London, Paris, Fairbanks

Nearly August: garden update

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 16:06:00 -0800

So things have been growing, some more than others, and it’s time to take some more notes for next year.

From an economic point of view, the Swiss chard (DE: Mangold, FR: blette — we grow the kind with the pretty yellow and red stems) just keeps giving and the zucchini plant has produced one beautiful squash with more to come. The bok choy, despite its tendency to break out in bloom, turned out to be very tasty (we’ve supplemented the small plants we got from the CSA with leaves from ours because we like a big heap of bok choy stir-fried over rice). The potato plants closest to the light are shooting up shoulder-high, wich I’m not sure is a good thing….

… but on the other hand, the snow peas are another small success, with very tasty pods just getting ready now, a week or two behind our neighbours:

I planted seeds from two varieties. “Snow bird” came up very prolific and dense but stayed small; these are producing right now. “Sugar Daddy” took longer to come up, and much less densely, but grew taller and is in flower now. I expect will also produce a meal or two of pea pods.

The single sorrel plant is a nice complement. On the flip side the carrots should have been watered more early on and thinned out. Hopefully they’ll grow a bit.

On to the brassicas. The Brussels sprouts (DE: Rosenkohl) are taking their time, and so are the kohlrabi, but something’s happening, so that’s good. The nicest progress comes from the broccoli. I had to emergency-harvest one of the six plants, which had fallen over, but the other five are just getting ready. When Melinda’s back from traveling, we’ll have a week of broccoli meals, I think:

The overflow garden is a bit hit-and-miss. What worked: Oregano, majoram, thyme, mace, and possibly the shallots. Sage is ok. Parsley and basil pretty much meh, as are the tomatoes. The leeks are also still awfully small, though I’m sure will come out edible. I’ll look into better soil next year and select the herbs more attentively. I mean, we should be able to grow parsley! Also, I miss dill. There’s a pot with some arugula I sowed late, which should be ready soon.

The peas are fun. I had a lot of left-over seeds, which sprouted in a tray during the wet early summer days and got strewn around unlikely places:

It staggers the harvest.

The CSA has been giving me ideas. Special attraction: beets (the red ones were spectacular, and the leafy parts taste great, too), turnips and spinach.

Swiss chard and yellow summer squash frittata

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 22:54:41 -0800

I keep forgetting recipes that work. So here’s one that worked really well tonight. I bought some small yellow summer squash at the grocery store - like zucchini, but yellow and more delicate. And we have Swiss chard in the garden ready to use. So I looked online for inspiration and was heavily influenced by this, though I took my time caramelized the onion a little bit and my result was less dry than their photo.

This is the amount of chard I used - sorry for the blurriness:

For two people:

3 eggs
1 small yellow summer squash (or a zucchino)
a handful of Swiss chard, stems included, approx. 100g
1 medium-sized yellow onion
3 cloves of garlic (or less)
parmesan, grated (optional - I used about 2 teaspoons of a mix that came with ravioli)
olive oil, a little bit of butter
salt, pepper to taste
chives (optional)

Cut squash once lengthwise and then into fine slices. Set aside.

Cut chard stems into 5 mm long pieces. Finely chop leaves. Finely mince garlic. Chop chives. Set all aside.

Beat eggs in a roomy receptacle and season with salt and pepper. Set aside.

Pre-heat oven to 350 °F / 175 °C.

Cut the onion into fine strips or small chunks. In a small, non-stick (preferredly), oven-safe frying pan, sauté onion until translucent, then reduce heat and under near constant stirring caramelize until lightly brown (takes about 30 min — you can stop with a sautéd onion if that’s too long). You may have to add some butter in the middle of the process if the onions get dry. Season a little.

Add squash, stems, approx. half of the garlic. Stir constantly and sauté until squash is slightly translucent and stems are still crunchy but edible. (5-10 min)

Add leaves and wilt, stirring. (Approx. 1 min)

Take pan off the fire and let cool for a minute. Meanwhile, season again and stir parmesan into the beaten eggs. Then add the content of the pan to the eggs and fold under lightly. Add the rest of the garlic.

Put pan back onto the stovetop and if necessary add a little olive oil or butter. Add mixture back into the pan. Once the bottom has set, put pan into the oven until the eggs have set completely and a nice crust has formed on the bottom. (Approx. 10 min)

Serve garnished with chives. We liked it!

Gardening notes 2012, July

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 17:24:00 -0800

This is a quick & straightforward chronicle of this year’s gardening efforts. I noticed that I neglected to write down anything we did last year, what worked, what didn’t and that now I wish I had done this.

Here’s a picture of our main plot. As is obvious, it’s pretty hard to fight the fireweed, prickly roses, chickweed and grasses that feel at home here.

The rows aren’t straight, but I don’t mind. Most of the plants (more on exceptions later) were put in during the Memorial Day weekend (the last weekend in May), or the one after. This is the traditional planting (or transplanting) time in interior Alaska.

Quickly what I remember from last year (2011). We had, in the same three rows:

12 bok choy plants - great success, we were drowning in bok choy
butter bib lettuce (4 or 8 plants, can’t remember) - excellent
brussels sprouts - grew like mad, developed wonderful little cabbages, but all 6 plants were eaten by a moose just when we wanted to harvest them
broccoli - was eaten by Black Bunny (a tame run-away domestic rabbit that had elected to live on the property during the summer of 2011; I still miss him) and his little snowshoe hare friend
peas - ditto
spinach - ditto
carrots from seeds (can’t remember which) - nice success, small, but tasty
shallots - ditto
eggplant - didn’t grow
zucchini - flowered repeatedly but seemed to drown in rain
some kind of pepper - developed one tiny stunted fruit
tomatoes: 1 Roma, which didn’t develop any fruit. 1Siletz, which I understand was developed in Oregon for short growing seasons. We first thought this one was a bust, too, but when the season threatened to end, this poor plant started cranking out fruit like crazy. We ended up with several pounds of severely green tomatoes, which I transformed into a tasty green salsa. The Siletz plant was a slightly surprising half-success.

I may have forgotten some plants. All the transplants came from Holm Town Nursery. We also had a mint plant, several Italian parsleys and some dill in the very shady bed next to the house entrance. None of them was very happy there but we got at least some herbal leaves from them.

So now on to this year. I had put it into my head to grow potatoes, so I got three pounds of seed potatoes from Homegrown Market. They nearly fill up the left row — at the back are German Butterball, and in front two different red-skinned varieties the names of which I may fill in later (they are on plant labels, but it’s raining now). I don’t know what’s going on beneath the surface, but the plants themselves (all 31 or so of them!) are clearly quite happy. At the front of the row, a lonesome and not too happy zucchini plant, which nonetheless is just preparing to flower.

In the middle row, from front to back:

Another squash plant (not originally planted here in May - see below)
2 kohlrabi plants from Calypso Farm (where we are also members of the CSA) - doing fine so far
2 bok choy plants from Calypso; to our surprise we realized last weekend that they have bolted! The leaves still taste good. I originally wanted to plant a sixpack from Holm Town Nursery, but forgot to add them to my purchases in May.
Originally 4 butter bib lettuces, 2 seem to be surviving
Carrots from seeds - need thinning soon
6 brussels sprouts from Holm Town - doing great
a sorrel, which was part of the Calypso herb pack (more on that later)

And finally on the right, the following were planted originally:

6 Swiss chard (Holm Town) - 4 are doing great, one more may be surviving
6 broccoli (Holm Town) - doing good so far
two different kinds of snow peas from seeds I bought at Safeway (their Organics house brand and another big brand)

The surprise so far was the bolted bok choy and the loss of two heads of butter bib lettuce. So yesterday I went back to Holm Town Nursery to see if they had any more of their bok choy, which had done so well last year. Well, they had a tray full - all bolted. What they did have was a “buy two, get one free” offer on transplants. So I came home with a sixpack of red cabbage, a sixpack of something called “Chinese cabbage” (the closest I could find to bok choy) and another summer squash plant, just starting to flower, to help out pollinating the zucchini. These went in gaps and at the ends of the middle and right rows.

Now to what I call the “overflow garden” - plants in collected pots and other odd receptacles.

The front four containers and the big cut-open tire planter contain the rest of the herbs I got from Calypso. A bit of a mixed bag - none of the basil plants seems to be developing and even the flat and curly parsley aren’t very happy. The thyme, majoram, sage etc. are doing a lot better.

The other six containers, starting and ending with the clay planters, clockwise, contain:

arugula I sowed on a whim only two weeks ago
more basil (not to bad, this one)
more herbs (summer/winter savory and… mace?)
shallots (some didn’t come up)
leeks (from Calypso)
more peas from seeds

Well, a month ago the overflow garden looked like this:

We’ll see what becomes of it.

Last, tomatoes! I got one plant (Polar Big?) from Calypso and two (Siletz and Polar Star) from Holm Town. Can you see them?

I thought I’d use the odd tire planters that the previous owner of the house appears to have used for flowers. They should keep the warmth in better than the raised row. None of the tomatoes looks spectacular, but they all have flowers and/or green fruit in development. I’m coming to the conclusion that growing tomatoes here is hard, at least outside a greenhouse.

This is not quite all. Melinda has a bunch of strawberry plants in a hanging basket. The front bed contains an orange mint, very stunted lemon balm, red sage and some more peas etc. And then there’s a native gooseberry bush in its planter, which is full of berries but looks very exhausted. We’ll see.

Of ebooks and bookstores

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:59:13 -0900

In 2011 I got an ebook reader. I also moved from a European capital city to a small place in a different country, and now seem to be more attentive to the institutions that make a difference to one’s quality of life. (*) Two of the places I care about are Gulliver’s Books up here in Fairbanks, and Burlingham Books, the bookstore my friend Ann Burlingham opened a few years ago in her hometown, Perry, in the state of New York.

When I had surgery last summer, Melinda got me a black-and-white Nook reader that Barnes & Noble just had come out with. I picked this model to compare with Melinda’s own Kindle, and because B&N looked somewhat more like the underdog compared with the Amazon juggernaut. The Nook, but not the Kindle, has the ability of displaying ebooks in epub format that are locked down with Adobe’s digital rights management (DRM) software, such as books sold through other stores than B&N or lent from libraries.

The other day at Gulliver’s Books, there were posters all over the store inviting customers to buy ebooks via the Gulliver’s Books website. The idea I could circumvent the Barnes & Noble lock-in and funnel some of my ebook money back to independent businesses was both intriguing and appealing, so I checked it out. Turnes out, both Gulliver’s and Burlingham Books offer this service, in an identical way: via a Google eBooks store. Here is how buying an electronic book for your Nook from your independent brick-and-mortar bookseller’s website works in practice:

Use the “Search Google eBooks” function on the bookstore’s web site. The integration is pretty smooth, including a shopping cart functionality. Prices appear to be identical with B & N, on the books I checked.
After hitting the Checkout button, log in via your Google account. The actual buying/online pay module is clearly provided by Google.
Once you’re done, there will be a link to access your Google eBooks — more or less well integrated with your local bookstore’s site — or you can go to Google Books directly and find it there, either to read online or download.
Hitting the Download button, you get an .acsm file. It won’t be readable on your ebook reader. Reading the book offline requires Adobe Digital Edititons.
If this is the first time you’re using the Adobe software, you have to download and install it, create an Adobe ID, and also register your ebook reader.
Now you can open the .acsm file in Adobe Digital Editions, which is at the same time an offline reader, simple books database and digital rights management application. ADE will download the book itself in epub format and allow you to read it or drag it onto the reader.
Voilà, you have the same HarperCollins (or whatever) ebook on your Nook that you would have bought from Barnes & Noble.

Phew! No question, this is a lot of steps, and I went wrong twice the first time round. However, and that’s the important part, it’s not quite prohibitively complicated. Once you’ve got ADE installed, it’s there. You may not want anything to do with any of this terrible DRM software, but this would mean, currently, no ebook reader. (Also, I need it for library books anyway.) ADE is clunky, for example by not letting you eject the Nook without closing the software, but it’s still no show-stopper. I dislike having nearly all my online activities go through Google, but this is a small extra price to pay, and unlike Barnes & Noble, Google hasn’t tricked me into giving up my VISA card number, so at least I have a small measure of control. Also, with all due respect, I’d rather trust Google to implement online payment than my local independent bookstore.

The bottom line is: If I’m buying ebooks from my computer where everything is installed, the complexity is tolerable: about the same as any online purchase via a clean interface, and with near-instant gratification. Given how much I dislike being locked into the big chain store for ebooks, this is worth it for me.

I’ll still use B&N - when I’m at an airport connected via some free wifi, the convenience (and likely even security) of buying right from the Nook, with three stabs of my finger, is just too great. It would be helpful if the requirement to go through your home computer could be dropped — “buy your ebook here” kiosks in local bookstores, with a USB interface to plug in your Nook, for example.

Ebooks are apparently up to 8% of book sales in the US. In France or Germany, they’re still below 1%, but there’ll be a growth in market share over the next year or two. The UK should be somewhere in-between. There is a lot I like about reading some some type of books this way, in particular at the cheap end of the market - paperbacks and classics. I’ve been reading a little bit more and enjoying it. There’s also a lot I could write about what I dislike about ebooks. I don’t want them to take over, but feel they’re here to stay. And the last three I bought came from independent bookstores.

(*) Not that the inhabitants of large cities shouldn’t care about their small stores and neighborhood institutions — obviously they should, and if they don’t it’s not something to be proud of. But it’s a lot easier to feel that someone’s commercial success depends on you, personally, in a small community.

Risks and side effects

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 10:41:45 -0900

This very well-done banner comes to me from Facebook, via my friend Bernhard Rohrer, but just sharing it there would have left my predominantly non-German-speaking friends in the lurch or required a descriptive text too long for that platform.

The reference is this: When it became legal for over-the-counter drugs to be be advertised on TV and the radio in Germany, any ad had to come with a disclaimer, the canonical text of which is “Zu Risiken und Nebenwirkungen lesen Sie die Packungsbeilage und fragen Sie Ihren Arzt oder Apotheker,” translation: “Concerning risks and side effects please read the information leaflet and ask your physician or pharmacist.” The sentence has become somewhat of a catchphrase in German because of the comical effect of the typically accelerated delivery of this ubiquitous admonishment — and, I imagine, a still present feeling that advertising for drugs is not unproblematic.

As for the image, the text, in English, would be “Concerning risks and side effects of Nazi rallys please read a history book or ask your grandparents.”

(This post was brought to you by the Department of Dubious End-of-Year Resolutions.)

On GRE prep books and standardized tests

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:18:00 -0800

Last Friday’s jaunt into town included a stop at the Fairbanks Barnes & Noble store for browsing and (mediocre) Starbucks coffee. This is a large store that, unlike the independent Gulliver’s Books, looms next to a Sportsman’s Warehouse in a strip mall at the edge of town. Next to it: Home Depot and Walmart.

I’ve often been to Gulliver’s: the coffee’s not much better, unfortunately, but they have a lovely used book section, a selection of local interest books, and are able to give fairly competent advice. But this is a small place, and for all its faults, B&N has armchairs, reading locals, wifi and an artificial gas fireplace. Asking the information desk for help — no copy of Dan O’Neill’s Firecracker Boys — was not without pain, but I walked out with a stack of book-shaped and related objects, among which the latest McGraw-Hill GRE test prep workbook, for the standardized test that is required for enrolling in formal graduate study in the US and Canada.

The first thing I learnt is that this very month they’re changing the test format. Also, scores won’t be on the 400-to-800-in-increments-of-10 but on a new 130-to-170-in-increments-of-1 scale. Whatever. Tasks are mostly multiple choice, and some look like this:

Before I forget: whatever you do, don’t buy this book. It is riddled with errors badly enough for me to go on Amazon and write my first-ever book review, giving it two stars and employing the phrase “not entirely worthless”. Linguists should be warned that the “grammar” review section is on par with the bottom drawer of advice literature. I remembered McGraw-Hill as a serious academic publisher, so this was a disappointment.

This GRE business isn’t of any urgency for me. The idea of adding, belatedly, some of the academic qualifications that I didn’t get when in my 20s has come up lately. My new work situation at UAF would open opportunities, but we’re at the “potential” and “maybe” stage. Nonetheless, it is good to know what formal hurdles there would be, and this GRE test thing is one of them.

It doesn’t look insurmountable. Being well-oiled in elementary and middle-school level math and figuring out how US kids are taught to write essays seem to be two of the keys. The latter should be a lot easier than wrapping my head around the French dissertation format: the memory still makes me shudder, but I find the variation of essay styles across cultural areas quite fascinating. (“Your essay should start out with a clear statement of your position on the issue. There should be no doubt in the reader’s mind about which side you are on from the beginning of your essay” says the book — definitely not how I learnt it in Germany, but sure, if you want me to…)

As for the language part, I hope the image above is representative of shoddy prep material rather than of the test. But what really struck me was the mediocre quality of the texts underlying the reading comprehension tasks — an area where I don’t expect the real test to be any better.

Which brings me to standardized testing. It’s something that we Europeans tend to turn our nose up at, and I should say not entirely fairly: setting equitable criteria for evaluation of outcome in a heterogeneous education system is a hard nut to crack, and such tests do help tease out some students that would otherwise be given less opportunity than they should.

But this result comes with a price to pay: a higher one in language/humanities subjects, which are harder to shoehorn into multiple-choice questions than math. Still, does it have to be that bad? Any widely used test will set the incentive to prepare for it (duh!), but to expose kids to endless stacks of insipid 200 word texts that point out two odd things about flamingoes or argue on the most superficial level against government-sponsored health care or are otherwise full of the most irrelevant crappy consumerist chit-chat can’t be good for their critical faculties. After only a few hours I yearned for something more gritty, like two pages from Gulliver’s Travels, or some poem or other, or simply — it doesn’t have to be HARD, just INTERESTING — an extract from The Phantom Tollbooth (a wonderful book I read while in the hospital).

More Alaskan fauna & flora

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:04:57 -0800

A quick continuation of my previous post on the animals that I see on my walks and rides through the neighbourhood.

The vegetation is dominated by boreal forest (taiga), and late summer and autumn bring out the mushrooms and berries. Of the former there is a confusing variety, which either deserves a post of its own or a lot more study, or both. Suffice it to say that early in the season, Quaking Aspen Boletes (Leccinum aurantiacum - Espenrotkappen in German) were plentiful. They should be edible, but I’ve seen reports of stomach upsets caused by Leccinum mushrooms and would not use them before having gone out with an experienced local. Berries are a different matter. I seem to have missed the blueberry season, but the next wave of berries is just rolling in. Highbush Cranberries, genus Viburnum, aren’t cranberries at all. Many texts put them with the Honeysuckles (DE: Geißblattgewächse), but there seems to have been a recent reshuffling of classification. Apparently, there are three very similar shrubs of unequal culinary value, but the ones here taste lovely, though they are acidic and have a rather large pit. As for Lowbush Cranberries, these are called Lingonberries elsewhere, and to my delight are turning out to be the same species as the German Preiselbeere (Vaccinium vitis-idaea).

As for animals, Dark-eyed Juncos are all over the place, and I either saw another type of sparrow the other day or a juvenile Junco. They intermingle with Black-capped Chickadees and Orange-crowned warblers. The Sandhill Cranes are already preparing to leave, and there’s a Crane Festival at the Creamer’s Field Migratory Wildfowl Refuge this weekend. Seeing a Sandhill Crane stalk along our road and take off right in front of me was a highlight of my morning recently.

New bird sightings:

While fishing with Melinda at the Chena River west fork, we saw an American Dipper (DE: Grauwasseramsel), a beautiful aquatic thrush-sized grey bird.
Yesterday out at the 48 mile pond on Chena Hot Springs Road, two ducks that I believe to be Lesser Scaups.

Indeed, yesterday offered a high point of the last months’ wildlife sightings, up there with the caribou that circled my co-workers and me when out in the field on the tundra of the Arctic North Slope: Two moose cows that we could watch for many minutes, feeding on the other side of a pond, swimming across it and then making their way along the edge of a second pond. For odd reasons (read: Facebook), we named them Merriam and Webster. I only had my phone camera and it was getting dark, so here’s a terrible “find the moose” (that’s plural) picture:

Europe to Alaska: roads

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 17:24:00 -0800

This is one of the promised instalments of my impressions moving to the Alaskan Interior after 15 years living in European capitals. Today: Roads.

Roads were on my mind on my very first visit to Alaska. The last leg of my long itinerary left Anchorage and its agglomeration (population approx. 375,000) on a night of October 2009. I had a window seat, looked down, and saw nothing. Occasionally, a patch of light, then darkness again for long stretches. When Fairbanks (population 50,000, counting the urban area) showed up, it looked remote and isolated, despite quickly revealing itself as a modern and reassuringly ordinary city. With regular roads like any other.

The fact is, there aren’t that many roads in Alaska. Take a look at an online road map:

Apart from the streets in built-up or residential areas, that’s basically it. And if you scroll west and north on the live map, you’ll see a large number of places with no roads connecting them to anywhere: I have made people smile with the (slightly wrong) statement that there’s typically either no road or one road going to any given place in Alaska.

The concept of being off the road system was new to me and still slightly boggles my mind. It is quite ubiquitous. Walmart (of all places!) has a special counter to arrange air shipping to what is called without irony the Bush (usually upper case). While many Bush communities may only have a few hundred inhabitants, there’s a good number of small towns in the region of 3000-8000. Of course the state capital, Juneau in the far south-east, isn’t on the road system either, though for slightly different geographical reasons. That’s a lot of people.

I have the privilege of occasionally travelling to Barrow for work, which is the northernmost settlement in the US and the seat of the North Slope Borough and its school district, has a wonderful public library, medical services, a small post-secondary college, a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant. Barrow is also a largely Native (Iñupiat) community that practices whaling and hunting (seal, caribou), and artistic traditions. And people have cars there — private pickup trucks, police patrol cars and even yellow school buses. So where do these come from?

First answer: they are brought in by barge. One thing that’s obvious from the map is that most off-the-road-system communities are either located along the coast or along the major rivers. This means snow machine traffic is possible in winter and boats can access the communities in the summer. But surprisingly this is not the only answer. When one of my Barrow co-workers got a new truck last March, a group of three drove over the sea ice and frozen tundra over to Prudhoe Bay, where they could catch the Dalton Highway towards Fairbanks: a trip of something like 24h one way. The Toyota Tacoma pickup truck was bought at a dealership and driven back up. A regular temporary ice road materializes every winter, overseen in some fashion I’m unclear on by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency), which declares the road closed every spring as soon as the tundra has melted too much.

Easy to imagine how glad the locals are that Amazon, for example, delivers to these localities, though anything beyond book-sized parcels is a problem anywhere in Alaska, even in the large cities.

Another way at looking at the road system is to consider the border between Alaska and Canada. It is roughly 2500 km / 1500 miles long. Number of road crossings? Have a look at the road map. Yes: four. Two of them are in the extreme south-east, and one is closed in the winter, and regularly at other times for reasons such as flooding or earth slides.

Of course I didn’t know any of this before I started visiting, but back in 2009 I expected roads to be rough. Sure enough, some of the highways have a reputation of not being for beginners, and residential streets outside city centers are usually unpaved. But others are perfectly fine.

As for “our” road, Chena Hot Springs Road, which leaves Fairbanks to the east, Melinda initially mentioned “frost heaves”, something I was unfamiliar with, but I expected rough roads. To my surprise CHSR was in a far better shape than most roads along the outskirts of London, where potholes are legendary. Indeed, having seen my first Alaskan spring and summer, I’m highly impressed with the speed and planning of the road crews that take care of the yearly maintenance. Given the demands of climate, budget and the short work season, tradeoffs are inevitable and may be controversial (and I wish they’d use less chipseal), but I think the authorities are overall doing an impressive job maintaining the roadways.

London riots from afar

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 22:37:00 -0800

Now 6 months and more than 6000 km away from London, I still feel as if I should be competent to have something intelligent to offer to those of my friends who ask the question what to think of the events. Thing is, after being away for the weekend, I only found the news this morning and haven’t managed to put together my own completely coherent narrative yet. So I’m offering some links and points of view. Make up your own mind.

One thing to note is that a lot politically left-of-center people, friends as well as commentators in the media, who have a dispassionate sociological-sympathetic view on the 80’s riots in England (Liverpool, Brixton and so forth), but condemn today’s in very strong words. The underlying and usually implicit idea seems to be that the kids of the 80s had good reasons to complain or even erupt into street battles, whereas today’s don’t. This is one of those statements that, to me, looks both true and untrue, depending on the angle you look at them. The comparison is a feature in many articles, and BBC has collected a few 1985 vs 2011 quotes.

There is no doubt that the signals from the UK have been preoccupying for those who, like myself, follow the argument that economic inequality and social justice are the linchpin of a society’s wellbeing, at least for the Western post-industrial societies I’m familiar with. That, plus civil liberties. Violence, and even specifically in Haringey (the borough where Tottenham is), was being predicted even before it started (Guardian: Farewell youth clubs, hello street life – and gang warfare). But at the same time I’m having the thought that if we’re depending for peace on youth clubs and places for kids to hang out safely and get through the difficult years (most, after all, will grow up into adults with jobs and responsibilities) then we are just papering over the cracks. When living in London - including in Brixton - it struck me how hard it is, compared to, say, Paris, to be casual friends or acquaintances with people from very different walks of life. There, you meet at the café. (And in Alaska, for that matter, adverse weather conditions in a sparsely populated place draws people together - plus everyone goes fishing). You can’t hold a building together by the wallpaper. Where do people develop commonality?

In the Guardian, Nina Power is the most unspoken one to be sympathetic or at least unsurprised about the riots. She’s in the minority, and the commenters aren’t happy. Some are terribly racist (despite the fact that in Enfield and Edmonton, looting and rioting was done by a white or ethnically mixed crows), and of course many have learnt the lesson of the endless chav mockery and jokes of the recent years. A very small number are at least thoughtful.

I followed the Guardian map, and of course am familiar with some places in South London. The BBC is reporting about Brixton.

Back to the 1980s vs 2011 comparison, I think you can’t equate them, but not because kids today have it so much better than kids in the 80s (they probably don’t), but because the 80s riots have triggered so much debate that it changed the context. There is a feedback loop there. Stuff that was new to the mainstream 25 years ago is now a commonplace argument, or even a cliché. And expectations have shifted.

The strongest condemnation of the violence, to me, comes from those who’ve been working at making life better in the working-class neighbourhoods. Especially private individuals who happen to live there, like the Jamaican woman whose video was posted. Or those who are trying to run a business there (and not one that caters only to the resident yuppies). Brixton Cycles (mentioned above) is a worker’s cooperative. They do sell expensive bikes to yuppie commuters, but also have tons of local kids in the store - there’s a BMX track next door. Plus they’re major bike geeks. Quite a few of the businesses that got looted cater to the locals. The Curry’s in Brixton does, too.

While I’m not naive enough to think that the 80’s rioters exercised political action in a pureness of purpose, today’s “getting free stuff” calls make for a sorry picture. Mobs are terrifying and speak to parts of human nature I don’t completely understand. It’s the depoliticised, consumerist nature of the calls to action (some details in London riots: how BlackBerry Messenger played a key role), and of course the disregard for families living in buildings set on fire, that makes me recoil.

Then, of course, a voice in me wonders why you would expect anything else from disaffected youths who have been taught and learnt the consumerism message much better than the citizenship message.

This blog has moved to the Subarctic. Plus, there are no Eichelhäher in Alaska.

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 09:19:00 -0800

It’s coming up to six months that I’ve left Europe and moved to Fairbanks, Alaska. The times have been frantic, though it feels as if I’ve lived here for much longer already. I have a car, a job, a commute, two bikes, neighbours and colleagues. Melinda and I have taken up fishing and gardening. We share the place with her team of Siberian Huskies, live around moose and foxes and innumerable birds, and are being visited by a very social escaped pet rabbit who lives somewhere under the guest cabin. There has been no shortage of new-to-me experiences, most of which are working out very well, and we’ll see that the others will fall into place, too.

Losing, or rather giving up - again - a social environment for a quite radically different one, leaving 15 years of life in European capitals behind, and returning to science and research is raising questions about what communities and conversations I want to be part of. I contemplated putting the new experiences into short but minimally developed posts, longer than Facebook updates. This hasn’t happened, but my notes are still fresh.

So to put some pressure on myself, here, in no particular order, is a list of topics in a yet-to-be-written series of “Europe to Alaska” posts:

Weather and seasons
Charismatic megafauna
Radio
Taxes
US healthcare: first contact
The road system
Cars and driving
Cycling
Meet the Arctic
Food and food shopping
Consumption and consumerism

Now I really dislike navel-gazing blog posts about the future of one’s blogging about one’s blog. So to change topics, here’s something for those who like birds. Those who are indifferent have to wait for the next instalment.

I didn’t know I liked birds. They were part of the environment, nearly always charming and welcome, but no more than that. If you live in Western Europe, migratory birds will do their migratory thing between Europe/Central Asia and Africa. This means that even in relatively similar climates, American birds will be different species from their European counterparts. Similarities are superficial, and only few of the birds I’m used to having around show up over here. No Amsel (or rather, different kinds of Blackbird). No Eichelhäher (they call it “Eurasian Jay”, but really no one here has even heard of it). No Rotkehlchen.

So I acquired a pair of binoculars and started keeping track. Here’s my incomplete bird list, Alaska version. And an opportunity to mention the wonderful resource the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has created.

At home (in Two Rivers):

American Robin (not at all like the European Robin (DE: Rotkehlchen) — the American Robin is a thrush (DE: Drossel), a relative of the Blackbird (DE: Amsel), and behaves like one)
Black-capped Chickadee
Boreal Chickadee
Dark-eyed Junco (“Oregon” subspecies)
Gray Jay
Orange-crowned Warbler
Raven
Sandhill Crane
Spruce Grouse (summer and winter)
Varied Thrush
some other species of Sparrows, not sure which

Not far from home:

Bald Eagle
possibly a Golden Eagle, but likely a juvenile Bald Eagle
a smaller bird of prey, maybe an American Kestrel
Tree Swallow
a wading bird, possibly the Lesser Yellowlegs
Ducks, in particular: Common Goldeneye (or maybe Barrow’s Goldeneye), possibly a Bufflehead, Black or White-winged Scoter, Green-winged Teal, and of course Mallard
Trumpeter Swan
Tons of gulls, Mew and others
some pigeons

Up in the Arctic (North Slope of Alaska):

Snow Bunting
Greater White-fronted Goose (I think)
some sort of Jaeger, possibly a Long-tailed Jaeger
more Gulls, some of them Glaucous
a type of teeny-tiny wading bird, possibly a Least Sandpiper or a Semipalmated Sandpiper
a lot more small birds and waterfowl, but not enough time to look closely

And around the Interior, previously during the cold seasons:

American Three-toed Woodpecker (dead, on our porch)
Northern Hawk Owl (in Denali National Park)
Pine Grosbeak

At the embassy

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 15:51:00 -0900

So the visa interview at the US embassy in London is behind me.

Short version: Everything went smoothly and my visa was granted - yay! I’ll get my passport (with visa inside) and paperwork back via courier service within a week or so.

Long version: I found it good to read of other people’s experiences, so here is mine.

My appointment was for the late morning (10:30 am), and the instructions had many warnings against arriving more than 30 min before the set time. Therefore, I arrived with 10-15 min to spare, only to find at least 30-45 min worth of queue labeled “visa” in front of the building. Yikes! There had also been warnings not to arrive more than 30 min late, otherwise you wouldn’t be seen by the consular officer. After briefly panicking a little bit, I realised there wasn’t much I could do at this stage, calmed down and went with the flow.

The queue moved jerkily. There was a first paper-checking station, and then a second person who would inspect the paperwork again and direct US citizens to an entry pavilion to the left and the bulk of us visa applicants to an identical pavilion on to the right. No electronic devices were allowed, so I had come with no way to track time. I should have brought a regular wrist watch, which was allowed. The irregular movement of the queue was partly caused by people being sent back because of paperwork not checking out, people with too bulky bags that required inspecting, mobile phones and other forbidden items being discovered, fractious children that needed to be caught, and sometimes no visible reason at all. Once arrived at the front, we were ushered in sets of four into the entry pavilion, where we underwent an airport-TSA-like inspection. Except that the airport experience is smoother. There was a lot of “step over here now, please”, “is this your bag?”, “no, don’t take it, please step over HERE now” and so forth. Our group of four was only allowed to leave the pavilion on the other side of the fence once everyone had passed muster, and one person’s metal make-up case caused another small wait.

From there everything went as expected: Walk around the side of the building to the entrance desk, get checked in via the barcode on the appointment letter, receive several copies of your number, sit down in the waiting room and wait. From the screens, it became clear that at least four separate queues were going on: A common one for the initial paperwork collection and fingerprinting at approx. 10 desks along the side of the room, and several queues at desks and offices at the end of a hallway off the main room for the actual interviews. The second wait seemed longer, but that was maybe because the book I had brought was one I had already read (dang!), or because the screens needed to be watched, as several queues were serving numbers that had come in after mine.

The interview itself was short - 2 min maximum. The consular officer, a friendly and businesslike woman, asked me to describe the project I would be working on and how it was funded. She even made a remark that doing atmospheric research in the Arctic sounded cool, or cold, all the while typing what I was saying. My visa is a J-1 “research scholar” visa of the type usually issued to postdocs and doctoral students, so that led to some questions about my professional path. The only slightly dicey question was about what I planned to do after the project finished, and I said that as this was a return to research after 6 years in commercial software, I couldn’t say with certainty, but planned to stay in research — which is completely true. There were no questions about my family, living arrangements or personal funds.

After I was told “the visa is granted”, there was a last step to drop off a tracking sheet with my address at the courier service (and pay the fee). All the paperwork stayed at the embassy and will be sent to me once the visa is affixed into my passport.

The entire process took a little over 3h.

I’m on my way!

Calling all London/UK friends

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 07:17:44 -0900

2010 was a year heavy in travelling for me, which is likely the main reason for my complete lack of planning any trips over the end-of-year holidays. There’s also a lot going on in the background, which may have contributed as well. Originally I thought of the Continent, or at least an attractive place within the British Isles, but with the current travel chaos, even the latter plan sounds like too much of a hassle.

So I am trying to come up with some plans, which it would be nice to share. I wonder if there are other people stranded in London with no Christmas plans who’d like to meet up for something along the lines of:

Going to the Tate, or the Natural History Museum, or any other Place Of High Culture
Visiting Kew Gardens (they have a winter close-up photo competition by the way)
Watching the Dr Who special (I don’t have a TV set, though)
Any other event that is going on

Work-wise I’m on call for emergencies for the next two days, and then off Mon and Tue. Any takers, send me a message or leave a comment.

Translation gone awry. I think.

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:50:50 -0800

So I was watching The Buggles’ 2004 performance of Video Killed the Radio Star on Youtube, and wanted to translate one of the comments, which is in Japanese:

これだと「前橋が見えてきたら自慰」とは聞こえないな。
「今井毎年2枚か」は聞こえるけど。

Google Translate suggests:

This said, “If you begin to see Maebashi masturbation” can not hear.
“Imai every year or two” is sound, though.

I expected something more helpful, TBH.

undefined (undefined)

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 12:09:16 -0900

undefined (undefined):

Anonymous says:

Calme-toi :D J’ai un vague souvenir de l’explication. J’en suis pas sûr du tout mais bon c’est une piste si tu veux chercher un peu…

Je crois qu’ aux USA on ne peut pas ajouter de nouvelles fonctionnalités à un produit gratuitement. Il faut demander quelques dollars pour ça :D

Bon ça explique pas pourquoi c’est si élevé ^^

"Verizon Says It Will Support Google’s Android"

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 14:34:13 -0900

“Verizon Says It Will Support Google’s Android”

- Erick Schonfeld [Doesn’t Google have the cash to support one measly android all by themselves?]

R.I.P. Les Rita Mitsuko

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:28:22 -0900

R.I.P. Les Rita Mitsuko:

Fred Chichin dies, and there’s hardly anything in the English-speaking press.

"Yesterday, a meeting involving participants from Canada and France did not take place: the French..."

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 09:29:00 -0900

“Yesterday, a meeting involving participants from Canada and France did not take place: the French participant thought Thanksgiving was a holiday in Canada and sent a cancellation, whereupon the Canadian thought it was a holiday in France.”

undefined (undefined)

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:30:43 -0800

chrys says:

I am actually seeing some beginnings of acceptability of some SMS-style short forms in business writing. Both my manager (late thirties, French, title of VP) and his manager (late fourties, American, title of SVP & GM for Europe) use “u” and “ur” in internal email, even of a serious nature. It’ll be interesting to see where this all goes.

(via coComments related to chrys)

Contemporary living

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:07:18 -0800

: is that a screenshot?
: heh, no :) it's outside my apartement :)

Keywords (No AIDS Love Only)

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 13:54:54 -0800

chrys says:

As a child growing up in Northern Bavaria, I learned about föhn in elementary school. I wasn’t very attuned to atmospheric phenomena, but the adults around me regularly attributed bouts of headache to föhn. Also, for a German-speaking child it’s an intriguing word: it also designates a hand-held hair-dryer.

(via coComments related to chrys)