by cg on November 15, 2009
Colorful produce has become something of a Sunday cliché here at gulker.com, in large part because we have to drive past, almost, actually, through Menlo Park’s very nice farmer’s market on our way to and from church – and, please, let’s not get into the faith and religion thing.
Since I’ve returned to my old practice of always carrying a camera, it’s hard not to snap the bounty – visual and otherwise – that we see displayed there while we shop (as you can see, the tangerines caught our eye this morning). At least, Linda comments, I’ve moved on from photographing the peppers every time…
by cg on November 14, 2009
So we just bid our guests good night after hosting a dinner party for six. I did everything from scratch – cream of broccolini soup (in demitasse), heirloom tomato slice with flake salt, burrata, basil and raw onion, and slow-cooked lamb stew (modeled on Balthazar’s famed bar dish) – well, OK the canapé dip was store bought.
I also walked two miles this morning, picked up pictures from the framer and measured and installed hardware for a newly-framed instance of Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico. With Linda, I did most of the dishes, pots and pans, just leaving the stemware for the morning. We’re a bit tired, but exercise really helps with stamina, in my opinion, so we are not just blowing off the blog this evening. Rather, we’re describing how it is we’re not blowing off the blog this evening…
by cg on November 13, 2009
So, the Big Road Trip to Yosemite on the occasion of the moon and Half Dome aligning themselves in just the position captured in Ansel Adams’ iconic photo isn’t going to happen.
Scott is recovering from rotator cuff surgery, meaning his right arm is strapped into a serious-looking sling, and thus, hemiplegic moi would be the pilot for this journey. Not that I haven’t driven to Yosemite many times, I have, and not that it started snowing in Yosemite a couple days ago – hey, I hail from Ohio and New York. I even have chains (and a tow rope) for my 4-wheel-drive Ford Escape Hybrid – it’s fully winter-mountain-road legal.
Neither Scott nor I wanted to be the first to broach the topic on our last, recently resumed, 1.5 mile walk, but this would have been hard on both of us, especially considering that, lately, the weather’s been iffy in Yosemite, and it doesn’t seem to be trending the right way. The Ahwahnee Meadow, whence Adams made his photo, is already covered in snow, which would have been more perilous for both of us than the drive up.
I did enjoy listening to Michael Adams, Ansel’s son, describe how his dad stumbled upon the picture. The elder Adams was on his way to the Ahwahnee Hotel when he spotted the minor astronomical miracle of balanced light from sun and moon in front of him (not to mention a clear November day in the Sierras). He dived into his trunk and came up with the Ansel Adams version of a point-and-shoot camera (a Hasselblad) and waded out into the meadow’s snow to make the picture.
Trees have now grown sufficiently high to block the spot from which the original was snapped, but astronomers figure that the sight line should extend for some hundreds of yards back across the meadow. I never realized that the image came from a ‘mere’ Hasselblad, and I have a print from the original neg hanging in my guest bedroom. Adams was awesome in the lab…
by cg on November 12, 2009
TED prize winner Karen Armstrong launched her TED wish at the National Press Club in DC today. Simultaneously, hundreds of groups worldwide, both secular and faithful, celebrated the Charter for Compassion, Armstrong’s call for the world’s adults to re-insert the Golden Rule into our daily existence.
I covered one such event today for InMenlo.com, the hyperlocal blog that spouse Linda and good friend Scott Loftesness cooked up some months ago. Interestingly the Charter includes language that I, who has spent a lifetime struggling with faith, found immediately sympathetic:
We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.
Oh yeah. We’re definitely not wild about mindless fundamentalists of any stripe, or mindless secular ideologues, either. Secular extremists are just as vile as religious extremists, in my very humble opinion. Faith, however you want to describe it, keeps this world from going completely to the hell that religion, in its many guises, works to produce. Ms. Armstrong is onto something, and TED has risen in my estimation for supporting her work…
by cg on November 11, 2009
Linda and I have talked for a while about getting a child’s car seat for our Ford Escape Hybrid. Linda, who has made a point of claiming she’s not the cuddly kind of grandmother, nevertheless is visibly delighted by the presence of one Grace Getze, just turned two, in our midst.
Indeed, the last time Grace spent the night with us, her grandmother’s biggest regret was that we couldn’t take her to church for a ‘viewing’ – we had no car seat. Recently, friends from that same church found themselves no longer needing their car seat, their last child having graduated to the proper age and/or weight, and Linda pounced, bringing home the seat this past Monday.
The former owner was mortified at the condition of the seat cover after years of use by a succession of tiny hands and bodies, but Linda insisted that she, with three still-young children, not lift a finger. Linda would take care of it.
Turns out it’s a bit complicated to disassemble a car seat’s many belts and other features to get the seat cover off, so granddad, realizing this would fall to him one way or another, decided to just get it done this afternoon. Getting the seat’s components apart was relatively straightforward, and I figured an industrial vacuum, spray disinfectant, a strong (but eco-friendly) detergent and lots of hot water would address the tiny-hands issue.
Sure enough, a couple hours of vacuuming and swabbing and three wash cycles later, we have sparkling, scrubbed seat components that we feel will do our princess proud. Now, all I gotta do is re-assemble it and install it in the car – with a final safety check by Menlo PD, of course…
by cg on November 10, 2009
Today is one of our ‘triple witching’ days at UCSF. First up is an 8 A.M. (yes) MRI, followed by a 10 A.M. neuro-oncology consult and then chemo at 3:30. Given the time gap, we’re thinking a leisurely lunch at the new California Academy of Sciences’ Moss Room might be a good way to kill time. Given the number of people who need these UCSF services, it’s remarkable we can get all three scheduled on a single day…
by cg on November 9, 2009
Scott and I are seriously considering cruising on up to Yosemite for the ‘encore‘ of conditions for Ansel Adam’s iconic Moon and Half Dome photo.
During a previous encore – a recreation of conditions for Adams’ ‘Autumn Moon’ in 2005, some 300 photographers showed up. The last Moon and Half Dome concurrence, in December 1994, drew about 40 photographers, who endured snow, cold, overcast skies and a partially obscured moon. We’re working on the details and logistics… tire chains, hotel, adjusting the equipment portfolio…
by cg on November 8, 2009
And, because of that, having already spent countless hours installing Windows 7 (we haven’t even announced the recent, succesful 64-bit install), we chose to use our first Sunday afternoon off in over a month to fix a bunch of problems with our server and WordPress installation.
And yes! Frustration continues. Seven hours later, nothing is fixed, indeed at least temporarily, things became worse! We have been resetting http server uids and guids, setting FTP paths for our WordPress installation, changing the security keys to very long gibberish strings, going in, mano a mano, on the command line to change file ownerships and otherwise been a heads-down geek today.
All to no avail. Nada. Rien. Nothin’. Sheesh. I used to be good at this stuff.
The good news is that, all the while, we were tending to a lamb stew made with produce from the farmers’ market this morning, and it came out well, if I do say so myself. So, I’m taking the rest of the evening off… think I’ll watch Wall-E…
by cg on November 7, 2009
Yesterday evening we scrambled a bit desperately for Scott’s promised ‘InstaPost Package,’ to no avail, forcing us to whip up a post which included twice-warmed-over blog content.
Today, however, Scott provides this gem from The Ansel Adams Gallery Blog:
“On November 28th a celestial “encore” of Moon and Half Dome will appear in the sky east of the Ahwahnee Meadow in Yosemite National Park. The moon will be a fraction of a degree north of where it was on December 28th, 1960, when Ansel made this photograph.
Texas State University astronomer Donald W. Olson and his team have studied Ansel’s famous moon photographs and worked out the exact dates the negatives were made. To do this they had to find the precise location of his camera to calculate the position of the moon and sun. In honor of this event, our weekly photography class In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams will present a special program focused on the making and printing of Ansel’s famous image of Moon and Half Dome on Saturday November 28th, starting at 12:30 p.m. The fee is $95.00 and includes our logo camera strap. Please see our website for more information, or call us at 209-372-4413.” Thank you Scott… we had another long day today…
by cg on November 6, 2009
We warned readers, at least obliquely, that this was what gulker.com had come to. Friend Scott promised an ‘InstaPost Packet,’ but I’ve been looking on the porch and searching the inbox in vain, and, given that it’s now past 9:00 PM I feel compelled to act.
Anyway, trolling the hard drive for inspiration – it’s amazing what you forget you tucked into those Great Terabyte Spaces – we came up with the following (warts and all), which I’d written as homework for a discussion group at church this past February.
In any case, we, meaning me, are simultaneously reading Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth and Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God (great title, no?) on the Kindle and been thinking about faith a bit, lately. Anyway from the HD:
My [favorite] Heretic: Baruch Spinoza
“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”
-Albert Einstein
From my blog (October 21, 2006):
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and, really for a couple years now. My therapist recently commissioned me to write about my faith, an essay tentatively tited ‘The Rules of the Universe’…. The essay… starts with a quote from Albert Einstein: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”
Spinoza is Baruch Spinoza, a rationalist philosopher and ethicist of the 17th Century, who was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam for his view that God was not personal but, rather, the mechanism of nature. He also believed that the Bible was metaphorical and allegorical.
In quantum physics, there exists circumstance in which what the observer sees depends on where, when and how the observer chooses to look. The same phenomena , at the same instant, can have very different aspects. I find myself wondering if this isn’t a very deep spiritual insight.
From the blog, July 2008:
Spinoza advanced the idea of pantheism, the notion of ‘God or nature’ being equal descriptors of the universe and all that it contains. He rejected the personal, human-like Abrahamic God of the Old Testament (and was ejected from the Jewish community of 17th-century Amsterdam for his views). Einstein’s infrequent references to God seem to me to result from awe arising from his ability to see deeply into the elegance and wonders of cosmic machinery.
I share that awe: that creative intelligence can rise from so much stardust, that simple laws and a handful of particles can spawn the fantastic complexity of the cosmos leaves me quaking, and wondering ‘Is this God, or is this nature?’
Spinoza, a man of faith, wrote some 300 years before quantum physics was first posited by Niels Bor et al., yet he saw a duality in God and the universe, an argument that is still central to Western thought in the 21st century. Not bad for ‘post-in-a-box,’ eh?