Arbor to run a dozen errands, including processing a loan and ordering a sexy new desktop computer, then had my four-hour afternoon class on film in Central Europe, and took care of a few emails before I left campus.)

By the time I got home at 8:15 I was starving. . . so dinner tasted SO good. Then I watched the creepy Robin Williams episode of Law and Order, then called my Mom and two of my dear friends at home, hearing Ms. Marta's little girl in the background talking to the kitty.... And this morning I slept until almost noon, waking to lovely sun shining over the lake. Vacation time is SO GOOD.

My iPod even seems to know that it's time for bossa nova in the shuffle.

. . . Magic.

And now it's just about time to go back home and lounge with some cafe con leche with freshly ground nutmeg, and do a little cleaning.

2008-04-30T12:34:00.002-04:00

A friend has pointed me to an emerging cultural tradition in Hungary: Dinner in the Sky.

2008-04-30T12:32:00.001-04:00

OMG! I wish I could go back to Cali for the Herdeljezi festival this year. Petra and Gogol Bordello and Carol and Sani . . . argh.

A kingdom for a UC job at the end of my Ph.D. program.

2008-04-28T09:48:00.000-04:00

oh. my. head.

why? why?

Finishing up the term

2008-04-23T19:22:00.003-04:00

As my dear friend alluded to in her last comment, I am without internet at home. My computer crashed a couple of weeks ago, and since I don't have the money to get it repaired, I am just making use of the public library machines once a day to get my internet needs met.

I wouldn't be able to manage completely without internet, but I've actually gotten quite comfortable with my routine; I like the environment here, it's cool and relatively quiet, except for a lot of really cute kids who float in and out with their parents and their storybooks. I mostly get a great deal of uninterrupted time on the relatively new HP desktop computer, though sometimes I get knocked off by someone who comes along if the other machines are also being used. I find that the most important stuff can usually be finished in half an hour, and then I move along to the rest.

Meanwhile, the word processing, I do at home, on my father's ancient laptop. The battery can't run without the AC adapter, and it has no wireless card or ethernet port, and it runs on Windows 95, but it's good enough to write on, and I can save my work to an old 3.5 inch floppy disk I had hiding around in a nook or cranny.

This way, I've completed a draft of my research internship paper that I wrote for my built environment and material culture in postsocialism course, and I've been working on my archaeology exams.

I did my grading the old-fashioned way, with pencil and paper, on a clipboard, overlooking the lake. It's been incredibly sunny and beautiful in Michigan recently after an unbearable and seemingly unending winter. So it's really something, sitting there, sunning my legs, reading undergraduate papers.

Having finished both the grading and the first version of the research internship paper, which I need to LET GO OF for the moment, even though it needs a ton of work, because it's 46 pages (!!), I have to move on to my archaeology papers. I hope to finally be caught up with my coursework and all, and finished with my research internship, by the end of the spring term in June, and on to my social work prelim. I'm actually really looking forward to the summer. I feel I've already set the pace of it with my quiet mornings spent reading and writing overlooking the lake with a mug of cafe con leche, and afternoons at the library. I wonder -- could I cancel my cell phone and my internet for a few months, and hide away in glorious, hermetic, spartan calm?

Mabfataah

2008-04-12T13:38:00.002-04:00

I miss my old kitty. Neener sent these photos. Aww . . .

Chain of Lakes tour

2008-04-03T17:16:00.005-04:00

A light-hearted video tour of my beloved chain of lakes . . . Never mind the sort of annoying framing; enjoy the scenery. :)

Sunrise on the lake

2008-04-02T23:52:00.006-04:00

And suddenly, just like that, water is water again.

weekend fun

2008-03-30T12:56:00.005-04:00

Waking hungover but happy at noon on Sunday after much fun and revelry this weekend (tally since Friday: four house parties, two visits to Cafe Habana, two sightings of K&J, two sightings of Alice, two coffee dates at Amer's with colleagues, one slightly-drunken stroll through the Pinckney Kroger wearing fishnets and a cleavage-bearing black chiffon dress with freakishly long sleeves, one 3am dining adventure at the Fleetwood, one quiet walk in a Metropark, one baking event.)

A lovely lazy Saturday spent soaking up as much vitamin D as possible (oh, blessed sun!) , doing a little GSI work, and acquiring green vegetables (broccoli and spinach, yum!) and gas and strolling through the aisles of clothes, wine and liquor, and fancy, sexy computers at COSTCO. . .

. . . led into an evening of baking adventures and a couple nice house parties. A quiet, intimate group including some wonderful friends, with an outstanding spread of food, and woeful soulful music at Jenay's place . . . a stop-off at Cafe Habana to pick up Alice and some of her law school friends, and then over to Jonathan and Dan's place for one of their characteristically wild parties, peopled with drunken, maudlin boys, snarky and hilarious architects and artists, and lots of GEO folks, with astonishingly good fresh salsa verde thanks to their Mexican roommate. Alice took me out to the Fleetwood afterwards, then we parted ways at about 4 am.

I'm tired and my head hurts, but I feel cleansed from the experience of being with good friends. It had been a long week, with the GEO picketing and all. I never knew what hard work it would be to be out there.

Time now to wander around the house for the afternoon in my super-soft pink bathrobe and slippers and drink lots and lots of coffee. And maybe eat even more bacon. Mmm.