Dead Park Walking [UPDATED, July 24]

[Update, July 24:
As Brian notes in the comments, today's action by the State legislature has spared most of the California state parks from closure, if that ever was a serious possibility. Some State parks will almost certainly close, but lists I've seen of the ones on the Governor's plate of possibilities include only those that actually could be physically closed: museums, historical homes, and mines, for example. So it seems that "Kelsey's Park" -- our local Henry Cowell Redwoods -- is likely to remain available to him for at least a while longer.
Now I can get back to the business of worrying about my colleagues' jobs, my students' welfare, my community's ability to function, and the intelligence of my State's leaders.]

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California isn't just broke, it's broken.

How do you close a forest? How do you close a river?
Kelsey and me, 2001, Henry Cowell State Park

The state is in a state of financial collapse. The legislature and the governor are trying to address a deficit of staggering proportions. The numbers are numbing, and beggar attempts to fathom: currently, the figure is $26 billion dollars for the next year. To try to put that in perspective, it's almost twice the entire yearly expenditure on prisons, and almost half of the entire state annual spending on elementary through community college education, and one-third of its annual expenditures on health and human services. Any fix will involve massive reductions in services, and conjures up images of Dickensian despair among the poor.

Just how the State with the world's eighth-largest economy got itself into this horrid mess can be (and is) debated endlessly, but it all boils down to an initiative process which has written mandatory, large expenditures into the State constitution while also making revenue increases almost impossible. We've been heading toward this gargantuan train wreck for more than thirty years, and it's here.

My own job is in jeopardy, of course, since my salary as a community college teacher ultimately comes from the State's coffers. While the people of my local district have been very, very generous over the past few years, taxing themselves to the tune of half a billion dollars to fund capital improvements (including my incredible new planetarium), that largesse can only go to capital improvements -- it can't fund salaries. My department is in relatively good shape, since we teach huge classes... but the folks at the Titanic's stern were in relatively good shape, too, in the spring of 1912.

Kelsey helps his mistress around the circuit after surgery, Henry Cowell State Park, 2002.

Since crucial state functions like education, safety, and social services are about to fall into an abyss, I almost feel guilty writing what I'm about to. But I'll write it anyway.

Bliss, 2004, Henry Cowell State Park

At last look, California is planning to close 220 of its 279 state parks. This supposedly will save, over a two-year period, about two-tenths of a billion dollars, if one doesn't factor in additional expenses that trying to keep forests and beaches "closed" will entail. Among those 220 are the three parks in our part of the Santa Cruz Mountains: Big Basin (California's first state park with an awe-inspiring stand of thousands of years old Sequoia Sempervirens), Castle Rock at the crest of the mountains, and Henry Cowell Redwoods park in Felton.

That last one is what pierces my heart like a shiv, since it is Kelsey's favorite place in the entire world.

Shortly after we rescued Kelsey from the pound in 1998, we took him for a walk in Henry Cowell park. The joy he manifested on that first visit was thrilling: he didn't walk or run, he leapt from place to place along the path. Sniffing, peeing, pooping, bouncing, grinning... it was like he had found heaven after his puppyhood of neglect. The course we took through he park -- a roughly two-mile circuit through the hardwood forest and along the banks of the San Lorenzo river -- burned itself into his brain then, and he and I have followed that course countless times since.

A winter's walk, 2006, Henry Cowell State Park. Our friend Lucile jollies Kelsey, while Diane is tended by the spaniels.

On most of those trips along his circuit, it has been just him and me, and we traipse it a couple of times a month. Now eleven years old, he can tell when I'm even thinking about taking him to "Kelsey's Park," and his usual dour demeanor changes to giddiness. He will remain patient in the back seat as we drive, until we go past the turn that would take us to the vet, and then he begins trembling. As we turn in to the road to the park entrance, he whines a warble that he never does at any other time, and when we get out of the car, he becomes ecstatic. For a while. Then he becomes all business, sniffing every leaf along our well-known path, marking his specific spots until both tanks are empty, and even beyond that. He wades in the river for about a minute along the way, pauses respectfully when horses pass on the horse-trail part of our circuit, and ignores, for the most part, other people and dogs. He has business to do, you know, and doggy newspapers to read on the scents of the grasses and the leaves.

From a horseback vantage point, 2000, Henry Cowell State Park.

River dog, 2005, Henry Cowell State Park.

If and when the park is closed, I suppose we will find other places for special times -- but, at his advanced age, he will lose something that has been an integral part of his joy forever.

And so will I.

Closure of the parks pales so much compared to other losses that will befall this State that I can't bring myself to become too active in protesting them. Many of the poorest among us are about to be handed a slow-motion death sentence, not by lethal injection but by lethal abandonment. My students, for many of whom community colleges are the last, best hope not just for them but for their families, will lose that opportunity. My co-workers will lose their jobs. How dare I worry about what effect it will have on my dog?

I don't know. You try explaining it to him here in the evening twilight of his life. I can't.

His heaven.

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Independence A

This old Model A is a bit like the rest of California on this Fourth of July, 2009: a little run down, a little corroded, but still proud of her looks... and fashionably attired.

I hope you all had a fine day, no matter where you live!

(Photo taken in the Santa Cruz Mountains town of Felton, California.)

Kelsey's Excellent Encounter

Usually when we have a weekend BBQ for family here at Ft. Harrington, there are many, many people involved. On Saturday, June 27th, 2009, though, we had an unusually small gathering: just Grace-the-Granddaughter, her mom (Adrianne), and her uncle Adam.

Old yellow Kelsey generally has an absolute gas at family gatherings, tripping happily from one person to another until he's so worn out that he collapses. With fewer targets this time, though, for some reason he zeroed in on Adrianne as the object of his attention.

In this little set, we see him wooing her, greeting her, and, ultimately, settling in happily at her side.

What a suck-up my dog is.

Adrianne, Kelsey, and Grace. Kelsey starts by placing himself where he can't be ignored.

Kelsey sandwich! Excellent!

"Please, let me introduce myself!"

"... I am a dog whose refinement belies my breeding, my lady."

(It's interesting to note how he holds his ears in this set compared to how he does when he's at work.)

Kissing the back of the hand is customary, but Kelsey's doing pretty well for a dog, don't you think?

She's let me sit here! Oh, the ecstasy! Oh, the joy!
Oh, the damn' little suckup spaniel, horning in from the left. He always does that.

Settled in.

Little does Adrianne know it, but, at this instant, Kelsey would have followed her through the very gates of Hell. He's also actively guarding her now; note the position of his ears.

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One Dome, Two Skies

Path to the main entrance of DeAnza College's Fujitsu Planetarium, whose blue dome can be glimpsed through the redwood grove that shelters it.

While I have posted before about the installation of remarkable new technology in the planetarium I'm privileged to work in, I have not until now posted any images of what that technology can produce. In part, that has been due to the imaging challenges involved: the planetarium simulates the night sky in all ways, including darkness. That and the odd geometry involved in shooting photos of images projected on a hemisphere was enough to keep me from learning how to manage it for a while.

But I'm starting to be able to do it.

Mars and Phobos, seen from about a hundred kilometers above the latter, as they would have been seen at about 2pm, Pacific Daylight Time, this afternoon.

The "Two Skies" part of this post's title refers to the two sky simulation systems at the heart of the planetarium's renovation. I refer to them as the "space simulator" (SkySkan's all-digital system) and the "sky simulator" (Konica-Minolta's new-generation Infinium-S optical-mechanical system.) Each does a different job in magnificent fashion.

The Space Simulator

SkySkan's digital system provides me with the ability to "fly" through a huge database which includes, among much else, accurate information about the locations, angles of illumination, and orientation of thousands of solar system objects at any time within several thousand years of now, both forward and backward in time.

Jupiter's inner satellites' orbital paths and their locations at about 2:15, PDT, June 25.

It's important to note that the images in this post are actual photographs of part of the inside of a planetarium dome, not screen captures from a computer monitor. Unless otherwise noted, each of the images here cover the same area of the dome, a slice about 25 feet wide and commensurately high. The dome itself is a hemisphere 50 feet in diameter, and the camera's location was about 35 feet from the point of aim. This means that, while not particularly evident, the edges and top of the frame are fairly significantly closer to the camera than the center and bottom (which is just above the bottom rim of the dome.)

Simulated Ganymede with Jupiter in the background, June 25, 2009. This and the other "space simulator" images in this post are 20-second exposures with a Nikon D70 at ISO 400 using an 18mm lens stopped to f/8.

It is also important to note that the images here are not frames from a movie. The operator of the system is completely free to specify location, time, and direction of view of the "camera." Navigation is remarkably simple -- but what goes on under the surface isn't. The database is manipulated by a stack of ten quad-core Intel computers. One computer orchestrates the other nine, one is dedicated to managing sound for applications that have it, and the other eight each manage one "channel." Each visual channel is projected on a "tile" that covers 1/8 of the dome, and the ensemble is remarkably seamless in appearance. Projection is done by a pair of cinema theater grade Sony digital projectors with special optics, each of which handles four of the channels.

Looking back toward the Sun from Saturn on June 25, 2009.

The detail and accuracy in the database (which is frequently updated by SkySkan) is astonishing -- and very, very useful as a teaching tool. The above image of Saturn, for example, shows some interesting things in the shadow of the planet across the rings toward us. (Click on the image to see it larger.) Notice that you can see some stars through the rings in the shadow? That's not a mistake: there are places in the rings where the material is thin enough for that to happen... and places where it isn't. If we shift our position a little down and to the right...


... the two stars that shone brightly through the "Cassini Division" in the previous view are now blocked by the more richly-populated A Ring (the brightest component of the system in reflected sunlight.)

View toward the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. If you click on the above image, you'll see that all of the stars have color. Those colors (based on the stars' spectral types) are not usually evident to most planetarium patrons except for the very brightest ones -- as is the case in the real sky -- but they're there, nonetheless.

The Sky Simulator

The other system, the Konica-Minolta Infinium-S, can't fly us around the solar system, but it provides a much more realistic simulation of the night sky as seen from right here on Earth.

The optical-mechanical projector at the heart of the Konica-Minolta system is an engineering marvel, and I don't have a clue as to how it performs its magic.

Until very recently, all planetarium projectors achieved different brightnesses for their projected stars by a very simple, but very innacurate, method for all but the very brightest ones: by having the "stars" be different sizes: bigger "star" --> brighter "star." That's also the way that the digital Space Simulator that we've been looking at so far does the trick.

But that's not the way the real universe looks.

Unless your eyesight is really bad, the stars in the real sky all look the same size: pinpoints of light. Their brightness differences are entirely due to different intensities. That's the heart of why planetarium simulations never looked very real to me: different brightnesses were achieved by different sizes of images which all had the same surface brightness.

Here's an expanded view of Canis Major in the space simulator system, the one that does brightnesses the old-fashioned way:


... and here, to the same scale, the constellation Lyra in the Konica-Minolta sky simulator system:


If you click on the above image, you'll see that all of the stars have exactly the same size, no matter what their brightness -- just the way the stars appear in the real sky. (As an added bit of realism, the 20 brightest stars in the Konica-Minolta sky can be made to twinkle!)

The realism of the sky simulator system is such that I still haven't figured out how to capture its view very well with my camera. Here's a two-minute exposure toward the Great Summer Triangle at f/8:

(the lights at the bottom are inside the projector itself.) And here's an eight-minute exposure:

I was baffled by the red glow here: to my eye, the dome was pitch black except for the pinpoints of the stars' images.

But the camera doesn't have the same spectral sensitivity that our eyes, do, evidently. Where the faint red in this long time-exposure came from is evident in this trial shot at a lower angle for the space-simulator system:

Saturn, its rings, and some of its satellites' orbital paths.

See the bright red rectangle near the bottom about 3/4 of the way from left to right? That's an infrared broadcast station for the planetarium's assistive listening device system. Its radiation is invisible to the human eye -- but not to the D70's sensor! (This was the first time that I realized that my old digital camera records a significant amount of infrared. That's a little disconcerting.) So the pervasive red glow in the very-long time exposures is IR from these devices reflected from the dome.

The next time I try this, I'll turn off the ALD system... but I ran out of time this afternoon.

The cities shine like stars.

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Tomorrow Came in the Mail Today

Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow, by Brian Fies. Please click on the above image to be taken to Amazon.com's ordering page.

My friend, Brian Fies, is a scientist by college training and a cartoon artist by fame. His first book, Mom's Cancer, was written and drawn in response to his mother's battle with the disease and his family's battles to cope with it and to support her. It was widely acclaimed and won many awards. More importantly, selfish creatures that we are, it touched a deep, personal place in each of us who have dealt with a loved one's cancer and that person's response to it, which is not always one of traditional stoic heroism. Maintenance of love through the most difficult of circumstances is facilitated by an unblinking inner eye, and Mom's Cancer showed that very, very clearly.

Since Mom's Cancer, Brian's fans have been anxiously waiting for his next book. Would it be a "sequel"? A medical advice book would have been logical, since Mom's Cancer was so widely acclaimed as a help for families coping with a loved one's catastrophic illness. Or would it be something else entirely?

It is something else entirely.

Brian's publisher, Harry N. Abrams, and his editor, Charlie Kochman, encouraged Brian to follow his enthusiasm for science, technology, and exploration instead of going the "safe" route with a sequel. Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow is the spectacular result of that gamble.

Whatever Happened... chronicles the 20th Century American love affair with technology and progress from its first-bloom manifestation in the 1939 World's Fair through its confused dissolution at the end of the Apollo era. Along the way, it presents images and print media that are genuine echoes of the times they represent, including "play-within-a-play" comic books that are authentic not only in their art, but in the paper on which they're printed! That sort of attention to detail pervades the work: every frame seems to have been researched assiduously for accuracy. I could find no anachronisms, and I tried. Hard.

Hardbound, handsome, brilliantly printed, it would be well worth the $50 cover price it should have. It is an absolute steal at $19.

I'm pretty sure that I would say all of that if I were a thoroughly impartial observer. But I'm not.

Page 118 of Whatever Happened... looks like this:

Click to see a clearer version. Guinness, at right, is waiting for his dinner, not particularly enthralled by the artwork.

... and here's a closer look:

(Click the image to see a ligible version. Guinness's butt, blurred by the long exposure, is scooting behind the book at upper-left. Maybe it's time to feed him, think?)

That scene is based on one of my Dad's photographs, taken in the early 1960's:

Mom and I lunching in a Florida roadside diner, spring, 1961.

Brian saw it in this post in SherWords at a very opportune time while he was working on Whatever Happened... , and asked if he could use it. I think I hesitated for less than an eighth of a second. I think he did the shot justice, and his acknowledgement at the end of the book is very gracious.

Another thing about Whatever Happened... : Brian had a little virtual "Launch Party" for Whatever Happened... just a little while ago. It is well worth watching -- especially for two things: Brian's careful demonstration of cartooning techniques, and for a "visit" by a famous cartoonist, Stephan Pastis, who does the daily Pearls Before Swine strip. Pastis is a hoot, and it's clear from his behavior at Brian's party where the inspiration for his "Rat" main character comes from.

Pastis also takes off his shirt in that clip. Just in case you needed any further impetus to watch.

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"Satchel" Is Online

Dad working on his Model T, circa 1935.

A Satchel of Ordinary Treasure is now online with its first post. A second entry will appear tomorrow morning, and the plan is to roll out a new post or two each weekend. We'll see.

A Question You Do NOT Want to Hear from Your Wife When She Calls You at Work

"Honey, where do you keep the snake?"

For Ruth: Truly Overdone Raised Beds

Over on "Live in It Then! Five Cents, Please," our good friend Ruth just posted a nifty trio of posts chronicling her and Larry's construction of a raised garden bed. Sturdily constructed of concrete blocks, and located very conveniently to their back stoop, it should serve them well with a minimum of fuss. Except for its somewhat disturbing sedan abuse, it appears to be a very sensible raised bed.

Sensible. Unlike the Ft. Harrington raised beds, which were constructed in June of 2000 with overkill, over-build, over-complexity, and general over-the-toppishness. The hyperthyroid Ft. Harrington raised beds are even visible on Google Earth, if you know where to look.

But they were fun to build, and they are actually still there, in excellent shape, ready to pop out veggies on a season's notice.

Staking out the plan.

We had lived in what would become "Ft. Harrington" for only one full calendar year when we decided that a garden would be wonderful, now that we had the space for it. We cleared the space you see above, which had been just a weedy, overgrown mess under previous owners. (It is also the leach field for our septic system.) We planted the tiny apple sapling at right, and staked out the locations for four 4x8 raised beds.

The first box.

The material for the raised bed boxes is local redwood, which -- even untreated, as it has to be for this application -- is rot resistant. The corners are 4x4 pieces; the sides are rough planks. I had envisioned all four boxes as three planks high, but this first box convinced me that the others could be just two planks high.

Short-box mass production -- Kelsey T. Dog, supervisor.

Note the spiffy new fence at left. That is part of the new periphery fencing that Doug built (with Adam's and my help -- Doug, after all, was the carpenter, so we were the grunts). The fence was built during our first summer here, 1999, in order to allow us to get a dog. We wound up with Kelsey instead. (Just joking, big guy!) Note how skinny he is here; he was only a year and a half old at the time.

New boxes at the ready.

The planks are attached to the legs with high-calibre lag bolts, not wimpy nails or even screws, and the legs extend six inches below the bottom of the boards to be sunk into the ground for stability. These are the DC-3's of raised beds. They will last longer than our house. After Armageddon, cockroaches will use them for mansions.

New boxes entrenched to ground level.

Moles, voles, or terrians can't claw up through this sturdy steel wire mesh at the bottom of each box. Well, terrians, maybe could, but they're not real. Or even highly-rated.

Compost-enhanced soil, shortly after its delivery. A human would be smelling the roses.

Lining the boxes.

The boxes are lined with heavy-duty black plastic sheeting for two reasons: 1) to eliminate water loss through the sides, and 2) to further retard any rot in the planks. Almost ten years after the boxes were built, there is no sign of any rot anywhere on any of them.

Ready for the dirt.

Full up.

Operational.

This view was taken in spring, 2004, in the fifth year of the boxes' operation. Three minor alterations can be seen: posts for jute webbing for a tomato cage on the tall box, a wire trellis for vines on the far box, and wide planks along the long edges of all of the boxes. The last serve as benches for comfortable, lazy gardening.

Corn, peas, and beans, 2004 -- and notice how big the apple tree has become (trunk at left).

Pumpkin, tomato, and crooked-neck squash plants, 2004.

Garden supervisor.

This is JT, a neighbor's cat, and the self-appointed mayor of the settlement we call "Creepy Hollow" that surrounds Ft. Harrington. He approves of the raised beds, overbuilt as they may be.

Coming Soon: A Satchel of Ordinary Treasure

Left to right: Jim Harrington, Bonzo, Lynn Harrington
circa 1935

My long-promised new adjunct blog is about ready to roll out for public display. It will feature short excerpts from reminiscences of the first half of the 20th Century, primarily but not exclusively from my Dad, Lynn Harrington (1915 - 1999), and will concentrate on what life was like for a working-class family in the Syracuse area of Upstate New York during that time of rapid change in the routines of daily life.

I plan to have most of the posts for the next year be a serialization of Dad's Remembrances of a Childhood.

(Please click on the images to be taken to legible versions.)

After he retired (and even for about 15 years before), Dad wrote voluminously about his memories, and one little piece of his work has appeared in this blog, wonderfully illustrated by Brian Fies. Like that piece, the episodes in his Remembrances of a Childhood don't dwell as much on family events or extraordinary occurrences as they do on what ordinary daily life was like and his own recollections of its affect on him. This ordinariness -- and its differences from what is considered ordinary today -- makes it more likely to be of interest to people outside the family, but my main goal in "Satchel" will be to digitize Dad's work and thus preserve it for family in the future.

Please click to view larger.

Some of you know that I've been doing a similar thing with his photography: digitizing many of his slides and backing them up (with some commentary) on Flickr. Those slides are from a later time than the stories in "Satchel" will be. Slides can only be taken with a camera, and a camera would have been an unimaginable luxury in the time period from 1918 to 1930 for the working-class Harrington family. I'll try to come up with the occasional illustration -- especially when Dad describes some device or process that is unfamiliar to us now -- but "Satchel" will probably be significantly less graphics-heavy than what I've become accustomed to producing lately. Graphics may be in short supply, but images won't be: Dad was very good at using words as pixels to produce clear pictures in the mind's eye.

The title of the new blog comes from an episode early in Remembrances, and I'm not going to explain it on "Satchel" itself -- I'll leave it as an in-joke for my loyal readers over here:

The transition from horse power to internal combustion engines in the work of transportation, earth moving, and construction did not occur overnight. In my early childhood, up to about 1922 or 1923, horses and wagons made up a considerable share of the traffic on city streets.

We lived a little more nearly in the state of nature then than we do now. When a horse felt a call of nature, he stopped and answered it, no matter where he might be. It was a common occurrence in the city, and we took it quite for granted. We noticed, but thought nothing in particular about, the performance of a little man who walked past our house on his way to and from the street car line which carried him to and from work each day. He carried a brown leather satchel as he walked during the spring and summer months. On his homeward way in the evening, he commonly went out into the street in two or three places, opened his satchel, took out a small scoop, transferred some horse manure from street to satchel, replaced the scoop, closed the satchel, and continued on his homeward way. When I asked Mama why he did that, she said he probably had a nice garden, and used the manure to fertilize it.

"Satchel" will be online sometime on the weekend of June 6th and 7th. A link will be posted here when it's ready.