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We are on our way to Death Valley even though the weather is supposed to be pretty bad. Windy, which means even windier at higher elevations and dusty. We'll see.
It got me thinking. Why is this a hack story? because I have seen it before? Several times? This is a story of Buffy Summers and River Tam, it is the story of any woman in any Luc Besson film. Or, as far as that goes, like the Marine Lioness Program . Then I started thinking What if it isn't a hack story, but a new female archetype?
It is an archetype of a young woman as the most powerful person in the
Universe of the story.
Buffy Summers is all that is between Sunnydale and the hoard of Vampires that will destroy the world. There are men who, maybe, can help her - often not very well, atleast, compared to her - but she is the only one that can save the world. The men are there to hold the structure, but Buffy holds the power.
Part of the Buffy story is that she is both damaged and vulnerable and River Tam even more so. Mathilda, in Luc Besson's The Professional is incredibly vulnerable and damaged but, in the end, she is more powerful than Leon, her protector.
I think that this is a new myth. A New Story. Granted, my education in myths is preeeety shaky, but I can't think of a Grimm's Tale or a Greek Myth where the female is young, vulnerable, and straight up, kickass, powerful.
And, like any archetype, it is coming out in stories because it exists in the real world. One place, for sure, the archetype is starting to manifest itself is the Marines Lioness Program. The Marines are now training women to go on patrols because they can interact with the local women in Afghanistan and Iraq. In other words, they can go where the men can't. They have power the men don't.
We got this email from a neighbor - a neighbor that lives at least a mile away, though - yesterday and I am both horrified and thrilled.
We had a mountain lion kill a deer on our back porch, and it almost broke our sliding glass window.
(See the photograph below.)
It was very early in the morning, around 4-5am. The deer appears (footprints) to have gone to the watering hole. The mountain lion appears to have been in stalking mode on the stairs. It attacked the deer as it was moving along the back porch to the hillside.
The lion slammed the deer against the back slidingdoor, almost breaking it, then started eating a few feet away.It feasted in one abdominal, and butt area, without biting the neck or adding other wounds; it discarded the stomach and some green organs. My turning on the lights and shouting at it frightened it away. I dragged the carcass;300 feet to the eucalyptus tree line.
Upon returning 30 minutes later, I discovered something had been eating the bowels that fell out of the carcass, including the liver and possibly the heart. It could have been a cat, but also the mountain lion since Animal Control advised that it may still be in the vicinity. It may be feasting on the carcass right now.
Blue jays are squawking because lots of red-tailed hawks are swooping in for a feast on the kill. We can expect a lot of carnivore predators out tonight; bobcat, coyotes, mountain lion, etc.… I’ve called the neighbors to advise keeping their dogs indoors tonight.
I’d seen a mountain lion once at or near the house, and it was not very afraid of me when I cornered it next to a big bush/rock. It moved away, but not really fast, when I jumped and yelled. I have many photographs of bobcats which did not do this sort of damage. Also photos of coyotes which hunt in packs and bite the neck of the prey, dragging it down.
Animal Control may put out an alert for Portola Valley, suggested I keep a shotgun in the house, in case they break through the window the next time. We have a lot of windows around the porch, from which I have photographed a lot of bobcats, boars, and deer, but never a kill.
Portola Valley awaits you... with a carnivorous hummmmm……
Horrified because the whole thing seems much more violent that I thought it would be - not that I had thought about it very much - and I can now easily imagine a writhing deer/mountain lion combination breaking through our back door and rolling around the livingroom. All I have is a 16" ruler to fend them off. Thrilled because the email came through the PV Garden Club which now seems much cooler; the writer seems so nonchalant, and thrilled because we live in a town where they aren't scrambling helicopters and SWAT teams over this.
Last Sunday - OK, last Sunday in the Bay Area - maybe only the south Bay Area - was Native Plant Day. Every year, the Native Plant Society hosts a series of open houses for gardens that are planted with Native Plants. Actually, because there are so many tempting plants that grow here if they only had year around water, usually these gardens have more than Native Plants.
The gardens seem to fall into three categories: true natives only which are very rare, natives with other plants that don't take much water, and, the most common of all, regular gardens or old gardens with some natives added.Either way, I always enjoy going to gardens where people are interested in plants. As an added bonus, these kind of gardens are often owned by plant people who are more than a little crazy anyway.
When I see a front yard like this, with a nice dry creek, I get very inspired to rip out our whole backyard.
And I am probably not the only one. Talking to fellow enthusiasts are what makes garden tours fun. Oh! and looking at nice natives like Iris douglasiana
or these very colorful mesembryanthemums from South Africa.
I love NPR but I thought it was dying. I mean, I love NPR but I am 70 and I sort of thought kids - you know, people under 40 - were listening to something else. The chart below, thanks to Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress shows that that I was wrong. NPR - National Public Radio - about as low teck as you can get, is doing very well. Why?
A couple of reasons, I think. No ads for starter. Once I got used to listening to radio without ads, it is hard to go back. And longer stories with lots of real analysis. More discussion on what is happening politically and less discussion on the horse race aspects. And little oddball stories. Oh! and nobody is yelling.
To me, from now, from here, slavery seems so improbable. Not informal, chance slavery like bringing home a captured souvenir from winning a war; but institutionalized slavery. It requires a belief that the slaves aren't really as human as the owners - how does someone do that to a person they are living with every day (and, more than sometimes, having sex with), it requires complex laws to define who are the slaves and who are the owners, it requires an huge infrastructure to keep the slaves from escaping, it must, I think, require a preoccupation that permeates every part of society.
That is why the whole concept of slavery in the south is abhorrent but not really real. And that is why a post, entitled Honoring CHM: One Drop, on Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog, is so horrific. With little commentary, it shows a picture of eight people and reprints a letter asking for money to educate them. They are emancipated slaves.- eight individual, traumatized, human beings.
The letter describes each one of the people with passages like this
Wilson Chinn is about 60 years old, he was "raised" by Isaac Howard of Woodford County, Kentucky. When 21 years old he was taken down the river and sold to Volsey B. Marmillion, a sugar planter about 45 miles above New Orleans. This man was accustomed to brand his negroes, and Wilson has on his forehead the letters "V. B. M." Of the 210 slaves on this plantation 105 left at one time and came into the Union camp. Thirty of them had been branded like cattle with a hot iron, four of them on the forehead, and the others on the breast or arm.
