Puttering in the Study

Batman: Gotham by Gaslight

To my intense relief, I didn't like this.  Gotham by Gaslight is an interesting variation on the Batman - a 1892 Batman in a Victorian Gotham City battling Jack the Ripper.  Wearing bulky woolen clothes under his cape instead of a body suit, he foils criminals and gets himself mistaken for Jack the Ripper.  While an interesting concept, the concept and cover art are better than the story, which simply involves a couple of jaunts by Batman before he puzzles out who the Ripper is confronts him, and gets a confession in the presence of Detective Gordon.  This books lacks the presence of the other Batman books I've read lately - there's little drama and none of the soaring artwork I'm now used to.  Again, it's a great idea, but they didn't do much with it.

Putting up the Christmas tree

Of course it's not Christmas until the tree goes up.  This year we put up our big tree for the second time in the new house, unpacking it from the garage and putting each of the seven segments into place, topped with the angel Daddy gave us after we got married.  The following show six of the seven segments going up (I forgot to take pictures after one).        

It will take days, and days and days to decorate.  I'm already planning installing a crane on the top of the big ladder to take it apart.

Thanksgiving dinner

My sister Emily had this picture of everyone gathered in our kitchen for dinner on Thanksgiving.  We had a pretty good crowd, and the food was phenomenal (as you can see).

Tree planting

Spent yesterday planting trees around the house.  I bought 23 bare root trees from Greenwood Nursery (my usual supplier) and this time went for size over quantity, with these being 3-4 year old trees that varies from 12-18" for the spruce & fir to 4-6' for the hybrid poplar.  In the past I've forgotten how hard planting these is and have raced around the borders frantically digging slits for 50-75 trees at a time with the predictable result that most don't survive, and the remainder don't grow fast at all.  This time I got a post hole digger, three bags of Miracle-Gro tree planting soil and a bag of bark mulch.

This year I bought five Douglas fir, five Norway spruce, three Colorado blue spruce, and ten hybrid poplar.  They also sent along ten dwarf burning bush which I scattered in the wood borders near the house.

Although I remembered not to buy large quantities of trees, I forgot to check the zones, and discovered after I ordered that the firs and spruce only go to zone 7, and we are zone 8.  As a result, I planted those in border areas where they would be sheltered by the surrounding taller trees from afternoon sun.  I also dug good holes, backfilled with planting soil mixed with native dirt, watered, and gave each sapling a good blanket of bark mulch.  If they die, they'll die comfortable.

The Douglas fir I saw in Napa last month, and it is an old friend from Twin Peaks days as well as reading about carrier decks, so I concentrated it in the border near the house - two in the back yard, two outside the study, and one in the north border near the generator.  The Colorado blue spruce are the ones I've really been looking forward to because they (or trees like them) figure prominently as specimen trees in Olmsted's landscapes, and I've been looking forward to their blue color.  The Norway spruce was - well, okay, I got a little carried away.  I'm trying to get my yard to look like Vancouver with a lot of geometrically shaped firs and spruces.  We'll see how well it works.

Anyway, back to the blue spruce.  I put one in the yard (not the border) outside the study, one in the border near the dock by the pond (in the area I'm hoping someday to do a little patio sitting area) and one in the front meadow between the road and the pond woods - near the live oak.  The other spruce, the Norway , got the remaining border spots that were shaded from afternoon sun, including one close to the front gate.

When it comes to durability and fast growth, not much beats a hybrid poplar.  (8 year old shown) I planted three of these at the old house, and by the time we left, the one that survived, which was three feet tall and the size of my finger when I planted it, was about the size pictured.  I planted a number at the new house in 2002 and 2003, but many didn't make it due to bad planting or getting mowed over - offhand I can't think of where one is that did.  These mostly filled in holes in the borders - one near the depot playhouse, and three in the front meadow, but six got more prominent locations.  One is in the grass behind the play area in the back yard, one is in the yard north of the house, one at the northern tip of the pond, one in the meadow (near the spruce and live oak in an exposed location that is sure to annoy Jamie) and two flanking the front gate.  I planted them in the best locations, which are not symmetrical, since I was trying to deemphasize the gate from the house side.

Once I finished planting, I took the time to work my way around the pond cutting the white plastic tree wraps off the many cypress and river birch trees I planted in 2003.  I planted a dozen or so large of each, if I remember right, and 25 or 50 smaller ones.  The smaller still aren't doing a lot, but the bigger ones are turning into monsters.  The cypress are reaching six feet or so and really bushing out, and the birch are more like eight feet, and some over an inch in diameter.  As I said, I cut the wraps off and cut the lower branches to better show the peeling bark which is the thing I liked about them in the first place.  I also cut several small pines around them down, since I focus more on deciduous trees in border areas, for the sake of fall color.  The pond borders still need some clearing out with a weedeater, but they are definitely getting there.

I also replaced the fill line to the pond with a new one, and realized that the old (broken) one had been leaking water through the dirt so much that the creek bed was now clogged with silt (plus we weren't getting much water into the pond).  The new line was dumping a huge amount of water when I left it, and had started the entire creek running.  I may post more pictures of it today, but as I think we may be starting on the Christmas tree, I may not get a day off to work in the yard as I had yesterday.

Thanksgiving

Having a great Thanksgiving today at the house.  Both my sisters and their families are here, as well as both my parents, and Jamie's parents and her grandmothers.  Great day.  Until Billy Cundiff missed a 33 yard field goal.   

Batman: Bloodstorm

Yep, I'm still reading Batman comic books this week - I'm as ashamed as anyone over this unexpected development.  I do expect it to be over soon, though.

Last night finished the second of the Batman vampire trilogy graphic novels.  This one picks up where Red Rain left off, with Batman as a vampire who is bent on destroying other vampires while refusing to drink blood himself.  But he gets the craving for blood worse and worse as the story goes on (offering some great opportunities for artwork of a seriously strung-out blood junkie in a bat suit - can anyone ask for more?), and only gets relief when he around Catwoman, who in this story is a were-cat, transformed by a vampire's bite into a, well, purple were-cat with red nails.  Nice original touch - if you're going to have Batman and vampires, why not take the fairly logical step of making Catwoman a real cat-woman?  It couldn't be sillier than Halle Berry in a catsuit.  (Respect must be paid to Michelle Pfeiffer in the same role, however, and once again, damn Warren Beatty to hell for getting Annette Benning pregnant when she had that role - I'm still mad about that).

The artwork of Batman suffering blood withdrawal is great - it's so graphic and so scary that, again,  can't let Grayson see this, and I thought I was buying it for him.  The artwork of Catwoman is just not much more than silly, unfortunately, despite the innate logic of the idea - somehow the drawings of a bulked-up muscular naked woman just don't do much for me when she has a tail, elongated ears and is purple.  But still, an interesting story, although lacking the panoramic qualities of the first.  That's partially the nature of the story - in the first Batman is literally flying around fighting Dracula so there are lots of opportunities for cape swirling around and great artwork, which is what I like about the series - the dark gothic nature of it.  In this one the cape doesn't get to do much more that wrap a junkie who is fighting withdrawal and getting more and more desperate.  Against, the anguish shown on his face is terrific - and frightening - but it's good artwork on a smaller, more personal, scale.

Have already ordered the third and final graphic novel in this series, as well as the one that preceded this trilogy, which sets Batman in Sherlock Holmes' England fighting Jack the Ripper.  Now that ought to be good!  And I'll stop after that, I promise.

Napa Valley trip

Last month Jamie and I spent four days in Napa Valley, California at a seminar.  During breaks we saw a number of the area wineries and had some really good meals.

On Tuesday after a car trip from Oakland that took longer than the flight from Texas (well, including a slight detour over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco - did you know that you can pull a U-ey on Treasure Island?), we checked into the hotel in Napa (which has huge pumpkins out front) and then did winery tours of Artesa & Domaine Carneros, followed by dinner at Don Giovanni's with friends from Texas.  On Wednesday, we got a little more serious, with tours of Close Pegase & Sterling, followed by lunch at Wappo Grill in Calistoga.  The driving is just great there - the vineyards make great scenery.    After lunch we toured more wineries (at least I'm pretty sure we did, but I apparently didn't keep track) and eventually had dinner at Greystone, which was in the Culinary Institute of America's facility in Napa.  The cooking school's gift shop was definitely a high point of the trip.  Thursday we did tours of Cakebread and Peju in the morning, followed by lunch at the Rutherford Grill (which had this incredible grilled artichoke appetizer) followed by tours of Coppola, Grgich Hills and Rambauer in the afternoon.  Before dinner we had a reception for conference attendees at Whitehall Lane Winery, and after that we did a late dinner at Brix, at which I had whole fish for dinner, and Jamie was so shocked I ate it that she took a picture.  We drove back to Oakland Friday and flew home, carrying six tasting glasses and a bottle of wine, plus subscriptions to a couple of wine clubs that we really liked.  Overall a great trip, and a nice chance to relax for a few days.

Raising Atlantis - Thomas Greanias

When I go on trips, I usualyl download a couple of books onto the Palm so I can read without lugging a book around.  Typically these books are pulp adventure or sci fi - not something I would normally buy in book form, but which the low cost of e-books makes worthwhile.  The last purchase was the Rule of Four posted below, which I enjoyed very much, and Raising Atlantis, which I didn't. 

raising Atlantis is your basic pulp adventure story - not unlike a Clive Cussler book.  And it is actually better written than a Cussler book - the testotesrone level is lower and the characters are actually pretty well drawn.  The problem is that the plot is way too thin to support what he's doing.  The book is something about a city under the Antarctic ice which is supposed to have been Atlantis, but everything happens so fast that it's hard to take seriously.  They're running around this alien city (which Clarke did far better in Rendezvous With Rama) figuring out all these alien puzzles so fast - and without any error - that you just stop identifying with them.  No mistakes for this crowd - they instantly know the correct answer to questions I can't even comprehend.  You could buy that Dan Brown's heroes could - just barely - figure out clues that medieval minds directed straight at them.  Here we have essentially aliens from the thousand years ago, and theses guys are nailing every question, even - when the need arises - coming up with the precise date and hour of Christ's crucifixion (contradicting many historical bases) when they speculate that that's the answer to a ten thousand year old puzzle.  What?

Not bad characters at all, again.  But they deserve better than this plot.  So do I - I need to find some better pulp fiction than this.  Maybe Clive Cussler has something new out...

Batman: Red Rain

I was looking for Batman comic books for Grayson at Half Price Books in Dallas Sunday morning, and ran across this graphic novel (and the subsequent Batman: Bloodstorm) which are from the DC Comics Elseworlds series.  The idea is that they change the place or time of the traditional characters to give them a chance to interact with different villains or situations. 

The idea behind this one is that Batman has to duel Dracula, and in the process becomes a vampire, albeit a good one.  Obviously the ears are pretty long on this version of Batman, and the artwork is just really phenomenal.  I hadn't read a true graphic novel in years, and this one is a keeper.  The artists get a chance to do some really nice horror work on Dracula, and of course Batman is a great character to draw, and drawn very well here.  The layout and artwork is really exceptional, and very enjoyable.

Only problem is that I can't let Grayson see this - it (and the sequel) are really graphic in terms of the undead and scary images of Batman.  I don't think this is appropriate for a six year old, so they'll be staying on a high shelf for a while.

The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople - Jonathan Phillips

Just finished this book about the sack of Constantinople by knights of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, and started on another book about the final sack by the Turks in 1453.  This was a hard book to read, because from the very beginning, you know that a thousand-year old culture, which had roots hundreds of years before that, was totally destroyed when the Latin Christians crusading to recover Jerusalem were diverted to Constantinople.  The book does a good job of explaining the motives of the various parties, and how this was not a clash of good and bad forces, but rather the result of intense pressures on the crusaders by their debts to the Venetians, which eventually caused them to sack the city of Constantinople to gain the money necessary to pay their debts to Venice.  The abysmal condition of the Byzantine leadership was new to me, as was the remarkable courage of the crusaders, their lack of good judgment in overestimating the size of the crusade when ordering transportation from the Venetians (which started the whole train of events) and the startling leadership displayed by the Venetian doge that accompanied the crusade to protect his city's interests. 

But what goes unexplained, and what never fails to shock, is the astonishing depravity of the sack of the city itself.  Not that the Byzantines, or indeed any other culture (with the notable exception of the Saracens) did much different when it took a city, but the scale of the theft and the rape and cruelty and the plunder was, and is, unparallelled.  And that it was committed by Christian knights who had sworn an oath to do no such thing the day before, and yet did it to fellow Christians, is shocking.  The blasphemy that the knights subjected the holy sites of Constantinople and the Eastern church to is still impossible to comprehend.  This is one of the low points in the history of Western civilization.  There have certainly been worse atrocities, but in terms of single events, caused by religious forces, this has to be right up there.  The level of hypocrisy is impossible to understate.  What began as a religious crusade (a flawed proposition from the beginning) descended into an unparalleled orgy of greed and destruction.

Overall, a very depressing (although well-written) book.  It says something that I was glad to finish it and get started on the next sack of the city, by Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453.  By comparison, his motives were at least honest ones, and he stopped his soliders from the sort of sack that the Christian knights were only too happy to engage in.