Storm

We had a sudden storm on Monday night. It's nothing unusual here - thunder and lightning is common on summer afternoons and evenings, though there seems to have been more this year than most. As a result things have been unusually lush and green, though the sun has begun to bake the grass yellow in the last couple of weeks.

Monday's storm came through at about 10 at night. We could hear the wind and sudden heavy rain, and then the lights started to flicker on and off before going out altogether. I haven't been in a power-cut worthy of the name since I was a child, so it was exciting to light candles and brush my teeth by torchlight and worry about whether the fish in the freezer would all have to be barbecued the next day and where I could possibly have put my battery powered radio. Unfortunately, it was a little too close to bedtime to enjoy it to the full. Lying in bed and watching the lightning through the blinds was fun, though. I woke up sometime in the middle of the night with the bedside light shining in my eyes.

Afterwards I looked at Denver Post reports about the damage caused, including this one this morning. I thought that they must be somewhat sensationalized, going on about fallen trees and windows being blown out of buildings just a few roads west of here - after all, the only effects visible in my garden were some extra bits of next-door's tree scattered around my lawn, and my tomato plant knocked a little askew. However, we learned otherwise when went for a bike ride along the Clear Creek Trail, a trail from Denver to Golden that passes to the north of us through a particularly nice wooded area by a small river - part of Wheat Ridge's green belt. The path was officially closed due to "hazardous conditions," and there were fallen trees everywhere - uprooted, snapped in two, lying over the path or in the river. There was one resting on the corner of some unfortunate person's roof nearby. At some points the path was carpeted with fallen leaves, giving a whole new meaning to the term "green belt."




There is a "no swimming" sign planted by some of the small lakes that this path goes past.


I like the way that it manages to look as if it's OK to swim, as long as you don't expect to be happy. Or, Beware of Octopus.

California

The sea, the sea!

Last month we took a brief trip to California. I was giving a paper at a conference in Orange County, and we stayed on for a couple of days to see Los Angeles and its environs.

We flew into John Wayne Airport, Orange County. My first impressions as we drove to our hotel were that it was both like and unlike the greater Los Angeles area I had imagined. I'd expected it to be all roads and cars, which of course it was, but it was strange beyond that. There was lush greenery all around, towering palm trees lining streets and surrounding buildings, beautifully tended bushes spilling flowers - but at the same time it felt oddly dead. Office blocks, apartment blocks, hospitals - they take up huge spaces, with wide roads in between them, so that they somehow seem like so many remote islands; of course, it doesn't help that there is minimal sign of people moving between them, other than in their cars. The built-up area seems to fill up all the space between the mountains and the sea, and yet there seems to be nothing there. It's a good place to produce films concerned with illusive realities.

We stayed relatively near Laguna Beach, though of course to get there (or anywhere else) you had to get in a car and drive. In fact, most of the time we spent there was in the car, driving along one freeway or another, only to get somewhere from which we had to drive back. Even the Pacific Coast Highway has only the rarest scenic glimpses. It mostly looks like this:

Overall, it seems untenable. There are lanes and lanes of cars on freeway after freeway, all those people going in the same direction but individually powered by a non-renewable resource. There's no point in calling for more public transport in such a place; either technology has to change, or the whole place will be left an abandoned monument to the strange way people used to live. Somehow it was easy to imagine distant generations marvelling over a deserted landscape of huge empty roads.

Still, there are lovely places amidst the general dystopian monstrosity of it all. The coves around Laguna Beach, with their flourishing greenery, were beautiful.

By the pier at Santa Monica, the sea was dotted with strange seal-people bobbing up and down in the water:


And sitting on the railings at the end of the pier, we saw this juvenile pelican, with its beautiful beady eyes.

We also went to the Getty, where I was happy to come across James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels. Afterwards we took a quick drive through the Hollywood area. Once is enough! In spite of being right next to all those residential areas of the rich, Hollywood Boulevard itself is a grimy tourist strip that you can see for yourself if you imagine Oxford Street and then add in the worst of the souvenir shops on the Royal Mile.

Reading signs

From when I first started driving in the U.S., I noticed that there is a much greater reliance on words for road signs than on the kinds of symbols you'd see in Britain, Europe or - I suspect - pretty much anywhere else. For instance, "right lane must turn right" is usually indicated by a sign that reads "right lane must turn right," and if like me you have a tendency to confuse right and left when they are presented in words rather than in symbols that relate directly to your symmetrical existence, you often find yourself embarking on little adventures on streets you'd never intended to visit. Things get even more confusing, however, when words get combined with symbols. The above is my favourite, a sign on a road passing through the middle of my university. Whenever I pass it, I get so distracted by trying to decode it that I run the risk of ploughing through the crowd of students it is trying to warn me to avoid.

The Eco Zoo

Last night I searched for online pop-up books and found this one, Ecodazoo. Why aren't there more sites like this one? Or are there?

Polar Bears

Memorial Day weekend, and the academic year is almost over. Hurray! I have such a light load this term, but I have had to see the same small group of students four days a week for a twenty-week stretch since New Year, with only one week's break in the middle - and much as I like them, I think we're all due for a rest from each other. If their idiosyncrasies wear on me after this time, presumably mine wear on them just as much.

Memorial Day - what is that? I've tried asking this before (and all those bank holidays in the UK - do you know what they're for?), but I'm still not very clear. If you watched TV, you'd think it was for buying cut-price mattresses. Actually, it seems officially to be for honouring war dead. Two years ago I ran in the Bolder Boulder 10k race on Memorial Day, and many people had marked on their t-shirts the names of family members who had fought in a war; and at the stadium spectacle that followed, there was military display and parachuting in with big rippling American flags and a lot of clapping and cheering (woo hoo!). Oh, it's also a marker of summer - someone said to me that you can assume it safe to plant after Memorial Day. My plants are planted, though - I have a little herb garden going in the back yard.

Anyway, as to those polar bears....
Yesterday we went to see the film Earth, otherwise known as Disney's Earth (warning bells!), otherwise known (depending on where you are) as BBC's Earth. J. saw this in Germany last year, and had said how beautiful it was - but for a long time when we searched for it online all we could find was BBC's Planet Earth. Only after we saw it at the cinema yesterday did we manage to look further into its origins. It appears to be substantially a re-edit of footage from the Planet Earth series done for the big screen, with an attempt to shape it into a natural epic of struggle and survival, heart-warming stories of mother-and-child migration, with a good dose of polar bear tragedy and the odd comic bird.

I've never see the whole of the Planet Earth series, to my regret - just bits of it here and there. I know enough about it, though, to know that it focuses on different areas of the planet as the series progresses, presumably giving it an overall sense of depth and breadth that was lacking in this film version. Well, there was breadth, of sorts - but a strange lack of unity in the whole, as if they had their three main mother-and-child stories (polar bear, elephant, humpback whale), and then added in other things by way of weak thematic links to try and make it long enough (migration theme: cut to migrating demoiselle cranes struggling over Himalayas; seasonal change: cut to the Papua New Guinea rain forest without seasons, and laugh at some dancing birds of paradise).

Things were picked up and then dropped again - near the beginning was a sequence on the boreal forest of... wait... where? I didn't catch it, and it never came up again, but it's supposed to be the biggest forest on earth (do they mean the entire boreal zone?), supplying 30% of the world's oxygen... or some such figure. But not much animal life can eat those conifer needles, so now we speed off to somewhere else, by way only of a shot of a lynx and a comment about the spirit of the wilderness (Wait! What does he eat, if there's nothing here to leave footprints, as you say?).

Well, it's at least very beautiful. And distinctly emotional at times, including that polar bear tragedy: polar bear exhausted by swimming at sea, having wandered too far from land when the ice melts, arrives back on shore and tries in his desperation to grab a walrus cub; but is fought off, wanders shakily for a while, and then lies down and dies. It's upsetting to watch something die of starvation and exhaustion like that. But don't worry! The narration tells us that the brave spirit of the father polar bear will live on in the heart of his cubs. Never mind that they've never met, and that he'd presumably have eaten them if he'd caught them when a little smaller. And here, predictably, is the major flaw of Disney's Earth. The narration is just terrible. It might have been just as bad in German, but at least we wouldn't have understood it.

There's also an issue with trying to make this epic, which is the taking of sides - something supported by the exhausting orchestral score. Early in the film we have a view of migrating caribou - oh, how beatiful, how brave! - when a wolf appears on the scene, accompanied by ominous music. After a long chase he gets our beatiful little caribou baby, though luckily the film jumps away just as the caribou gives up and sits down with a bleat - game over, no need to worry about the gore to follow. And yet, when the polar bear is trying to grab the walrus baby, whose side are we on? And what about those poor shrimp bubble-netted by the whales?

"Just as I expected, this is worse than I thought!"

No posts since December... I really am behind.

Here are the major events of the first part of this year.

In early January we bought snowshoes, and then we drove into the mountains to Golden Gate Canyon State Park only to have my car break down as we pulled into the parking lot. We had to get towed back to Denver (happily paid for by my AAA membership), where my car was pronounced dead. I spent several weeks riding the bus to work and failing to buy a new car, until I finally got one at the beginning of March through AAA's auto-buying service. It has a working radio and tape player, which feels like great luxury to me. I dug out all of those old tapes I could never bear to throw away, so I can drive to work in a cloud of nostalgia.

Somewhere in early February, at almost exactly the same time as last year and well into a horrendously busy term, my computer hard drive suddenly went the same way as my car. Had I learned my lesson and backed up recently? Well, I had at Christmas, at least.

In March we got our second cat, Palm of the Hand Kittie. She's both frenetic and friendly, and looks like Jiji in Kiki's Delivery Service.

I've been meaning for a while to write a few notes on things we've enjoyed lately. My last term was, as I suggest above, pretty hectic - I had an extra class to cover for a colleague on sabbatical, one I hadn't taught before - so I didn't have time to read or see anything much at all. Now I am being paid back, though - just one class to teach first thing in the morning, and then I can come home and do something more interesting instead. I've started reading Orhan Pamuk's "The Black Book," and am back to reading some Ishikawa Jun and trying to relaunch my research career. As to things seen: in TV I wholeheartedly recommend 30 Rock, a comedy series set in the NBC TV studios. In films, I recommend Coralline, the 3-D animation, which we went to see towards the end of last term (giving me just enough to hope to struggle through to the end...). It's by far the best thing I've seen in a long time, full of wild imaginings, magical gardens, strange circus scenes - very rewarding, even though the ending is a bit rushed and disappointing.

We've done a lot more in the way of listening. By way of brainwashing and sleep-deprivation techniques, I seem to have got J to like listening to BBC radio comedy at bedtime as much as I do. Our favorites from the last few weeks are Old Harry's Game (on both Radio 4 & 7 at the moment), and Nebulous (just finished on 7). The latter is a short two-series program that I'd listened to with half an ear in the past, but which this time round seemed hilarious. It's a sci-fi comedy set in a future time "after the Withering." The quotation heading this entry is from the last episode.

Catching up

Happy end of year, everyone, from somewhat snowy Denver.

It was a busy latter half of the year for me. I still have the same job and still live in Denver - or, at least, the greater Denver area - but otherwise lots has changed. I bought a house at the end of November, and have escaped the roasting oven of my downtown apartment. Moving with me to Wheat Ridge (northwest Denver) was the visitor of the previous entry, J., now no longer a visitor. Completing our little winter huddle is our cat Marley, whom we adopted about three weeks ago.

He was the unexpected cat - we saw him in our nearby branch of PetSmart, a big chain of pet supply stores which have adoption areas that can be used by local shelters, but he wasn't the cat that either of us had in mind. Still, we kept going back to see him while we tried in vain to adopt cats from other places. The strangest of these was Adams County Animal Control, where they told us they had some astounding number of cats - 380? - but where they seemed very confused about which cats were ready for adoption and which weren't (we were told that the one we'd gone to see, advertised for adoption online, was in the "storage area" and not available. "It has ringworm. You wouldn't want it."), and where finally they refused to let us adopt the pair of kittens we chose. One of the two was semi-feral and was going to need a lot of attention, but it was a lovely little playful and curious tabby and we decided to take it and its similar-sized and better socialized black playmate. Initially we were told we couldn't have either because they were on medication (this in spite of the large signs posted on their enclosure - "We are available for adoption!"), then told we could put a hold on the black one until it finished its treatment and fill out forms to apply for the semi-feral one. Three or four days later they phoned and told us we could have the black one but not the tabby, because the person in charge had doubts that I had enough experience to deal with it. I'm still astounded that she wouldn't bother to talk to us herself to find out if we knew what we would be getting into or to ask more about our circumstances - just got one of the receptionists to phone us and tell us we could come and pick up the black one and would we like perhaps to choose a different one to go with it? I withdrew my hold on the black one, and gave up on the place entirely. It was a big drab concrete facility in the middle of nowhere, with hundreds of cats in little rooms or individual cages, and they didn't pursue the chance to have us take two of them. A huge machine efficient at sucking in furry bodies, but with malfunctioning apparatus for spitting them out again. If you start imagining this multiplied across the country, all of those unwanted and abandoned cats...

Later that day we went to visit Marley again, arrived conveniently at the time when a representative from the shelter was there to unlock the cage and let us meet him properly, f illed out the papers, and took him home. I'd worried when we'd seen him in his cage in PetSmart that he was somewhat unresponsive and perhaps wouldn't engage much with us - he was described on his paperwork as "shy and retiring" - but once he was home and had managed to get over his fright and come out of his carrier, he turned out to be extremely sociable and playful. He's a delight to have around. We've been cat-sitting too for the past couple of weeks, so it's been quite lively here.

Below is a picture taken of the inside my house, toward the dining-room area. In the winter, at least, we have beautiful warm light coming through that window in the morning and in the afternoon. In fact, it was what swayed me to buy the house (which, like Marley, I had to see on several occasion before I finally made the decision to take it - mostly because I wanted a much bigger kitchen, but these seem hard to come by here, at least in my price range).


The time before moving was hectic with trying to finish up the quarter and close on the house; and the time since has consisted largely of trips to large hangar-like stores on soulless highways to get a never-ending list of necessities; but I managed one more 14er hike in the autumn up Pike's Peak. Nice hike at the beginning, from Crags Campground; miserable slog up the peak itself, to find a big flat concreted summit with visitor centre. A road and a cog-railway go up there. It might have a nice view, but we were too tired and cold to care much by the time we got to the top, and too concerned to find a ride down the first part so that we'd be out before nightfall. Now it's ski season, not hiking season.

Christmas in our house was nice - we had Christmas stockings, a new puppet friend from my brother's family, and a wonderful parcel of goodies to open from my parents. I made pizza, and we drank White Russians. On Boxing Day (not that there is such a thing here) we went to the cinema to see The Day the Earth Stood Still - the recent remake, not the 1950s original. Not my choice, obviously, but I watched the trailer and thought it looked bearable (and it looked so much more attractive after I'd seen the trailer for Valkyrie). It had pretty terrible reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but to my own surprise I thought it was quite good, though marred by a very clumsy end - the premise in this version is that aliens are going to intervene on earth because we're destroying the environment and are apparently incapable of changing; we're saved when the representative alien sees our "other side" - but the scenes in which he's made to change his mind are horribly clunky and unconvincing, and the acting seems to go downhill as if they all know this.