A walking carnival ride

WORKING ON these old photographs tends to produce in me mixed emotions, but there's no denying that it can get me down. Too much loss. So, fortunately, yesterday, I attended a very nice family get-together, and it made me conscious of present circumstances about which I can be very glad.

More specifically, I'm happy to be a part of the lives of my niece and nephew. They're like pups or kittens, full of energy, full of fun. They seem to think that I'm a walking carnival ride, Mr. Toad's wild Uncle.

1. Most of these photos are "details" from much larger photographs taken by my father more than thirty-five years ago. At the time of this shot, Fanny and I were in High School, and my little brother, at right, had just turned six. We're somewhere in the Sierra Nevada.

2. The second photo reveals how close I was to my littlest brother back then. We used to sing to Beatles records together—Help was a favorite. Nowadays, such affection as is revealed in the photo is never seen between us, although it is manifest and abundant between me and his two wonderful kids. I call 'em weasels.

Sometimes, when I'm singing or playing with young Adam, age three, I'm conscious that I had precisely the same relationship with my little brother, their "papa," a long time ago. I'm determined not to allow the relationship to become less close. But who knows.

3. Here we are near El Morro. Like my hair? Salt water does that.

4. This shot includes Fanny's fiancé, Davey-Doo, an engineer, at left. He was very successful in his field. Made big bucks up in Silicon Valley.

A few years ago, he flew his super-duper stunt aircraft straight into the ground. Fanny tells me that his body was never found. She says things like that, and then, for a split second, she awaits a reaction. She'll deny it.

People are complex.

5/6. My new car. Not really new, but new for me. I get a car every ten or twenty years.

This one looks damned good, if you ask me. The design team for the Chrysler 300 was led by a Haitian/Canadian named Ralph Gilles (pronounced "Jeel").

Way to go, RG.

I gave Adam and Sarah a ride in the thing yesterday, and, in the back seat, they squealed and rocked to the music: Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" and The Damned's "New Rose."

I think Sarah's gonna become a dancer, like her mom. She was doing The Monkey back there, that little weasel.

Dispatch #5

•
TOMORROW the poets. Today lots of paper and a little worry. We know now how it all comes together in the end somehow.

No more water to boil after all. The bear still prowls Apache Court.

another poem:

The Snakeskin by Brenda Hillman

—And the world bent into the wide,
the field of beige and mild forevers
but the snake wanted something else;

I found its skin of stretchy diamonds
and picked it up, so I could keep
one of the two selves. The skin had eyes and the eyes

had skin, all papery before and afterward,
a little cellophane with dirt
around the rim—that’s good;

there had been time for it to be one thing
before the world behind the world
called the snake, and the snake went —

Board meeting Monday

I'M TOLD that, yesterday, the SOCCCD Board of Trustees held a special meeting. I'm also told that the meeting concerned the evaluation of the Chancellor.

My sources tell me that the board has renewed, or is contemplating renewing, Mathur's contract and granting him valuable cash prizes to boot. (See added agenda item below.)

The agenda outline for Monday's meeting is now available online. Check it out. Or not.

Among "general action items" listed on the outline are:

5.4 SOCCCD: Academic Personnel Actions

Approve New Personnel Appointments;
Academic Temporary Part-Time/Substitute Staff;
Additional Compensation: General Fund;
Additional Compensation: Categorical/Non-General Fund;
Administrator Contract Extension Correction;
Leave of Absence; Resignation/Retirement/Conclusion of Employment.

—You'll recall that, immediately prior to last month's meeting, Chancellor Mathur pulled the item concerning approval of Saddleback College faculty stipends. (This occurred without the trustees' knowledge. See Mathurian Shenanigans: Plan C.) This meant that, owing to "questions" that the chancellor suddenly developed just prior to the meeting, affected faculty would not be paid but would instead be compelled to await approval of payment at the July meeting.

Naturally, those instructors became hopping mad. Near as I can tell, they're still hopping mad.


5.2 SOCCCD: Board Policy Revision:

[Accept, for review and study?:]

BP 100: The South Orange County Community College District,
BP 101: Mission,
BP 102: Functions of the Governing Board,
BP 103: Board Membership,
BP 104: Student Member of the Board of Trustees,
BP 105: Organization of the Governing Board,
BP 106: Board Elections,
BP 107: Board Policy and Administrative Regulation,
BP 108: Vacancies of the Board,
BP 109: Board Education,
BP 112: Duties and Responsibilities of the Board of Trustees,
BP 120: Regular Meetings of the Board,
BP 122: Closed Sessions,
BP 124: Special and Emergency Meetings,
BP 126: Quorum and Voting,
BP 128: Agendas,
BP 130: Public Participation at Board Meetings,
BP 132: Speakers,
BP 134: Decorum,
BP 136: Minutes,
BP 138: Recording,
BP 146: Chancellor Succession,
BP 148: Evaluation of the Chancellor,
BP 152: Presentation of Initial Collective Bargaining Proposals,
BP 154: Conflict of Interest,
BP 158: Political Activity,
BP 160: Personal Use of Public Resources,
BP 162: Communications Among Board Members,
BP 164: Board Member Compensation,
BP 166: Health Benefits,
BP 168: Board Member Travel,
BP 172: Board Self Evaluation

P.S. (8:00 p.m.):

At some point today, the following item was added to the posted agenda outline:

5.6 SOCCCD: Chancellor's Contract

Approve contract of employment for Chancellor.

Sick ‘n' tired of subscientific boobulescent ignoramitude

GET A FRIGGIN’ CLUE. Leaving aside those pesky subatomic particles, nature is regular, which is why even NASA scientists manage to aim those expensive rockets and hit their mark over and over again. I mean, rocks, fireballs, and gravitational tugs are pretty damned consistent.

From a scientific point of view, you don’t get to say that things go like this over here, but they go like that over there. The laws of physics don’t morph or stutter or adjust for POV.

Same goes for medical and health phenomena: you don’t get to say, “well, maybe urine therapy doesn’t work for you guys (skeptics), but it definitely works for us guys (true imbibers).” Such talk emerges from the dark (and crowded) cave of subscientific boobulescent ignoramitude (SBI).

I don’t care who’s got it, whether it’s Bill “ET” Richardson or Mike “Nope to Darwin” Huckabee. I’m sick and tired of SBI.

I’ve been telling my students for years that, contrary to popular opinion, taking vitamin C doesn’t prevent or cure colds. I mean, if it did, then that would be the pattern that researchers would find when they give people dollops of vitamin C. But that’s not the pattern they find, OK? That pattern is: take it, don’t take. Coldwise, it’s pretty much a wash.

Case closed.

Yesterday’s Guardian Unlimited (Cold comfort: vitamin C myth exposed) makes the point yet again, only with an even bigger mountain of evidence:

Daily doses of vitamin C do little to protect people from the common cold, scientists revealed today….In a survey of scientific studies spanning more than two decades and including more than 11,000 people, those who took 200mg of vitamin C daily had almost as many colds as those who took no supplements. The vitamin also failed to have a substantial effect on the length and severity of a person's cold.

The supposed cold-combating powers of vitamin C have been hailed since its discovery in the 1930s. …[T]he Nobel laureate Linus Pauling encouraged people to take 1,000mg of the vitamin daily to ward off colds….

However, the latest survey, compiled results from 30 different studies around the world, concluded that only people who were exposed to exceptionally high levels of stress, such as marathon runners, skiers and soldiers on sub-arctic exercises, had fewer colds as a result of taking the vitamin. Among these, a daily supplement of vitamin C reduced the chances of catching a cold by half.

…The review appears in the latest issue of the Cochrane Library, an international organisation that is widely regarded as the most prestigious medical research evaluating authority.

—Like I said, nature is regular. And so, if you give vitamin C to one group and withhold it from another, and, coldwise, no difference emerges, then you’ve gotta wonder about all this Vitamin C malarkey. And if there are shitloads of studies, and they all converge on the same negative finding, then maintaining a belief in the efficacy of Vitamin C (re colds) is no better than believing in ghosts or auras or Iraqi WMD.

“Oh, you silly man! Don’t you understand that truth is an illusion? Truly!”

Oh yeah? Here’s a truth. Rocks are hard. Smash a big one into your iMac and watch what happens.

“Well, really, anything is possible!”

Good. Got that rock yet? Start smashin’ and see what this wacky universe comes up with!

The Guardian article goes on to say:

A separate study recently warned that people who took regular supplements of vitamins A, E and beta-carotene in the hope of living a fitter, longer life were instead at risk of dying younger…[The] study, published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that during 47 trials involving more than 180,000 people, those who took the supplements were at greater risk of dying than those who did not.

UH-OH: SLOPPY LEFTIST SCHOLAR A SYMBOL OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM. This morning’s Inside Higher Ed reports that “The University of Colorado Board of Regents will hold a special meeting July 24 to consider a proposal to fire Ward Churchill, the controversial ethnic studies professor who has been found by faculty committees and the president of the university system to have committed research misconduct.”

Evidently, Churchill has vowed to litigate to keep his job, should he be fired.

That hackneyed Voltaire quotation goes here, I guess (even though Voltaire never actually said it).

MONEY MAKES THE U GO ROUND? This morning’s LA Times (UC regents seek compromise) reports on the U of California’s struggles regarding tobacco research money:

Members of the UC Board of Regents, unable to agree on a proposal to ban tobacco industry money for research, said Wednesday that they would seek a compromise to maintain the university's integrity while protecting academic freedom….

The board is divided between regents who oppose the acceptance of any tobacco funds because of the industry's history of manipulating research and members who believe the university should trust the faculty to decide what grants to accept.

…U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled in [a] case last year that the major American tobacco companies conspired for decades to deceive the public and had manipulated research to make it appear that scientists disagreed on the effects of second-hand smoke. One study she cited was conducted by UCLA researcher James Enstrom.

[Former U.S. Justice Department attorney Sharon] Eubanks urged the regents to ban tobacco funding…"Why would the University of California permit university researchers to accept money from a group of racketeers who intentionally mislead the public?" she asked. More than 20 other universities across the country have banned the acceptance of tobacco research funds. Eubanks predicted that, as a result, the industry will pump increasing amounts of money into UC.

…But most of the board members were not persuaded. Some expressed concern that prohibiting faculty members from accepting funds from one industry could lead to bans on grants from other industries.

Several regents also argued that the board should respect the recommendation of UC's Academic Senate, which voted earlier this year in favor of allowing continued tobacco industry funding of research….

A QUOTATION FOR YOU:

[The] Heisenberg Principle … is applied to very small particles and forces. The parapsychologists borrow … [it], and taking it out of context,... suggest that paranormal demonstrations are best performed when not being too closely observed. Professor John G. Taylor of Kings College, London … named this the "shyness effect,” meaning that wonders preferred to happen when out of sight.

As a magician, I also prefer not to be observed, and the miracles I can produce under that circumstance are prodigious.

—James Randi

Dispatch #4

THUNDERSTORMS TODAY, poets on Saturday, and in between there will be black-eyed peas and red wine.

And there's drinking water to be boiled (don’t ask).

I am surrounded by people who for years now I see each summer. There is always that moment when we measure what the other has lost and gained, what is the same.

a poem:

Meditations at Lagunitas – by Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

In the Sierra Nevada, 1972

I'VE BEEN scanning hundreds of old family photos. Here are a few from 1972.














1. Part of a topographic map used during one of our many two-week backpacking extravaganzas in the California Sierra Nevada. You can see Banner and Ritter Peaks at the bottom/left. One of ‘em’s over 13,000 ft.


2. That’s me below the falls.


3. The next three are what they are. Don’t know where.


4. Mom. People call her "Sierra."


5. More granite for you.


6. I see that my next door neighbor, Randy, was along for this trip. That’s my bro Ron looking like a Prairie Dog at the right. That’s my sister with the hair. Always did have hair.


9. We’re above Lake Edison.


12. My bro Ray.


13. My littlest bro Ron, standing at the precipice.

Dispatch #3

LAST NIGHT, during dinner at the upper house, Pokey, the faithful Portuguese water dog, alerted us to a bear in the lower house, the so-called Annex where we live. It was an adolescent bear, a lumbering rather embarrassed teenager who eventually slunk away. A beautiful creature with a full dark fur coat.