Idyllic Modjeska Canyon

For the Times’ Janet Wilson and other canyon residents, it’s been a rough eight months. Janet gets personal. Check it out: Fire, rain, love, marriage—and an idyllic Modjeska Canyon to intensify it all

Casualty of the October fire.

The view from The Reb's neighborhood.

Still idyllic.

Sunny Girl, prowling in nearby Live Oak Canyon, twenty minutes ago. (All photos: Chunk, except top photo: LA Times.)

A little science for you

.....Here’s a little science for you this morning. A good place to go for science reporting is the British Guardian. This morning’s Guardian tells us that, according to Swedish scientists, Gay men have similar brains to straight women

.....Striking similarities between the brains of gay men and straight women have been discovered by neuroscientists, offering fresh evidence that sexual orientation is hardwired into our neural circuitry.
.....Scans reveal homosexual men and heterosexual women have symmetrical brains, with the right and left hemispheres almost exactly the same size. Conversely, lesbians and straight men have asymmetrical brains, with the right hemisphere significantly larger than the left.
.....Scientists at the prestigious Stockholm Brain Institute in Sweden also found certain brain circuits linked to emotional responses were the same in gay men and straight women.
.....The findings, published tomorrow in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest the biological factors that influence sexual orientation—such as exposure to testosterone in the womb—may also shape the brain's anatomy.
.....The study, led by the neurobiologist Ivanka Savic, builds on previous research that has identified differences in spatial and verbal abilities related to sex and sexual orientation. Tests have found gay men and straight women fare better at certain language tasks, while heterosexual men and lesbians tend to have better spatial awareness.
.....Savic and her colleague Per Linström took MRI brain scans of 90 volunteers who were divided into four groups of similar ages according to whether they were male, female, heterosexual or homosexual. The scans showed the right side of the brain in heterosexual men was typically 2% larger than the left. Lesbians showed a similar asymmetry, with the right hand side of the brain 1% larger than the left.
.....Scans on homosexual men and heterosexual women revealed both sides of the brain were the same size….

• From a couple of days ago (Guardian’s “Bad Science” column): How being swindled can make you feel better

.....…A paper currently in press for the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (available online) addresses this issue explicitly. Participants were given a quiz on American history, with the opportunity to win cash rewards for correct answers and the option to get advice for each question. The 'advice' was simply another student's answers, perfectly likely to be wrong, and the experimenters were quite clear about this.
.....The participants were either offered the advice for free, or they were offered the opportunity to buy it. It was made absolutely clear that the advice was of exactly the same quality, whether it was free or not. Participants were significantly more likely to change their answers in line with advice they had paid for, compared with advice they received for free. We are suckers.
…
.....A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March subjected 82 healthy subjects to painful electric shocks and, in a lengthy and authoritative leaflet, offered them pain relief in the form of a pill which was described as being similar to codeine, but with a faster onset. In fact, it was just a placebo, a pill with no medicine; a sugar pill. The pain relief was significantly stronger when subjects were told the tablet cost $2.50 than when they were told it cost 10c.
.....Even better is a paper published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Volunteers tasted and rated five wines, each individually priced, although in fact there were only three different wines, and two were tasted twice: once labelled at $90 a bottle, and once at $10. The results were clear: cheap wine really does taste better simply because we are told it's expensive….

• From Friday’s What’s New (physicist Bob Park):

.....After 99 years of trying, naturopaths in Minnesota can now call themselves "doctor."
.....That's OK, in Minnesota they call tag-team wrestlers "Governor."

• Listen to the Guardian’s Science Extra podcast from the 16th: MIT chemistry professor Dan Nocera tells Guardian science correspondent Alok Jha why chemistry can solve the energy crisis

Nuggetology

.....Well, it’s that time of the year when newspapers such as the New York Times collect and preserve the nuggets of wisdom dispensed at commencement speeches around the country. Here's some of that nuggetry:

Messages of Exhortation, Counsel and Congratulation:

Jessica Lange
Actress
Sarah Lawrence College

We are living in an America that in the last seven and a half years has waged an unnecessary war, established prison camps, condoned torture, employed corporate armies, eliminated the right of habeas corpus, practiced extraordinary rendition. And believe me, this is only a partial list.
…
Gavin Newsom
Mayor of San Francisco
San Francisco State University

What is the secret of all success? Winston Churchill, he said it was moving from failure to failure with enthusiasm….

Allen Weinstein
Archivist of the United States
Southern Methodist University

Begin with the Salem witchcraft trials of the 1690s. Move forward to the Alien and Sedition Acts of the early Republic, and from there to the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Turn then to the arbitrary political arrests of the First and Second World Wars, the many abuses of the cold war McCarthy era, and from there to the civil liberties climate in our own time. Find your conscience and hold it close.

One of the pivotal connective links from earliest repressive efforts to the present time is the pushback each received from opponents at the time: a phenomenon that the late scholar and United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called the “self-corrective” forces at work within American society.

These forces make difficult any and all efforts to create a thoroughly repressive climate of opinion, even during wars and pre- or post-war red scares. You will not find similar self-corrective societies in great numbers in our time. There are precious few and none as obsessively self-corrective as ours.
…
Bill Nye
Science educator
Harvey Mudd College

When you’re a little over six months into your 31st year, we will probably be over 12 billion — and on our way to 15 billion — humans on earth. Keep in mind also that half of the world’s people have never made a phone call. Their lives are agrarian and rural. Nevertheless, they know our culture and have seen what science and organized technology can do.

I’ve traveled a little, in India, China and Africa. People are walking less and driving more; we’re putting more cars on the road every week. Put roughly: if everyone on earth were to consume, drive, and especially use energy at the prodigious rate that each of us does here in the United States, we would need two more Earths. We don’t have two more Earths. We barely have one.

Clarence Thomas
Supreme Court justice
High Point University

…Most of us would do well to solve our own problems. Often, as most of us know, the real battle is conquering ourselves….

Let me first confess that I am no good at telling people what to think or how to live their lives. As those of us who take responsibility for our lives, and don’t blame others, know only so well, life has a way of humbling, if not humiliating us.

James Fallows
Author
Ursinus College

In the end, we are our habits, so take time developing good ones….

Get in the habit of being happy. We all have problems which we can’t control; what we can control is how we look at them. Get in the habit of being excited. It’s a great big world, with no excuse for being bored. It’s fun to have feuds and enemies — I’ve had my share — but break the habit of nursing grudges.

Here’s one tip: Always write angry letters to your enemies, but never mail them. ... Take every chance to tell your spouse, when you have one, and your children that you love them. When in doubt, phone your mom.
…
Rita Moreno
Actress
Mills College

…I am constantly saddened and dismayed by the way in which we have come to torture the English language. ... College students who use the term “he goes” in place of “he says” and whose sentences are riddled with “you know?” and who cannot complete a sentence without inserting the word “like” at least three times. ... My advice: Stop it this minute.
…
Sandra Day O’Connor
Former Supreme Court justice
Gettysburg College

The only job offer I received in the private sector on my graduation from Stanford Law School many years ago was a job as a legal secretary. So I started my own practice, sharing a small office with another lawyer and a shopping center in a suburb of Phoenix.

Other people who had offices in the small shopping mall repaired TVs, cleaned clothes or sold groceries. It was not a high rent district. I got walk-in business. People came in to see me about grocery bills they couldn’t collect, landlord-tenant problems and other every day matters not usually considered by the United States Supreme Court.

But I always did the very best I could with what I had. I learned about how the law affects the average citizen, and how a lawyer can help solve day-to-day problems.…

P.S.: Re Fogeys, listen up!: Stay in the know. Be hip.

My young friend Jason, evidently overcome with pity over my manifest fogeytude (his email was entitled, "Stay in the know—be hip"), sent me a list of more contemporary artists/songs. Here's four on his list, all videos. I especially liked the first one. Some kind of New York band. Never heard of 'em.

MGMT - "Time To Pretend" Music Video
Autolux - Turnstile Blues
Portishead - Machine Gun: Video
CSS - Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex

Jason also listed videos from these bands: Datarock, Cold War Kids, M.I.A. (the Brit), Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Spoon, Deathcab for Cutie, Band of Horses, M83, and Placebo.

A reader likes Jason's list, but adds: ...where's The Arcade Fire? They're surely amongst the most important bands of the decade and only a very small number of bands can try to come close to that crisp orchestral sound (+ they're fantastic live). Listen to Rebellion, Intervention or Haiti and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Fogeys, listen up! That's right, I mean you!

.....Feelin’ old? Continually weirded out because, in class, you refer to, oh, the Gulf War (“You mean the one we're in now?”), or, say, the Velvet Underground ("Never heard of 'em")—and students just stare at you like carps?
.....I know just how you feel. I get carped all the time. But look at the matter from the students' POV....
.....Here are some more-or-less contemporary bands (if 2006 is contemporary!) with some great music that, just maybe, you be missin’ out on cuz, like me, you just stopped keepin' up a long time ago. (Pace those who are way ahead of me on this.) Do check ‘em out. I think some of our students listen to this stuff. Sure hope so. It's great when you can appreciate the same things as your students.

1. Rilo Kiley: “Portions for Foxes”
.....A terrific pop song with some seriously contemporary attitude (relative to old folks like me). I'm not judgin' it. Lyrics.
(Live, 10/5/07.)



2. My Morning Jacket: “Wordless Chorus”
.....These guys make beautiful music. The lyrics are, oh, highly personal, I guess. These youngsters are as self-indulgent as we were! Lyrics.
(Live with Boston Pops, 6/9/06.)



3. Clap your hands, say Yeah: “The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth”
.....A wildly terrific rock song from a couple of years ago. The singer is, well, distinctive, but no more so than, say, Dylan was. Again, the lyrics seem, um, highly personal, I guess. I'm goin' with it! Lyrics.
(Live, 12/27/06.)



4. Jack White
.....Just in case you didn't know it, Jack White (of the White Stripes) is one of the towering figures of the current era, pop-musically speaking. Really. Check out Black Math, Ball and Biscuit, Seven Nation Army, Hotel Yorba (2004), and The Raconteurs (2008). The video with Loretta Lynn (below) is mind-blowing. You won't believe your eyes and ears.

Jack White and Loretta Lynn, 5/31/06


5. Leslie Feist: "Secret Heart" (8/9/07)
.....I think this gal is considered uncool by many, maybe because she's Canadian. (Technically, I'm one, too.) Or maybe it's her tendency to get jazzy. Worst of all, I guess, is that commercial she made for Apple ("one, two, three, four"). I don't care. Sometimes (see the video below), she's just amazing.

Song for a Summer Day: If I Had a Boat

Some people wondered what Julia Roberts saw in Lyle Lovett. I never did. I always knew.

Now, sing along, won't you?

If I had a boat
I'd go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat

If I were Roy Rogers
I'd sure enough be single
I couldn't bring myself to marrying old Dale
It'd just be me and trigger
We'd go riding through them movies
Then we'd buy a boat and on the sea we'd sail

(chorus)

The mystery masked man was smart
He got himself a Tonto
'Cause Tonto did the dirty work for free
But Tonto he was smarter
And one day said kemo sabe
Kiss my ass I bought a boat
I'm going out to sea

(chorus)

And if I were like lightning
I wouldn't need no sneakers
I'd come and go wherever I would please
And I'd scare 'em by the shade tree
And I'd scare 'em by the light pole
But I would not scare my pony on my boat out on the sea

And if I had a boat
I'd go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat

OC Weekly consults REBEL GIRL

In today’s OC Weekly:
Lisa Alvarez’s Summer Reading List: Cowboy gunplay, High Sierra poetry, the Inland Empire and more!:

Since Oakley Hall passed away, I’ve consoled myself by reaching again for his books. Hall published more than 20 novels in a half-century writing life, most set in the West. Hall co-founded UC Irvine’s master’s-of-fine-arts fiction program (I was his student) and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley (where I work). Warlock revisits the shootout at the O.K. Corral—but much more. A 1958 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Warlock famously inspired Thomas Pynchon. Fans of Cormac McCarthy and HBO’s Deadwood should see where it all began.

I fell hard for Alfredo Vea’s Gods Go Begging 10 years ago; today, it resonates Iraq-wise. Meet Jesse Pasodoble, a Vietnam vet criminal-defense attorney in 1990s San Francisco. He discovers yesterday’s war being fought today while solving a double murder. Vea, himself a combat vet and attorney, both fulfills and transcends multiple genres—war novel, Chicano novel, mystery—laced with magic realism, sharp humor and, somehow, hope. I taught it in my Chicano lit class and will add it to composition classes next fall.

Robert Hass’ Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. I bought a dozen last year as gifts for friends. And that was before Hass won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. What I like best about this poet is all here: sense of place, humanity and history—so often starting in California, in the High Sierra, then traveling to landscapes past and present, near and far.

Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California’s Inland Empire, an anthology edited by Gayle Wattawa, features writers who also appear with me in Latinos in Lotusland (Kathleen Alcala, Michael Jaime-Becerra and Alex Espinoza) but ranges widely in its thoughtful reach, with the usual suspects (Mary Austin, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, M.F.K. Fisher, Carey McWilliams, John Steinbeck), some surprises (hmmm . . . Joan Baez? Norman Mailer? Calvin Trillin?) and real finds such as Katherine Saubel’s translation of the Cahuilla Indian creation story, which opens this must-have collection.

In Jim Krusoe’s latest novel, Girl Factory, the innocent and almost archetypally misguided Jonathan works at Mr. Twisty’s, a yogurt shop in the mall. He confronts the responsibilities of liberation upon discovering in the basement five naked ladies kept in suspended animation in, yes, acidophilus. In Esquire recently, Krusoe suggests this novel explores the desire to bring dead people back to life. I’m ready. Like Hall, Krusoe is a former teacher of mine, and he’s a crafter of instructively wise, funny, elegant prose. I look forward to this long-awaited novel of quotidian allegory.

THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION (aka "liberal busybodies") OFFERS BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS:

UCI study on Academic Women

In this morning's Inside Higher Ed: 'Quiet Desperation' of Academic Women:

.....Interviews with 80 female faculty members at a research university — the largest qualitative study of its kind — have found that many women in careers are deeply frustrated by a system that they believe undervalues their work and denies them opportunities for a balanced life. While the study found some overt discrimination in the form of harassment or explicitly sexist remarks, many of the concerns involved more subtle “deeply entrenched inequities.”
.....While the study was conducted, with support from the National Science Foundation, at the University of California at Irvine, the report’s authors and most of those who were interviewed for the research state that they don’t believe the problems discussed are unique to Irvine.…
…
.....The article, “Gender Equity in Academia: Bad News From the Trenches, and Some Possible Solutions,” appears in the new issue of Perspectives on Politics (abstract available here)….
.....…Here are some of the highlights:

Unintended bias and outdated attitudes: Many of the women in the study described a steady stream of comments, some of them ostensibly offering support, that suggested that the older men who made them didn’t really understand how to interact with women in a professional manner. These men generally had no clue that their attitudes were either patronizing, sexist or both, the report says. One woman is quoted as describing a job interview in a top department in which an African American scholar took her aside and said, “This is a great place for people like you and me, if you know what I mean, honey.” ….

Devaluing positions once women hold them: At Irvine, as at most research universities, the last decade has seen a significant change in the number of women serving as committee chairs, department chairs, deans and administrators in a variety of capacities. And the women interviewed for the study praised this development, crediting women in various senior positions for being mentors or going to bat for their younger counterparts. But the women — across disciplines — described a pattern in which once a woman was named to a more senior position, others treated it as more service-oriented and less substantive….

Service and gender: Those interviewed reported some protection for junior faculty women, but said that among the senior faculty ranks, women were picked disproportionately for service assignments, especially those that are time-consuming. Then those same women are criticized for not doing more research, and the theoretical credit awarded service is never to be found.

Family vs. career: As in similar reports, women reported intense pressure — well beyond that faced by their male colleagues — with regard to having children, raising them, and also caring for aging parents. Many women reported strong reluctance to take advantage of policy options that might be helpful, fearful of how they would appear to male colleagues, and women reported regret and some dismay over choices they made to avoid confronting colleagues with their needs for more flexibility….
…
.....Asked for a reaction to the study, Irvine released a statement criticizing it. “Professor Monroe’s article draws attention to the persistence and toll of sex discrimination on women faculty. Unfortunately, the article cannot to be said to offer original insight into the promise and challenge of gender equity in higher education. The formulation of the problem overlooks research in a host of related issues, such as gender schemas, work-life balance, and leadership development among others,” the statement said….

NO DECLINE. Also in this morning's Inside Higher Ed:

.....Despite warnings in many recent reports that the United States is losing its edge in science and technology, the lead remains significant and U.S. investments in science remain high, according to a new report from the Rand Corporation. The study said that the United States should not be complacent, and that some other countries are stepping up, but that the idea of a significant decline having taken place is unfounded.