50/50

My mom and dad braved the freeways of Los Angeles to come up to see me for Thanksgiving, which is the busiest travel holiday of the year in the U.S.  It is like Icelanders on Verslunamannahelgi or something. Well of course someone has to stay home to bake the turkey, but usually at least three or four other households join in, meaning that at least 2/3 of the population is simultaneously leaving their home and heading to someone else's home, all trying to be there by 10pm Wednesday night. That is a lot of traffic on the road all at once. Today, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the same thing happens again: everyone tries to head home. But the timing is less strict, since some people get sick of their families already by Friday and head home then. My parents stayed all the way until Sunday morning, which is quite an honor really, since they'll have to hit a lot more traffic on their way home than they would have had they left yesterday. So that is nice. Even nicer is that my m...

I read about a church taking donations of frozen turkeys to give to families for Thanksgiving, so today when we were at the store, Palmer and I bought a frozen turkey. The store was offering a discount to anyone who bought over $50 dollars worth of groceries, giving 50% off the price of the turkey. Since I spent over $100 I must have gotten an even better discount, because the turkey was only $7 dollars. But when I brought it over to the church, and saw all the people in line waiting for groceries in order to make a Thanksgiving meal, including many families and older couples, well, that turkey seemed very valuable.

This week is Thanksgiving week here in the U.S., and as seems, elementary school kids in most of the U.S. get this week off. At least Palmer does, and every other child I know. This is different than when I was a kid; we only used to get Thanksgiving Thursday and the Friday afterwards off. But now it is a whole week. So Palmer is coming to stay with me this week, which will be fun. And my mom and dad are coming up on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning. Dave is, as always, going to do the honors in terms of most of the cooking, but I think I will at least make some sweet potatoes and a pumpkin pie or maybe lemon bars (my mom left a package of that at my apartment last time she was up, and it is about time it get used!). But actually I am not thinking all that much about the holiday. My mind is still rather preoccupied with the Occupy protests and what has been going on at University of California Berkeley and Davis campuses. On top of that, I have a lot of work issues I am thinki...

One of my students was a witness to the police shooting that took place here at UC Berkeley on Tuesday. He came to see me during office hours, and we had a long discussion about the horrible event. He said the man who was shot and killed by police was a student he had taken a class with last semester, a rather quiet and sullen young man. The information he had heard was that the young man was a security guard, and the gun he pulled out of his backpack was the one he had been issued at work. It is unclear if the police over-reacted in terms of shooting him when he did not immediately drop his weapon. It could have been that the student simply was sitting down to do some lab work and wanted to have the gun where he could see it, instead of in his backpack; he should have known however that bringing guns onto campus is not allowed. So in that sense it seems more likely that the student might have thought Tuesday--when demonstrations were going on and most of the classes cancelled--would b...

I just finished writing a chapter of my dissertation, which resulted in a much larger discussion of cultural tourism in Iceland than I had intended. But the fact is, this is an issue I have been extremely interested and concerned about for at least 15 years, if not 20. I have never, ever liked the way Iceland is marketed to tourists in the U.S. Everything from the unspoiled nature to the crazy city life in Reykavik. It has always left the part of Iceland I loved--the simple joy of being in a relaxing and lovely place with my family--completely out of the picture. In 2001, I went to Hvollsvöllur to examine the Saga Centre as part of a study commissioned by the National Park's service to look into cultural landscapes as heritage tourism. I thought that endeavor might represent a change in how Iceland was presented to tourists. But in the last 10 years, and especially while working at Vikingaheimar, and at meetings with the Saga Trails Association, I came to see just how completel...

Wednesday afternoon, my son's father started talking to me about the Penn State football coach criminal sexual abuse case. Although I had seen a headline that day about Joe Paterno stepping down, I did not pay it much attention, mostly since Joe is 84 years old and I have been expecting his retirement for a while. But also, I must admit, because I generally speaking keep much better track of Icelandic news than U.S. news. So the sex scandal I had been following was not the one most American's were following. I was instead reading all about the book written by the daughter of a deceased bishop accusing him of repeatedly sexually molesting her through her childhood, and the reaction to that book by the woman's family. Of course I am referring to Iceland's child sexual abuse story of the week. With all due respect to everyone in Iceland involved in this, and with full cognizance of the status and power of a bishop, the child sexual abuse case at Penn State so completel...

Yesterday I gave my students an article entitled "The Aesthetics of Reading" which was published in 2002 in the journal Aesthetic Education. The articles thesis was that there are several exceedingly important mental skills that we acquire from reading novels that we do not acquire from watching movies, or even from reading other types of printed material. Specifically, he identified three things 1) the way time is treated in novels, which is rarely a natural chronological flow; 2) the way we have to remember characters, part of a skill he called "funding" and 3) the depiction of conciousness, in the form especially of reading a character's internal thoughts. In all these things he said that the reader's experience of a novel over a very long period of time, at least days if not weeks and months, makes for a very different mental experience than seeing the same narrative in movie form. The elongation of the unfolding of the narrative heightens our reliance o...

Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and Palmer has the day off school. When I noticed this two weeks ago, I thought it would be fun to drive down to Southern California with him, to visit my parents. Then I started having car trouble. And my mom starting having back trouble. And a large rain storm was predicted for the exact day we'd be driving. So on Monday of this week, we decided to postpone the trip, and go down there over Thanksgiving instead. Then last night, things changed again. My dad said he would rather come up to see me in Northern California, than us come down to Southern California for Thanksgiving. So as of today, that looks to be the plan. Thanksgiving is though two weeks off, so things could change again, of course. Do I have Christmas plans yet, you ask? You tell me.

I am having car troubles. On Friday, my Saab worked just fine, getting me safely back and forth to lovely Stanford University. But on Saturday morning, when I tried to get her in gear to take me to Palmer's soccer game, nothing doing. The clutch pedal was completely flat against the floor, and any attempt to shift gears made a tremendous racket. I just had the clutch worked on by a shop called Svensson Automotive (yes, they specialize in Swedish cars; yes, the owner is of Swedish decent), which is (like any good Swedish company) not open on the weekends. So yesterday was spent getting the car towed from my apartment to Svensson's. Dave was kind enough to let me borrow his second car until my car is fixed, a red Chevy HR2. And that worked out great this weekend for Palmer and I when we went to a birthday party Saturday night and when I took him to school Monday morning. This morning I also took him to school no problem. Then the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me wit...

I think I spelled that right. The library here at Cal has the issues of this journal from 1926 to 1936 bound together and on the shelves. That is it. Nothing from before 1926, and nothing after 1936. Other university libraries in the UC system (UCLA and UC San Diego) have earlier issues, but nothing later. So I went online to look at the digital holdings. I found a Google Library version of the issues from 1885 to 1890. I am reading through that now. And then bingo, the website Timarit.is has all the articles, 1881 to 2001, online. I am enjoying the issue from 1885 though. It is fascinating because back then, 125 years ago, Icelandic was written different. Jeg instead of Ég. Sjer instead of Sér. I suppose these spellings, which make Icelandic look more like Danish, were removed for just that reason. It is also fascinating because of the way archaeologists back then used the sagas in their work and knew all the saga characters and events. Very different from today. So, thanks to...

Yesterday, or maybe the day before, I heard some commentator saying that the Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement were two halves of the same coin. In a way, this is good news, because it means that there is space for productive cross-dialogue between the two movements. And indeed they are both upset about overlapping issues,  as illustrated in this diagram . But what this analysis misses is that the two movements have at their core fundamentally different moral codes. The Tea Party wants to go back to the conservative values of the 1940s and 1950s in the U.S., in which Christian Religion was central to defining behavior. The Occupy movement--although it has been depicted as somewhat amoral--has instead a very different moral code at its center. I had heard the term "socially progressive" lots of times here at Berkeley and San Francisco, but I never really understood what it meant, until yesterday when I was reading coverage of the Occupy Walnut Creek event on Saturda...

Yesterday morning, a television show focused on Iceland finally aired here in the U.S., after having been heavily hyped by Inspired by Iceland. The show was only a half hour long, but it must have run a promo for the give-a-way of a trip to Iceland 4 times in that time period. I must say the affect was a little bit like the show was a paid advertisement for Iceland or something. But actually it is part of ABC (American Broadcast Cooperation)'s Educational and Entertaining Saturday morning lineup, which includes Jack Hannah's Wild Animals and this show. So it is kind of a throw back to good old fashioned family friendly programming by one of the national broadcast companies. The show was however not about Iceland, really. It was about the host, Richard Weiss, "investigating" what it is like for Icelanders to live so close to volcanoes. He did a good job of explaining the terror and downside of this fact of Icelandic life, especially by a long bit on the Westmann Is...

The Bay Area Rapid Transit system, affectionately called Bart, zips all around the bay area, from the hills of San Francisco way out to the back bay. It is one of the real unifying points of the diverse communities in the area, and something the local people are pretty proud of. Ironically, however, when riding the Bart, no one talks to each other. All these individuals standing and sitting right next to each other, and yet they are not conversing at all. When I used to ride Bart a lot, as an undergraduate, everyone had their nose buried in a newspaper or book. But nowadays, almost 20 years later, everyone has their attention on their smart phones and ipads. They are, in other words, far more interested in letting the people who aren't on the Bart with them know what they are up to, than in taking the time to talk to the people around them. And I think that happens more and more to travelers these days, that their primary concern is to make sure friends and family back home get...

When I moved into my new apartment in Walnut Creek, I decided to go with a black and white decorative theme in the bedroom. I have a white dresser drawer and some black and white accessories, so I bought a black wooden platform bedframe with a cool swooping headboard (called Miami style). It was however a bit more challenging than I thought to find a bedspread I liked with a black and white design. In fact, I found one for Palmer's bed (a small single bed in the corner of my room, which can fold up into a chair) before I found one for my bed. It is a black and white and grey with some orange and teal on it, a sort of skateboarder motif. Then I finally found a bedspread I liked, mostly grey with a dark grey border on the bottom and black and white leaf design in the middle. I thought I would end up folding Palmer's bed into a chair most days, but actually the bedspreads go so well together I just leave both beds out and made even on the nights Palmer isn't here. I was pret...

Last week I gave back my students their first papers, which they had written about the Viking Age in the North Atlantic. I actually gave them their papers one day with my comments on it, but without a grade, and let them tell me what grade they thought the paper deserved. Most students gave themselves a B+, which actually is about what I was going to give them. One student gave himself a C, which was too low; his paper was not that bad.  Another one of my students came up to me all freaked out about my comments, and wanted to argue every single point I had made. He tried to verbally explain things he had not explained well in the paper. After about 5 minutes of this, I finally put my arm around his shoulders and asked him if he thought his paper was really terrible or something? "Yes! You said my thesis contradicted my conclusion, that makes a bad paper!" I simply shook my head and took the paper away from him. Today I am giving him back his paper and he'll see his final...

A few years ago, I decided to make a cake for my Christmas at my cousin's house. I made up the recipe myself, using a custard mix for part of it but I left off the carmel icing and used a cookie-bar base and whipped cream topping instead. It looked good, but once I took my first bite, I realized that without the carmel coating, the custard had no sweetness to it. And the cookie bar bottom had basically no sweetness to it either, since it was supposed to have a very sugary fruit toping, instead of a very mild custard topping. So I made a dessert that had basically no sweetness. It took me a while to learn the moral of this tale, and to really make it part of my new thinking. Because I have always prided myself on my ability to improvise on the spot, or to make a situation work.  But when I tried to fix this dessert, by adding a sugar coating to it afterwards and trying to rebake it, creme brule style, it became even more of a disaster. The custard and whipped cream melted into the...

After reading all the blogs and news reports about the Chinese businessman/official who wants to buy up a sizable piece of realestate near Sandir, I suppose I was extra sensitive to a news item that I heard last night about realestate here in California.  California was very badly hit by the recession, especially because so much of our economy is in realestate. So I had been curious why housing prices have not fallen more dramatically; 9-12% unemployment should have brought it down a notch or two. But nope, it is still as ridiculous as ever. $450,000 for a tiny house in a run-down neighborhood, an absolutely impossible sum to save up for. So one has no choice but to take a huge loan from the bank or rent the rest of one's life.   Anyhow, after the crash there were not so many people willing to buy homes, especially homes worth more than 1 million dollars.  But last night I found out that the clever realestate agents and bankers in California, and in other parts of the ...

I have a white 1993 SAAB 9000CS, and today I am putting a new liner on its interior roof. The old liner got a hole in it sometime in 2003 or 4, and then it started to sag around that point, right over the middle of the back seat. The sag got worse and worse as more and more fabric came loose from the metal roof of the car, until eventually it was hard to see out of the rear view mirror. This, plus the fact that the car leaked oil terribly and the engine head was cracked, made my dad and others suggest I should probably sell the car. I of course was unwilling to do so. Not only do I not have the title to the car (long story - I lost it during my move to California in 2003 and have never had a chance to go back to Virginia to get a replacement), but I wouldn't want to sell the car anyhow. I bought it in 2000, from an Ethiopian guy who owned the gas station where it used to get serviced by the doctor who bought it new. That part doesn't matter so much I guess, save to suggest that...

Last week no one thought anyone would show up at the protest planned in the affluent suburb that I now live in, Walnut Creek. But they were wrong--200 people showed up. And the protests are planned every Wednesday at 4pm. This is not quite the die-hard protests you see elsewhere in the country, where people are actually camping in front of public buildings and banks, literally occupying the space. This one is a more moderate affair, lasting only a few hours, and yet still considered noteworthy in that it is happening at all. This is not a place known for protests. And unlike some other protests, which have an aggressive edge to them, this protest is being organized mostly out of the peace organization in the area . I am planning on going. I have been drafting slogans and think I finally decided on what I want to put: "Billions for the Banks!  Trillions for the Military!  Nothing for the Middle Class!" but I am worried that has too much anger in it. This protest is not about...

My students have been writing "response papers" to each reading we have done in class. Although they constitute 20% of their overall grade for the semester, I am grading each paper on a check, check plus or check minus scale, with a maximum of 5 points per paper. In other words, I am grading those response papers really easy. By contrast, this week I am grading the first research paper they have had to write for this course. They will have a second one later in the semester. These I am grading much harder, in as much as I have made it clear that an A paper has to not just meet all my expectations, but actually exceed them. Though I am not done grading, it does seem that the students are putting in a sincere effort. But so far none of the papers have really wowed me. The one about cows inhabiting Iceland did amuse me, however.