hmpph

did the detroit free press really have to print the name, age and occupation of the person they quoted as saying "I don't know what's going on, but I'm tired of the unrest in the Middle East causing my gas prices to go up"? wouldn't we all be more comfortable attributing that statement to a caricature, rather than a real person?

why not be tired of the way generations of cheap gas as led to wasteful habits? why not be tired of record profits posted by the oil companies? why not be tired of being ignorant of macroeconomic models of supply and demand?

and if it's "unrest in the middle east" that's got you down, why not be grateful nobody is dragging you out of your house and bashing your head because you couldn't produce the right identification card at the right time? why not be grateful nobody is shelling your neighborhood? why not be grateful nobody has built a wall between your house and your olive trees?

sometimes it's difficult to distinguish between caricatures and real persons. maybe sometimes there is no difference. i think you have to decide which you're going to be, and then live that way on purpose.

caramba

the title track. bennie maupin what what what. listening to him, and his sound, makes me want to experiment with hard rubber mouthpieces again.

this morning as i was riding along packard i saw a black cat dart into the street about 50-75 feet ahead. okay so no big deal, but then i hear the guy in the nearby u-m plant operations pickup truck step on the gas, and bear down on the cat as it made its way (safely, as it turned out) across the street. and i thought, what a jerk. so i began to think of what to say and/or do if i happened to catch up to him, a pithy comment or an ugly stare or some more virulent form of invective, and sure enough the red light at hill street stopped him, and he put on his blinker to turn left (which meant, of course, that the cars behind him began to ooze into the bike lane), and once the light turned green and i went past the open passenger-side window, i looked in at the two guys and called out "so you like cats, do ya?" and i heard someone in there cackle.

so here's what i think was going on: the driver was showing off to his pal, possibly some inside joke about cats, and felt like he was in control enough that there was no real risk of him hitting the cat; it was a lark. not something i would have done, nor would i admire in anyone else, but that's why i think my unrehearsed comment was spot on (for once). it made the guy laugh, it was ambiguous as to judgment on my part, but it at least planted the notion in the guy's head that people are watching. i think there's an awful lot of ill goings-on out there that takes place simply because a lot of people don't think anybody else is watching, or cares, or whatever. so i know better than to impose my own morality on strangers, but i do think it's good to let them know i'm paying attention. there is nothing wrong with paying attention to what is happening around you. it may even actually be helpful.

you read it here: start paying attention to what is happening around you, it could be helpful.

a pound for a brown on the bus

on monday evening ann arbor held its second annual “townie party”, an event intended to provide local residents an opportunity to stretch out and relax for an evening before being descended upon by many thousands of visitors to the city’s famous, ever-expanding and bordering on out-of-control street art fairs. there was live music, face-painting and other low-key forms of revelry.

what is somewhat funny, or maybe at least ironic, is that your correspondent attended this party without knowing what it was. i had ridden into town on my track bike, all set up in track mode with the sewups and the track drops and no brakes, in an attempt to elevate the town atmosphere to something more like a true urban center (either that or i was simply showing off). so i came upon this scene and thought what’s up with all this? and who’s that guy singing that country song? he sure can play the guitar (it was bill kirchen, whom i guess i should have recognized but really he is from before my time).

anyway i read the paper the next day and lo and behold it was the “townie party”. as if the summer festival wasn’t enough of an ann arbor self-lovefest. a woman was quoted saying “i’m seeing people here i’ve been seeing for thirty years” and i’m thinking “that’s special because...?” everyone’s years of service were noted in this article, none of which exceeded my 46 years, which of course proves nothing. my only regret was not hanging around and listening to mr. kirchen, who was accompanied by sarah brown and rich dishman, for longer. now there’s some serious ann arbor cred for you.

as an aside, it is a popular sport among locals, self-styled or otherwise, to bash the fairs and complain about the inconvenience. in earlier days i did this as well, but since becoming more worldly (that is, traveling out of town more often) i believe that street fairs are inherently a good thing, and that any opportunity to shunt cars off to the side and let people walk around instead should be taken up with gusto. the art fair is a nuisance in the same way as are home football games: you know exactly when and where they’re going to happen so shut up. some folks are enjoying themselves.

a day in the life of a lily

so last night there were strong storms. not a whole lot of rain, but powerful winds, or so they sounded, for that brief period i was awake in between well-deserved slumbers. and the debris around the neighborhood bore witness as well; a mighty blow, or two.

last weekend i rode those 200 miles for multiple sclerosis, on the white bike. the ride was, in a word, excellent. most notable was the total absence of knee pain, or any true pain at all; just a little soreness here, a little numbness there. but the knee problems that practically crippled me last year, and have been a recurring issue for all rides longer then about 40 miles in recent years, did not show up. at all. for that i am highly thankful. i’m attributing this mostly to a more comfortable setup - the bullhorns, the wider avocet saddle with at least nominal attention paid to fore-and-aft positioning. to be sure, i was wondering after an hour or so if i shouldn’t tip the front of the seat up just a little, based on how it felt sitting there, but truly i have to let the results speak for themselves - if i can ride 200 miles in two days without a trace of joint trouble (and i have a history of joint trouble), then there is no way in hell my seat position can be “wrong”.

the ride itself unfolded in similar fashion as the year before. i started early, and had a decent pace going, although all the stops were open when i arrived, if not crowded. i began to get the impression that i wouldn’t beat my previous mark of “third rider to century loop rest stop”, and i didn’t; another chap actually rode past me while i had stopped, unscheduled, to pee (drinking a lot to ward off dehydration), although i did pass him a few miles later. the young volunteer making me a peanut butter and jelly half-sandwich replied, when i asked, that there had been “five or six” other riders so far. the lack of precision in her answer seemed to suit the warm, humid and relaxed atmosphere. i certainly didn’t care; my knees felt like a million bucks.

later in that century loop i had a few riders catch up with me, but they did not pass. i was not really trying to stay ahead, just sticking to the usual fixed-gear program of booting it somewhat on upgrades, but then also letting myself relax on the downgrades, fully expecting one of these guys to finally surge past; they didn’t. a west-northwest wind was picking up over the course of the day, and at this point (around noon or so) the path was south, and then east for a jog, so we had the wind at our backs to some extent. we all ended up together at the rest stop where the century loop rejoins the main route, with the usual chit-chat and exchange of propers. i was on my own for the last 16 miles, which went by in a flash, flagging a bit with the headwind, then flying once i turned south. the temperature had probably reached 90 °F by then, but it seemed fairly dry, at least for this part of the world, so it didn’t feel like a problem.

the rest of that day was blissful: i had a massage, i took a shower, i had sweated out all manner of poison and i didn’t hurt, anywhere. it doesn’t get any better. that evening, rather than avail myself of the festivities offered at the residence halls, i went out again on the bike and found an excellent “riverwalk”, actually a paved path following the looking glass river all the way to its confluence with the grand, in lansing proper, and on from there through downtown and past. i had to turn around where an outdoor concert was taking place, and admission was required; that night it was etta james, mavis staples and, on the “other stage” (so the young man in the ticket booth told me), the bangles. i asked him “is vicki gonna be there?” but he had no reply. anyway this path was a blast because it covered a lot of urban and semi-urban territory: bug-infested bottomlands, the city zoo, combined sewer overflows, an electric utility storage yard that smelled strongly of creosote, railroad tracks with intriguing abandoned structures, and so on. it hugged the water closely enough so that they could route it under all of the highway and railroad overpasses, so there were no grade crossings at all - you could just ride your bike. that was sweet.

my randomly-assigned dorm-mate was a long-haired guy from cincinnati, who rode a trek 5200. he told me that for a living he ran the u.s. office of a german company, and said he had flown to germany on tuesday, flown back on thursday, and had driven up here from cincinnati on friday. i heard this and thought excellent, this guy will be asleep before me! i had brought a little fan and was sharing it with him by setting it to oscillate; once he was sawing logs i turned it back on myself, until morning.

i was on the road at quarter to seven and the sun came ou bright and clear soon afterward; it looked like it would be hotter than the day before. i had a nice spin going and was flitting past all other riders when i came up on two guys at the base of a hill. they both stood up and dug in, but i had that momentum thing going and zipped by, without standing up. a moment later another rider was at my side, and i looked over to see he was riding a langster. i said “i wondered when i was going to see another fixed-gear bike” and he said “you just passed two of us”. i was surprised, and a little embarrased, not to have noticed. after checking out so many bikes and not seeing any, i must have given up looking.

i had this chipper pace going so i got to the rest stop at the beginning of the century loop before them. they, however, did not stop there and i never actually rode with them again. i saw them pretty much everywhere i stopped, though, and we had the predictable conversations about gearing, handlebar types and not touching our road bikes very much any more. they were not youngsters, although perhaps not as old as me - maybe late thirties. the one guy had the langster, and the other rode a jamis sputnik. they were on some insane bike-riding holiday, four centuries in five days (one on tri bikes, the other three on fixies), then a trip up to leelanau for some more serious up and down. so that was cool.

the sky had clouded up for much of the morning, actually, with signs of actual weather and possibly rain to the north, but after completing the century loop and getting back to the southern parts the sun did indeed come out and it did indeed get back into the nineties. oof. the heat was actually okay with me but there was a lot of sweating and drinking (i took out my eyewear to ride this morning and there were salt crystals around the edges) and it got somewhat tiring by the end. the last dozen or so miles of this route go up and down the moraines of oakland county, and that combined with the large number of other riders to pass and the increasing pressure from obnoxious oakland county motorists made me somewhat impatient to get back, and have it over with. but all in all it was a most excellent ride, making as good if not slightly better time the second day as the first (no pain, ride harder), spinning thoughtfully through the relentless rural reaches, marking progress by the change in newspaper boxes from the lansing journal to the argus express to the flint journal, that big blue racer sitting in the middle of the road without a care in the world, the calves chained to their fiberglass veal huts, piles of manure and hay everywhere and me unsure of where one odor left off and the other began, and everywhere the chorus of insects, katydids and crickets and grasshoppers and, yes, cicadas.

no, i did not take any pictures. i brought the camera but thought i would be too focused on time the first day, so i left it in my luggage. on sunday i considered it again but felt i would be too sweaty to stop and fool with photography. yes, there were a couple of free items that begged photographing. so it goes.

thank you dear reader; that was lengthy. i’ll be back.

here's where we went to class

thanks to the miracle of flickr, the free project is up and running. now i simply need more photos. what i think is attractive about this is the structure, in which two collections of objects, which are random and unique (asserted but not proven), are mapped to each uniquely as well. one collection is, of course, the various pieces of crap everybody is trying to get rid of. the other collection is the hand-lettered signs saying "free"; perhaps less random, in that they all sat the same thing. but using arbitrary materials, different pens and kinds of paper, or cardboard, and so on. anyway, it is an ongoing thing that i've wanted to do for a long time, since way before digital cameras and the internet and all that.

what might be cool is to get photos of free stuff from other people too. hint hint.

so the weather forecast for this weekend's MS-150 ride has settled into considerable sunshine and highs in the low 90s. wish me luck!

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expressin with my full capabilities

a few days ago i began to actually have some vague feelings of doubt about the upcoming ms 150 bike ride. sunday i went on a breakfast ride with the bike shop guys (including cicadashell jr. the elder), on the way back pushing that slightly bigger gear (50:16) that i had put on for thursday's trip to the vélodrome. and i felt okay. but later that day i rode back to dexter, and around south via parker to scio church, to get to the swim club, and it was hard, pushing that same gear. the stiff headwind didn't help, i suppose, but all the same i was a little more tired than i expected. a few backs i rode sixty miles on that bike (using a 48:16 gear) and felt great, no twinges or soreness or anything. but sunday i felt, or at least imagined i was beginning to feel, murmers of dissent in both knees.

i was further daunted after considering the weather forecast, which is calling for temperatures in the 90s. yes, i like heat, better hot than cold, i always say. but highs in the 80s are entirely sufficient; the 90s are unnecessary. i note that, as of today, the heat is forecast to arrive a day earlier, with higher humidity on sunday and then possible thundershowers on monday. now i know how inexact that type of forecast is, and it wouldn't surprise me to see it all pushed up by the weekend, with the unstable weather actually arriving on sunday.

but anyway. i will ride it, and relish the opportunity to do nothing but ride my track bike for a couple of days. the cicadas are buzzing, the corn and soybeans and wheat are transpiring furiously in the sun, the calves are bleating in their fiberglass huts, rolls of hay are appearing in the meadows, and basically all is in place for a lower michigan summer. i may even try to beg up some pledges.

opened a flickr account, need to go pro. at last, the free project has a home. look for more free stuff as the summertime-give-your-crap-away season unfolds.

windowpanes preferred

this past weekend i had the rather astonishing experience of meeting up with an old friend, and by old i mean from way back, the single-digit years, what we might have referred to as "short pants days" in another era (i wear shorts more often now than i ever did, however). although he was a year older, he was my next-door-neighbor and we were inseparable until around junior high, when everything begins to change. his family moved away after eighth grade and i had neither seen nor heard from him since, although i wondered not a few times what had become of him; living my whole life in this town affords me numerous opportunities to reflect on things like where the fuck did everybody go?

the occasion of his second visit to ann arbor in 30+ years was a reunion of the sixth grade class at burns park school. this is one of those crazy things that the internet makes possible, and while i had gotten wind of it, i had no plans to check it out; to be sure, i was not invited (recall that he was a grade ahead of me). but when i returned home during a lull in our activities with our palestinian houseguests and checked the answering machine, there was this message from this guy, and in 90 seconds he described just a few of the insane parallels between our lives, based on conversations with my older sister who was also a member of this class, parallels that included barely escaping high school and playing jazz saxophone for a while before going back to school and studying engineering and getting into environmental consulting and...well, it was striking. and his dissertation (grad school was where we kind of parted paths) concerned fluvial geomorphology, which to us (in this office) is a sort of vast, uncharted research wilderness that holds the keys to understanding all sorts of contaminant transport problems that are currently difficult to solve, and to which we marshal our richest creative energies, that is when, as consultants, someone will pay us. which is not often. but here is a guy with whom i used to roam the burns park neighborhood, pulling a wagon and collecting dead batteries that we would then line across the street so cars would run over them and we could see what was inside them, and this guy is leading research in this important field. this sort of thing renders uninteresting, to me at least, any discussion of fate and predestination.

rather than go on with other arcane details (both of science and of my early childhood) i will reprint here a biographical sketch he submitted while the reunion was being organized. the detail of his memory is simultaneously surprising and unsurprising; together we were able to fill in many gaps between us.

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Hi Everyone! Here are some more memories, at least some of them unique. And in anticipation of many wonderful hours together catching up on the last 41 years (6 at BP plus the 35 since), I’ve included a brief life story (which I wrote to ****** when he first contacted me, back when this crazy reunion thing was just a bright gleam in his eye). I look forward very much to seeing you all in just a couple of days! *** (wife), ***** (son, 4) and I will be flying in from London tomorrow, so we might be a little dazed on Friday night from the 5 hour time change. (******: I guess we don’t win the “came the farthest” award because we are stopping in Ann Arbor on our way home to California, but how about an honorable mention?) First Grade: Mrs. *****. She broke her hip over the summer and we had another teacher for several months of the fall. I remember liking her and being glad when my little sister ***** was in her class 5 years later. It’s funny what one remembers from being six years old. One of my strongest memories is of a rainy day when there were hundreds of earth worms on the sidewalk between school and Wells street. I wondered where they all came from. Another vivid memory is playing with ****** ***** in the tiny back compartment of my parents’ VW bug. We called it the Gee-Gee car and were happy being crammed into that little space together for what must have been hours. I also remember spending long hours standing outside my house on Prospect St., watching street crews install new curbs (or was it a new sewer?). That’s where I first got to be good friends with my next door neighbor, [cicadashell], and his big sister *****. My house number was 1234 Prospect Street. I remember on the first day of school, when some adult asked if I knew my address, they didn’t believe me when I just started counting up and stopped at four. It was really easy to remember. Then there was the time I was down by Burns Park on a weekend, at the drive way into the parking lot off of Wells (off by myself at age 6, hard to imagine now), and there was a hole in the pavement protected by a sawhorse. For some reason I pushed the sawhorse over and moments later a bigger boy appeared on a bike (he must have been 8). He told me I was a vandal and that he would turn me in if I didn’t bring him a quarter right away. I had no idea what a vandal was but I knew I was in big trouble. I ran home and told my mom I needed a quarter (which was a fortune in those days, I hadn’t even started my nickel-a-week allowance yet). When she got me to confess why I needed the quarter she told me not to worry about that big boy, and that she wouldn’t be giving me any change. Well, I probably did worry about that big boy a lot, but I also got the idea that whatever vandalism was, it wasn’t so bad. Second Grade: Mrs. ********. My happiest (and only) memory of second grade is the Valentine’s Day post office we made. It was so exciting, everyone had a mail box, and I got all these wonderful valentines. The whole project seemed to last for weeks. I don’t recall if we were required then to give valentines to everyone in the class, that’s the way it works in my son’s pre-school now. Third Grade: Mrs. (***? *******? *********? Can’t remember). Third grade was tough. Life got much more serious then, and scary. We used to have wild “soccer” free-for-all madness at recess. Whoever had the ball would get chased by everyone else. It was exhilarating but dangerous. I recall the game was also called “Smear the queer”... There was another game we used to play during recess where the boys would hide on the back side of the big hill, and wait for the girls to venture onto the hill, whereupon we would jump up and chase them back to their hill (the little hill of course) and then occupy it until recess was over. One day this game of implied violence got real for me when the girls decided not to indulge us, and we lay in wait for what seemed like an eternity. I finally decided that I didn’t want to play this game anymore, and got up to leave. ******** ******, who was our leader, took this as a great personal offense and, happy to have someone to chase, led the pack in chasing me down and delivered a rather brutal punishment for my insubordination. Back in the classroom he was outraged that I had told on him and promised to beat me up again at every opportunity. From then on I tended to stay close by the teachers at recess and became best friends with the somewhat less cool guys, like ***** **** and ***** *****, who already stayed close to the adults to survive recess. Fourth Grade: Mrs. *****. The Tigers winning the world series that October seemed like one of the biggest events of my life to date. I recall listening to the games in class, first secretly with an earpiece from a transistor radio, and after we got caught by Mrs. *****, being allowed to do it openly so everyone could listen too. Most of my memories of her are not so good. There was the whole fight over the Christmas Pageant being converted into a Winter Festival that year. Some parents got together in the PTA to shift our big holiday event for the parents from re-enacting Jesus’ birth to just singing a bunch of secular songs about good times in the snow. (I think ***** ****’s mom *** was a ring leader). Mrs. **** was very upset about this, and had me and some of the other Jewish kids stand up in the front of the class while she explained that it was us and our parents who were responsible for taking Christmas away. (**** **** wasn’t Jewish actually). Needless to say, after that I didn’t feel that she had my best interests at heart. She also had me stand in front of the class that spring, along with ***** *******, when we both wore brand new flowered bell-bottoms to school (probably purchased at Middle Earth). I liked those pants and must have sought the attention on some level, but she clearly hoped to scare us out of our hippy tendencies. I recall dreading the penmanship lessons, when she would grip my hand so hard it hurt, and move my stiff arm around to write in script. I never did learn to write script and have had nearly illegible handwriting ever since. (Thank goodness for word processing on lap tops!). Another memory from that year is being introduced to musical instruments by the music teacher (can’t remember her name) who showed us cardboard pictures of the instruments. I chose the cornet but when my parents took me to the music store downtown to rent one, they pulled out a box with strange black things in it. Turned out they had heard “clarinet” (probably wishful listening, considering the difference in potential volume), and coerced me into “trying” it. I ended up playing the clarinet in the band the next two years, next to ***** *******, who was first chair. Fifth Grade: Going to Washington DC with my family and ***** ****’s family for the big “moratorium” march against the war. I really liked the sex education that year, girls’ bodies were so interesting and complicated! My strongest memory from the sex education experience was feeling BIG. Somehow, knowing about hormones and puberty confirmed that we would actually grow up some day, that all the effort of being a kid and striving to be a “big boy” was worth it. I recall jumping and being able to touch the ceiling in my room for the first time, shades of hormone overdoses to come. Sixth Grade: The drug education assembly had a big influence on me - I decided to try drugs after that. I left school a month early the spring of 1971 to go with my family to Japan so I missed whatever graduation ceremony there was. Random memories of the school: - Throwing wet toilet paper wads onto the bathroom ceiling, where they stuck to form mini-stalagtites. - Climbing up the outside wall of the school, in the narrow slot next to the classroom that stuck out. - Ice skating in the big rink, skating full speed to the edge and jumping into the snow banks. - The sound and smell of vast piles of leaves in the fall, walking through them on the way home from school. - Loving the library, which was my sanctuary in fifth and sixth grades. Somehow I got excused a lot to go there and read, and escape the classroom. Random memories of Ann Arbor. - The Bluefront, getting comic books and red pop there. - Football games, the sound of the drums from far away, running through the crowds pretending to be halfbacks. The agony of the rose bowl, the collapse of our team in the warm California sun. (now I live in California) - The arboretum. The trails through the trees. The river and the railroad bridge. The sledding hill. - Student riots, over the war, and over the county sheriff’s rule. - Middle earth, the hippie store. Buying peace sign medallions there, and black light posters (Having a club house in the basement with a black light and cool posters). - The record store on state street, getting my first record of my own: Chuck Berry’s greatest hits. - Going to the movies at the State and the Michigan (every Saturday afternoon?). All those 60’s silly movies like the journey into the body, James Bond, etc. Sitting up in the balcony. - Also watching movies at the Y. (I spent a lot of time at the Y, swimming lessons, chess club, Judo) - Passover at the Hillel, Jewish Cultural School on Sundays. - Pizza at Bimbos, birthday parties. - Easter egg hunts with the UofM History department. - Blizzards on Easter and Halloween. - So much snow we couldn’t open the doors and had to climb out the window to start shoveling. A brief account of my last 35 years (written for ****** when he first contacted me). - After Burns Park I went to Tappan for two years, where I got very involved in radical politics (farmworkers union, Human Rights Party), and dropped out in spring of eighth grade to try to live a life of a 20 year-old stoner activist (e.g. hitchhiked to New York and then to Iowa to attend Yippie “smoke-ins”). Perhaps not coincidentally my parents split up that summer and I moved to Boston with my mother and sister, where I refused to attend any school, got a job washing dishes at MIT, and pursued new ways of rebelling. After a year my mom and I moved to Los Angeles, where I landed in a tiny alternative school that saved my life (“Horizons center for the creative arts and humanities” - 65 kids in 4 grades) . There I got deeply committed to jazz music, and discovered other positive aspects to life (hiking, poetry, girlfriends). After two years (10th and 11th grades), the school folded and I moved to New York City to live with my dad (prof at NYU) and be in the jazz capital of the universe. I managed to get accepted into the Friends school in Manhattan (long haired Californian = diversity) for my last year and actually graduated from high school in 1977. I wasn’t interested in going to college (what could they teach me?), and spent the next couple of years studying the saxophone, playing in bands, and working crummy jobs (like bike messenging in Midtown). I finally did enroll in City College, but took only music classes, so after a few semesters they wouldn’t let me register unless I started taking all the other stuff so I dropped out. My music career came to an abrupt halt when the band I was playing in imploded (we got screwed by our coke-dealing manager) at the same time that I got a carpentry job fixing up tenements on the lower east side, which I really enjoyed. One thing led to another and after a couple of years I had a contracting business, specializing in museum exhibition installation. At 25 I realized that going to college might not be the worst thing that could happen to you, and started at NYU (where I could go for free). All along I had been involved in various political causes, and decided that I wanted to be an engineer so that after school I could go live Central America and rebuild all the bridges the guerillas were busy blowing up (after the “inevitable triumph” of the revolutions...). It took 3.5 years of remedial and basic classes in science before they would let me transfer into the engineering program (Cooper Union really), but I finally got a bachelors degree (two actually) at the age of 30. I then moved to Berkeley for grad school in Civil Engineering, and decided not to move to Central America after the Sandinistas got voted out of power. After getting a masters degree, I got a job in San Francisco with an engineering company working on river and wetland restoration projects and then started working for a small non-profit called International Rivers Network, which helps people in developing countries fight big dam projects. I worked at IRN for a few years, traveled all over the world, made lots of trouble at places like the world bank, but missed the student life and the joys of mathematics. So I took a class at Berkeley in Geomorphology (earth surface processes) and had an epiphany. I quit my job and spent the next nine years being a graduate student and learning to be a scientist. My PhD dissertation was on how rivers erode through bedrock, cutting canyons and valleys and limiting how high mountains can be. I developed a theory for how the sediment that rivers carry influences the erosional process, tested it with lab experiments using miniature rivers, and applied my ideas to field sites in California and Taiwan. My first year in my second tour of grad school I had another epiphany, that I loved and wanted to marry a woman I had met years before doing Central America work (luckily she felt the same way), and we got married in 1996. *** moved to Berkeley and a couple of years later went to Stanford, where she got a PhD in environmental science and policy. Our son ***** was born in 2002. Being his dad is the very best thing in life! Now I’m a professor of geology at San Francisco State University (having turned down jobs at a few big research universities to stay in the Bay Area) and *** works at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Berkeley, organizing scientists to change climate policy. At 45 [now 46] I’ve finally reached adulthood, house, kid, job, and I like it very much. I’ve got my hands full right now - I’m responsible for too many people’s work: 11 student researchers at SFSU and 6 at Berkeley and other universities, a post-doc, 3 lab technicians (the lab has grown into a huge affair spread over three buildings), and a bunch of other collaborators clamoring for a piece of my time. Hopefully I’ll find a way to calm down soon and enjoy more time with my family, camping and strolling along the beach...

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peace not walls

so last week we had three teenage boy houseguests from ramallah., palestine. they are members of the al raja dance troupe, here on a seven-week trip to share some of their culture with us. it was an interesting, tiring and ultimately rewarding experience.

pictured are the three young men who stayed at our house, in a well-executed boy-girl sitdown near the michigan league during summer festival which, fortuitously, was taking place during their visit. the festival was a good place for everyone to loosen up a bit, have some popcorn and hear live music.

between performances and scheduled picnics and whatnot, it was difficult to find much down time when we could simply hang out, but we did what we could. language was not difficult as they had all been studying english “since kindergarten” (an interesting turn of phrase), and of course there were some opportunities to spend time down in the music room where all languages meet fairly comfortably. they all stayed up terrifically late and one evening i took them on a shopping trip to meijer’s, around 11:00 or so. on the way out there we passed a young man who had his car stereo blaring while wearing headphones; they found this as funny as i did, which was reassuring in a small-world sort of way.

the only thing resembling an incident took place before saturday’s performance at king of kings (an elca congregation). there is a group that persistently demonstrates every saturday at various synagogues in ann arbor, urging an end to all u.s. support of israel in an effort to promote peace in the middle east. whether their purpose is well-served by haranguing jews on their way in and out of temple each week is debatable (although please not here). two of them showed up at king of kings on saturday, and while one remained silent the other took it upon himself to interrupt the minister from texas (who was traveling with the group) to take her, and indeed anyone else who could hear, to task over the elca’s “investment” in israel, and how we were just “pretending to help” by bringing these people here. “divest in israel!” he shouted again and again, and while divesture is no doubt an important part of the overall process, if one recalls the situation with arpartheid and south africa it is not a simple matter of picking up the phone and telling your broker to transfer the money out of the israel fund. the man has a legitimate beef; he should take it to the synod where he might actually make a difference, instead of trying to raise a ruckus in a church. anyway his true integrity was revealed when we attempted to lead him out: his shout changed to “take your hands off me, that’s assault!” and then, almost comically, “where’s a camera?” - i held mine up, still in its case, not there to take pictures of some clown who has never gotten over missing the 1968 democratic convention.

so his companion convinced him to go outside and while i felt angry and upset at the disturbance, i admired the troupe for their ability to put it behind them and give their performance. then it occurred to me: growing up in palestine it would probably take much more than one shouting gentleman to unnerve you. afterward we took them on one last ann arbor experience and painted the rock, with a suitable message; this we did along with a couple of the elder son's pals to shore up the teen connection. the american boys rode home separately and we were treated, in our minivan, to some impromptu drumming and singing in arabic (of course). it was an unguarded moment and ms. cicadashell and i felt honored, again in a very small-world sort of way.