It was just wonderful seeing dancers perform again!
Saturday, September 25, 2021
Capital Dance Project - Behind the Barre - September 18, 2021
I want to review these dances at the Crest Theater in more detail, but I'm hampered at the moment by the absence of a physical program. I don't know where the virtual program is.
A Bit From Jack's 8th Birthday
As a special treat, Jack was treated to a video conference with one of Rachel's classmates, Chris Robinson, who is an anthropologist/paleontologist at CUNY. For color, I brought along some dinosaur bones from Dee-Na-Zin Wash. Chris' work is much more recent, however.
Skunk, From Afar
I went on a walk shortly after sunset, with Jasper and his friend Max. Jasper dragged Max over to visit one of his favorite places, the Feral Cat place. There's usually at least one or two grumpy cats there to bark at.
The ladies at the DMV maintain food and water for feral cats at the Feral Cat place. From time to time, one of the ladies also takes feral cats for spaying and neutering.
We arrived shortly after sunset. Lo, and behold! A skunk! 🦨 The dogs pleaded to be released from their leashes, but for some reason, I didn’t let go. Still, much barking!
A successful walk!
Appeasing Trump Doesn't Work
A tumbrel for Mark Zuckerberg:
When Trump complained about Zuckerberg at the rally, the crowd began chanting "lock him up."
"Well, they should be looking at that, Trump said.
Trump's comments came less than one week after a new report claimed the Facebook CEO cut a deal with Trump to avoid fact-checking political posts. In return, the Trump administration would not impose regulations on the social media behemoth.
"Facebook sold its soul and got a 'lock him up' chant in return. While doing its part to destroy democracy around the world," former Obama Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said.
"This speech is a real indictment of the entire strategy employed by the Facebook public policy team. Years of twisting themselves into a pretzel to appease Trump only to have him through Zuck into imaginary Gitmo," former White House senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer said.
"Guess those ass-kissing sessions at the White House and letting him break Facebook's rules didn't protect you Mark," former Obama spokesperson Tommy Vietor said.
Planetary Longwaves Looking Good
I'm liking how the planetary longwaves (typically five around the northern hemisphere) are setting up this next week. One of the longwave troughs looks like it will be parked off the U.S. West Coast - a favorable place for eventually bringing rain to desiccated California. In fact, that trough is the ONLY thing that will bring substantial rain to the Golden State! The trick will be keeping that trough in that place long enough to matter.
Covid-19, and El Paso
Interesting article on how El Paso is following a different Covid path than the rest of Texas:
But while delta raged through most of the state's 254 counties in July and August, breaking records and overwhelming hospitals in both rural conservative areas and sprawling liberal metros, El Paso — with one of the highest vaccination rates in the state — has been relatively unscathed by the most recent surge.
"We held our breath after July Fourth, but we didn't see the increase we thought we'd see in terms of hospitalizations," said Martinez, a local government employee.
While some other metro areas like Austin reported record high numbers of COVID-19 patients in their area hospitals just last month, and while statewide hospitalizations came close to eclipsing the January peak of 14,218, El Paso-area hospitals, which serve nearly a million West Texas residents, haven't come close to their previous highs.
...Helgesen and others say much of the credit can be attributed to the area's high vaccination rate, widespread compliance with masking and social distancing, and a strong partnership among local community and health care leaders.
"It is amazing," Helgesen said. "It is absolutely a credit to our community. I really think it was an all-out effort."
The share of COVID-19 tests in El Paso that come back positive is hovering around 6%, while the statewide positivity rate is three times that at 18%.
And while COVID-19 patients, most of whom are unvaccinated, took up more than 30% of hospital capacity in some areas and more than 20% statewide last week, in El Paso they accounted for only 7% of patients in local hospitals.
For a city with one of the state's highest per-capita COVID-19 death counts, the numbers present a rare glimmer of good news for the traumatized residents of this West Texas border city.
"Compared to the rest of Texas, we're in heaven," said Gabriel Ibarra-Mejia, assistant professor of public health at the University of Texas-El Paso. "That doesn't mean we are free from COVID, but we're doing much, much better than most of the rest of the state. The numbers don't lie."
Lost Wallet
Earlier today (Sept. 19), I didn't realize that I had dropped my wallet in a parking lot out in Rancho Cordova. A young man named Noah returned it. He had to be persistent; I didn't answer my door the first time he came to my house. I'm grateful he kept trying.
Obstacles
Jasper gets his way on the street by barking excitedly. That German Shepherd that had the audacity to pull his master down the street on a skateboard? Excited barking to him!
Then there are those obstacles that won't yield, no matter what....
Dolores Huerta and I Share Ancestors (As Do Many Thousand Others From Northern New Mexico
(Via NLL) I'm related to Luis Martin Serrano too (hopefully the same one). We're all one big happy family!:
Dolores Huerta helped found the United Farm Workers labor union in the 1960's and now shares her family history with NBC News' Simone Boyce.
Trona on the Edge
I was intrigued by this article about the state trying to corral water usage in Trona, an especially-dry place, against local opposition. At work in 1993 and 1994, I did Chemical Mass Balance analyses for suspended dust at the Trona playa, on behalf of North American Chemical Corporation. I've never been there, actually, but I'm otherwise familiar with the place:
Perched on the edge of a mostly dry salt lake, Trona has no source of clean water and for at least 70 years has relied on groundwater pumped from wells 30 miles away in the Indian Wells Valley.
Two pipelines snake through a dry-wash canyon delivering water to the town’s historic mineral plant, where it is used in the production of soda ash, boron and salt. Any surplus is then treated and sold for residential use.
That source of water, however, is in jeopardy due to legislation passed seven years ago in Sacramento to protect aquifers throughout the state.
Protection in the desert isn’t cheap, and a local water agency is ordering the mineral plant to help by contributing roughly $30 million over five years. Or stop pumping.
...As Ronnie sees it, if the mineral plant loses its water, so does Trona, and their home for 35 years would cease to exist.
Water wars are central to the history of the American West. Although the battle taking place in Trona and the Indian Wells Valley may not be as epic as the wrangling over the Colorado River, the outcome will have implications not just for the Tolberts but for the rest of California.
Once one of the state’s most dependable sources of water, groundwater can account for up to 60% of the state’s supply during a drought. 9But its reliability was abruptly checked nearly 10 years ago when California was in drought. As rivers dried and reservoirs emptied, more wells were dug, pumping continued, and land surfaces began to sink. Canals cracked, roads buckled, and sediments, once depressed, would no longer be able to store underground water.
In 2014, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed three bills aimed to protect the state’s groundwater. Collectively they are known as SGMA (pronounced “sigma”) for the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.
The state Department of Water Resources was given the authority to oversee the new law. Of California’s 515 groundwater basins, it identified 21 that were “critically overdrafted.” The law required those basins to form local groundwater authorities and come up with plans by 2020 to preserve the underground supply by 2040.
Of those 21 basins, the Indian Wells Valley — about 600 square miles south of the Owens Valley — presents a unique challenge, both politically and technically. First, it has neither rivers nor streams nor lakes to draw on; to restore its groundwater, it will have to import water.
Second, the valley straddles three counties — Kern, Inyo and San Bernardino — each with competing interests. The largest city is Ridgecrest, population of 27,000, due largely to the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, a massive federal installation exempt from state laws.
And then there is Trona, which lies outside the valley but is dependent upon it.
...“We’re way behind the curve,” he said. “We have had at least three decades of a declining water table. At what point of time do we take ownership and solve this problem?”
Monday, September 20, 2021
Alexandra Denisova, Dancing
When I recently posted about Ballets Russes on Facebook (and on the blog here), I received comments from Maria Galian Meredith, who was a daughter of Patricia Denise Meyers Galian, a Canadian who danced in the Ballets Russes (together with my ballet teacher George Zoritch) as Alexandra Denisova (non-Russians were typically given Russian stage names in the Ballets Russes).
Here is a video of Alexandra Denisova dancing with Gene Kelly (available only on YouTube at the video link).
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