A Chinese balloon! Oh nooooaauuwwrr! They are spying on us with their evil-wrought balloon!

bought a dozen pencils at the bookstore - came home and sharpened them - now my engineering people are all jealous

Struggling to get hooked on the next book I want to read — then, in bath, suddenly engrossed — letting the mystery in.

My dad just told me the rent on his first place out in the country after leaving LA, at the end of Pigeon Point Road in Humboldt: fifty cents a month. 1969-70.

To have been a boomer!

I’m once again thinking of this haiku by Taneda Santōka:

141

busy pulling away

at paddy weeds—

those big balls*

Only enhanced by translator Burton Watson’s asterisk:

*In Santōka’s time, Japanese farmers working in the fields in hot weather often wore only a simple loincloth.

Sometimes the good feelings curdle. Then it’s time for solitude, and for straining emotion through the cheesecloth of contemplation.

To make, uhhh, “mozzarella art”?

Reading that no one knows who exploded sections of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 undersea pipelines, I can’t help but think of the acts of anti-fossil fuel sabotage in KSR’s The Ministry For the Future. Maybe it wasn’t Russia! Maybe the eco-terrorists are finally here!

www.washingtonpost.com/national-…

I’m sorry to report that over on the bird site the you-can-only-read-four-tweets-if-not-logged-in tool seems to have broken again, or been disabled. A pity for a social media junkie like me. Back to visiting individual people’s pages and gobbling up all their tweets.

I’m sorry but scientists have now found “space hurricanes” that are “Over 600 miles in diameter with multiple arms that rotate counterclockwise … contain a calm center, or eye, and ‘rain’ electrons into the upper atmosphere”? If Philip Pullman was crowing when it turned out “dark matter” was real, he ought to have a real field day with this one.

Another capsicin observation: there is a specific, peculiar sensation in your mouth when it is burning with chili and then you take a gulp of very hot coffee. This sensation is for me so distinctive that today when I felt it, my mind whisked me right to my favorite diner, Cafe One, in Noyo, where I always get the huevos rancheros and wash them down with some delicious, half-burnt diner coffee, black.

Samin Nosrat talks about “layering fat” in a dish, for instance by adding goat cheese to a salad that you then dress with olive oil. I am working on a parallel theory of “layering chilis” in my latest bowl of rice and beans, featuring half a grilled poblano, a handful of pickled jalapeños, and a drizzle of habanero hot sauce. It’s working.

Today’s announcement that California scientists finally achieved net-positive nuclear fusion seems like good news for the climate fight. But will this moonshot siphon resources from the actual, workable solutions we already have to hand? (Seems likely.) And worse, even if we do achieve fusion on a wide scale, will the insane engineering and materials requirements of the technology concentrate political power—and electrical power—every more fully in the hands of the already-rich and already-powerful?

To me, one of the most beautiful things about solar as a power source is its decentralized nature. Like the internet, it is a technology that tends toward anarchy and democracy. Fusion on the other hand seems like it will require tremendous amounts of centralized capital and administration.

Here’s my hope: most everyone achieves local energy independence in my lifetime, by way of a few solar panels and the big nuclear reactor in the sky. Then we use fusion to run things like aluminum smelters and data centers.

In this article about a Central Valley police chief’s breathtaking scheme to get rid of the town’s library and instead fill the building with cops, check this passage:

Ah yes, books, children, young mothers—all expendable, all less important than cops.

I read this whole article with my jaw hanging open. Just an incredible condensation of the problem of police nationwide, condensed into one little nightmare.

I do wish the New York Times had pushed back more against the police chief’s framing. At the beginning of the article, they paraphrase him:

His argument: Crime is exploding, the city is growing, the tax base is tight.

Only right near the end of the article do we get anything resembling context, which suggests something much closer to a flat line:

All the while, gang violence has been a growing issue. The city has seen three homicides so far this year — the same number as last year — and all were gang-related, Mr. Williams said. In October, after a series of shootings, including a drive-by in nearby Delano, several McFarland school sporting events were canceled.

That’s sad, especially for the actual people impacted. But is the line really going up, as suggested at the beginning of the article? Are more cops really going to resolve this? The article doesn’t investigate these foundational premises of its reporting.

Even without some necessary context, the story is wild. It reminds me of the bizarre practice of “asset foreiture,” where police have free reign to claim the possessions of people arrested for certain crimes—regardless of whether or not they are eventually convicted.

The cops want that big, airy library. Why not take it? Why spare a thought for the kids studying in it after school, waiting for their farmworker parents? If anything, they’re just going to become criminals. Right?

This War on Cars episode, “Muscle Car City,” explains something I have definitely observed around LA: the dramatic rise in muscle cars driving hyper recklessly on the same streets I push my newborn’s stroller down, and the cops not doing much at all to stop them. Like the best journalism, it leads you to understanding without rapping you over the head with it.

thewaroncars.org/2022/12/0…

I am a pathetic social media addict; the only solution I have found is to never log in anywhere. So restricted, I don’t have a personal “feed.” Instead, all I can do is pull up individual Twitter accounts, and, because I’m not logged in, Twitter locks me out after I look at 4 tweets.

Unfortunately, after the Musky Boys took over Twitter, the tool that blocked me from reading more than 4 tweets either broke or was disabled. Now I could scroll with abandon. And I did! I became a completist for my favorite follows. Found myself losing twenty, thirty, forty minutes every evening, caught in the scroll.

I am happy to report that the only-4-tweets-for-you feature is back! And so I find I have some time on my hands, to do things like actually post my own things, on my blog that no one reads :)

Was so much enjoying the Jeff Parker ETA IVtet’s Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, that I went ahead and bought the album on Bandcamp. Worth it to get the third and fourth cuts, and also—it felt GOOD to actually buy an album for the first time in years.

eremiterecords.bandcamp.com/album/mon…

A poem:

A friend sent this over, after a conversation about Stevens. I love the opening line, “One must have a mind of winter” and how it states as fact the way our minds change over seasons. It reminds me of the poem I was recommending to my friend, “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," which is so full of rabbit consciousness, the state of mind of being a rabbit at the end of the day, eventually leading to the great lines, “The trees around are for you, / The whole of the wideness of night is for you, / A self that touches all edges, // You become a self that fills the four corners of night.”

A poem:

How much we love to classify, to tease apart. But: “If you know when to stop / you’re in no danger.” Yes, precisely this.

A passage:

– Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

I’m currently profiling Jean Kayira, who is faculty and Program Director of Antioch’s PhD in Environmental Studies. She grew up in Malawi, and she says that Freire’s explanation of this concept of education really captured the system and attitudes under which she was taught.

Myself, I grew up in Northern California, but I don’t think my education was always so different from this, either. And when I found myself in college, certain teachers presented themselves as real J.P. Morgans, deigning to share some crumbs with me, the pauper.

Why do some of us accept this and even embrace it as an educational model?

In a clumsy attempt to get more caffeine into myself, I have begun drinking a cup of tea between my two cups of coffee. Sacrilegiously (at least for my personal religion), I have been adding some milk. From a tiny pitcher. Sometimes midway through my cup.

My question: do I actually enjoy this? Or am I just in it for the squat little pitcher, with its red rim and drawing of a blue hen?

My obsession with trying new software continues. The thrill of a new interface. The promise that it will help me “accomplish” something. The frustration when it doesn’t.

12:27am. In the kitchen, the cat carefully opens a cabinet drawer. Stands there, head inside. Considers crawling in. Turns away.

For me, who just got my first smart watch, the killer feature is—unexpectedly—the moon phase complication on the watch face. How cool is that?!

Pumpkin, shadow, prism.

A few days ago, in the early morning, as I held my newborn son, I happened to look out the window to see a man and his adult son each cut a mature agave attenuata from the succulent forest out front of the next door apartment building. Flora in hand, the men ran, guiltily, to their idling truck. They nestled the poached agaves amid landscaper tools and sped off. How strange to witness so small a crime, and how normal to wonder, Would I have done it too? My son stared intensely at the window frame, the delicious chiaroschurro.