Yesterday a set of comments on the blog post I wrote the previous day, Saturday, reinforced a very powerful bit of information which I have a tendency to forget over time. We all know different things. You may well say, “Of course!” At the most basic level, sure, we all know this, yet as a writer, blogger, and graphics nerd; I can forget that the things with which I work, day in and day out, are not common knowledge.
I was unsure as to whether I would be writing something that was of no practical use to anyone when I wrote a short post on a basic resource for free images. I didn’t want to insult anyone’s intelligence, and I’ve known of this resource for ages.
But those fears went away when one reader commented that she had bookmarked the resource and thanked me. The other comment that popped up Sunday morning was reinforcing the info I had shared as a known quantity but one of high quality. Today another reader thanked me. I love sharing information that is useful.
So today I’m wondering, how do I find out what it is that I know that others don’t know that they might want to hear about? I’m at a loss. I mean I can ask you the readers, and I am going to ask you, but other than questionnaires and scouring my analytics, what else is there? How do you determine the topics on which you write? What are the subjects of which you would like to see more? There is a poll on this topic in the sidebar; please fill it out if you would be so kind. It will remain open through October 31st. Do you like my reviews, my information nerd articles, pet articles, personal stories, or political stuff? You can always leave a comment too. Thanks!
Horrible Site Name, Great Free Photos
I engage in a constant search for great free photos to use as featured images for my blog posts. I used to love sxc.hu but the site etiquette for “free” photos strongly encourages you do what the photographers want and link back or acknowledge where you have used the image. No problem if you are looking for an occasional image to use but when the process of the search is at least a daily one all the extra “steps” in acknowledging photography can add time that I just don't have to the search process. This is similar to certain Creative Commons licenses. Remember when cc meant carbon copy? But I digress. I have not found a great way to search for Creative Commons licensed photography.
But there is morguefile.com
Everything image on Morgue File is free to use. Read the fine print even here, but basically other than use in a standalone fashion, you are free to use the photos on the site without attribution. For folks who are not making money from their blog, this can be a goddess-send. If you are creating a professional site, you probably want to invest in great photographs to enhance your great site, but when money is a real concern and limiting constraint, Morgue File is your enabling constraint.
The photos on the site are not all second rate. Some are not professional quality. But some are great quality and are used to entice you into viewing that photographer's site or professional work for sale on other sites and purchase some of those images. I found these images on Morgue File when I was looking for fall images.
Of course you can always just take your own pics too!
An Eight Sided Name For Month Ten
Names
I've always wondered why October, which is obviously supposed to be the eighth (octo means eight) month of the year, is now the tenth month of the year? I know two months were added to the calendar at some point, but most people who have passing acquaintance with such things think it has something to do with Julian to Gregorian calendar conversions. Nope. Blame Numa. He changed the calendar of Romulus where Winter had no months, and the year started with the Vernal or Spring Equinox. The following explanation is from Wikipedia:
Numa Pompilius, the second of the seven traditional kings of Rome, reformed the calendar of Romulus by prefixing January and February around 713 BC to the original ten months; thus the names of Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November and December (implying fifth through tenth) no longer agreed with their position in his calendar.
Although Numa wanted to have a year of 354 days, Romans considered odd numbers to be lucky,[4] so Numa added 51 days to the 304 days in the calendar of Romulus and took one day from each of the six 30-day months giving a total of 57 days to share between January and February. January was given 29 days leaving February with the unlucky number of 28 days, suitable for the month of purification. Of the eleven months with an odd number of days, four had 31 days each and seven had 29 days each.
Actions
Provisioning used to be the focus for everyone in the Northern Hemisphere at this time of year that falls between the Harvest and Hunter's Moons. Even when I was a child on a farm in Indiana we were focused on canning or preserving the last bit of the garden, culling the old hens and replacing them in the chicken coops with pullets who had been free-ranging up until that time. Dad and my brothers were busy harvesting out in the fields. Wardrobe was assessed with fit and wear-and-tear determining what needed to be replaced when the crops were sold. Preparations for hunting season were made. Winterizing the house with storm windows and closing up the window wells into the cellar except for the shoot for filling the “coal bin” with wood or coal, and of course checking out the furnace to make sure it was functioning properly. October was a month of intense work. Halloween was not a big deal back then. We had other stuff to do. How times have changed for most of the population. At the time I had no idea that I was one of the last people to live on what was essentially the last of the small family farms that were more akin to the 19th Century than 20th.
Thoughts
October makes me think, and I suspect I'm not the only one who feels this way. The long stretched rays of late afternoon sunlight really does have a different feel about it. The golden glow is beautiful but somehow melancholy. Dormancy and the dying back of plants is a reminder of the passing of time and the cycle of life. Seasonal Affective Disorder can steer a person toward depression biologically and the approaching Holidays for some can be a reminder of people who are no longer in their lives. I know that I will have thoughts aligning themselves in new ways and that there will be massive amounts of inspiration for writing. I can settle into absolute funks this time of year, but with a new puppy in the house to keep me busy,I don't think I will have time for any moping, but I will have time for snippets of writing between puppy tasks, so it should lend itself to blogging and other well bounded writing tasks.
Framing the Shuttle
Somehow the flyover of Tucson by the Space Shuttle was a nice way to say goodbye to the old space program for me. From what I can tell the buzzing of the U of A campus was a last minute request by the last person to pilot/command the shuttle, Mark Kelly. His wife didn't get to really experience that last flight because she was recovering from an assassination attempt. They were on the top of a parking garage today for the flyover. That was neat! Local news covered it of course. Apparently since the flight path went over Tucson anyway, from Houston to Edwards Air Force Base, this little buzz was requested by Mark for Gabby yesterday. Double neato.
In the late 1970s I spent a couple summers in Berkeley, CA. My Uncle Carl had worked at Edwards Air Force Base, for a couple decades. He was in the trouble shooting engineering dept that worked on optics/camera for moon landings and he managed to get my boyfriend and I and another couple VIP passes to see the first free flight test of the shuttle. They took it up piggyback, just like today's flight, on a 747, and then it disconnected for computer testing and landing. It was amazing. It was in August, the Perseid meteor shower was at its peak the night before the launch, and we drove all night from the Bay Area to Edwards. The meteor shower was spectacular and at dawn as we got close to where my uncle and aunt lived, we had to stop for a shepherd to finish having his flock of sheep cross the road. At that time, LA had not sprawled north that far and there were still Basque shepherds in the Antelope Valley.
After introductions and a cup of coffee we piled into my uncle's old nondescript car that had been aged and naturally sand blasted to perfectly match the surrounding Mojave Desert and drove toward Edwards AFB. We went through checkpoint after checkpoint with crowds of people standing to watch the test flight outside each checkpoint. At every checkpoint there were fewer people, and finally at the last one, we went through and turned behind some hangars to park in an open air parking lot and there in the next section over in the parking lot was the Shuttle on top of the 747. We really were in the VIP section with Senators, and Military Brass all standing around outside the hangars. The roar of the crowd at the successful glide in still resounds when I remember. Pretty neato. And yes, we saw the take off, separation and landing. Those dry lake beds are amazing and perfect for landing spacecraft.
Having personal visual memories on either side of the Space Shuttle program frames an era literally and figuratively for me. It must mean I'm old. Or lucky. Yes, lucky. Pre and post program memories. Thanks Uncle Carl, you would have liked today here in Tucson.
Be Kind When People Say, "I'm So Sick of Politics" – Part 1
Before I say anything else, please allow me to say that, “I too am sick of politics.” It is that disgust, turn away from the awful scene, “don't look at the blood,” type of revulsion that motivated me to become active in the peace movement in early 2003. I knew if I didn't act to try to stop the invasion of Iraq I would regret it with every fiber of my body down the line. I tried. I tried my damnedest. We didn't stop the war. I still get that nauseated feeling when particularly hateful or misinformed or malicious information is spread by the same forces that worked for the Iraq War/
Ten years later my great nephew is on his way to Afghanistan to fight in the longest war this nation has ever fought. Our resources were pulled from Afghanistan to fight in Iraq to help out the oil lobby with which Dick Cheney had secret meetings and help out the contracting service, Haliburton, which he helped run before his Vice Presidency. It isn't right. That war, Afghanistan, was sabotaged by redirecting resources to Iraq in order to make U.S. based corporations and families obscene amounts of money, while the American people amassed a huge amount of debt to pay for the second, unjustified war.
Now my family, two generations younger than me, is headed, at this moment, to fight a war that should have, and could have, ended within a couple years of its start, definitely by 2005, had we not squandered our most precious resources, the lives of our military, and the future well-being of our children and grandchildren,by unnecessarily sending them into harms way and wasting our economic surplus and financing the wars we waged through debt accumulation.
But I have always been more aware of political everything than most people. It is just how I am. In 6th or 7th grade I could never understand why other kids wouldn't go for the extra credit points they got when we could clip and bring in newspaper articles from home about the country or geographic area on which our lessons focused. I could find dozens of articles somehow related to our every subject, and I didn't even need the extra credit. But to do the clipping activity, you had to have 1) access to newspapers, and 2) enough where with all to scan the international and political sections of the newspaper. Without intending to do so, I learned tons about international affairs, economics, and politics. I just wanted the points. I wanted to win. Win what? I'm not sure, the points, the respect of the teacher, getting the most points in the class, or maybe a little bit of “all of the above.”
Earlier this year I wrote a bit about the partisan nature of news in the U.S. and I scanned an image of personal memorabilia from second grade for the featured image for the article. It proves that I have been a political nerd since early, early, early in life. What was it? This:
The capstone event that insured my life as a political being, not necessarily a partisan being, actually happened a few years later, but I was still in primary school. My brother enlisted in the Marines and went to Vietnam. His draft number was low, meaning he would be drafted, without a doubt. He entered the Marines in 1967. We were farmers, poor farmers. He wasn't great student so college was out, and we didn't have any friends in high places to pull strings at the draft board. That was my first acquaintance with an early version of the poverty draft.
Roger, my brother, who was 9 years old when I was born, was the youngest of my four brothers. He was injured in the Battle of Hue in which he caught a bullet in the left leg, and then injured, once again, a few months later in the Battle of Khe Sahn, on his birthday, August 4th, 1968. he caught an explosive round under his flack jacket that ripped through his core, lower back to gut, as he lifted an injured buddy into a Medical Evacuation Helicopter. Soldiers in those days never survived such injuries, but somehow, probably because he was, essentially, injured inside a Medivac Chopper they were able to keep him alive and got him to a field hospital where he was patched up enough for immediate travel to Japan were he had several surgeries before he was shipped to Great Lakes Naval Base for further recovery.
When I was a Junior in High School I wrote a short vignette about napalm, firestorms, and a young boy in Vietnam who realized he was about to die. This story just flowed from my fingers, the first time I'd ever had that experience as a writer. That little bit of writing got me recognized as a potential writer and journalist, and that got me into college. Life moves in mysterious ways.
So, I guess all of this background is to say that I come by my views, political and otherwise, honestly. I opted to become an anthropologist rather than a journalist, but in many ways the training was similar. Gathering information, interviewing, analysis, and reporting are key methodologies within both disciplines. I rarely see anything that moves me to act, but when I do act, it is because my heart and brain are on the same page and that means that I have evaluated something morally and factually. It doesn't mean I am right, but it means that I believe I am doing the right thing.
There is a part of me, a selfish part, that thinks that people should be like me — but most people are not information junkies like me. Most people have such a selfish, ego-centric part of themselves, that thinks that other people should be a lot like they are. I've learned that we all tend to act from what we believe is right. That is why we need to be kind and attempt to understand where others are coming from. But that said, misinformation can be very harmful. I will explore more about the distaste many Americans currently are feeling about politics.
Food Bloggers Infiltrate Science Writing
I always pride myself on noting when iconic culture change happens, and there was a significant merging of food blogging and science writing this week. A recipe for a pesto-like cilantro-based sauce/paste was published in an article, NATURE | NEWS: Soapy taste of coriander linked to genetic variants on Nature.com.
Nature is the online identity of the interdisciplinary science journal by the same name, one of the very top science journals in the world, that has been around since November 1869. Nature doesn't do recipes. Recipes for science experiments, yes, (called methodology sections) but not for food. But it did. There are many ways to discuss the reason behind that a small but significant portion of the population thinks cilantro or coriander tastes like soap and will not eat it. Julia Child was one of these people and the article brings both her reaction to cilantro and a recipe that uses a preparation technique, crushing the cilantro, that helps reduce the soapy taste of cilantro.
By the way the recipe ingredients are:
1/2 cup [c. 75g] toasted almonds
3 cups coriander leaves and tender stems (about 2 bunches)
1 or 2 garlic cloves
1/2 cup [120ml] extra virgin olive oil
2/3 [c. 70g] cup grated aged sheep’s milk cheese like Nisa, Serpa or pecorino-Toscano
Serve right away with pasta, grilled meats, vegetables or soups, or freeze.
This recipe inclusion doesn't mean that science is dumbing itself down. But just as with journalistic reporting, scientific reporting, for the masses, is in flux as people search for information via mobile and digital platforms that deliver infomation up without the visual and tactile cues that once distinguished scientific journals from lifestyle magazines.
This doesn't mean that the online version of Nature will deliver begin delivering recipes and decorating tips. But it doesn't mean that it isn't considering something along those lines either. When people search for information, there is usually a question that motivates that search. Many bloggers know this and form their individual posts around an answer to a question.
Search is less skilled than it once was. Perhaps you remember the days when you were in school and you actually had to go into a library and use print copies of a general index such as The Readers Guide to Periodical Literature to find basic information, or perhaps you remember searching on computer stations that had CDs or online access to basic informational databases such as InfoTrac. On a different table, station,or CD kiosk in that same library were indexes that were far more specialized. Those sorts of distinctions still exist, but your searches are apt to be done outside of a library without the guidance of someone with training on how to find information. Most likely you do a Google search. There is a chance that you could land on the site of Nature, The New York Times, or a Food Blog partially dependant on how your search has been personalized by Google.
So what does this all mean? It means that purveyors of informtion of all types are competing with advertisers and publishers outside of their traditional competitors to have your eyeballs land on their pages and use their presentation of the information for which you search. Different formulas and methods for presenting that information will be tried by publishers.
If you are looking for food science information to answer the question, “Why does my kid think my homemade salsa tastes like soap?” you may want a more technical article that talks about aldeheides in food. The pool of individual writers and publishers, aka bloggers, has changed the information that is available to people with questions. The old school publishers, even in science, have noticed this and are changing how they frame their information. Never doubt the power of women, and men, writers.