Fred Sandsmark's Blog

Surreal story in today's New York Times about an entrepreneur in the United Arab Emirates who's so smitten with the French city of Lyon that he wants to build a small version of Lyon in Dubai. Among the points of interest:

The Paul Bocuse Institute is hoping to set up a branch to train young chefs and restaurant and hotel managers. The Museum of Textiles is poised to open a silk museum and lend select treasures from its vast silk collection. Lyon’s soccer team has signed up to operate a center to train a Dubai team. Research is under way to cool outdoor spaces naturally to make strolling bearable during dust storms and 105-degree heat. [Emphasis mine.]

I, too, love Lyon. It's the home of our dear friend Hélène and the setting of many wonderful memories. It's a superb walking town -- the Castro Valley Boulevardier would appreciate it. Its festival of lights is breathtaking -- do a Google image search for "Lyon 'Fete des Lumieres'" to see some examples. Lyon has the finest farmer's market in France, which says a lot. (Interpol headquarters is there, too -- what could be cooler than that?)

But loving Lyon is one thing; trying to re-create it under a dome in the Middle East is something else entirely.

Labels: food, France, friends, science, weather

Norway.org, the official United States web presence of Norway, has a wonderful article about Geir Jordahl's new photography book, Searching For True North.

A gallery opening for Searching for True North is slated for Friday, February 1, 2008 at ModernBook Gallery in Palo Alto. These images -- many shot with a Widelux panoramic camera and many made using infrared film -- have been described by Margaretta K. Mitchell as "restless dynamism." See you there!

Labels: art, friends, Norway

I was thrilled to read on CSUEB View that our friend Eric Kupers earned a $10,000 Princess Grace Fellowship and a $15,000 Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Grant for his contemporary dance work. Eric runs Dandelion Dancetheater and is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance at CSUEB. Jane danced in (and thoroughly loved) his "Dance For All Bodies and Abilities" class at the University. One of her cane chairs now serves as a prop in some class performances.

Eric's response to the good news: "Now the work begins."

Labels: art, friends

Last night I ate the last apple of the season from my tree.



The tree's a dwarf Granny Smith, planted in the front yard next to the alley. This year I got some twenty apples from it -- surprising for a tree that's only about four feet tall. We worried when we planted the tree by the alley that its fruit would all be used as projectiles by passing schoolkids. But the sad fact is that kids don't walk to school anymore, and the homeschool kids who take piano lessons next door are polite enough not to mess with the tree, so the fruit stays on the branches until I (or gravity) take it off.

And I like to leave Granny Smiths on the tree for a long time -- ideally until after Christmas. Left on the tree, the fruit turns golden and sweet, like a Golden Delicious only not mealy. Perfect for slicing and eating. But for now, it's back to commercial apples.

Labels: food, garden

For the first time in many, many months, I took the kayak out on Lake Chabot yesterday morning. The weather was beautiful, chilly, and windless; the lake level was low and the water was quite cloudy and slimy in areas. Clearly, the lake operators are expecting more rain. At least two other kayakers, two scullers, and lots of fishermen were out, including one paddling about in a float tube. Before I went out I considered packing my camera, but opted not to. Bad choice: I was thrilled to see a bald eagle flying over the north end of the lake. I had heard about bald eagles at Lake Chabot for several years but this was my first sighting.

What is it about free wireless at Macworld that makes it irresistable to create a blog post, even if one has nothing to say?

Labels: technology

KTVU News last night had a segment on the wild turkeys at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I wrote an article on wild turkeys for the short-lived MyHomeMyTown magazine in late 2003 and reproduce it here. My friend and boss (at the time) Bill Crosby let this fabulous headline stand, for some reason.

Big Birds Bug 'Burbs

At first glance -- maybe out a car window along an East Bay road -- they look like rocks or tree stumps. Definitely too big to be birds. A closer look reveals wild turkeys, scratching for a meal.

They're a thrilling -- and increasingly common -- sight. The wild turkey population in North America has quadrupled to more than 6 million in the last 30 years, according to the National Wild Turkey Federation. And though turkeys aren't native to the state, some of that growth has been in California; indeed, turkeys can be found in every California county except San Francisco.

Once the birds are established, their population growth is a matter of biology and arithmetic. Hens lay 10 to 12 eggs a year, and the chicks, who learn feeding behaviors from their mothers, can grow to adult size in three to four months. At that rate, the birds can quickly get in trouble with homeowners who find them flocking to yards and gardens, making a racket, and delivering unwanted, ahem, fertilizer to lawns, patios, cars, and even roofs. "Almost invariably, people will tell us that when they saw the first five of them, they loved them," says Scott Gardner, a wildlife biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG). "But four or five years later, when they've got 30 or 50 in their yard, they hate them."

California's turkey population has prompted the DFG to publish a Strategic Plan for Wild Turkey Management this fall. Among its goals is to "minimize unwanted interactions between turkeys and the public." Much of the responsibility for these interactions lies with homeowners who unintentionally domesticate the birds, Gardner says. "The relationship between a human and an animal changes pretty quickly when you start feeding it."

Gardner will be relocating a limited number of "chronic problem" birds from suburban areas (including the East Bay) over the next year and studying the results. But relocating turkeys isn't easy, and the program is subject to California's budget woes, so Gardner also hopes to convince homeowners to admire the birds from a distance -- and not feed them. "The long-term question," he says, "is how we get the turkey population behaving more like wild animals and less like stray cats."

The Strategic Plan for Wild Turkey Management is available at www.dfg.ca.gov/wmd or by calling (916) 445-3406.

Labels: clips, science

I found this odd bit of news in the Australian newspaper, The Age:

A nationwide search for a missing 13-year-old Czech boy exposed a bizarre case of identity theft in which a 33-year-old woman spent four months posing as a schoolboy in Norway, police said.

I recently watched She's The Man (dubbed in Spanish) on a Mexican bus, I have to say that the Czech woman, Barbora Skrlova, appears to pull off the teenage-boy act better than Amanda Bynes. But you can judge for yourself; the news article has a photo, and can be found here.

Labels: Norway

On Saturday, January 26, 2008, I'm planning to dedicate the niche where Jane's ashes rest. Details can be found on Jane's memorial site. All are welcome.

Labels: Jane

A good-hearted wire service story talks about Ringo Starr returning to Liverpool to mark the city's year as a European Capital of Culture. Ringo and Dave Stewart (the musician, not the pitcher) will headline an outdoor concert featuring 600 local musicians. Good for them. Here's the official Liverpool 2008 website.

The last paragraph of the story reads: "Stavanger, Norway, is the other culture capital for 2008." Who knew? And who will be Stavanger's Ringo? Here's the official Stavanger 2008 website; there's an English-language button in the upper left corner.

Labels: music, Norway

I'm a fan of Darrin Bell and his "Candorville" comic strip. Any cartoon character who uses a Mac and wears a Star Trek logo t-shirt, like Lemont, is okay with me. I've exchanged emails with Bell and own the original art for this strip.

An article in Editor and Publisher says that Bell and some other African-American cartoonists will, on February 10, 2008, all publish the same comic, but with their own characters. According to E&P, "The idea is to satirically protest the erroneous notion of many editors and readers that comics by African-American creators are interchangeable."

Mark your calendars. It should be fun, and I hope the cartoonists get more attention.

An experiment is taking place at the Scientific American website. Writer M. Mitchell Waldrop has posted an article entitled "Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?" and is asking readers to comment on it prior to publication (I assume in the ink-and-paper magazine).

It's billed as an "experiment in 'networked journalism,' in which readers—you—get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form." That's not quite accurate, since readers don't get to muck with the article itself. Still, putting it out for comment prior to publication is a cool experiment, and an example of the very subject of the article.

I hope there'll be follow-up to see how readers' comments affect the finished product.