Gramarye

Last week was just chock full of birds. I’ve been taking a lot of pictures of them for the same reasons I’ve been taking a lot of pictures of flowers and cloud formations.

# They’re obvious. They have a natural tendency to look interesting, or, failing that, to at least seem interesting to the careless observer. People are less likely to consider disliking a picture if there’s a bird in it.
# They’re ubiquitous. Not in general, but for me. I work literally right next to Lake Merritt Channel, which connects to the bay and is home to a preposterous quantity of water birds. Most of them hang out in other parts of the lake, but a substantial minority see fit to hang out in plain sight as I’m going to and from work or eating my lunch.
# They’re persistent. If I wish, I can take pictures of birds every day. In theory, this should have a correlation to me getting better at it.

h4. Nick, who sees all things

And, in fact, I think I have. I’ve gotten used to looking more and more carefully at the wildlife around me, at the immediate environment of the channel, etc. I’ve been noticing and really seeing all sorts of stuff that I had previously not bothered to consider — like the fact that the height of the channel changes significantly with the weather, sometimes exposing interesting stuff, like tires encrusted with barnacles and algae:

And I’ve got plenty of pictures of “birds,”:http://flickr.com/photos/kukkurovaca/tags/birds/ not all of which are crap, and I was thinking about all of these things Friday morning. Which is when I almost stepped on a pair of ducks (one of the local mated pairs that often hangs around the joint). They erupted into flight right in front of my face, so close that I could have reached out and grabbed one if I were paying attention and had mad ninja skills. They had been snoozing in the grass right next to the entrance to our building, and I had been about to walk blithely past them.

Some observer, huh?

That said, I also had some more positive experiences this past week with my feathered friends and foes.

h4. ??A Solitary Blue??

For example, we were visited by what I believe (although I’m no kind of birder at all, so I’m just as likely incorrect) to be a great blue heron. This is not one of the species that I see a lot of — mostly I see cormorants, coots, egrets, and several kinds of duck, and a few kinds of geese, including egyptian.

Here’s the heron standing by the bank:

and here he is in flight:

Note: For those of you who were never teenage girls (or, like me, enlightened teenage boys) ??A Solitary Blue?? is a reference to Cynthia Voigt’s book by the same title, which is roughly part of the “Homecoming” series. It was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, because I was into vicarious emotional trauma and really good prose (those being Voigt’s two signatures). If you’ve never read Voigt, you should really start, regardless of your age or gender. ??A Solitary Blue??, ??The Callender Papers??, ??Jackaroo??, and ??Bad Girls?? are all excellent starting points, depending on whether you’re into deep emotional pain, American gothic mystery, artfully demythologized fairy tales, or funny, smart, tough, bitter tales of elementary school noir, in that order. (If my description of ??Bad Girls?? seems obscure, think Jerry Spinelli’s ??Maniac Magee??, only modernized and female-centric. And if you haven’t read either Jerry Spinelli or Cynthia Voigt, you should feel deeply, deeply ashamed.)

h4. Coots!

I also got some very good shots of the coots, of which let me share only the one most interesting, rather than, oh, a couple hundred of my favorites.

Basically, it’s a pair of Coots Rampant, and I really want to put together a nice coat of arms with a stylized version of this image:

I could crop this, and at some point I may, but in the meantime, you might want to click through and use the “All Sizes” button to get a closer look.

In order to understand just how freaking excited I am by this picture, you have to understand that coots are a real pain to photograph, and most of my pictures of them are just little black blobs that are hard to make out.

Why are coots so hard to photograph? Well, for starters, they’re small. The ones I spend the most time around are babies, and they’re _tiny_. The adults are a little bigger, but still smaller (at least, to the eye) than most ducks. They’re also almost totally black, except for their beak, and you have to be pretty close up to see any detail of their feathers, etc.

But these two problems are minor in comparison to the fact that coots are scared sh**less of people.

I should say that they may simply be scared of me; I haven’t seen them around other people much, because I’m usually the only one out there. But I can say that whenever they see me coming, they immediately take to the water if they’re not already in it, and if they are already in it, they swim straight to the other side of the channel. They’re fast, strong swimmers, and while they aren’t much in terms of high flying, they’re good at short, swift bursts that skim across the ground or water, more than adequate to give them a good fifteen or twenty feet of distance at all times, if not more.

In contrast, most of the other birds will let you get fairly close to them, and then if they decide you’re encroaching, they’ll sort of ease away from you. Some of them are harder than others to spook; you can practically walk up to the geese, and while they might bitch at you or even attack you, they won’t flee unless you freak out. The Egyptian geese in particular seem to be quite secure. The cormorants are a little more skittish, and the egrets fall somewhere in between. But the coots will flee not when I get too close, but literally as soon as they see me coming around a corner or over a rise.

This is interesting, because the coots are also, so far as I can tell, by far the smartest birds on the channel. They’re very curious about their environment, and will often observe with what I anthropomorphically suppose to be bemusement the antics of their fellow birds. “Poor example.”:http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=429343229&size=l They seem — and again, I’m anthropomorphizing, here — to have opinions about the behaviors of other coots. They also seem to have a curiosity about death. “Example.”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kukkurovaca/418976759/

I am fascinated by this juxtaposition of a curious, interested orientation towards the word combined with a paranoiac aversion to it, and to people in particular. Reminds me a lot of myself and my family.

So, I like them personally and am convinced they have by far the highest concentration of personality of all the local birds. For this reason, I put a lot of effort into getting pictures of them, almost all of which are utterly tedious, because they’re simply clusters of black blobs.

Friday, however, I finally broke down and adjusted my strategy. I took off my hat, crouched down in the grass and behind whatever cover was available, and snuck up on the little bastards.

I don’t normally do this for a number of reasons. For one thing, the time I have for this usually comes in 5-10 minute chunks at the end or beginning of my commutes to and from work, respectively, or else at the end of my lunch break, after I’ve taken care of eating food and whatever other tasks I cram into that time. For another, I try not to get mud all over the knees of my pants, or fall in the channel, or pick up a lot of bugs. I forewent these concerns, however, and got fairly good results. In the pictures from Friday, you can actually see what the coots look like. This is important for developing a proper appreciation of the hilarity of their antics.

h4. Ken Rockwell facts

I’m acquiring a basic knowledge of photography in a sort of haphazard way. Most of it comes from podcasts like “Tips from the Top Floor”:www.tipsfromthetopfloor.com and “The Digital Photography Show.”:digiphoto.thepodcastnetwork.com/ My current favorite is Jeff Curto’s podcast of the lectures from his course on “History of Photography.”:www.cod.edu/photo/curto/1105

But one of the more hilarious sources of information is http://kenrockwell.com. He seems to the subject of a fair amount of dispute, which I am certainly not qualified to arbitrate. A lot of what he has to say seems common sense, and appealing, but since I don’t know anything about photography, it hardly counts for much that what he says sounds _to me_ like common sense. Possibly more to the point is that I find almost all of his actual photography, at least as it appears on his website, to be totally uninteresting. Not bad, necessarily; it’s just very clearly not my cup of tea.

Nonetheless, he is sometimes hilarious, and a lot of his general principles (like focusing on usability over absolute image quality) seem valid for those of us who have no interest at all in being or seeming to be pros.

I mention him because I found his page on “bird photography”:http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/birds.htm to be particularly amusing. In particular, he dismisses the importance (or, rather, the efficacy) of more powerful zoom lenses:

bq. Instead of buying a 600mm lens, first consider a pair of waders or a blind which will give better results for one percent of the price!…My avid bird photographer friends spend hours every dawn and dusk crawling around in the mud sneaking up on birds, and even with 500mm lenses and teleconverters they’re having to crop everything.

Of course, I like to hear this, since it’s exactly what I found myself doing on friday — not the hip waders per se, but you get the idea.

The other reason I mention him, though, is that, as I said, he’s a somewhat contentious figure in the realm of internet photography forums (I have no idea what, if any, his role is in the world of commercial, art, or other kinds of photography), and someone put together a delightful list of “Ken Rockwell Facts,”:http://www.bahneman.com/liem/blog/article.php?story=Ken_Rockwell_Facts on par with the well-known Chuck Norris facts.

Some examples:

Ken Rockwell doesn’t color correct. He adjusts your world to match his.

Before Nikon or Canon releases a camera they go to Ken and they ask him to test them, the best cameras get a Nikon sticker and the less good get a Canon sticker

Ken Rockwell doesn’t use flash ever since the Nagasaki incident.

Ken Rockwell’s nudes were fully clothed at the time of exposure

flickr:õSC03868

Norton 360 protects you while you’re shopping. Not only does it stop phishing schemes and online fraud, it erects an invisible but impenetrable barrier to keep your kids from interrupting you. Little Stevie and Heather will have to find some other way to entertain themselves, like shaving your pets and challenging traditional gender roles.

Rose McGowan “insisted crew members sanitize her pole.”

Movie & TV News @ IMDb.com - WENN - 27 March 2007

I wonder whether, in fact, any of the corporate enttities have concerned the market impact of alienating women with “M Appeal” style advertising.

I also wonder whether perhaps any companies have started targeting disaffected woman geeks and business owners — I doubt a feminist (or, I suppose, “feminine”, although I that has its own objectionable aspects) domain registrar would get much traction, but I bet a feminist web hosting company that also offered domain services would have a shot.

Amyloo: Monday, March 26, 2007

Can anybody recommend a good cheap registrar that doesn’t proactively drive away women customers? I’m in the market to transfer today. This just infuriates me. It makes me angry at the companies who use 1950s cheesecake ploys — and it makes me sad and discouraged to think that they probably do it because it works. Somebody help me understand this; I don’t fathom the male geek mind. You see skin on the home page, and you think “Wow! I’ll buy my domains here”? I’d think the tactic would insult your intelligence, like the 3-story inflated dinosaurs that retail places put outside to attract attention. It’s so discouraging when you consider it as part of the gender divide on the net, it makes me want to cry.

A couple of quick notes on my immediate prior post. First off, it was a little mean, and while in the case of Dawkins, et al, well, it probably wasn’t mean enough, but in the case of Erika’s possibly new age (or not) views, it was a little too mean. Also, I have the feeling that I sort of started a fight via trackback, which seems excessively passive-aggressive. For both of which, see my comment “here.”:http://redshirtknitting.com/?p=891

But, to move away from that discussion for a moment, I had an interesting discussion this evening with my mother, who coincidentally had a couple of positive experiences with religious people. I should say that these are tricky topics here in the bay area; in the more well-off areas of SF, Oakland, and Berkeley, there are large populations of people who belong to either the camp of well-educated unbelievers with chips in their shoulders or the camp of (also often well-educated, go figure) new agers, or some combination of these two. (For new age, I’m lumping in diverse groups, including but not limited to revivalists of the pagan and wiccan varieties, several kinds of Buddhism, Hinduism, and their westernized perversions, etc.) But you don’t have to go very far to find dogmatically conservative (although usually socially progressive) Christian populations, many of them in the black, latino, and asian populations, and of course if you push a little farther east, you’re basically smack dab in the midwestern state of mind.

My mom works in one of the more afflicted regions, and she shared an anecdote regarding a recent experience which I won’t provide in detail — I didn’t think to ask if I could quote it — in which a couple of people were able to provide useful comfort and perspective which was deeply grounded in their religious background. Anyway, these colleagues were black women, and my mom mentioned that that was a community whose religion she typically found palatable, unlike the religion of most white people, for example. This is true despite the fact that most of the women she’s talking about attend congregations where, _doctrinally speaking_ gays and lesbians occupy a pretty despised position, and, in theory, the intellectual condition of the congregation is pretty conservative. But this doesn’t necessarily carry over into how these people act with her — how accepting they are, and how willing they are to share their faith with her. And this doesn’t mean proselytizing, because it’s not about conversion; for women of this kind, religion is inextricable from moment-to-moment existence, providing meaning and guidance in all things, and for them to be paying attention and trying to connect with you, faith necessarily enters the picture.

I suspect that the religion of black women working and/or living in situations of poverty, affliction, and oppression, is necessarily first and foremost a practical religion, sticking close to the roots of Christianity in charity, compassion, and advocacy for those who have the least and need the most — added to which is a need to come to terms with the ubiquity of violence and suffering, both in terms of the role religion plays in helping people cope with the psychological implication and in terms of taking action that will help reduce these things. This is what Christianity looked like in the time of Christ, and in the time of the martyrs, and in some cases afterwards — in antiquity, Christians were often the only advocates of anything like social welfare and social justice, and in times of plague, they were often the only ones to attempt to care for the sick and maintain order and hygiene.

Of course, this is also exactly what Christianity loses every time it ascends to a position of power, and starts to use doctrine and dogma — not to mention the manipulation of the faithful — for the acquisition and maintenance of power and the oppression of minorities. It’s easy to think of this as a historical progression in which Christianity started as something that had consequences and became something that had bad consequences, but it’s a struggle that’s ongoing in the Christian community — in places where Christianity is allied to authoritarian power, the sorts of doctrine that allow people to classify, reject, judge, and, ultimately, oppress segments of the population come to the forefront. This is why the religious right wing in America behaves as it does — it isn’t a necessary outgrowth of religiosity, and in fact has a specific, contingent, documented history.

The religion that is practiced on a daily basis in the impoverished parts of Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, and other communities across the country has, in practical terms, little to nothing in common with this religion of power. And bear in mind that the religion we’re talking about is also the religion that enabled the civil rights movement to proceed. (There’s an interesting “game theory analysis”:http://www.amazon.com/Collective-Movement-American-Politics-Political/dp/0226104400 of what was necessary for the civil rights movement to happen that is pertinent here.) Without the tradition of non-violent religious opposition to violent political authority, which in that place and time could only have been traced back to the Christian martyrs who, in death, still shattered the power of a corrupt Rome — without that tradition, it is highly unlikely that the civil rights movement could have proceeded without either dissolving in the face of abuse or transforming into a violent revolution.

It’s very easy for a lot of comparatively affluent, comparatively caucasian unbelievers to mock or scorn the beliefs of Christians in general in favor of what they believe to be the implications of modern science. Those who do are typically lacking in a sense of history (because anyone who’s made even a minor study of the history of western civilization knows that the situation calls for a more nuanced approach, both because in light of the history of religion and in light of the history of science). I think they are also caught up in a “first world problem” of epistemological one-upmanship (which, for the record, they only _think_ they’re winning — cf. Quine) when in fact the real problem isn’t that people are stupid enough to keep believing in god, but rather that faith has the power to move millions of people to act, and that it can motivate the kind of action embodied in the martyrs’ faith of the civil rights movement, or it can motivate the kind of action we see marshaled by the ring-masters of the religious right. Similarly, atheistic ideologies can motivate humanists or place masses at the whims of tyrants.

Yeesh. I’m sounding like a Foucauldian….I try to avoid that.

There aren’t many knitting blogs I follow closely, although there are many, many that sit in my RSS aggregator and that I breeze by on my way to other content, and occasioanlly tempt me to read, usually with astonishing pictures of finished objects and/or rockin’ yarn.

Today, I was interested to note that Reshirt Knitting, the blog of the inventor of the tree sweater, has launched a small debate on religious diversity, specifically pertaining to the very common practice of (non-religious) community organizations, such as knitting guilds, to hold meetings in church spaces.

The short story appears to be that she is a non-religious person who is offended by the default assumption that no one ought to mind meeting exclusively in religious settings, because this reflects an assumption on the part of organizers that everyone is okay with organized religion.

I certainly agree with this in principle; as a child, with a child’s basic understanding of the constitution our country, I refused to participate in the pledge of allegiance, on the grounds that it violated freedom of religion — which it does, and I’m always astonished that there are many, many people who don’t grasp this intuitively.

Now, knitting guilds aren’t responsible for upholding religious freedom, and they’re not violating anyone’s rights by holding meetings in churches. However, I agree with Erika that it is very poor manners to assume that no one will have a problem with this. I don’t think it would bother me — mind you, I subscribe to no organized religion, and do not have views which are compatible with any existing flavor of Christianity. (If someone ever gets around to taking Origen out of the penalty box, give me a call.) While I do not subscribe to the majority religious perspectives, and while I strenuously object to those who would try to impose those perspectives on others, I know that this places me in an overwhelming minority in this country, and I don’t take offense at the fact that others don’t necessarily take my views into consideration.

Similarly, as a lifelong vegetarian, I would object to any attempt to force me to eat meat, but I don’t take offense when someone schedules a lunch meeting at a steak house or other meat-promoting establishment. Still, it is clearly more meritorious to take into account the dietary requirements of others (vegetarianism, religious restrictions, allergies, etc.) when planning events, and I usually try to do so when I can’t avoid putting myself in that position.

I think that these considerations are fairly straightforward, and should be apparent as such to anyone who bothers to take a moment to think about such things.

Erika also, though, has a broader agenda:

I firmly believe that those of us who feel otherwise need to start speaking up, stop smiling politely and gritting our teeth when the issue of organized religion comes up. Because otherwise, the church-going folks are going to roll right over us.

Represent!

She specifically identifies with the perspective of Richard Dawkins, which I find annoying, mostly because Dawkins is, as she says, a jackass. Not that I begrudge her her opinion; I would just rather no one paid Dawkins any attention, for the same reason that I would just as soon never hear from or about Ann Coulter ever again.

Obviously, Dawkins and Erika and others who are opposed to organized religion, period, are entitled to their opinion, but I am seldom impressed with the arguments put forward by Dawkins and others that religion constitutes an evil per se. I don’t subscribe to any religion, and I don’t have much use for anything like a belief in god or providence, etc., by any normal definition. But that does not mean these views are evil.

We have no decisive epistemological basis for determining whether or not there is a god, or any of the other metaphysical postulates associated with religion. Anyone who tells you otherwise — on either side — is deluded. We each have reasons, which are persuasive for us, for accepting, denying, or ignoring each postulate.

(Note: I’m with William James and WVO Quine on this front; and in particular, people who believe they have “proof” in these matters needs to consult Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” which is google-able.)

So, arguments that religion is bad because it is false are to be discarded; either a dogma is persuasive for me based on my experience, the methods of argument and evidence I accept, etc., or it is not. In my case, it is not, but I will not elevate my personal judgment to a universal truth, unlike both fundamentalist proselytizing theists and fundamentalist proselytizing athiests like Dawkins.

The other arguments Dawkins and co. can offer up have to do with the supposedly negative effects of religion on society. It’s not hard to point to religious people doing horrible things (Cardinal Feng: Bring the comfy chair!). However, as Dan Savage (atheist) correctly pointed out in one of his columns, the willingness to do horrible things in the service of wrong ideas is not confined to religious communities. The only really large-scale athiest enterprises in history are communist states, and they have more than their fair share of genocide, atrocity, and social ills. Power corrupts, whether it is the power granted us by our religious communities or the power granted us by our political idealogies, or both. The only reason why it is easy to find more examples of religious violence than idealogically motivated athiest violence is that atheism is not and has never been very popular. Were it to become so, well, the skies the limit when it comes to the body count that might ensue, as it has been so far for Christianity, Islam, and most other world religions.

Note: I’m not ascribing Dawkins’s jackassery (or wrongness) to Erika — I just have a hard time resisting the impulse to Dawkins-bash when his name happens to come up. And don’t get me started on Philip Pullman….

The one thing I would be inclined to knock Erika for is this:

Since you can’t have a debate like this without discussing beliefs (more’s the pity - because this debate is not about beliefs). I believe that our thoughts and actions have a real and tangible effect on our lives, and the lives of others, in a way that is not yet fully understood by the scientific community. (Ask a quantum physicist. They believe this, too; they just haven’t yet come up with the answer.)

I believe that this phenomenon is what gets attributed to “luck” or “karma” or “the invisible hand of God.”

I believe this phenomenon is real, and almost palpable at times. I want good things to happen to me (and to others, of course), so I in turn try to be a good person and do good things, and I really believe that I affect the world at large by doing so.

And I believe that church ain’t got nothing to do with it.

Again, I can’t reject the claim outright (although I can say I find it wildly un-compelling), but it does bother me to find otherwise serious unbelievers with a willingness to resort to irritating, soft-headed new age platitudes (whether justified with an appeal to physics or otherwise). It’s very much like trying to have your cake and eat it too; either take the hard line and accept the consequences, which are devoid of consolations of this kind, or take the consolations of religion along with the necessary underpinnings required.

A friend of mine regularly talks about evolution as though it were operating under a principle of agentless (i.e., no-god) providence, and teleological accounts of history, including natural history, in the absence of a conscious agent directing history, are clearly hogwash.

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