Another Sad Passing

I just saw the news that Norton Buffalo has passed away from cancer:

Mr. Buffalo, who appeared on more than 180 albums and spent 33 years as a member of the Steve Miller Band, was diagnosed with cancer in September.

Buffalo was an extremely gifted and versatile musician, and I enjoyed hearing him live many times as well as listening to many of the recordings he either led or backed up on. I'm glad there is such a store of recordings, but I wish there could be more.

I haven't blogged about cancer much lately (yes, I know, or about anything else very much), but this one is very sad. 58 is much too young to be dying, especially from cancer.

So remember to take care of yourselves, get checked up, and help out where you can.

Twits and Twitter

Oh, dear. Some people just don't know when to, like, shut up:

A highlight of her invective was, perhaps: "Because people, like, honestly, like, I mean people wanna know why, like, you're, like, unhealthy, and, like, you need, like, get out and do stuff and, like, be in the world instead of being like this (pretends to be hunched over a keyboard) all the time. And, like, all I did was, like, lay in bed all the time."

I know there will be some who might fear that Miley has removed herself from Twitter because the 140 character limit did not allow her full expression of her likes and thoughts.

In case you weren't, like, totally sure, that was, like, Miley Cyrus opining on the future of Twitter, or rather her preferred lack of same.

It is unclear to my why I would care what she thinks about Twitter, but then, I'm pretty much a Twitter naysayer. I have a Twitter account. I think I've "tweeted" about 6 or 8 times in a couple of years. I rarely look at what others tweet. Perhaps I'm not spending enough time hunched over a keyboard.

I realize that celebrities are entitled to their opinions, just like everybody else. And I'm entitled to, like, ignore them, just like everybody else.

I know this wasn't important, but I thought the article quoted above had some high-quality snark, which I always enjoy. I couldn't bring myself to watch the video, but the text amused me.

Small World

Now and then you cross paths with someone from a long time ago.

That happened to me a lot this past weekend, but you expect it at a high school reunion. I didn't expect to see NPR interviewing one of my favorite teachers from college:

SARAH GARDNER: Well, laugh all you want, Sam, but old, dead tree stumps are actually clues to climate past. Listen to this:

SCOTT STINE: These stumps tell us that California is capable of experiencing droughts more profound and more persistent than anything that we've seen during the last 150 years.

GARDNER: Now, that's paleoclimatologist Scott Stine. He looks at past climate to help figure out future climate. And scientists are really interested in this kind of work because, if they can understand climate shifts in the past, the hope is that that will help them more accurately project what may be in store for us this time around.

Scott was a lecturer in Environmental Science when I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley. His class on Bay Area Environments was memorable for many reasons, not least of which was Scott himself. He was like a walking encyclopedia of natural history for the area, and it's nice to see that his ongoing research on Mono Lake and other places is still paying off for him.

Check out the slide show linked from the NPR page. Hearing Scott's narration was fun, and it brought back lots of memories from taking his classes. Coincidentally, I had been talking about Scott this weekend with one of my high school friends who also took his class in college. Small world, indeed!

Cruciferous Vegetables

I just need to get this off my chest: What's with broccoflower? And more to the point, why is it that Japanese restaurants insist on hiding it in their vegetable tempura? I bite into something that looks like a nice, tasty piece of tempura broccoli, and it turns out to be a disgusting, green cauliflower.

Is broccoflower just some sort of attempt to woo people who won't eat disgusting cauliflower by making it look like some kind of tasty green vegetable?

Yuck. I know cauliflower is supposed to be good for you, so I assume broccoflower is, too. But really: yuck.

My broken State, Part V

We used to educate our children. Now, not so much:

And all of this was going to be free for Californians. It was an investment in the future, and it paid off, big-time. The quality graduates that came out of this public education system helped to grow the California economy at a pace far outstripping the rest of the nation. Some like to call the 20th Century the American Century, well, if that was true, the last half of the 20th Century was the California Century.

But like all good centuries, they come to an end. And with the election of Ronald Reagan, and later Deukmejian and Wilson, and to an extent, even Brown's son Jerry, the Master Plan has been gradually chipped away. As we stand right now, of the approximately $18 Billion UC budget, around $3 Billion now comes from the state.

In other words, the state university system is merely a somewhat-state-subsidized system, and barely that.

Great quote at the end of the piece from George Lakoff:

Lakoff, UC Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and author of several popular and scholarly books on the language of politics, said in a letter to UCB's Townsend Center that "the privatization issue goes well beyond public education. It is about whether we have a democracy that works for the common good, or a plutocracy that privileges the wealthy and powerful. Privatizing the world's greatest public university is a giant step away from democracy."(Berkeley Daily Planet 9/17/09)

As a product of California's public-education heyday, all the way from kindergarten through college, I have a great appreciation for what we used to have. And I'm appalled that the state (both the people and their elected government) no longer seems to value public education.

Journalism

Sorry for not writing much of late. Not that I don't have a lot to say; just don't have time to write it down here.

Stumbled across this piece, though, which I thought did a good job of explaining why you have to be very dubious of everything you read and hear. The people we grew up trusting to tell us what was going on in the world don't do their job very well. It's much less an issue of bias (although some exists) and more a case of laziness mixed with incompetence.

Excellent stuff at the end of the piece:

At the beginning of his article, Von Drehle referred to a recent poll that found "record-low levels of public trust of the mainstream media." Guess what? Articles like this are why nobody trusts the media. When you pretend that obviously false claims about crowd sizes are valid, people won't trust you. When you pretend that only liberals say 70,000 people actually attended last week's protest, people won't trust you. They shouldn't trust you. You aren't trustworthy. You are doing your job dishonestly and incompetently.

And that dishonesty, that incompetence, is what enables Glenn Beck. When Glenn Beck says 1.7 million people were at the protest, and the Washington, D.C., Fire Department says 70,000, and Time runs an article saying conservatives and liberals disagree about the crowd size, that enables Glenn Beck's lies.

Being a mouthpiece for liars of any political stripe is not journalism. Reporting the lies without saying whether they are, objectively speaking, true, is not journalism, either. *sigh*

Apparently some people (including people who are supposed to be journalists) really believe that everything is just a matter of opinion, that there are no objective facts. They are wrong.

Another Dramatic Day

Following another delicious breakfast at Morning Glory (I had a coconut almond waffle with lemon butter...wonderful!) we headed off to a last busy day at the Shakespeare Festival. First was the afternoon with "All's Well that Ends Well." This was a good production, although not entirely to the liking of our 8-year-old. She got it, though. She and Grandma had done some studying last night while we were off seeing Henry VIII, so she knew what to expect. Some bits (particularly when the French king got a bit long-winded) were not really able to hold her interest.

I thought the play was pretty well done. My favorite actor was probably Lafew, who had wonderful stage presence and great, expressive eyes. The repertory aspect was in view again, as the Clown/narrator (an invention of the director, which worked well) turned out to be none other than Don Quixote from our first play of this trip. He was amusing in this role, and worked very hard, too.

After a brief stroll through the art and craft fair along Ashland Creek, we had some ice cream at Mix, then a quick visit to the Tudor Guild gift shop, as we wanted to pick up a couple of items.

We then dropped off Grandma and our daughter for a visit with some cousins, and Jan and I went to dinner. We started with a little wine tasting at the EdenVale Enoteca, but weren't too impressed with any of the wines. So we stolled off to dine at the Ashland Bistro Cafe, which was quite good. Jan's scallop carbonara was particularly good.

Then to the final play of this trip, "Equivocation." In many ways this was the perfect conclusion to the trip, and it particularly helped to have seen Macbeth and Henry VIII beforehand. All in all, it was outstanding, with a cast of six players, five of whom play many, many roles. I believe we had seen all of them in other productions during the week, notably Anthony Heald (who we'd previously seen as Mayor Shinn in The Music Man and Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII) as Shagspeare and Jonathan Haugen (Gardiner in Henry VIII) as (mostly) Robert Cecil.

Intense, thought-provoking, and clever, I thought this was the best play we saw overall, and probably worth the trip all by itself. Two big thumbs up!

Now the theater part of the trip is done, and we're driving home tomorrow. I doubt I'll have anything to write about that, but one never knows.

Wandering Through History

Today was largely a day off, with free time to explore town. Since we didn't have theater tickets until evening, we spent a leisurely morning at the house, then headed across town to try breakfast at Brother's. The breakfast was okay, nothing really special, but the hot chai was quite excellent and the house-made scones were stellar. Tomorrow we'll probably be back at Morning Glory, mostly because of proximity.

Since we were in town after breakfast, we decided it was time to venture into some of the used book stores. First stop, Book Exchange, which is my kind of bookstore: unpretentious, and obviously staffed by bibliophiles. All four of us had a grand time shopping around, and I think each of us came out with at least two books. I found a Fred Pohl book I was previously unaware of, and another book by Allen Steele. I definitely need to read more science fiction!

Next stop was a pilgrimage to the Dagoba Organic Chocolate outlet, just outside town. Dagoba makes tasty organic chocolate, and they have quite a bit out for tasting. The woman running the tasting room was friendly and knowledgeable, and went out of her way to give us tastes of a couple of things that were not already set out. We bought quite a few bars of different flavors, several of which we were previously unaware of.

On from there to what bills itself as the world's biggest, best-stocked game store, Fun Again. I guess they have a well-stocked warehouse behind the retail section, but the store itself is not huge (though it is very well-stocked). Ultimately we didn't decide to buy any games, but it was fun to look around.

Then across the parking lot to yet another (mostly) used book store, Bookwagon. I thought they had less overall selection than Book Exchange, and not nearly the ambiance, but we did manage to find several more books to buy. My favorite, which I stumbled across on the new arrivals rack, was a copy of John Muir's The Velvet Monkey Wrench. I learned most of what I know about automobiles from Muir's classic "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive," so I've always been intrigued to read his Utopian prescription for living. We'll see how that turns out.

After a brief stopover at the house to rest up and change clothes, we ventured out to dinner. Somehow, after brunch and chocolate tasting, no one was all that hungry, but we knew we wouldn't survive the evening's play without sustenance. So we decided to try Greenleaf restaurant. The food was pretty ordinary, but might have seemed more impressive had we chosen to sit outside, along the creek. The BLT was worth eating, though.

And at last, off to the theater, where Jan and I saw "Henry VIII" at the Elizabethan Stage. It was quite impressive. We had to overcome a little cognitive dissonance, as the early scenes featured Buckingham, who last night was Professor Harold Hill, and Cardinal Wolsey, who was last night's tongue-tied mayor. Of course, this is both one of the joys and one of the drawbacks to a repertory company. It was momentarily distracting, but ultimately fine.

It's quite a staging of the play, majestic and full of pomp. In the end, I suppose the play is really more about Wolsey and Queen Katherine than about Henry, really (though he's obviously an important part). And more than any of the characters, it's about England and the struggle between the Catholic church and protestantism, which would quite literally tear at the fabric of the country for at least a couple more centuries. Of all the Shakespeare histories, this one might be the most complex in that it deals with such recent events at the time of its writing. (Forgive me if all this is obvious; I hadn't read or seen this play before tonight!)

Anyway, some very strong performances here. Wolsey was particularly good in the second act, when he's largely in monologue mode. He had some trip-ups in the first act with dialogue, but really shone in his solo spotlights. Katherine was quite powerful (although I thought he deathbed scene was probably the weakest part of the play). And Henry had his moments. I thought his silent scene during Katherine's speech at her trial was particularly good. He really conveyed a lot by his physical reactions.

All in all, a very worthy effort. We really enjoyed the play, and it hardly seemed to take an hour, much less two-and-a-half!

We ended the evening with a quick visit to Zoey's Cafe for ice cream. Very tasty gelato. I had the mystery rotator tonight, which was a chocolate and marshmallow with coconut. Very yummy!

One more long day tomorrow, with two plays, then we head home Sunday.