Looking North

Kingston Ferry at its berth in Edmonds, Washington, April 2016

The Sinking of Boaty McBoatface

In an ill-concieved attempt to raise public support for the construction of a £200 million Arctic research vessel, the Natural Environment Research Council of Britain engaged the public in a contest to nominate and vote for the name of the new ship. James Hand, exercising what he later came to regret as an excess of whimsey, offered the name "Boaty McBoatface" for the vessel, and the public, responding to the poll with a resounding unseriousness, voted overwhelmingly in its favor.

Embarassingly, nothing in the remit of the Natural Environment Research Council encouraged whimsey. They had a fallback position, which they hastened to exercise: ignore the poll result completely and go with their own choice in the matter.

Thus Sir Other Attenbourough was called in from the bullpen to lend his anodyne name and its associations to the ship, which even James Hand allowed was probably for the best.

Arbitrary Harbor View

Harbor Dredgers, Santa Cruz, February 2016

An Even-Numbered Year in Song And Story

A month into this year's baseball season the San Francisco Giants are the only club in MLB's National League West Division with a winning record at home. In April the Arizona Diamondbacks staggered around the unfriendly confines of their own home Chase Field for a stretch of 17 games of which they won only five. The Dodgers gained but five wins at home during that time, too, losing eight of the 13 they've hosted so far. All the teams in the division have lost at least eight games at home, except, of course, for the San Francisco Giants with their winning record, who have lost only six at AT&T Park a month now into the season.

Jazz Is Never Out Of Date

MENDACITY (1961)
by Max Roach and C. Bayen

Mendacity, mendacity, it makes the world go round.
A politician makes a speech and never hears the sound.
The campaign trail winds on and on in towns from coast to coast.
The winner ain't the one who's straight, but he who lies the most.

Now voting rights in this fair land we know are not denied.
But if I tried in certain states, from treetops I'd be tied.
Mendacity, mendacity, it seems is everywhere.
But try and tell the truth, and most folks scream "Not Fair!"

Jazz, The Early Years, On International Jazz Day

Knee Drops Louis Armstrong

Ain't Misbehavin' Louis Armstrong

Jumping At The Woodstock Count Basie

Minor Swing Django Reinhardt

Ornithology Charlie Parker

Senor Blues Horace Silver

Take Five Dave Brubeck

Giant Steps John Coltrane

Lotta Shaking

Here are 40 remarkable photos of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco, curated by Alan Taylor at the Atlantic. As of April 18, 110 years have passed now since that day.

All of my grandparents were on the far end of the Mission District, a mile south of the furthest reach of the fire that levelled much of San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake. As for the earthquake, one grandmother never spoke of it, and the other always called it "The Fire," preferring, like so many who lived through it, to memorialize the enormity with that all-consuming word instead of the other.

Merle Haggard (April 6, 1937 – April 6, 2016)

I'll Fix Your Flat Tire, Merle

Merle's was a music of crushed lives, prison time and poverty, busted romance and drinking steady to smooth out the day's ragged failures. Always the music of that underclass of perpetually dispossessed Americans, generations of originally rural whites broken and uprooted, decade after decade spilling West, like Haggard's people, who found themselves discarded in Bakersfield, California by some rude gesture of history, with all the regret and resentment and determination to get by goddammit you might expect of their kind. He had a straightforward plain genius for making music of all that.

An Unsuccessful Bit of Camouflage

Dog View 2016

Noted in Passing

That night Matt Duffy of the San Francisco Giants dove for a ball headed down the third base line, snagged it while prone, and in righting himself rotated completely around to throw across on one bounce to Brandon Belt at first base beating the Oakland A's runner for the third out of the inning: just getting in some practice before the start of the season.

Today, in Milwaukee, opening day of the 2016 season for the San Francisco Giants, Duffy went 2 for 5 with 4 RBI. Kid just might make the team after all.

April Noted Once More

Again With the Flowers

Noting The Condom-Shaped Safety Zone of Santa Cruz Harbor

Advisory Notice Posted At the Santa Cruz Harbor, March 2016

Remembering Those Who Did Not Make The Cut

The Fence at Holy Cross Cemetery

The Fence at Holy Cross Cemetery 2

Florescence Alert

Flowering Stuff, September 2013

Arbitrary Coastal Pine

San Mateo County, July 2014

The Dustbin Of History, Woulda Shoulda Edition

"Do Not throw out!!"

Summing Up The Supreme

Looking for the old per curiam ruling to sort out the residue of Scalia.

You May Drive Out Nature With A Pitchfork

Dredging the Shoaled Harbor Mouth, Santa Cruz CA, February 2016

Because Civilization As We Know It Needs A Break

The People Dream The Greater Dream Of Donald Trump

Tidying Up The Context for Patrick's Day

Lismore grew in time to be a great religious city, and a school of sacred sciences, to which pilgrims from all over Ireland and scholars from beyond the seas resorted.

—Patrick Power, Waterford & Lismore A Compendious History of the United Dioceses Cork University Press 1937 pg. 5.

As late as the 15th cent. the primacy of Lismore, among the Sanctuaries and Schools of Munster, seems to have been tacitly acknowledged. In recognition of the status in question, special immunities were granted to the city and church of Lismore, as well as to the attached manors, by the Provincial Synod, held at Limerick in 1453. These included freedom from exactions by anyone, even the Lord of Desmond, or the king's representative.

—See Appendix XIII.

Freedom from exactions sounds like a pretty sweet arrangement but the sordid truth is that, at least as passed down through my family's recollection, it was earned as tradeoff for Lismore locally settling with firm finality the whole snakes-out-of-Ireland controversy fomented from the first by fans of Patrick and occasioning there in Lismore as elsewhere throughout the Wooded Isle centuries of objectively unnecessary commentary ornamenting almost every conceivable aspect of the matter.

This local settlement did not countenance expression of certain divergent views, divergent in the sense that they strayed too far from the hard won consensus that for the good of all this snake-related nonsense must cease and Patrickology must move on.

In this way my forebears enlisted in a project of not only denying a place in Lismore to the snakes per Patrick, but actively subduing any idle talk of them as might arise in Lismore's vicinity from time to time as well.

Illustration

The Pines(detail) by Franklin Booth, via John Holbo at Crooked Timber

Booth's style nicely replicates the effects of woodcut using pen and ink. The clouded sky in the detail above is typical of the myriad of precise strokes of varying thicknesses he applied to every centimeter of his work to achieve the desired effect. There is nothing of economy in Booth's style, and still, the tree at right is pure suggestion. Composed of countless scribed lines, it's as much an impression of a tree's appearance as any Van Gogh ever drew.

Endorsement Season

Overshadowed by the Chris Christie endorsement of Donald Trump today was an endorsement over on the Democratic Party side of the contest, as Robert Reich endorsed Bernie Sanders for President. Reich has been admirable on most issues he's cared to speak on publicly following his time in Bill Clinton's Cabinet in the '90's.

Still, there was the big bully deferring to the bigger bully on the Republican side, which understandably hogged most of the day's stage.

Etymology Enacts the Plausible Yarn To Explain the Well-Known Name

Richmond Talbott was a slide guitarist and blues singer, and an old friend of Jorma Kaukonen. Talbott (then known as Steve Talbot), Jorma, Steve Mann, Tom Hobson, Perry Lederman and a few others were the acoustic blues guitarists on the scene in the early 60s who were the hottest and most sophisticated pickers, although only Kaukonen went on to success. As a private joke, they all made up “fake blues names,” and Talbott chose as his name “Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane.” A few years later, this play on the name of Blind Lemon Jefferson was later borrowed by Jorma’s new band.

—Ross Hannan and Corry Arnold, Freight And Salvage

One Way of Looking at Washington's Birthday

This Year's Peak Magnolia Came in February

Magnolias reached Peak Magnolia here in Santa Cruz earlier this week. Peak Magnolia happens when all buds that can be blossoms blossom. Usually this happens in late March, around the solstice, but after years of drought the local magnolias have responded to the wetness of the early part of this year's rainy season, over by mid January, with a quickened burst of early ripening.

Somewhere In A Future With Your Name On It

Yoooouge Improvement