We learned while reading plays aloud on Zoom that Zoom is inhospitable to reproducing multiple people talking in unison.
What we learned from a library educational program today is that Zoom also balks at reproducing the raucous sound of a crumhorn.
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience
This is a different Van Gogh images projection show than the one that's been on in San Francisco. The reviews I've seen say it's better, and it's also closer, which is the determining factor for one with only a casual interest. It's in the San Jose convention center's South Hall, which is the giant temp building they put up to occupy their back parking lot a few years ago.
You show your proof of vaccination - though they're quite bewildered by the actual card, expecting it to be transferred to a phone - and nobody's very interested in your ticket - and head down a clogged (because people read very slowly) passage by a series of panels with explanatory narration and quotes from Vince's letters in English and Spanish. Finally, if you get around that and the arrow-bearing signs reading "Gogh This Way" which must be terribly confusing to anyone who doesn't know how to mispronounce the name, you get to the main hall.
My tastes in visual art run towards the fractal. I like art which reveals more detail the closer you look at it. Van Gogh isn't like that. His art looks better the further back from it you get (which is hard to do in a cramped and crowded art gallery). Close-up it disintegrates, as the impressionists' art does, except that Van Gogh is more dynamic than any impressionist. You get up close and personal with a Van Gogh not to appreciate its beauty, but to study his technique.
Well, this exhibit is entirely up close. It's a huge room draped with hanging canvases all around and some randomly in the middle, on all of which and on the floor photo images of Van Gogh artwork are projected from ceiling cameras at Brobdingnagian size, with 2-4 fold repetition across the room so you don't have to look at everything. It's technique study time, all right, except that a major part of studying Van Gogh's technique is appreciating the three-dimensionality of the clumps of paint stuck to the canvas, and you're missing that here. There's nowhere to stand back, and if you get up really close to this, you see the individual pixels of the images.
What keeps this exhibit going, and what makes it so unpainterly, is its activity. The images change every minute or two, and in between they move. Images flow onto the screens bit by bit, as if an invisible paint brush were creating them as you watch. Ink drawings erupt into color. Foregrounds move in front of backgrounds, clouds waft around in the breeze, petals rush past blossoming branches, waves rock in the surf, portraits of people actually blink - oh, come on.
The whole sequence takes about 30-40 minutes to run on loop, and it's worth seeing parts of it twice. Attendees mostly stood around or sat on the floor. There were a few chairs and benches, and after a few minutes I took refuge on a rare vacant one. Meanwhile recorded music played, hard to hear over the roar of the air conditioning, but it seemed a mixture of minimalism, folk, and Parisian cafe music.
And then there's a meager gift shop with exhibit swag (plus covid masks with Vince's paintings on them: that I liked), and out the door.
It was an immersive experience, it gave a definite sense of the artist's style, but it also felt artificially curated and separate from the real art.
You show your proof of vaccination - though they're quite bewildered by the actual card, expecting it to be transferred to a phone - and nobody's very interested in your ticket - and head down a clogged (because people read very slowly) passage by a series of panels with explanatory narration and quotes from Vince's letters in English and Spanish. Finally, if you get around that and the arrow-bearing signs reading "Gogh This Way" which must be terribly confusing to anyone who doesn't know how to mispronounce the name, you get to the main hall.
My tastes in visual art run towards the fractal. I like art which reveals more detail the closer you look at it. Van Gogh isn't like that. His art looks better the further back from it you get (which is hard to do in a cramped and crowded art gallery). Close-up it disintegrates, as the impressionists' art does, except that Van Gogh is more dynamic than any impressionist. You get up close and personal with a Van Gogh not to appreciate its beauty, but to study his technique.
Well, this exhibit is entirely up close. It's a huge room draped with hanging canvases all around and some randomly in the middle, on all of which and on the floor photo images of Van Gogh artwork are projected from ceiling cameras at Brobdingnagian size, with 2-4 fold repetition across the room so you don't have to look at everything. It's technique study time, all right, except that a major part of studying Van Gogh's technique is appreciating the three-dimensionality of the clumps of paint stuck to the canvas, and you're missing that here. There's nowhere to stand back, and if you get up really close to this, you see the individual pixels of the images.
What keeps this exhibit going, and what makes it so unpainterly, is its activity. The images change every minute or two, and in between they move. Images flow onto the screens bit by bit, as if an invisible paint brush were creating them as you watch. Ink drawings erupt into color. Foregrounds move in front of backgrounds, clouds waft around in the breeze, petals rush past blossoming branches, waves rock in the surf, portraits of people actually blink - oh, come on.
The whole sequence takes about 30-40 minutes to run on loop, and it's worth seeing parts of it twice. Attendees mostly stood around or sat on the floor. There were a few chairs and benches, and after a few minutes I took refuge on a rare vacant one. Meanwhile recorded music played, hard to hear over the roar of the air conditioning, but it seemed a mixture of minimalism, folk, and Parisian cafe music.
And then there's a meager gift shop with exhibit swag (plus covid masks with Vince's paintings on them: that I liked), and out the door.
It was an immersive experience, it gave a definite sense of the artist's style, but it also felt artificially curated and separate from the real art.
Monday, September 27, 2021
flew shot
No we didn't fly, we drove to our flu shot, but it was a longer drive than we'd hoped.
So various articles had been urging people to get their flu shots early this year. Our provider had said they were going to start last week, but when we went in to our local facility, they said they weren't starting for another week. Then B. discovered they had a hotline number that confirmed this, but when I tried it a few days later, it had been changed to say that they'd postponed it indefinitely.
Other vendors were offering the shot (though it wouldn't be free, but quite expensive, if we did it that way), so this was vexing. But then it occurred to me: the phone hotline voice menu had asked callers to specify their local facility. What if I specified a different facility?
And what do you know: two of them, about 20 miles away in different directions, had already set up their flu clinics. It was just ours that was running late.
So to one of these we drove this morning. Two lines under tents in the parking lot, one for flu shot, one for covid vaccine. The former line was much longer; this is civilized country, so most people around here already have their covid vaccine. One man in the covid line was wearing a t-shirt that read "Just Do It" and I wondered, if that's his philosophy why hadn't he been vaccinated already?
Our line was mostly older people, although a family group in front of us had 2 small children, both of whom cried like the dickens when their turn came, as the nurses kept saying "It's all right." No it isn't, I'm sure the kids wanted to reply: you're sticking a needle into me! Everyone was masked although one older person had it pulled down to her chin, which is pretty clueless. It took over an hour to wend through the line though there were plenty of open stations. It was 10 am when we got there, and when we left at 11 the line was much longer and extended out of the tent, which it hadn't when we arrived, to a much hotter parking lot than it had been when we arrived.
But we're jabbed now and I hope that takes care of that. Next, still waiting for word from Godot about the covid boosters.
So various articles had been urging people to get their flu shots early this year. Our provider had said they were going to start last week, but when we went in to our local facility, they said they weren't starting for another week. Then B. discovered they had a hotline number that confirmed this, but when I tried it a few days later, it had been changed to say that they'd postponed it indefinitely.
Other vendors were offering the shot (though it wouldn't be free, but quite expensive, if we did it that way), so this was vexing. But then it occurred to me: the phone hotline voice menu had asked callers to specify their local facility. What if I specified a different facility?
And what do you know: two of them, about 20 miles away in different directions, had already set up their flu clinics. It was just ours that was running late.
So to one of these we drove this morning. Two lines under tents in the parking lot, one for flu shot, one for covid vaccine. The former line was much longer; this is civilized country, so most people around here already have their covid vaccine. One man in the covid line was wearing a t-shirt that read "Just Do It" and I wondered, if that's his philosophy why hadn't he been vaccinated already?
Our line was mostly older people, although a family group in front of us had 2 small children, both of whom cried like the dickens when their turn came, as the nurses kept saying "It's all right." No it isn't, I'm sure the kids wanted to reply: you're sticking a needle into me! Everyone was masked although one older person had it pulled down to her chin, which is pretty clueless. It took over an hour to wend through the line though there were plenty of open stations. It was 10 am when we got there, and when we left at 11 the line was much longer and extended out of the tent, which it hadn't when we arrived, to a much hotter parking lot than it had been when we arrived.
But we're jabbed now and I hope that takes care of that. Next, still waiting for word from Godot about the covid boosters.
Saturday, September 25, 2021
who shall decide when linguists disagree?
One of the most amusing, when it isn't frustrating, parts of the internet is its ability to give multiple conflicting answers to any question. Anything to do with how to fix a problem with your computer definitely falls in this category - usually I collect ten or twelve different solutions and none of them work - and so do song lyrics. I'm not going to bother checking to see what you get now, but I once looked up the lyrics to Jefferson Starship's "We Built This City," and got one line transcribed as:
You know, I've seen this common Vietnamese name in print or phosphors dozens, maybe hundreds, of times over the years, but I've never known how to pronounce it. I know, I'll consult the internet. This are just the pronunciations for English-speakers; they're not trying to teach you fluent Vietnamese here.
So while I'm doing all this, I find that YouTube wants to feed me clips of Norm Macdonald telling jokes to Conan O'Brien. I dunno: I never even heard of Norm Macdonald until I read his obituaries, but now I have these jokes. The dirty joke; The shaggy dog story; The ethnic joke; The slightly sick joke.
Ma Coley plays the mamba / While Tony plays the mamba / Marconi plays the mamba / Marconi does the mamba / Marconi played the mambo / Marcone plays the mamba / My pony plays the mambaAnyway, I need to phone up and speak in an importuning way to someone, and I ought to pronounce her name correctly. Her surname is Nguyen.
You know, I've seen this common Vietnamese name in print or phosphors dozens, maybe hundreds, of times over the years, but I've never known how to pronounce it. I know, I'll consult the internet. This are just the pronunciations for English-speakers; they're not trying to teach you fluent Vietnamese here.
Quora: nuh-we-in (with a long e and a short i); nwee-EN; noo-yen; nu-win; ng-wi-ng (others say do not pronounce the g); like "when" in two syllables, whe-en; only one syllable, to use 2 or 3 is like John Cleese's Frenchman saying "kuh-nig-it", so if you can't handle proper Vietnamese just say "winn".But my favorite video is one collecting clips of 7 people named Nguyen saying their names. Result: 4 "win"; 1 "when"; 1 "noo-in"; 1 I couldn't catch but something like "noon". Do we have a consensus?
YouTube (my transcriptions): nu-wang; when; Gwen; nwhen (one syllable)
So while I'm doing all this, I find that YouTube wants to feed me clips of Norm Macdonald telling jokes to Conan O'Brien. I dunno: I never even heard of Norm Macdonald until I read his obituaries, but now I have these jokes. The dirty joke; The shaggy dog story; The ethnic joke; The slightly sick joke.
Friday, September 24, 2021
unhidden
I've written before about my theory of the Hidden City in the history of the arts: that through most of the 20C a hegemony of modernists in each of the arts declared themselves the only true modern artists, and belittled or preferably ignored anybody who didn't create to that template.
Two recent references to the hegemony have caught my notice. Scott Alexander has written a post expressing his puzzlement at the modernist hegemony, mostly in architecture where he finds it continuing to maintain its hegemony. As several commenters including me have pointed out, Scott is essentially replicating the polemic argument in Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House, a book he doesn't mention. But as usual, he expresses himself intelligently and entertainingly.
Then there's an article in the 9/27 New Yorker about Richard Neutra, one of the premier architects of the modernist hegemony. It's by Alex Ross, who usually writes about music and in that field is usually aware that the hegemony was just a hegemony and not the whole story. Something in the article helped clarify in my mind, though without any help from Ross who here only tells one side of the story, the specific aesthetic difference between the hegemony and the hidden city (which in architecture was led by Frank Lloyd Wright). Neutra specialized in glass houses cunningly designed so that people inside the house could have the visual illusion of not being sure where the border was between the house and the outside. He was very sensitive, Ross says, to the placement of his buildings in the landscape.
But from outside, his houses look like alien artifacts placed arbitrarily in their location, with no connection to where they are. And he apparently wanted that effect. Since houses are in fact artificial, Neutra felt they should look that way. Here Ross contrasts Neutra with Wright, who was also sensitive to landscape, but who designed his buildings to look as if they fit where they were placed.
Neutra scorned this aesthetic, like any modernist scorning the hidden city. Ross quotes him: "Houses do not sprout from the ground. That is a lyrical exaggeration, a pretty fairy tale for children."
Aside from the knee-jerk belittlement of fairy tales and the association of them with children, something which J.R.R. Tolkien, another hidden city artist, could have corrected Neutra on, this is factually correct: houses are artificial.
But it's only the modernist hegemony which thinks that therefore they should look that way. The hidden city aesthetic says it's because they're artificial, and because we know they're artificial, that it's a greater and desirable artistic achievement to make them look organic, as if they sprout from the landscape. In much the same way that Tolkien's creation of a world with the texture of reality is all the more impressive because it feels real while we know that it's fiction. If we didn't know it was fiction it wouldn't be so impressive that it looks like fact; if we didn't know that Wright's houses are built artifacts they wouldn't seem so beautiful in the illusion that they're organic. Isn't "the illusion of reality" supposed to be the entire point of traditional painting? What Neutra calls "lyrical exaggeration, a pretty fairy tale" is a good thing: it's where worthwhile artistic achievement lies.
Two recent references to the hegemony have caught my notice. Scott Alexander has written a post expressing his puzzlement at the modernist hegemony, mostly in architecture where he finds it continuing to maintain its hegemony. As several commenters including me have pointed out, Scott is essentially replicating the polemic argument in Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House, a book he doesn't mention. But as usual, he expresses himself intelligently and entertainingly.
Then there's an article in the 9/27 New Yorker about Richard Neutra, one of the premier architects of the modernist hegemony. It's by Alex Ross, who usually writes about music and in that field is usually aware that the hegemony was just a hegemony and not the whole story. Something in the article helped clarify in my mind, though without any help from Ross who here only tells one side of the story, the specific aesthetic difference between the hegemony and the hidden city (which in architecture was led by Frank Lloyd Wright). Neutra specialized in glass houses cunningly designed so that people inside the house could have the visual illusion of not being sure where the border was between the house and the outside. He was very sensitive, Ross says, to the placement of his buildings in the landscape.
But from outside, his houses look like alien artifacts placed arbitrarily in their location, with no connection to where they are. And he apparently wanted that effect. Since houses are in fact artificial, Neutra felt they should look that way. Here Ross contrasts Neutra with Wright, who was also sensitive to landscape, but who designed his buildings to look as if they fit where they were placed.
Neutra scorned this aesthetic, like any modernist scorning the hidden city. Ross quotes him: "Houses do not sprout from the ground. That is a lyrical exaggeration, a pretty fairy tale for children."
Aside from the knee-jerk belittlement of fairy tales and the association of them with children, something which J.R.R. Tolkien, another hidden city artist, could have corrected Neutra on, this is factually correct: houses are artificial.
But it's only the modernist hegemony which thinks that therefore they should look that way. The hidden city aesthetic says it's because they're artificial, and because we know they're artificial, that it's a greater and desirable artistic achievement to make them look organic, as if they sprout from the landscape. In much the same way that Tolkien's creation of a world with the texture of reality is all the more impressive because it feels real while we know that it's fiction. If we didn't know it was fiction it wouldn't be so impressive that it looks like fact; if we didn't know that Wright's houses are built artifacts they wouldn't seem so beautiful in the illusion that they're organic. Isn't "the illusion of reality" supposed to be the entire point of traditional painting? What Neutra calls "lyrical exaggeration, a pretty fairy tale" is a good thing: it's where worthwhile artistic achievement lies.
Wednesday, September 22, 2021
books about food
Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food (Twelve, 2008).
Yes that is an 8 in her name and not a B. Chinese lucky numbers, you know.
The title is misleading. It's Chinese-American food. How different it is from the food in China (which is full of meats with the eyeballs still attached, and the little bony crunchy bits because they're the best part) is largely the point. A lot of the book is like this:
1. Lee becomes curious about some common Chinese-American food: General Tso's chicken, chop suey, fortune cookies.
2. Discovers that it's unknown in China. Nobody there has ever heard of it.
3. Lee goes on road trip to obscure corner of China where the food supposedly originated. Surely they will know.
4. Nobody there has ever heard of it either.
5. So where did it come from? Lee passes on legends, shrugs her shoulders, says "I dunno."
Sarah Lohman, Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine (Simon & Schuster, 2016)
At least Lohman knows the history she's trying to tell, though she also includes a lot of road trips told in the same transcribed-tv-documentary style that Lee uses, as do a lot of other authors of popular non-fiction. Includes chummy visit to the sriracha sauce-maker's pepper grower (frustratingly vague about where it is: it's in Ventura County), published at the exact moment that the two fell out and began famously suing each other. Nor is there anything about the factory's neighbors' odor complaints.
Also unlike Lee's, this book includes a lot of recipes, although most of them generate thoughts of "and where am I supposed to find that?" among their ingredients.
The eight flavors, arranged in the order of their historical introduction to American food, are: black pepper, vanilla, chili powder, curry powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG, and sriracha sauce. Now it's a curious thing, but I've had all of these, and while I don't positively dislike any of them, I'm not wild about them either. The one I'm most positive about is garlic, but it's not that I like garlic but that I like foods with garlic in them. B. likes garlic also, but would brush off several of the others as too spicy. As a result, I have to be very careful about using pepper when cooking; I make my own chili and curry powder blends so as to avoid spiciness, and I'd never use sriracha at home. (I prefer other hot sauces for my own use anyway.) I don't know what MSG tastes like, so I bought a shaker of it and put it on some vegetables. I still couldn't taste anything, but B. hated it.
Lohman also spends a lot of space debunking the notion that MSG gives people headaches. Scientific studies have shown, blah blah. Sounds a lot like the same scientific studies that deny that chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia are things. In all these cases I believe the people who say they're suffering from something, even if we don't know quite what it is. Clearly MSG sensitivity, if that's what it is, is a minority affliction, and the way to track this down is not to test everybody else but to gather together claimed sufferers and try feeding them various things to figure out what exactly it is they're sensitive to.
Yes that is an 8 in her name and not a B. Chinese lucky numbers, you know.
The title is misleading. It's Chinese-American food. How different it is from the food in China (which is full of meats with the eyeballs still attached, and the little bony crunchy bits because they're the best part) is largely the point. A lot of the book is like this:
1. Lee becomes curious about some common Chinese-American food: General Tso's chicken, chop suey, fortune cookies.
2. Discovers that it's unknown in China. Nobody there has ever heard of it.
3. Lee goes on road trip to obscure corner of China where the food supposedly originated. Surely they will know.
4. Nobody there has ever heard of it either.
5. So where did it come from? Lee passes on legends, shrugs her shoulders, says "I dunno."
Sarah Lohman, Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine (Simon & Schuster, 2016)
At least Lohman knows the history she's trying to tell, though she also includes a lot of road trips told in the same transcribed-tv-documentary style that Lee uses, as do a lot of other authors of popular non-fiction. Includes chummy visit to the sriracha sauce-maker's pepper grower (frustratingly vague about where it is: it's in Ventura County), published at the exact moment that the two fell out and began famously suing each other. Nor is there anything about the factory's neighbors' odor complaints.
Also unlike Lee's, this book includes a lot of recipes, although most of them generate thoughts of "and where am I supposed to find that?" among their ingredients.
The eight flavors, arranged in the order of their historical introduction to American food, are: black pepper, vanilla, chili powder, curry powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG, and sriracha sauce. Now it's a curious thing, but I've had all of these, and while I don't positively dislike any of them, I'm not wild about them either. The one I'm most positive about is garlic, but it's not that I like garlic but that I like foods with garlic in them. B. likes garlic also, but would brush off several of the others as too spicy. As a result, I have to be very careful about using pepper when cooking; I make my own chili and curry powder blends so as to avoid spiciness, and I'd never use sriracha at home. (I prefer other hot sauces for my own use anyway.) I don't know what MSG tastes like, so I bought a shaker of it and put it on some vegetables. I still couldn't taste anything, but B. hated it.
Lohman also spends a lot of space debunking the notion that MSG gives people headaches. Scientific studies have shown, blah blah. Sounds a lot like the same scientific studies that deny that chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia are things. In all these cases I believe the people who say they're suffering from something, even if we don't know quite what it is. Clearly MSG sensitivity, if that's what it is, is a minority affliction, and the way to track this down is not to test everybody else but to gather together claimed sufferers and try feeding them various things to figure out what exactly it is they're sensitive to.
Monday, September 20, 2021
come back next week
Seeing articles urging their readers to get the annual flu vaccine now, and seeing reports by clients of the UK NHS that they're already doing just that, we were primed to act on an e-mail B. received from Kaiser, our health service provider, that the vaccine was being rolled out this week, which is about when it usually appears. (I didn't get this e-mail. What Kaiser sends me are updates on the covid booster situation, which usually amount to "Reply hazy - ask again later.")
Owing to differing personal schedules, B. and I don't do many errands together, even when we're both doing them, but we drove down to the Kaiser facility this morning. No flu shots. The e-mail was in error, or something. It starts next week, and it will be drive-through.
Meantime, I'm taking comfort in the covid situation from our sterling numbers. My county is 73% vaccinated - that's out of the total population, and is third-highest in the state. Of 10 counties forming the greater Bay Area, 9 have rates of 66% or higher, all of them higher than anywhere else in the state. (The tenth is 55%.) The SoCal urban cluster is right behind it, though, at 60-64% in the various counties.
Meanwhile, the lone rural county that topped the recall poll at 82% bottoms out the state's vacc rate at 24%. 24%! Nobody else is below 31%, and few enough around there. I'm staying far away from there.
Owing to differing personal schedules, B. and I don't do many errands together, even when we're both doing them, but we drove down to the Kaiser facility this morning. No flu shots. The e-mail was in error, or something. It starts next week, and it will be drive-through.
Meantime, I'm taking comfort in the covid situation from our sterling numbers. My county is 73% vaccinated - that's out of the total population, and is third-highest in the state. Of 10 counties forming the greater Bay Area, 9 have rates of 66% or higher, all of them higher than anywhere else in the state. (The tenth is 55%.) The SoCal urban cluster is right behind it, though, at 60-64% in the various counties.
Meanwhile, the lone rural county that topped the recall poll at 82% bottoms out the state's vacc rate at 24%. 24%! Nobody else is below 31%, and few enough around there. I'm staying far away from there.
Friday, September 17, 2021
thought while wielding a kitchen knife
Among the selections from the produce stand, corn (maize) probably holds the record for having the greatest amount, in the form that you bring it home from the grocer's, that's discarded rather than eaten.
But celery, if you chop it down to the traditional stalks, is a good second.
I suppose you could use the cut-off bits to make cream of celery soup, and in fact I've done that, but I don't have much use for this either.
But celery, if you chop it down to the traditional stalks, is a good second.
I suppose you could use the cut-off bits to make cream of celery soup, and in fact I've done that, but I don't have much use for this either.
Thursday, September 16, 2021
water over the wires
I heard that our local water district was giving virtual Zoom tours of their water purification plant. Curious, I signed up. It turned out to be an hour of a couple PR guys explaining what the water district does (basically, they're responsible for ensuring water supply, wholesale distribution to local water companies, wetland environment maintenance, and flood control) and describing the plant, which was illustrated with a lot of still photos of large rooms with heavy water pipes in them and some outdoor tanks, plus a couple embedded videos outlining processes. The basics of the purification process are outlined here.
What interested me was the context in which this process operates. The plant is attached, limpet-like, to a much larger wastewater treatment plant shared by two of the district's largest cities. It siphons off a relatively small quantity of water that's already been cleansed enough for dumping into the Bay, and runs it through this treatment, ending up with what, the PR guys said, is five times purer, in terms of lack of contaminants, than our potable faucet water. But that's still not good enough to use the purified water for household use: they didn't say why, but I'm guessing that regulations are sensitive to the "ick" factor of processed wastewater.
So instead, they mix it back in with more of its own source water from the city plant, tamping the mixture down to a contaminant level that's legally clean enough for agricultural use.
Future plans, however, are to add yet another purification step that will allow them to inject the purified water into groundwater supplies, which will add yet another layer of cleansing before it's drawn out from wells. (That will require building a pipeline 15 miles uphill from the plant to the percolation ponds.) Delicate business, isn't it?
What interested me was the context in which this process operates. The plant is attached, limpet-like, to a much larger wastewater treatment plant shared by two of the district's largest cities. It siphons off a relatively small quantity of water that's already been cleansed enough for dumping into the Bay, and runs it through this treatment, ending up with what, the PR guys said, is five times purer, in terms of lack of contaminants, than our potable faucet water. But that's still not good enough to use the purified water for household use: they didn't say why, but I'm guessing that regulations are sensitive to the "ick" factor of processed wastewater.
So instead, they mix it back in with more of its own source water from the city plant, tamping the mixture down to a contaminant level that's legally clean enough for agricultural use.
Future plans, however, are to add yet another purification step that will allow them to inject the purified water into groundwater supplies, which will add yet another layer of cleansing before it's drawn out from wells. (That will require building a pipeline 15 miles uphill from the plant to the percolation ponds.) Delicate business, isn't it?
Wednesday, September 15, 2021
non-voting results
I've worked it out - the effect on the recall election of voters choosing not to select a replacement candidate.
Of course, there must have been a few who voted for a replacement but not on the yes/no question, but I'm ignoring that.
Despite the call for Democrats not to vote for a replacement at all, it's impressive how desperate many Democrats were for someone, anyone, to vote for. All 9 registered Democrats on the ballot were among the top 14 of the 46 candidates in number of votes received. 35% of the votes for Democrats went to Paffrath, so there was plenty of interest in the others. (69% of the votes for Republicans went to Elder.)
Now, for total votes. Of the votes cast for replacement candidates, 68% went to Republican candidates and 28% to Democratic candidates, with the rest to 3rd party or unaffiliated candidates. That sounds pretty meek of the Democrats, but (previous caveat allowed for) 44.7% of the ballots cast chose nobody. That's a hefty abstention (in the previous recall, only 8% abstained for a replacement), and while not all of the abstainers were deliberately abstaining Democrats, added to the votes for Democrats it's 60.2% of the total ballots cast.
We can test this out by comparing it to the most pro- and anti-recall counties in the state.
The most anti-recall was, no surprise, San Francisco. 86.7% voted against the recall. Of the total voters, 17.4% voted for Democratic candidates, 15.4% voted for Republican candidates (fairly close to the 13.3% "yes" vote on the recall), and a whopping 64.3% voted for nobody.
The most pro-recall county in the state was Lassen, a lightly-populated high-desert county in the northeast part of the state, more easily accessible from Reno than anywhere else of note, threatened by but as yet not much damaged by the fires that are ravaging Plumas County to its southwest. It jumped up above even its neighbors by voting 82.9% for the recall. But of its total voters, 80.7% chose Republican replacement candidates, just 6.1% chose Democrats, and only 11.8% abstained. That could include both abstaining Democrats and anybody else who just decided not to vote on that question, but it's very small either way. (As 1.3% of Lassen's voters chose a 3rd-party or unaffiliated candidate, that + R gets within a percentage point of the "Yes" votes on the recall, thus making D + abstainers a close match to the "No" vote.)
The enormous difference between the percentages of abstainers in the extreme pro- and anti-recall counties, and the matching of them plus Democrats to "no" votes on the recall, suggest that the bulk of the abstainers were indeed deliberate anti-recall abstainers, and that those in that specific category strongly outnumbered those who chose a Democrat.
And that explains Larry Elder's apparent victory. Because while he got 46.9% of the votes cast for replacement candidates, almost matching Arnold's 48.6% in 2003, if you count his vote against the total ballots cast, candidate-choosers and abstainers alike, he got only 26%. Which looks close to a core DT loyalist vote to me. So it's a good thing the recall went down, because while Elder as the leading Republican certainly encouraged the hefty "No" votes the recall got, the Democrats brought the possibility of his governorship on themselves.
Of course, there must have been a few who voted for a replacement but not on the yes/no question, but I'm ignoring that.
Despite the call for Democrats not to vote for a replacement at all, it's impressive how desperate many Democrats were for someone, anyone, to vote for. All 9 registered Democrats on the ballot were among the top 14 of the 46 candidates in number of votes received. 35% of the votes for Democrats went to Paffrath, so there was plenty of interest in the others. (69% of the votes for Republicans went to Elder.)
Now, for total votes. Of the votes cast for replacement candidates, 68% went to Republican candidates and 28% to Democratic candidates, with the rest to 3rd party or unaffiliated candidates. That sounds pretty meek of the Democrats, but (previous caveat allowed for) 44.7% of the ballots cast chose nobody. That's a hefty abstention (in the previous recall, only 8% abstained for a replacement), and while not all of the abstainers were deliberately abstaining Democrats, added to the votes for Democrats it's 60.2% of the total ballots cast.
We can test this out by comparing it to the most pro- and anti-recall counties in the state.
The most anti-recall was, no surprise, San Francisco. 86.7% voted against the recall. Of the total voters, 17.4% voted for Democratic candidates, 15.4% voted for Republican candidates (fairly close to the 13.3% "yes" vote on the recall), and a whopping 64.3% voted for nobody.
The most pro-recall county in the state was Lassen, a lightly-populated high-desert county in the northeast part of the state, more easily accessible from Reno than anywhere else of note, threatened by but as yet not much damaged by the fires that are ravaging Plumas County to its southwest. It jumped up above even its neighbors by voting 82.9% for the recall. But of its total voters, 80.7% chose Republican replacement candidates, just 6.1% chose Democrats, and only 11.8% abstained. That could include both abstaining Democrats and anybody else who just decided not to vote on that question, but it's very small either way. (As 1.3% of Lassen's voters chose a 3rd-party or unaffiliated candidate, that + R gets within a percentage point of the "Yes" votes on the recall, thus making D + abstainers a close match to the "No" vote.)
The enormous difference between the percentages of abstainers in the extreme pro- and anti-recall counties, and the matching of them plus Democrats to "no" votes on the recall, suggest that the bulk of the abstainers were indeed deliberate anti-recall abstainers, and that those in that specific category strongly outnumbered those who chose a Democrat.
And that explains Larry Elder's apparent victory. Because while he got 46.9% of the votes cast for replacement candidates, almost matching Arnold's 48.6% in 2003, if you count his vote against the total ballots cast, candidate-choosers and abstainers alike, he got only 26%. Which looks close to a core DT loyalist vote to me. So it's a good thing the recall went down, because while Elder as the leading Republican certainly encouraged the hefty "No" votes the recall got, the Democrats brought the possibility of his governorship on themselves.
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