Up in the Air, Junior Birdmen!

I couldn't resist exorcising (sic) curiosity a little as to the Iowa caucus results tonight.  At the moment it appears a dead heat between Romney and Santorum, with Paul nipping at their heels.  I guess that is about as interesting an outcome as I could have hoped for.  Theoretically it might have been nice to have a very tight five-way tie or something, no one coming out happy and the scratching and yowling kicked up a few notches for our "entertainment."

But that would be pretty shallow stuff, on the level of People mag or the increasingly puerile "talk" shows.  What a joke this "journalism" has become.  Supposedly broke to the point of cutting back on almost all fronts, the primary outlets are yet squandering their resources in pursuit of salaciousness or something in Iowa.  Mr. Sirota, always a good read, can help with this:

This revealing piece in the trade publication Capital New York tells that sad story. The same journalism industry that pleads poverty to justify cutting big city newspapers’ editorial staffs, gutting coverage of state legislatures and city councils, and eliminating every other critical topic not related to Washington’s red-versus-blue fetish from news content — as writer Joe Romero recounts, this same industry has for months devoted a massive army to cover Iowa’s small contest.

In truth, that last sentence should have quotation marks around “reporters” and “cover.” As any perusal of the news (er, “news”) from Iowa shows, most of what this army produces is candidate stenography, a recounting of the latest poll numbers, gossip or naked speculation — that is, most of what it produces is valueless and neither “reporting” or “coverage” in any dictionary-definition sense of those terms.

You'd be well-advised to check out the article in full lest you take the whole Hawkeye State Barnum-and-Bailey too seriously.  The contrast with the consistently loathsome "reporting" on the exuberant and outside-the-box Occupy Wall Street activism is astounding.

For more on that, we turn to the esteemed Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone, under the caption "Iowa: The Meaningless Sideshow Begins."  Here again we have thoughtful writing, well worthy of however much you are able to invest in it.  I want to believe that many of the elite few of you who encounter this obscure blog, whether through your own devices or by way of my angry-bird-like missives, know by now that Mr. Taibbi does not do short and shallow.  There's larnin' to be found in an article like this, brief excerpt barely touching the surface:

The 2012 presidential race officially begins today with the caucuses in Iowa, and we all know what that means …
Nothing.

The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe. Just as even the non-British were at least temporarily engaged by last year’s royal wedding, people all over the world are normally fascinated by the presidential race: both dramas arouse the popular imagination as real-life versions of universal children’s fairy tales.

Instead of a tale about which maiden gets to marry the handsome prince, the campaign is an epic story, complete with a gleaming white castle at the end, about the battle to succeed to the king’s throne. Since the presidency is the most powerful office in the world, the tale has appeal for people all over the planet, from jungles to Siberian villages.

It takes an awful lot to rob the presidential race of this elemental appeal. But this year’s race has lost that buzz. In fact, this 2012 race may be the most meaningless national election campaign we’ve ever had. If the presidential race normally captivates the public as a dramatic and angry ideological battle pitting one impassioned half of society against the other, this year’s race feels like something else entirely.

In the wake of the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and a dozen or more episodes of real rebellion on the streets, in the legislatures of cities and towns, and in state and federal courthouses, this presidential race now feels like a banal bureaucratic sideshow to the real event – the real event being a looming confrontation between huge masses of disaffected citizens on both sides of the aisle, and a corrupt and increasingly ideologically bankrupt political establishment, represented in large part by the two parties dominating this race.
Let’s put it this way. What feels more like a real news story – Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a liar for the ten millionth time, or this sizzling item that just hit the wires by way of the Montana Supreme Court:

HELENA — The Montana Supreme Court restored the state's century-old ban on direct spending by corporations on political candidates or committees in a ruling Friday that interest groups say bucks a high-profile U.S. Supreme Court decision granting political speech rights to corporations…
A group seeking to undo the Citizens United decision lauded the Montana high court, with its co-founder saying it was a "huge victory for democracy."
"With this ruling, the Montana Supreme Court now sets up the first test case for the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit its Citizens United decision, a decision which poses a direct and serious threat to our democracy," John Bonifaz, of Free Speech For People, said in a statement.

Now that is real politics -- real protest, real change. Exactly the opposite of the limp and sterile charade in Iowa. This caucus, let’s face it, marks the beginning of a long, rigidly-controlled, carefully choreographed process that is really designed to do two things: weed out dangerous minority opinions, and award power to the candidate who least offends the public while he goes about his primary job of energetically representing establishment interests.

If that sounds like a glib take on a free election system that allows the public to choose whichever candidate it likes best without any censorship or overt state interference, so be it. But the ugly reality, as Dylan Ratigan continually points out, is that the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the time in America.

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Most likely, it’ll be Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama, meaning the voters’ choices in the midst of a massive global economic crisis brought on in large part by corruption in the financial services industry will be a private equity parasite who has been a lifelong champion of the Gordon Gekko Greed-is-Good ethos (Romney), versus a paper progressive who in 2008 took, by himself, more money from Wall Street than any two previous presidential candidates, and in the four years since has showered Wall Street with bailouts while failing to push even one successful corruption prosecution (Obama).

There are obvious, even significant differences between Obama and someone like Mitt Romney, particularly on social issues, but no matter how Obama markets himself this time around, a choice between these two will not in any way represent a choice between “change” and the status quo. This is a choice between two different versions of the status quo, and everyone knows it.

Indeed.

 

Please read the Whole Thing.

Occupy, Don't Ossify!

I made a point of wandering by the Seattle Central Community College campus the other day, having heard that the Occupy Seattle troops had encamped there, their overnight presence at Westlake Mall an ongoing challenge to keeping something like working relationships with the PTB.  And quite an encampment it is, replete with scores of small tents and mega-buzz.  It was good to hear that the SCCC potentate had backed off of his small-minded grumbly threatening tone about folks camping on their property.  I hear there are SCCC faculty offering instructional sessions to the Occupiers.  I don't doubt that there were CC students commendably in the first ranks of the Occupiers at Westlake.

It is thrilling to me to see this activism.  I am truly agog over this international Occupation.

I was stunned a while back when my generally-very-liberal hair-cutter remarked that the demonstrators just needed to "get a job."  If only.  Well yes, a job might be a great thing for the gazillions of Americans out of work and/or working for what amount to slave wages, barely covering child-care costs and often with abysmal or no health care benefits, while the fat-cats get their billion-dollar bonuses year in and out.  That is not the point.  We have arrived at a system that enriches the richest at the expense of all the rest of us thanks to casino politics where the vast majority of politicians are effectively owned by the corporate interests who pay for their whopping campaign bills and also control the "mainstream media" so the (dare I say) silent majority who settle for passively letting the tube infuse them or don't even bother with "news" don't have to be troubled with facing the absolute corruption that is our politics today.  And the whining and sniveling from the uber-rich is astounding and needs more attention from those organizations supposedly in the business of edifying anyone still resigned to getting their "news" through classical media.  This embodies such a blatant assumption of entitlement and victimhood at the same time that it is clear where the tea-dregs learned it.  Oh you pitiful things.

It's a wonderful thing that the Occupy folks designated Wall Street as their target.  Many of the primary WS players have featured huge CEO bonuses after accepting taxpayer bailouts to save them from their outrageous flim-flam packaging of certain-to-fail mortgages that they had collaborated in and in many cases fraudulently approved and then I gather sold-short against, further profiting while providing no value to anyone but themselves.  These are definitely not creators of jobs.  The corruption stinks to high heaven.  The payoffs they have made to our congress-swine to eviscerate the regulations make a pig-pile seem sweet.

I was also delighted that Elizabeth Warren, the consumer-rights advocate running for Ted K's Massachusetts Senate seat, has received some serious props as a major inspiration for the Occupy movement.

Our 2011 Western Washington Quilt Shop Hop

We greatly enjoyed participating in the Western Washington Quilt Shop Hop extravaganza late in June.  Son-in-law Sean was the booster for this, but alas his foot surgery precluded his actual participation.

It was quite a gas (and would have been a guzzler had it not been for snazzy hybrid the youngsters are now sporting - I found paying for the gas quite tolerable).  This whacky venture involves 50+ fabric stores spread all over Western Washington and all eager for our business.  The way it works is that there are some custom fabrics developed just for the event and each shop designs a quilt block around those fabrics and offers each shopper at least most of the fabric for their block, as well as their own embellishments in the way of other fabrics and perhaps other refinements, the latter sometimes at a price.

You equip yourself with a "passport," to be stamped by each vendor you visit.  If you visit 16 shops you are qualified to compete for prizes, some pretty consequential (multi-day quilting workshop, sewing machines, $100+ variety bags).

The "Hop" was a remarkable experience that will stick with me.  This was well outside of my normal envelope in several ways.  For one thing, as we played it, it was a multi-modal event in terms of transportation.  Eric graciously took us to the train station early Thursday for Amtrak to Vancouver.  In anticipation, I had printed out USGS topos of key route portions of interest to me, e.g., the stretch from Tacoma through Tenino.  Between maps and my gps, there was no time for R-&-R.  This stretch includes a tunnel that opens on shoreline a bit north of the Tacoma Narrows bridge(s), leading on through fascinating saltwater verge to  Dupont, where apparently an amazing amount of explosive material was exported down through the years.  From there it was on to the recently greatly-enhanced Nisqually Delta (no view of that alas) and the interesting and confusing transect of the mixed US Army-Tribal territory east of Lacey that eventually leads to the "East Olympia" station and Tenino, the place-name for fascinating patches of weird regularly-spaced mounds 15' or so high.  Not to mention the site of a terrific rock festival (Charles Lloyd!) that I fortuitously got to attend back in '69 or so courtesy of failure of split-rivet causing outboard motor prop to fall off in Anacortes marina on the way to the San Juans.  (A story for another day!).

It was not quite the full John Candy panoply - i.e., no planes (and mercifully no JC - okay, neither of 'em!) - but we did maneuver through three forms of transport before our Hop was over.

As it happened, my mother chanced to also be on this train, on her way to a J. S. Bach music festival in Eugene.  We were in the first passenger car, she in the last.  I wended back - a surprisingly long walk - pretty early on (Boeing Field - Auburn?) and we had a nice chat, but alas I did not repeat the visit.  There was a good stretch paralleling I5 that was prime, but I was dozy and she had admitted to the same.


It was a little offputting to find train station in Vancouver chock-a-block with major recycling facility.  And, as too often, these unfavored NIMBY eyesore-undersides of our "civilization" can tend to be unhappily planted right next to major water-bodies, in this case the Columbia River.  We tried to look the other way, but that was made more challenging when we learned Mara was trapped no more than a few hundred yards away behind long immobile freight train. Eventually that train moved, only to have another train further delay her arrival.  But eventually we were united.

As any routine peruser of my posts knows by now, I avoid the wide concrete whenever there is an option.  The train helped with that, while paralleling route we have driven innumerable boring times.  I rode this route at least once before, and Marg has done it several times, but there are always new observations possible.  It was fun to actually this time notice the strange transitions where the rails end up briefly between the I-5 North and South lanes.

But shop location alone dictated some Big Highway time.  Marg and I had already checked out the great shop in Castle Rock, which was probably the sixth stamp on our passports after Vancouver, Kelso, and Longview.  And there were shops in Centralia and Chehalis, one previously visited, one not (the latter excellent, the former not so much), as well as Tumwater and Olympia, both winners.  That kept us on the freeway a bit longer, not allowing for my original fantasy Tenino bypass, heading for several shops a way up the Nisqually watershed on the backside of Fort Lewis: e.g., Yelm, Eatonville, Graham, Orting.  Some of that was entirely new territory to me.  I found even the familiar parts unfamiliar as my prior transits had almost exclusively involved goal-oriented north-to-south travel with the Mt. Rainier vicinity as my mono-maniacal destination and these modest burgs as annoying slow spots in the road.

So there were also revelations available there for me.  Aside from the occasional need for a meal or gasoline, I rarely have had occasion to even notice these Small Towns.  Some are pretty ignorable, I admit.  But some are pretty darn intriguing.  Orting comes to mind.  My impression is that this town, which I may never have even passed through before, may be built on several hundred feet of mudflows from a long-ago Rainier event (i.e., a lahar).  It features a very scenic setting near the junction of two major Rainier-draining rivers (the Carbon and Puyallup), a Veteran's home, a great two-story fabric shop, and very friendly folks.

In general, on this strange event, I experienced some frustration that our collective mania did not allow for more than minimal photo-ops.  I will have a few up here, but given all the visual splendors, outdoors and in, that we were privy to, my inner PicMan was and is sorely distressed.

My original naive concept was that we would bust our butts Friday and hightail it for home that night, to lick our wounds and/or savor our fabrics and fire up the sewing machines.  Oh no!  My ladies had their designs on Saturday shop-hopping as well, to the point that we almost wandered off-track late Friday in the interests of finding a domicile that would support our needs.


We found that in Silverdale, allowing for access to Kitsap County shops, but with the timing precluding shops in Tacoma, as we had to hightail it across the Tacoma Narrows.  (It also meant for an eventual ferry ride, mode three, ka-ching.)  We pulled into a nice mall shop in Port Orchard just a few minutes before closing time. The owner was quite accommodating, to the point of eventually having to rescue us when we found ourselves outside the shop but locked inside the mall.

I don't remember too much about our motel in Silverdale.   I botched the freeway exit, making minor backtracking necessary.. I think we had a view of tideflats with scavenging GBH.  The captive restaurant seemed a work-in-progress, with basically no wait-staff during the dinner hour and 2/3 of our chosen entrees unavailable. 

Saturday found us visiting some great Kitsap County shops, the ones at  Kingston and Pt. Gamble already familiar to Marg and me, from Port Angeles trip this Spring and Marg's junket with Mara's chum Jean-Babtiste in the aftermath of Mara and Sean's wedding.  By this time we were fully committed.  There was no mention of retreating home via the Kingston ferry.  The wrinkle here was that we learned more-or-less on arrival that there was a Civil War reenactment underway at Pt. Gamble, a wonderfully reconstructed historical site.  Intriguing conjunction, quilting and blunderbusses.  The occasional astonishingly loud cannon-fire was very disconcerting, to say the least.

And our arrival in Port Townsend could hardly have been worse-timed.  Long ferry wait, and no practical way to retreat and visit local fabric store.  We consoled ourselves with a nice seafood lunch.

Time lost in Port T made for painful choices for the rest of the afternoon, given 8PM closure for the shops.  I was reminded that Mara inherited a highly competitive spirit on both family sides.  We foraged up Whidbey and Fidalgo Islands, did Mt. Vernon but not Stanwood, then Everett but not Arlington, figuratively screeching tires as we hooked up with Eric, who'd graciously agreed to feed us.

By this time we were totally in thrall I guess.  Bellevue, Woodinville, Duvalle, time-out for memorial service in Federal Way, and another shop in Des Moines (!).  Intense, bordering on obsessive?

Towards the end I suspect an observer might have remarked on semi-OCD behavior, from the standpoint of trying to fill in a second passport and increase our prize chances (as if).  Mara managed to get her second passport stamped by some remarkable pick-up of those shops we'd missed in Tacoma on our transect Friday, desperately seeking Port Orchard and Silverdale.  Marg and I ended up one or two shops shy of two completed passports.  In the end no prizes were won by any of us anyway, but it was one heck of an interesting adventure.

A Quarter-Inch Essence

We've been on a pretty fabric-intensive jam here over the last year or so.  I have another post lolling in draft that starts out almost identically.  If I can, as I hope, get a mini-post out here that sets the stage, maybe I can do some scrubbing on prior more lengthy draft with photographic ambitions, and get it posted "soon" too.

I re-delved into the sewing arts last Winter, making a table-runner for sister Ann for Christmas when I saw a couple go by and concluded I too could do that, and then a couple more for Mom and sister Mary.  Before I knew it, I was angling for bigger fish.  I invested in some fabric early this year, riffed on approach I had seen on PBS and eventually in print, leading with no little drama and printed-paper exercises and excellent suggestions from relations and accomplished pros, to my first mini-quilt.

Around about this time I was inveigled into attending a quilt expo at the Puyallup fairgrounds. Alas, that turned out to be a bit of a disappointment - comparatively limited actual creative work on display, very commercial, and quite crowded. One of the few times I brought out my camera I was harassed for it.

But we decided we couldn't resist attending the Stanwood Quilt Show.  This was quite overwhelming.  Astonishingly well-made quilts, with concepts and methods way beyond me.  But then again, there were a number in the show that to my eye were not that far beyond what I have observed in my little Q circle.  By this time I had done my first quilt front piecing but was clueless on next steps.  I was very lucky to link up with a sympathetic pro with good suggestions as to some options for the border.  Later on, I had great advice on binding fabric from another pro.

Next thing I knew we were going for the Western Washington Quilt Shop Hop, a multi-day fabric shop extravaganza in late June well beyond my previous imagined boundaries.  Wow.  Details to be found on another post!

And as if that wasn't enough, we also attended the 30th-or-so Quilt Show in Sisters, Oregon, a  prestigious event that draws folks from all over the country and beyond, always held on the second Saturday in July every year.  Yikes!!  An amazing display of quilting talent and audience for this stuff.  More Triple-A quilts than I could possibly count (or photograph!).

We continue to cherish our fabric work, a great creative outlet and wonderful respite.

Stay tuned for hopefully illustrated more-detailed posts on one or more of the above events.

Are We Down to Four Degrees of Separation?

This is old news now (not sure why it didn't get posted in more timely fashion), but still with some amusement value.

My Marg has a redoubtable gang of women-friends acquired from a course of pre-school with our respective first-borns some 30 years ago.  They play hostess to each other most months of the year for a dinner, at least in our household known as MNO (Mom's Night Out).

It is a great group of women and moms.  Way-back-when, these MNO events meant I would likely be indulging in something like all-you-can-eat fish-and-chips at Skippers with Mara, a happy event.  These days it is a quiet night at home.

But then, once in a blue moon, the circus comes to town.  Marg was the hostess late this Spring.

I had suggested Salad Nicoise as the main course and found myself the salad assembler.  We do this pretty much according to Julia: high-quality tuna, hard-boiled eggs, al dente green beans, potatoes, tomatoes, olives (none of those insipid canned blacks), capers, and etc.  Oh my.  In my opinion, a triumph of beauty and savour.

I wandered off as the ladies took their pleasure but at one point heard mention of Mitch Daniels.  Having encountered his name and face on my alumni magazine cover a while back, I'd realized that despite my active pursuit of political insights, here was another major revelation in the form of a classmate who was a potential candidate for president.

I dutifully trotted out my freshman yearbook and assorted post-grad materials.

To my great consternation, it turns out that one of the MNO members was Daniel's senior prom date!  Good golly.

And, of course, his candidacy was an early debacle!  By comparison to some of the current leading "contenders" he seems like a bright light - were it not for a few skeletons.  But my hope is for more of that much-vaunted transparency when it comes to those elbowing and brown-nosing for the nomination.  We need all the help we can get, given how poorly the party seemingly in the majority has done.

Ripe Tomatoes in Seattle!

I had my doubts, I confess.  But giddy co-worker Todd prodded me yesterday to the effect that he had "a" ripe cherry tomato on my mother's birthday, 8/8, thus beating me despite my headstart on planting.

Somewhat reluctantly I went (on my knees) to my first plants last night and behold! Three fully red cherries!

It has not been what anyone would call a good year for warm-weather crops here in the PNW.  But then, given what we can stand to learn of conditions in the rest of the country (I'm only talking wx here!), complaining would seem pretty cheesy.  We have had decent snap and English pea harvests, lots of lettuce and other greens, and aggressively-planted beans could still come through.  Hard green sets are apparent on almost all of the too-many tomato plants.  Fava beans are productive.  Tomatillos ditto.

But those love-apples are the real test of a NW gardener's prowess.  I should probably not get so invested in such a low-payoff game, but it's hard to resist.

One more ripe today!

The Weekend Yang and Yin

This may be the busiest time of the year for those of us actively dealing with yards and gardens, especially when it includes vegetables and aggressive management of existing plants.

There are always some things that might need serious adjusting (or removal), and this season was no exception.  We took out a group of camellias that had never done much for us and had produced a lot of litter and other problems.  M tagged our yard-work folks for that a couple weeks ago.

If only it was so easy..  In hindsight, I am ambivalent over who got the better deal.  The trunks and rootballs fell to me.  Axes, pry-bars, loppers, and all sorts of mean and nasty implements (apologies, Arlo G) were required.

But "we" got most of them out last weekend, and in celebration of our 34th anniversary, the last most-nasty-trunk, this weekend.

Meanwhile, I was also attempting to accommodate my more gentle side, cozying up to a sewing machine with a new project.  Perhaps I have blundered (some have said so) in getting more than one such project in the queue, but I concluded that was inevitable, both from watching the more-seasoned sew-ers around me and from an analysis of the tasks involved and their psychic payback.  Some of this is just dull work.

Anyway, my present fabric activity includes one now-quilted quilt in need of only binding (mercy, how many hurdles can there be!), a couple clandestine table runners with unspoken needs, another also off-the-record project that is just barely underway but also involves some new adventures and education, and another batik-intensive quilt-in-progress featured above, with major fabric work largely done, tedious small work on border maybe half done.

In this case though I was working off a pattern, so the border and binding are within reach.  I'm still pondering the backing - maybe an equally-complex quilt?