I read some of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"

Catalyzed by a scheduled getaway with mom and sister to Hannibal, MO, Mark Twain's (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) boyhood town, this week, I'm reading the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the writing is blowing me away. I want to buy 9 copies for the young people in my life. The writing so entertains my mind and triggers images of the author contemplating each paragraph for a whole morning at his desk and how he could most creatively and humorously, with metaphors and adult-life reference points, present the mood and energy of seemingly simple boyhood pleasures and antics. Here he talks about Tom's new whistling skill:

[His] new interest was a valued novelty in whistling, which he had just acquired from a Negro, and he was suffering to practise it undisturbed. It consisted in a peculiar bird-like turn, a sort of liquid warble, produced by touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth at short intervals in the midst of the music. The reader probably remembers how to do it if he has ever been a boy. Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet. No doubt as far as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, th advantage was with the boy, not the astronomer.

Spam, a little history

Spam. It’s Hormel’s SPicey hAM product popularized after being distributed to every American soldier in WWII but became the moniker of unsolicited emails after a Monty Python skit in 1970 in which diners, trying to order something from the menu that has no Spam, is overpowered by a group of Vikings in the background chanting Spam! Spam! Spam! As the short order cook tells them to shut up. See this video on You Tube.

In 1994, a couple lawyers started the spam craze when they made $100,000 on 1000 clients by sending a mass email to millions offering services to help get immigrants into the country. Their internet service providers (back then there were a lot of individual ISPs, I remember) disowned them - cancelled their accounts. The community was so incensed by the inappropriate use of the web, a techno-faux pas. They proceeded to write a book about it.

What’s a botnet? In 2003, the Sobig virus was sent out, designed to embed code into machines that enabled it to send millions of emails (turning it into a pseudo network). The infected PCs called zombies or slaves linked together in a sort of network (botnet) controlled by folk somewhere in the world.

So, easy-to-guess passwords on your wireless network can make you vulnerable to getting spam-making viruses or virus-sending spam. Cruising the net and clicking on infected websites can trigger a “drive-by download” of a virus to your computer, then find address books and send itself to all your contacts!

2003 was the year they passed the CAN-SPAM act –Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing. The bill permits e-mail marketers to send unsolicited commercial e-mail as long as it adheres to 3 basic types of compliance: unsubscribe, content and sending behavior. In May 2008, two spammers were convicted and sentenced to pay $234M to MySpace in damages under the CAN-SPAM act.

Did you know that in 2007 (I read about this in the August 2007 New Yorker magazine article by Michael Specter) Microsoft Hotmail had 285M accounts which were all filtered for Spam (in this case I should call it spam, no capital S) plus 130,000 special email accounts designed to trap and examine suspicious email? some designed to function as “honeypots” that receive emails and determine the source’s internet address after the sender thinks they have successfully infected it…

Billions of dollars a year are spent to filter/examine spam. USA today (Dec 2009) says spam accounts for 88% of all e-mails. Image spam was the latest thing… computers have an easier time filtering for text than for images, because computers can’t see, and images have a lot more data to look through…

Ok this blog entry is long enough.

Cattle Rustling in Karamoja

Karamoja is the dryest, poorest part of Uganda - with 80% illiteracy rate - in NE Uganda on the border with Kenya. Karimojong are the people - nomadic pastoralists competing across the Kenyan border with the Turkana nomadic pastoralists. Both rustle cattle across the border, a practice sometimes ritualized as a way to manhood, but fraught with violence as many gun-carrying men protect their herds which represent their wealth and symbolize their power in society. Kotido and Moroto make up the political area of Karamoja. Pastoralists from Kotido raid Kitgum to the east. Raiders from Sudan go into Kitgum. Raiders from Kenya (the Turkana) go into Kotido and Kitgum, and those guys go over to Kenya. These cows travel a lot. They bring diseases with them, foot and mouth disease is one.

Karimojong have had the belief that cattle naturally belongs to them so they can take more. In the 1980s they acquired guns from unhappy national army soldiers, and so began the gun culture. All this raiding brings a big demand for guns, so the Turkana, Karimojong and Sudanese are expert arms dealers specializing in inexpensive guns. They are expert marksmen too.

They don't want to wear western clothing but Idi Amin tried to make them. In 1972 Amin had 200 Karimojong shot for choosing not to wear western clothing. Now they wear sarong things, and army jackets I read somewhere.

The "Magoro accord" was sealed back in 1998 between Karimojong and the neighboring Teso tribe. If you kill someone in a raid and people find out, the government will take 60 of your cattle and give it to the victim's clan.

In June 2009, the Ugandan army sent out some troops as the cattle anti-theft force to protect the border between Kitgum and Kotido, and protect Kitgum from Sudanese too.

NY times story from 1991

Amazing timeline of Gun History in Karamoja

I read "French Women Don't Get Fat" by Mireille Guiliano

It was cheap at a thrift store in Boca Grande, and I needed some reading, figuring some nonfiction about eating habits was better than a Mary Higgins Clark mystery. I think her book is better than her title, though it was a very quick read saying many common sense things we all already know, and listing many recipes that I am excited to try (pumpkin pie with hazelnuts, cauliflower gratin, asparagus flan!, cooked pears with cinnamon, carrot soup).

Her book offers a cross-cultural comparison of eating between America and France and worries that if french culture goes by the wayside, her pais-mates will be getting obese like Americans. She quotes Brillat Savarin, the great 18th-century French gastronome: “The destiny of a nation depends on how it feeds itself.” She worries: "Where are we going? And why is everyone following?"

She advocates regulated gastronomic pleasure instead of diets as the most powerful tool of weight control and is shocked by how overweight we in the USA are. She presents a plan to change eating habits and lose weight. Start off writing down everything you eat, and send it to her; she'll find your main "offenders" in habit or food choice and advise you a solution. Just kidding she won't send you anything, you have to find your own "offenders." She stresess that you move a lot; french women walk everywhere and do little secret exercises with their arms and abs at home. Climb lots of stairs.

Second step to your new french-style life is to eat leek soup for 3 days. Thereafter, include lots of leeks in your life.

She speaks about having a variety of seasonal foods on your plate, sitting to eat giving full attention to the meal, chewing slowly deliberately meditatively, buying food at the local market and only enough for a few days. We must not cut out the fats; eat butter and whole milk and goat cheese. Just moderate. And if you eat a large meal today, compensate tomorrow with no sweets, and minimal bread etc.

The funniest thing is her encouragement to fool yourself and others. Example: When you don't really want a dessert when everyone else is getting their own, go ahead and order it, eat 2 bites slowly and engage your neighbor in conversation so they won't notice that you've put your fork in the 5 o'clock position that tells the server to take it away and of course s/he will without anyone noticing that you were so moderate!!

What a notion that we are all going to start spending 1 hour shopping every 2 days and an hour preparing meals with 4-5 sides on a set table with linens and candles. But her idea of variety and small portions of each makes a lot of sense for your digestive enzymes and nutrient requirements.

I do like leek soup... Her anecdotes describing the wild blueberries and mirabelle plums are delightful, and you can learn a lot about different little foods (how to clean mushrooms) and french food culture. The 2 days a year at Christmas where everyone eats a few slices of cake are a charming picture.

She encourages doing chores, cleaning things the old fashioned way, taking the stairs; essentially stop being lazy! Work to enjoy food and work to reap psychological reward and exercise benefits. Oh, and she is the CEO of Clicquot, Inc. and encourages us to drink champagne often; it's not just for New Year's and rare celebrations. Her recipes call for Champagne Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label Brut, and that you drink the rest with dinner.

She just falls a little short by not discussing our society and culture bent on consumerism, professional competition, fitting in lots of activities aimed at kids' pleasure because of parental guilt, socializing with wide unconnected sets of friends, and needing to do things fast, and get places fast so there is more time doing activities with our gadgets (watching, talking, playing, texting, buying). I guess she is challenging us individually to make gastronomic pleasure a bigger priority and an enjoyable family affair.

I read "Dharma Bums," by Jack Kerouac

It's hard to believe that this book was assigned to me as a freshman in a Jesuit university - an 18-yr old sheltered catholic girl, straight out of all-girls catholic nun-style high school, not knowing the first thing about beatnicks, poems, buddhism, hippie-freedom, california culture, pot-smoking or sex and not ready to investigate these either. I was only just discovering what male humans looked like and talked about and that's all I wanted to put my attention into. Now I've read some about tibetan-style buddhism so thought this book - which made a big poetic impact about this guy who wandered the country by thumb and traincar in the 1950s with his backpack, beans and notebook living a simple life - would resonate.

Ray Smith (autobiographical of the author) is our wanderer trying to co-lead the rucksack revolution with his mentor/idol Japhy Ryder (who in real life was modeled after poet Gary Snyder). We follow Ray during his joyful do-nothing year relying on his wits, fearlessness and friends to do a year traveling, visiting, partying and meditation. He is happy to sit and pray for the world; "something good will come of it."

Japhy gets on his case for not doing much besides sitting and poems while Japhy chops wood, works and reads Zen buddhist texts. He is an old bikkhu who loves haikus, satoris, the mountains and "hoos!"; he plans a trip to Japan. He tells Ray what it's all about. I loved that Japhy practiced charity all the time and I loved how it charmed Ray: "There was nothing glittery about it but almost sad and sometimes his gifts were old beat up things but they had the charm of usefulness and sadness of his giving."

The rucksack revolution that they both wanted was described by Japhy: "refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privelege of consuming all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TVs, cars, certain hair oils, and general junk you finally always see in the garbage a week later anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume. I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution with people going to the mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and older ones happier, all of 'em Zen lunatics who go around writing poems..." They had a fantasy of West meets East, with guys hitchhiking and tramping around the mountains praying and writing poems.

Kerouac talks about food alot, albeit simple food: beans, soup, food supplies, food storage, dinner, lunch, Hershey bars...

Ray had a breakthrough in his mother's back woods in North Carolina. He became empty and awake and saw no difference between himself or anything else; became a buddha. He felt the same as the trees, he felt blank, he became "Bikkhu Blank Rat." He experienced transendental visits without drugs - Samapatti. His life was a "glowing empty page and I could do whatever I wanted."

And that he did. He went back to Japhy's place in California (I saw the very tracks on the beautifuul coast south of Sta Barbara a few months ago), and they partied, got drunk, naked, and had sex in what they called the yabyum ceremony. Ray's justification for what seemed like Samsara stuff to me was that "the dharma can't be lost; nothing can be lost on a well-worn path." Interesting justification.

In a final scene, Japhy gets on his boat to Japan, makes love to his favorite girl and literally throws her from the boat to the pier as the boat pulls away so he can get on with his business of the Dharma. Is he finally seeing the partying as samsara chatter distraction?

Ray went to the Cascades to be a fire lookout, following Japhy's advice as usual. He got to be completely solitary on a mountain. And very happy claiming he learned all up on that Desolation peak, falling in love with God, and fearing his return to people and cities.

Jack Kornfield's "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry" would be a good book for Japhy and Kerouac to read. It discusses living a compassionate, loving-kindness, buddhist meditation, present mindful life with busy job, family, account numbers, jealous defensive people, rules and forms. Can someone maintain a Kerouac-style bikkhu-ness in 2009 in a literal way? Maybe outside the USA or in some parts of Montana, South Dakota where thin populations may engender some sympathy for a lone person on a rural highway. One can certainly adopt some of the rucksack philosophy to eat and live simply, having just the food needed for the next few days; figuring out stuff for ourselves or with our neighbors; having just the furnishings needed for sitting/staying, cooking, sleeping; and for sharing the used reusables given with attention to the potential to reduce further consumption.

Raw Goat Milk!

I bought a gallon of goat's milk yesterday from a farm with > 40 dairy goats including a recent Grand Champion Nubian (see photo of the champion). They are large with trademark floppy ears and known as the "jerseys of the goat world" for producing milk with high butterfat content.

So why goat milk? I figured it would be fun to go to a goat farm to pet and feed them but only a giant pyrenees let me pet him.

But actually, goat milk is mostly known for being more easily digestible than cow milk which can be partially digested leaving behind slimy goo of undigested stuff that ferments in your colon!

Why is it more completely digestible than cow's milk?

#1. The average size of goat milk fat globules is about 2 micrometers as compared to 3-1/2 micrometers for cow milk fat. These smaller- sized fat globules provide a better dispersion and a more homogenous mixture of fat in the milk (?)

#2. Goat milk does not have agglutinin as does cow milk which makes fat glob together and harder to digest. (?)

#3. It also has more linoleic and arachnodonic (spider??) acids as well as more short-chain fatty acids which our intestines can easily digest (?)

#4. Goat milk curd is small and light (good for drinking) compared to cow milk curd which is big and dense (good for making cheese). There are lower levels of alpha-s1-casein in goat milk. Softer casein curd with smaller flakes results in more rapid digestion of milk proteins. (?)

Diabetes: "Recent research published in February, 2003 has implicated the protein A1 beta-casein as a trigger for Type 1 diabetes and other health issues (Elliott et al, 1999). Commercial efforts are now being made to select and farm cows which only contain A2 beta-casein, which is considered the safe variant of beta-casein. Goat milk only contains the A2 variant of beta-casein, and is therefore a natural choice for those seeking to avoid A1 beta-casein" See link

Why is it more nutritious?

#1. Some Granadian scientists made the news in 2007 showed there was higher bioavailability of iron, calcium, phosphorus and magnesium in rats. (?)

This is one of the main sires!

#2. One article online claimed that goat milk has 13% more calcium, 25% more vitamin B-6, 47% more vitamin A, 134% more potassium and 3 times more niacin. 27% more of the antioxidant Selenium, but way less vitamin B-12 and way less folic acid. (?)

Hmm, I had a hard time finding comparative nutrition info between raw cow and raw goat milk but claims of the higher minerals and vitamins listed above were like common knowledge.

I compared raw goat milk to fortified homogenized pasteurized cow milk using USDA nutritional database online. There is no entry in the USDA database for raw cow milk. It listed goat milk as having 13 mg of Ca compared to cow milk having 113 mg per 100g of milk. They missed a digit. In this goat milk study in Greece, they reported 132 mg. Conversely, other minerals were lower in the Greek goats than the USDA goats but there is a breed variability along with diet factors and seasonality.

Homogenization hurts milk!

Homogenization of milk became widespread in America in the 1930s and nearly universal in the 1940s--the same decades during which the incidence of atherosclerotic heart disease began to climb. Luckily, goat milk does not separate like cow milk because the fat globules small.

There is a big debate about these claims made famous by two Connecticut cardiologists Oster and Ross in 1973 and 74:

#1. When fat globules cut into pieces with the machines, the enzyme xanthine oxidase is freed in a raw state and absorbed by your intestinal blood where it can scar arterial and hear tissue! wierd. And this can cause a release of cholesterol to pave over the scarred areas, yuck. (?)

#2. When milk is homogenized, it passes through a fine filter at high pressure so the fat globules are made a tenth as small and proteins are broken up. They become little express delivery packages that bypass the regular digestive process (sort of like the movie, fantastic voyage) so proteins that would normally be digested in the stomach or gut are not broken down, and are absorbed into the bloodstream. (?) Not good, this is like a foreign substance (I read a book about inflammation and this is a hot topic, partially digested things in your blood cause histamines and mucus and inflammation that causes disease). Oster & Ross demonstrated that milk antibodies are significantly elevated in the blood of male patients with heart disease! In 1983, there was this rebuttal and more after...

Pasteurization hurts milk!

It's heated to about 161 degrees for about 15 seconds, which destroys the bacteria that cause foodborne illness. All enzymes and good bacteria dead! Ultra pasteurization (my organic milk I used to buy!) heats things up to 260 degrees. (?)

#1. Kills (denatures) phosphatase, critical for absorbing calcium.

#2. Kills lactase which works on lactose (everyone complains about that).

#3. Kills lactoferrin, helps us absorb iron.

#4. Kills lipase, which helps us break down fat

#5. Kills good bacteria (probiotics) so we are drinking lots of dead bacteria!

#6. Destroys lactic acids that allow good bacteria (if it were alive) to implant in our intestines (?)

#7. Some say more than half of vitamins A, D and E are lost (?)

#8. Disables a good cortisone-like factor in butterfat (?)

Whereas raw milk naturally tastes sour from the lactic acid so is edible and nutritious, pasteurized milk rots because of all the dead bacteria in it.

Then there's the whole issue of grain-fed vs. grass-fed cows! Volume II of the story...

Reusing PET(E) Water Bottles

My friend Tim Anderson reuses plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET(E)) to carry his drinking water stored in his truck or boat for longish periods. I told him it wasn't great to drink old water from those bottles, but I couldn't give a good reason why besides the funny taste. I figured since I work at a water science center this is something I should learn about.

After searching on Google Scholar, antimony (Sb) seems to be the main threat of leaching chemicals from the plastic, especially over periods of time and exposure to heat. Sb2O3 is used as the catalyst in the manufacture of polyethylene terephthalate and is probably carcinogenic but there is not good proof according to the WHO ("Although there is some evidence for the carcinogenicity of certain antimony compounds by inhalation, there are no data to indicate carcinogenicity by the oral route.")

Westerhoff et al. (2008) found antimony concentrations in nine brands of commercial bottled water ranged from 0.095 to 0.521 ppb, well below the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) maximum contaminant level (MCL) for Sb of 6 ppb. The average concentration was 0.195+/-0.116 ppb at the beginning of the study and 0.226+/-0.160 ppb 3 months later, with no statistical differences; samples were stored at 22 degrees C. For exposure temperatures of 60, 65, 70, 75, 80, and 85 degrees C, the exposure durations necessary to exceed the 6 ppb MCL are 176, 38, 12, 4.7, 2.3, and 1.3 days, respectively.

Holy cow, does it get to be 140°F in our cars (that's 60°C)? If so, don't leave any bottles of water in there for 176 days. There are 3 or so of these bottles full of refill water in Tim's boat that I think he's planning to drink on his trip back to the mainland that have been stored since October 1. Temps on the island have probably been around 80°, so maybe it gets up to 100 in the hull of the boat... it's sort of in the shade and it's white, reflecting lots of heat.

I made a quick Sb release-curve; if you follow the curve up to the left, I think Tim would have to wait til next summer to have more antimony than the EPA likes in his water.

But there is great variability in Sb release of these bottles depending on who made the bottle! A group of geochemists at the University of Heidelberg headed by William Shotyk (2006) reported antimony in 15 brands of bottled water from Canada and 48 from Europe. They found that waters from a commercial bottling plant in Germany had 0.008 ppb Sb before being bottled. That same brand, when purchased in the store in the PET bottles, had 0.359 ppb (2 orders of mangitude!). After an additional 3 months of storage, the same brand had 0.626 ppb. (I converted reported unit of ng/L assuming it's = 1 ppt.) In 14 brands of bottled water from Canada, Sb concentrations increased on average 19% during 6 months storage at room temperature, but 48 brands of water from 11 European countries increased on average 90% under identical conditions.

We don't know who made Tim's bottles that are sitting in the hull of cuba canoe so we can't guess how much antimony is in them.

Tangent: I'm really curious to find out if these 4 guys made their 11,000 mile voyage on a sailboat made of PET bottles. Their boat is called Plastiki! (Kon Tiki is a wonderful book, I love it.) Oops, just saw their webpage; looks like they are still glueing stuff onto the boat!

Naturalization

Went to the naturalization ceremony today in US District Court. My friend Manohardeep had to renounce India, and I cried a lot. India is so beautiful, he is such an Indian person, he loves India and his parents, and he is so part of Punjabi culture, it sounded so terribly awful:

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen…”

There were plenty of people from other nice countries too.

The judge was in love with Kate Smith, a singer from the 40s and 50s, so showed two still shots on the overhead of her with the flag as God Bless America played (and some folks sang along), and again she popped up on the screen with flag singing America the Beautiful. He also showed a movie about Ellis Island so they could see how difficult immigration used to be.

Then a speaker from Egypt, who had naturalized in 1996, told funny stories of silly things he did when he first immmigrated (like paying full price for a car). Then he told the folks to "adopt the American values." He said it 2 or 3 times. That was his message (though he never described these values).

Then the judge told them that their kids would not have the accents they have today; their kids would be fully integrated Americans in the future.

The Daughters of the American Revolution, the Sons of the American Revolution, the Board of Elections, Altrusa and other groups had representatives that got to stand up to welcome them as citizens and tell about their group's civic activities that they could get involved in.

Then everyone recited the Pledge of Allegiance, recieved signed certificates and got to get pics with family members in front of the flag and US Seal.

Things opened and closed with a prayer/benediction, Amen.

Everyone went to another room to eat piles of homemade cookies made by older ladies from the aforementioned organizations. One lady tried to recruit me to be a member of Daughters of the Revolution (DAR) because I had told Sylvia that my great grandfather probably descened from a revolutionary family so she wanted me to get involved.

Cell phones were not allowed in the building; you were supposed to "leave them in your car," so I had to bury mine under the mulch behind a building for a few hours.

It was wierd and interesting, let me tell you.

Soils Art

I stumbled upon this art as I perused a digital elevation model layered over a soil drainage map around the Santa Fe River and Suwannee River confluence.

It made my heart jump.

Radio Button Biking

I live in Gainesville, known to be a very bike-able town by some standards. Compared to Cambridge, Boston and St. Louis I agree! But it is an exercise in decision making. Is there a town in the USA where you can always be a cyclist in your commute? From start to finish, I have not found a route to my office where I don’t have to decide to be a car or a pedestrian at times. Take a look at this photo; as I am going along, happy on my bike, approaching NE 16th Ave, I must decide to bail out to the sidewalk in my friend Crystal’s driveway (yellow line to the right of the red car merging into the would-be bike lane), or become part of the car-going crowd (2 choices). Here you can see the decision is being made at dusk when drivers get confused about what they are seeing, so if I choose the car radio button, I could be car-sandwich guts!

On my fair street (see photo) – and on many that I have carefully chosen through the historic tree-lined mossy Pleasant Street and 5th Ave neighborhoods to get to work – I must drive in the main car-driving space, but because of low car volume and speed, it feels like I get to be a bike. About 90 percent of my work route is made of streets like this but there are 3 intersections where I must decide to play in traffic, or ride on a sidewalk.

Last year our wise city chose to alter the smooth straight shot of SW 2nd Ave that had become a popular bicycle highway out of it’s biking lane siphoning 100s of bicycling commuters to UF every day. They added pretty landscaped roundabouts that Gainesvillians are still at a loss over how to maneuver. In this photo you can see there is no driveway-to-sidewalk bailout option, but one is forced to enter the circling tumbler of 19-year-old car drivers on cell phones discussing the evening’s greek swamp-swap party who wouldn’t know how to yield at these funny rotaries if they WERE paying attention. I don't bike SW 2nd Ave often anyway, just too many cars.

Here you can see my friend Stacie walking Casey across 16th Ave which allows a bicyclist to remain a bicyclist through the intersection. A rare street indeed.

I’ve been lucky and careful, assuming always that I am invisible (but I admit trying to beat cars to cross a street when in a hurry) and wearing my helmet (most of the time). I know too many friends that have been maimed or killed by mindless drivers and this attitude of “oh we’ll put in a bike lane when it fits here and there” isn’t helping any. Our city council is always planning how to reduce traffic by changing bus routes and exit ramps. If they could safen up and continualize our bike lanes, and provide secure dry bike parking (goto the Netherlands!), we might get more people out of their cars.

(And don’t get me started about the useless bike lanes on campus that are occupied by UPS, Fisher Scientific, hotel shuttle buses and maintenance vehicles every morning. I asked a bike cop why this was allowed, he said it wasn’t allowed, I said yes it is allowed, it happens every morning right in this block where you give tickets to cyclists not making full stops at the stop sign, and he said they aren’t supposed to… I just bike in the road on campus instead of weaving in and out of the bike lane around trucks.)

Check out this nice video on biking culture in Amsterdam. When the bikes get mashed up they get dumped into canals! See here how they recover dumped bikes with a barge! See this site for more serious bike safety/death/injury numbers.

First Date FaceBook

Cheat sheet, sneak-in.
Not discovering or
deliciously unpeeling the onion
as I’d be in coffee shops and baseball stands with him.

FB chops it open
I can see some blurry version
inside suddenly, no context.
I’m spying.

(no fun for this voyeur)

written April 2009

Strangers in Awe

This past year I experienced strangers hugging and kissing me; one held my upper arms in their clutch with eyes of amazement and awe transfixed on mine. It was a look of disbelief or of having discovered a big secret.

Last weekend we performed our “Carp Diem” shadow puppet show for the 4th time in public. This time it was really public, in one of the louder more crowded bars of Gainesville, Durty Nelly’s, with about 180 people that night. It’s an Irish Pub (as Irish as they get in SE USA) and we were part of a lineup for a CD release party which included 3 other bands, a belly dancer and a comedy act. Our refrigerator box – haphazardly painted black, with a semi-square opening papered over in white – couldn’t have looked very promising sitting on stage in the din of the semi-drunk crowd that had recently booed the comedy act off the stage. But oh, what an accordion can do to get folks’ attention. It announces that the show is beginning, then stops.

The fishmonger-lady shadow puppet appears, and things get quiet. Her clogs, stripey ragged outfit, poochy tummy and sagging breasts in bright colors of red, marine blue and rusty orange show her nebbish nature brightly on the screen (see below). I begin my slow, alto, a cappella “I’ve been a fishmonger all my life... because no man will take me as his wife…” The crowd is still hushed. The dancing-man shadow puppet pulling on his beard comes out with fish and buxom silhouettes of ladies and mermaids following him around. The goddess of the sea (we use the deus ex machina quite literally) Indonesian rod puppet supplies the magic flying sturgeon that strikes him in the head and wakes him up to his love of our fish-throwing heroine.

All ends in frenetic love with good amounts of spluge and ecstasy. Big applause and cheering climaxed with our puppets. I’m a bit nervous to show myself after being safely hidden in my box with Kathy Sohar, my puppet partner. Rob tells me to bow; the audience is standing, clapping and cheering, so I semi-curtsey, bow off the stage.

I am again surprised by the intense amazed reaction and love of our little show. Their was no electronica, lights, explosions or fast fast anything, just paper, lights and lyrics. I guess we made them feel something they didn’t know they were going to feel when they first saw that ramshackle refrigerator box.

Note: our show has still not been loaded to YouTube, but it will be coming soon.

Mediterranean (or Aegean) Shadow Puppets

I've always been interested in puppetry arts and I must have voiced this enough such that a friend who went to Thessoliniki to work on his PhD research on greek religious iconography 10 years ago returned with 2 articulated colorful shadow puppets made of plastic with very unique styles and personalities that made me think these were particular characters from a certain Greek tradition of story telling. Another clue was the packaging listing their names: XATZLABATHS (below) and ΑΓΝΑΪΑ (right). Both labels had greek words:

ΚΑΡΑΓΚΙΟΖΙΔЄЅ
ΤŏΜΟΛΛΑ

I've been trying to find the origins of these quiet storytellers and I believed they may be characters in the stories of Haridimos Karaghiozi, the well-known Greek shadow puppet tradition which was being kept alive and well by puppeteer story teller Evgenios Spatharis who sadly died after falling down stairs this past May on his way to a performance. He recorded 18 Karaghiozi stories on 78 records long ago. Luckily, another puppet artist Sotiris Haridimos keeps the tradition going in Athens with his Karagiozis Theater on Tripodon Street.

I found this photo of a record on UK's ebay and translation is provided showing same greek word that is on my puppet label with translation "To Miralogi Tou Karagiozi." So my puppets must be the characters of Karagiozi plays, yay, I solved the mystery!

Today I stumbled on the Cegniz Turkish shadow puppets; look how similar they look to the greek ones! It makes sense, Turkey and Greece are close neighbors.

Not sure about their language commonalities. On the webpage for the Cegniz shadow puppets they mention a play about environmental stewardship based on the shamanistic sources of Karagöz! Wow, these 2 traditions are more closely related than I thought, this is getting more interesting!

For the Greeks, Karagiozi is a representation of the struggles of the Greek peoples, especially in reference to Turkish occupation. Wow... . The main character has a hunchback and one arm 3 times longer than the other. He schemes to get things by acting roles of socially important people to gain small things, and the stories are full of historical and societal references that make Greek audiences laugh, purportedly.

In Turkey, Karagöz is the name of the traditional shadow puppetry tradition as well as the name of one of two characters portrayed in the traditional shadow puppet plays. He represents childlike, uneducated morality and common sense; a tactless little man (whereas the other main character Hacivat represents the ideals of the ruling classes during the Ottoman empire and gets irritated at Karagoz for ruining their fun).
In both traditions, this Karagiozi/Karagöz character is an underdog opposed to authority and sultanic powers. And so it seems that a long tradition in Turkey preceded the tradition in Greece for these shadow puppets. It makes sense because the Turkish tradition supposedly started at a contstruction site in 1396 by two guys sick of seeing corruption of ruling classes over the working man... and the Ottoman's began to rule Greece in the 15th Century. When did Karagiozi begin in Greece? This blogger's posting tells that it was in the 19th century (along with a lot of other neat shadow puppet history).

Darn! In May 2009 they had a shadow puppet festival in Istanbul with all the Cegniz puppets, and I missed it!

Djangofest on Whidbey Island

A few weeks ago I took the ferry with Marisa, Jack, Sian and Max to Whidbey island, WA,the location of annual Northwest Djangofests. I expected some ‘festival,’ replete with vendors selling cds, black berets, gypsy guitars, old Django Reinhardt vinyls aligned in a dusty fairground sprinkled with snocone and cupcake carts. Instead, it was a series of little concerts played each day of the week in the small community’s middle school theatre by mostly men playing to each other. I think 50% of the audience was itself gypsy jazz musician folk. My personal discovery of Django Reinhart dawned in 1998 walking through Amsterdam with my friend Jana when we encountered a most lovely group playing a music that stopped me in my tracks and infused total joy into my til-then-gypsy-jazz-empty brain. They were the Robin Nolan trio who all cheerfully signed a CD I bought.

We all enjoyed watching baby Max absorb his first concert on a Saturday afternoon (Mark Atkinson trio and Stephane Wrembel - The Django Experiment). I think our averaged ages made us the youngest group in the room, but we were Django-ites nonetheless. Back at the B&B, we made vodka drinks and watched Jack manipulate all species of electronic dvd vhs cable satellite display devices and move furniture to setup some evening babysitting couchside entertainment.

After watching the first part of the Matrix on VHS with Jack and Sian, Marisa and I got ourselves into some black-accented clothing to cruise the town for jazz-jam happenings that we had heard were not to be missed. We cruised through the rufous-hued town, so cute and lively in the daytime with family diners and coffee bakeries, but that night hanging with with crickets sounds and industrial street light. We went around a sleepy block (some cars are here!) to see a large white light with a central orange glory hole pouring out of a big garage. We had the feeling we might be finding the whole point of the evening. It was a retired firehouse, now a glassblowing art-display space. One side displayed sidesitting wavy nested bowl sets and other glass vessels. The other side was the activity side. A guy who might've just stepped out of the City of Lost Children wearing little metal round black-lensed glasses and a long stiff leather coat peered cheerily at us from his barber’s chair below a gypsy-naked-girl painting with his feet on the electric foot massager. Two gypsy jazz guitarists were chatting with the skinny lizard-energy glassblower. After Marisa got her own feet massaged, we wandered around the art objects as Callahan McVay began to circle in on us. We got to chatting about his glass-making and paintings around the place (is Madrid by the ocean?). Then he asked if we liked graphing. We happily reported that we liked plotting data and could help him out, we're scientists! Peering at his guestbook, he analyzed his last signatory’s message and explained an obvious lack of family and friends, and sexual frustration (because she crossed parts of letters?!). No! Her note was so nice, happy and friendly! Finally after he told us about his mother’s personal priorities as indicated by her capitalization habits in email, we were invited to the old hose tower (a stark, steep, diabolical vertical space). We gracefully made our way out past the 2 happy jamming gypsy guitarists leaving Callahan with his wine and foundry.

We drove the 3 blocks to the Cliffside tavern that had a circle of chairs waiting for the 8pm concertgoers to come jam together (see this 2008 Cliffside video of such a scene) and hang out with their co-gypsy devotees. We took posession of a primo spot at the bar and saw the guitarplayers at the glass blowing place. Mark called to Pat, “Hey, it’s the Glassblowing Girls!” We mingled... Here you can see Marisa enjoying her time in the jam circle. Marisa is one of the most comfortable-around-anyone-anyplace people you’ll ever want to meet who really enjoys people-nuances and can really laugh (at me, her or them). We checked out a second jam session outside with the black/grey-clad crowd of middle-aged guys with fingernails, rattling pockets and euro-hats. We spoke to a woman about her purse made from her favorite Prince vinyl (expensive, but the website let’s you pick the record). We strolled away from the lights, leather jackets and cigarettes to the cliff and the water. It seemed natural to ask, “Hey, do you want to make out?” but we decided to just get in the car and drive back to our yellow B&B with plums and apples in the backyard.

P.S. In the airport I ran into Pat Ciliberto, the guitarplayer at the glass firehouse. He is a gypsy guitarist in an L.A. jazz band called Noto D (as in ‘notorious Django’). Later I found out that Noto Swing is this cool song by Lulu Reinhardt.