Blood sport

Whether you enjoy blood sports, like hunting, or find them problematic, is an interesting cleavage in modern society. For myself, I consciously stopped hunting back in Idaho at about 17, when I was also deciding on a bunch of other changes in where my life was headed.

There were two specific incidents that tipped me over into making the decision. One came from going goose hunting with two of my nephews, Andy and Dan Tiller, out near a bird sanctuary near Lake Lowell in Nampa, Idaho. Dan and I both shot at the same goose. We both claimed it, which is still the occasion of discussion. But the real lasting effect on me was to realize that I wished it was still up in the sky, flying magnificently along, instead of crumpled in a dead heap of feathers on the ground. I started losing my taste for the idea, particularly since the poor thing was so full of buckshot that it wasn't even edible. The real tipping point came a bit later, when I was hunting rabbits out in the desert, near my hometown, Kuna, Idaho. I shot one in the stomach and it screamed. Exactly like a child. I was too transfixed to even go put it out of its misery at first. That pretty much did it. I sold off my .22 and shotguns.

I was fine with other people hunting, particularly for deer, particularly when they actually intended to eat the meat. I was even happy to eat it under those circumstances. I just stopped seeing it as my kind of sport. I recognize that a lot of hunters, like my nephew Dan, who has established a private game preserve in an old farm along a river in Idaho, do a lot of good in preserving the habitat of the birds they hunt.

Still, for a variety of reasons, the image of Sarah Palin hunting wolves from the air made me sick to my stomach. Not much sport in shooting an animal from the air, particularly in winter when it has almost no chance of getting away. Might as well tie it to a post and then shoot it.

My wife Sandy had an even more virulent reaction. She dreamed that cannibal hunters, including Palin, were hunting people, including her, from helicopters and then eating them. I am sure Dr. Freud could have a real field day with that.

Hunting wolves has been a particularly hot issue in the west. A lot of the locals see them as dangerous pests who just prey on livestock. Outsiders tend to see them as a noble animal which ought to be preserved. I lean toward the latter, but can understand how a rancher might think the other way. But I think the blood sport shown in this video is pretty disgusting either way. If a hunter wants to go after a wolf, he or she at least ought to have do it on the ground, preferably on foot, to even the odds up -- maybe put some actual sport into it.

Sic transit gloria 3869 Deervale Drive

When Sandy was 10, she and and her family moved to a then new California ranch-house at 3869 Deervale Drive in Sherman Oaks in Los Angeles. She grew up there and after we got married in 1978, we spent a lot of time there off and on. We stayed there for three months in 1979, while Sandy was having our daughter Julia, who got the distinction of being born in nearby Hollywood. We hung out by the pool, which you can see in the first picture, and admired the view out over the San Fernando Valley. With the kids, we walked down the hill to eat in Jewish deli's in Sherman Oaks and shop in some great used record and CD shops.

I guess all things pass. After Sandy's mother died in 2004, we ended up having to sell the house so we knew that it was out of our hands and into someone else's control. Still it was a shock to drive by today and see that the old house had been knocked down and a huge new white, rather ordinary looking house up in its place -- shown in the two photos here. I guess I had at least hoped that if something new went up it would be more interesting than the old ranch house it replaced.

Gondoliers for Obama

It is no secret that I am a big Obama supporter. One of the biggest reasons is the sheer 180 degree turn he would probably make in the image of the US abroad. I think few Americans realize how bizarre and scary we have looked to many in the rest of the world. So a lot of people abroad are very excited about Obama who seems to promise a whole different kind of America, that might be a lot easier to live with and deal with.

Factoid: several Brazilians running for local office are so excited about Obama, and he has such wide and positive name recognition, that they are running for office under his name.

Cheesy but intriguing video: Here is a YouTube video of Venetian gondoliers singing for Obama.

The Cellphone Effect

Amber wonk warning: I used to do surveys in Latin America for Uncle Sam for a living, 1979-1983, and I am still a bit of a political junkie. I am particularly interested in the impact of several of the new technologies of communication on politics, both USA and elsewhere.

Many younger people don't have a standard wired phone line. I really wanted to dump ours this year, both to save money, and to thumb my nose at least some of the wired aspects of ATT and Time Warner, although it is almost impossible to get away from them -- since our cellphones are on ATT, anyway.

But I have been very curious to know how that tilt toward cell phones might affect political polling, which had traditionally been done by randomly calling traditional wired telephone lines. Turns out that a number of the pollsters are already on to this issue, enough so that 538.com, which is one of the smarter groups combining and comparing polls, can compare the results of polls that do tap cellphone users and those that don't.

The result confirms that younger people, who use cell phones are tilting to Obama. When you compare the polls with cellphones in with others, cellphone users add a 2.8% advantage to Obama on average. That is quite a lot and says all kinds of interesting things about where politics and media are headed.

Check out the story at

Estimating the Cellphone Effect: 2.8 2.2 Points

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/estimating-cellphone-effect-22-points.html.

Travis Country Democratic Picnic

We live in a nice suburb, right by a huge nature preserve around Barton Creek, but it is still a Texas suburb, called Travis Country, no less. In our first fall, 1998, we invited grad students over for a party and gave detailed directions. One of them said, on arriving, "You could have just said the only house on the street without a Bush (for governor) sign."

Things have changed. This afternoon, the Travis Country Democrats, the 354th precinct of Austin, had a picnic for several hundred people. Many of dressed in the snappy precinct T-shirt you see modeled here.

We served chicken, veggie and beef fajitas. As a volunteer, I helped serve up the chicken and beef after taking over from the lady you see here setting it up.

There were a lot of kids, very excited about, what else, Donkey rides and a Donkey petting zoo. It is convenient that the Democratic animal mascot is the donkey. It would be much more complicated to have elephants (the Republican animal.)



We had some speeches, including a kickoff by the lady who is the precinct Democratic chairwoman, who you can see in this photo, Barb Colvin (mother of Shawn Colvin the singer). Later, there was a band, which you can see in the background, which did covers of songs like "Dead Flowers."



Maybe Texas will be a little less completely red this time around.

The 400

I am getting back in the academic groove again for the fall. Here is a picture someone took recently of me in full tilt lecture mode. The whole performance part of teaching really is fun most of the time.

Every other year I teach our huge intro course, RTF 305. This year it has almost 400 people in it, mostly freshmen, mostly majors in Radio-TV-Film. My first lecture was the first day of college for most of them. Too bad it has to be in groups of 400 at a time, but that is the economics of a big school. Unfortunately we have to teach big groups in some classes so we can afford to teach small groups in the upper division classes where they get to actually make movies and write more intensely. Still, a big intro class can be kind of fun because we do get to do a tour of the big issues.

So here we go, me and the 400, fewer than the 600 of the Light Brigade, more than the Spartans at Thermopylae. Less dangerous, but I hope still interesting.

Welcome Darth Mazda

We have done a major car shuffle recently, passing along our venerable Subaru wagon to Rolf. That left us with two interesting extremes, a Chrysler minivan -- practical, comfortable, capable of taking along everything you need for a week of camping, etc. and a Mazda MX-5 Miata sports car, which had been my 55th birthday, you're not really an old guy yet, present. Very fun car, real sports car suspension, which I would have loved back when I got my first sports car in 1974, a very unreliable 1969 Fiat Sport Coupe, but which was a bit much for a 57 year old lower back. Plus you can maybe carry two bags of groceries in the trunk if you are careful.

So time for a new car, which is one of the things Americans seem to do on Labor Day. The Mazda dealership was conveniently having a big sale on one of the cars I was most interested in, the GT hatchback version of the Mazda 3. Which seemed to come mostly in black. I haven't seen so much black all around since going to a Nine Inch Nails concert with Julia in the 1990s.

So Sandy has christened it Darth Mazda, revealing her not very well concealed inner Star Wars fan geek. Sounds good to me, too, come to think of it. Not nearly as obscure as what she called our first Plymouth minivan, the Pelagic Argosy. (Inquire directly to her for an explanation.)