asakiyume | Entries tagged with npr

Or, octopuses can be assholes, too. (And you thought only human bosses were jerks)

"Octopuses and fish share leadership--and enforcement--in group hunting."

The octopuses punch the low-performing or freeloading fish. They punch them!

Paul Salopek, this morning, talking about traveling in rural Yunnan Province, China:

Almost without being aware of it, [we] are losing touch with the human hand itself, what the human hand can make ... This realization paradoxically gelled when I stepped over the Myanmar border into China, possibly because I had these conceptions that I'd be walking into the most industrialized country in the world. And I didn't. Instead ... not only [are] the houses all handmade, but the roads to reach them were conformed to the human foot. People were still moving between them on foot or on bicycles or, on occasions, by pack horses. And even the tools to make this environment, I noticed, were handmade.
Source: "Writer Paul Salopek started a global journey ten years ago. Where is he now?" NPR Morning Edition.

The human hand and foot. I'm not holding this up as a way everyone should live--not at all. (I want there always to be thousands of different ways to live.) I just really appreciate how this show what people can do. We're not merely catalysts for automated processes.

Current Music: Marina: Handmade Heaven

This morning I caught Living on Earth, a radio show about the environment. They were talking about the Paris Climate Conference, and their last segment was a poem, "Tell Them," by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, from the Marshall Islands. I was lying in bed--the radio was on in the kitchen, but my attention was pulled: soon I was listening intently. It's a long poem, and I don't think I should put the whole thing here without asking permission (you can read it here), but here are some parts that I especially liked:

tell them our islands were dropped
from a basket
carried by a giant
tell them we are the hollow hulls
of canoes as fast as the wind
slicing through the Pacific sea ...

tell them we are styrofoam cups of Kool-Aid red
waiting patiently for the ilomij
we are papaya-golden sunsets bleeding
into a glittering, open sea
we are skies uncluttered
majestic and sweeping in their landscape
tell them we are dusty rubber slippers
swiped
from concrete doorsteps ...

we are children flinging
like rubber bands
across a road clogged with chugging cars
tell them
we only have one road ...

tell them some of us
are old fishermen who believe that God
made us a promise
tell them some of us
are a little more skeptical
but most importantly you tell them
that we don't want to leave
that we've never wanted to leave
and that we
are nothing without our islands.

Jaier Juano and family; photo by 黒忍者 on Flickr (click through)

ETA: Regarding the Climate Change Agreement reached today, Al Jazeera reports,

In a victory for small island nations threatened by rising seas, the agreement includes a section recognizing "loss and damage" associated with climate-related disasters.

Current Music: Tom Waits: Gun Street Girl

Here are some thoughts and pictures I've saved up over the past few days. First, a picture of magnificent skies. Such weighty clouds, such gauze of rain over there in the distance, and such uncanny light:

Influential rain

Some days later, there was a walk alongside a canal. Rain was coming down, not severely, but--and we hadn't expected this--fairly unquittingly. It was watching its influence spread as it hit the canal water. Lots of little circles of influence:

Salamander
And here, in a photo by

urbpan, is a magical creature, bred of wetness, despite the fact that the ancients associated its kind with fire. See how his hind quarters melt away? And he sparkles darkly. You can find out all about this salamander, a "leadback," at

urbpan's entry here.

Puzzler
The winner of NPR's Sunday puzzler yesterday was a 15-year-old, Arushi Agarwal. Will Shortz asked her if she'd been playing long, and she said she'd been playing for five years: her parents had thought that working on the puzzle each Sunday would be a great way to stretch their minds and spend family time together. I was so charmed by that notion! What a fun family thing to do! ... Only if everyone participates willingly, but Arushi seemed very happy. She has a brother, too, who's part of all this.

"So did you have help solving last week's puzzle?" Will Shortz asked.

"Yes, my brother helped me."

(The puzzle had been, take the name of a major US company, take off its first and last letters, and the remainder of the letters, in order, will spell out the name of a well-known singer.)

She went on, "We figured we probably wouldn't know the singer, so we took a list of the Fortune 500 companies and just went through it. When we got to "Walgreens" and took off the W and the S, we thought, 'Al Green seems like a pretty viable name,' so we went and looked, and yeah, he's a singer."

"So you didn't even know him," Will Shortz remarked with a laugh, and she said no, so he played her a clip of an Al Green song. And then she did the puzzle on air, and acquitted herself admirably.

I fell into a daydream about the Agarwal siblings figuring this out, the parents enjoying their kids working on it... I'd like to draw the picture, but I don't know if I will...

Rock of the month

a_soft_world was visiting. She told me about how she and her brother used to like breaking rocks open, and how they'd display the rock of the month--the one that was most fabulous or interesting inside. On our walk by the canal, in the influential rain, she picked up two, and the next day, we hurled them at a large boulder, and they did shatter! And here is one, split open:

Surely worthy of the title of rock of the month.

A couple of days ago, NPR had a story about a remarkable short film, "Present Tense," made by teens in the fishing village of Matemwe, in Zanzibar.

Watch on YouTube

It was about the horrible educational bind they're in: having been educated in Swahili in primary school, they're expected to continue their education in English in secondary school. The courses are taught in English--but the students don't know English. Furthermore, neither do their teachers, as fluency in English isn't required of graduates from teachers college.

We cannot understand our exam papers

The teacher speaks English, but I don't understand what he speaks about.
This is our problem in the class: he must speak English, but the students don't understand.

The well water has a lot of bad things and salt. If I have a lot of education, I will change this situation ...
If I'm an engineer, I will build new and good wells.

The teens made the film with the help of a retired pilot, who submitted it to EYE Want Change, a British film festival with a social consciousness bent. Their film won first place--but even better, the government of Zanzibar announced a change in its education policy: although English will still be taught as a foreign language, the language of instruction in secondary school will be Swahili.

Current Music: Carola Kinasha: Dua la kuku

I've been paying attention to the leisurely flow of Kilauea's lava toward the village of Pahoa, and over the weekend, they had a story on NPR about the possibility of diverting the lava. They had on John Lockwood, Volcanologist and Lava Diverter, to talk about it.

But, as the report noted, not everyone thinks the lava should be diverted. One woman said,

You cannot change the direction. It's Mother Nature. It's like me telling you, "Move the moon because it's too bright."

The photo of twin rivers of brilliant lava that accompanied the NPR story was actually from an eruption of Mt. Etna (whose diversion Lockwood consulted on), so I searched for a picture of the current flow, and found this one on the blog of Cassie Holmes, whose sister lives in Pahoa:

[picture no longer available as of 2018]

She's been documenting the slow advance of the lava, and offers her own reflections on living with an active volcano:

Puna will always be my home and no matter what happens with the lava I will continue to go back, even if it means hiking over freshly cooled lava to get there (September 17)

and

“Why would anyone want to live on an active volcano?” That is the question I’m hearing a lot right now, but first let me ask you this – Why would anyone want to live where there are earthquakes, tornados, fires, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and tsunamis? Anywhere we choose to live there is some kind of natural disaster that could happen, it’s just mother nature. (October 29)

(source)

And I think, Yes.

Current Music: Taylor Swift: Out of the Woods

The other day, I caught the tail end of a lecture that Rebecca Solnit (apparently an award-winning essayist and environmental historian, though I'm not familiar with her) gave in Seattle earlier this year. It was broadcast by Alternative Radio. These words had me transfixed--I was trying to commit them to memory, and they were coming too fast, so I bought the transcript. I'm hoping that this small quotation is fair use and not an infringement:

Something wonderful happens to you, and you instantly look back over your life and see it as a series of fortunate events stretching off into the distance like mountain peaks. Something terrible happens and your life has always been a litany of woe. The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn’t a story; it’s a whole milky way of events, and we’re forever picking out constellations from it to suit who and where we are ...

Musselwhite saved his life by caring deeply enough, Smith by telling it in a way that made someone else care, or at least hesitate, and by being yanked from the grip of her own troubles by the intensity of that ordeal.

I tell stories for a living, where I dismantle and break them and tell them otherwise. But never forget that you are also a storyteller. That we live in stories the way fish swim in water. That we choose our stories, if we can see them. That we are made of stories, and this can be a blessing or a curse, and is usually both at once as our lives unfold. Choose your stories carefully. Listen to what has been silenced. Learn to see the invisible.¹

The earlier portion of the essay touches on all sorts of things, but always with the theme of how the story has been told and how it can be reinterpreted to show new truths--touching on the nuclear era ("though we imagine nulear war as a terrible thing that might happen someday in the future, it was going on regularly, routinely, at the rate of a nuclear bomb explosion a month or so, between 1951 and 1991"), the war against native peoples in North America, how mass shootings are reported. Those are all cases where a comforting narrative is displaced by a more stark one, but she also talks about how a negative story can be replaced by a more positive one: how people's response to natural disaster is not the Hollywood portrayal of panic and chaos, that in fact "not only do people do this work that needs to be done of rescuing people, making community kitchens, improvising shelters, looking after orphans and injured people . . . but they love it, they take great pleasure in it, they find great meaning in it."

But it's the last part of the essay--the two stories leading up to the quote I give above, that I loved best, the story of two people who changed their own story, and thereby saved their lives.

¹Rebecca Solnit, "Making and Breaking Stories," lecture given June 5, 2014, in Seattle, WA, available through the Alternative Radio website.

Current Music: Dougie Maclean: Gloomy Winter

Voices are often what pull me into a story--even before I can hear what they're saying, sometimes just their tone, their manner. That was the case with the story of Jose Armenta, a Marine who, with a German shepherd, formed a mine-detecting team of two. Terry Gross interviewed him yesterday on Fresh Air.

Jose, his wife, and their dogs (Zenit in the background). Photo credit: Adam Ferguson/National Geographic

He was so soft-spoken, so matter-of-fact. So matter-of-fact about his traumatic childhood--shootings in front of his home--so matter-of-fact about his dangerous job, so understated about a sense of duty so strong that when he stepped on a mine, his first thought was shame at having "f--ed up" by failing to detect it.

Understated too about his deep love for Zenit, his dog partner. The soldiers who pair with mine-sniffing dogs aren't supposed to let themselves get too attached to the dogs, and Jose didn't think he had--but as he lay waiting for the Medevac, he kept asking for Zenit. And the National Geographic article "The Dogs of War," which goes into more detail about Jose and Zenit's story, notes that for his part, Zenit lay down next to Jose, ears pinned to his head, and stayed there until the chopper arrived.

During his recovery, Jose often woke from dreams, calling for Zenit. Even though the protocol was for Zenit to be assigned to a new handler in this situation (which did happen), Jose started up proceedings to adopt Zenit--and eventually succeeded.

Even though Jose doesn't go in for effusive statements of love, in his voice you can hear how much Zenit means to him. Zenit, for his part, ran right to Jose's side when they were reunited. We should all have--and be--such true friends. "I'm a lucky guy," Jose says.

Yeah, because even though he lost both legs above the knee, he's now married, has a baby son, and Zenit. It's not entirely happily ever after, but it's the sort of happiness this life gives us, if we're lucky.

I'm not a sports fan of any type, and I managed to avoid awareness of the fact that today is Super Bowl Sunday until about a week ago, and it was only with prepping from my sister that I could remember the teams involved

BUT

I loved this story, from yesterday's Only A Game, about how the Seattle Art Museum and the Denver Museum of Art are getting into the spirit of the competition:

"Seattle, Denver Museums Wager Works of Art on Super Bowl"

If Denver wins, then Kako Tsuji's "Sound of Waves"--with a picture of an eagle [very close, imagewise, to a seahawk]--will go to Denver:

If Seattle wins, then Fredrick Remington's "Bronco Buster" will go to Seattle:

The interviewer gave the art directors a chance to trash talk each other at the end of the interview but wow, that's a skill that's not in the art directorial portfolio, clearly.

Yesterday, NPR reported that one of NASA's satellites will be falling back to earth sometime soon, and the biggest piece of it will likely be around 300 pounds.

So what are your chances of being hit by that, or one of the two dozen other pieces? NASA calculates that the chance of someone, somewhere on Earth, being hit by a piece of the satellite are one in 3,200. Heck, a lot of things are more unlikely than that! But wait. Those are the odds for someone, somewhere. What are the odds of any particular single person getting hit? You, or me? Then, NASA says, they're one in trillions.

But Lottie Williams beat those odds, back in 1997. She spoke to NPR about it, said she saw something that looked like a shooting star, one night:

"It was just a big ball of fire, shooting across the sky at just a fast speed," she recalls. A little while later, Williams felt a tap on her shoulder. When she turned around, there was no one there — but something fell to the ground.

It was a small piece of burned mesh. An analysis later showed that it's most likely part of a returning Delta II rocket — the fireball she saw in the sky.

photo by Brandi Stafford, for the Tulsa World

NPR story here

Current Music: Men at Work: Overkill

Playlist for a ghost story that is just about finished:

( A Land of Deepest Shade )

I decided I had to take the plunge and actually finish some of the many, many things I've started reading. They are all things I desperately want to read, but if you have enough things you desperately want to read, you can end up dreading reading, because they all demand your attention, and if you're reading one, you're slighting another--and so it's easier just not to read at all. In my case, anyway. This doesn't seem to be a problem for people on my friends list, who are all prodigious readers.

In any case, to that end, I'm closing in on the last few pages of King Spruce, which I've decided I quite like, and not just because it sometimes makes me laugh when it surely doesn't intend to, as with the concept of.... the man-promise:

"Brother Dwight! Brother Dwight!" she half sobbed. "Oh, Brother Dwight, I didn't know--I didn't realize--I didn't understand, or I would have held you back until you had torn these two arms from my shoulders. I prayed for you and watched for you. They buy their logs with blood up there. but it shall not be with your blood, Dwight. I have hated father all these days. He knew what you were going back to, and didn't stop you!"

"It was all my own affair, little girl," Wade returned, gently--"my duty, to which I was bound by fair man-promise."

Not just man-promise, but fair man-promise! Let us now pause for a moment to contemplate foul man-promise.

...

Didn't that send a shiver up your spine?

Speaking of thought-provoking phrases, we had the news on the other day, and the ninja girl remarked, "I really hate the phrase 'grow the economy.'"

"Yeah," I said, "It kind of makes you think of grow lights and illicit cultivation. Like, 'The energy consumption was suspicious, and when the DEA investigated, they found a bumper crop of economy being grown in the basement. A spokesperson estimated that that much economy would probably fetch half a million dollars on the open market.'"

Current Music: Decemberists: Rox in the Box

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In the context of my previous entry, this news story was hilarious
roads that conform to the human foot
"Tell Them"
medley
The language of instruction in Zanzibar
You cannot change the direction
Rebecca Solnit--Making and Breaking Stories
Heroes and friends
The art museums' wager
Lottie Williams, beating the odds
a playlist, a strange word, and a thought-provoking phrase

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Asakiyume mita

Entries tagged with npr

In the context of my previous entry, this news story was hilarious

roads that conform to the human foot

"Tell Them"

medley

The language of instruction in Zanzibar

You cannot change the direction

Rebecca Solnit--Making and Breaking Stories

Heroes and friends

The art museums' wager

Lottie Williams, beating the odds

a playlist, a strange word, and a thought-provoking phrase