asakiyume | Entries tagged with news

There was a great article by Jeremy C. Fox in the Boston Globe a few days ago about Maria Herrick Bray (1828–1921), whose identifiers therein are way more extensive than in my subject line: "abolitionist, suffragist, temperance leader, lay minister, innkeeper, writer, 'editress,' naturalist, lecturer, matron of a women’s shelter, and philanthropist." But the article leads with the heroic feat for which she's best remembered:

For three days and nights in 1864, from her wedding anniversary to Christmas Eve, the 36-year-old West Gloucester native willed herself up each wrought-iron staircase every four hours to fill the tanks of whale oil, trim the wicks, and keep the lanterns burning as the snowstorm enveloped the 54-acre rocky outcropping just off the Rockport coast.

Globe caption reads: "A charcoal illustration depicts Maria Herrick Bray rushing between the twin lighthouses of Thacher Island. JEREMY C. FOX" --not sure if that means merely that the picture is in Jeremy C. Fox's possession or whether he drew it! It's a cool picture and I'd love to know the artist.

Her husband, the head lighthouse keeper, had taken a boat to the mainland with a feverish assistant keeper seeking medical care. They didn’t know the storm was bearing down on Cape Ann, blocking his return and leaving his formidable wife to tend both lamps with only her 14-year-old nephew, Sidney Haskell, for help.

That feat is no doubt why the US Coast Guard named a 175-foot Keeper class bouy tender after her in 1999.

But then the article goes on with a whole bouquet of other things she did:

While Herrick Bray lived on Thacher Island, she developed a fascination with aquatic plants that made her an early authority in their study, and she was among five local leaders who formed the Cape Ann Scientific and Literary Association in 1875, laying the groundwork for the Cape Ann Museum.

She wrote essays on snails and trap-door spiders, according to newspaper accounts, and gave lectures on topics including the apostle Paul; “The True Missionary Spirit”; Gloucester past, present, and future; and botany — “recommending the inculcation of a love for flowers in the minds of the children.”

And she was president of the Women's Suffrage Association in Gloucester and established Massachusetts' first women's shelter in 1890.

AND she seems to have been a lot of fun, with a contemporary writing about her,

“a bright-eyed glowing brunette, full of jovial life and elfish pranks. . . . She was not only the life of the old Herrick Homestead, but of the village ...A quick sense of the ludicrous, in person or occurrence, found her power of mimicry wide-awake, and no company could be long dull or morose with her in their midst.”

If you happen to have a subscription to the Boston Globe, you can read more here, but if not, I've created a Word document of it, so if you want to read more, I'm happy to send it to you--just message me. Because really, Boston Globe. I pay enough for this subscription that you should let me give gift articles BUT YOU DON'T.

There are rivers whose personhood has been recognized--in New Zealand, Colombia, Bangladesh, Canada, elsewhere too. And now, on the occasion of COP16, the 2024 UN Biodiversity Conference currently underway in Cali, Colombia, there's a legal petition to have Ecuador's Los Cedros cloud forest recognized as a co-copyright holder for a song, created by writer Robert McFarlane, musician Cosmo Sheldrake, mycologist Giuliana Furci, legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito--and the forest.

In this Guardian article, McFarlane says,

It wasn’t written within the forest, it was written with the forest. This was absolutely and inextricably an act of co-authorship with the set of processes and relations and beings that that forest and its rivers comprise. We were briefly part of that ongoing being of the forest, and we couldn’t have written it without the forest. The forest wrote it with us.

The organization they're working through is the More Than Human Life (MOTH) project, which describes itself as "an interdisciplinary initiative advancing rights and well-being for humans, non-humans, and the web of life that sustains us all." They have a book, MORE THAN HUMAN RIGHTS
An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing, edited by Rodríguez-Garavito, which is free to download on their site (link here), as they want people to have access to the ideas and thinking.

In other news, an owl perched in a lilac right by our door this morning, looking for all the world like a person in a parka with a fur-lined hood. Her feet were invisible where she perched, her eyes were black and only black when she swiveled around to look at Wakanomori and me. We had come to see what the disturbance was--crows were making such a racket. Apparently they don't like Madam Owl.

Current Music: Joe Hisaishi: 6 Banme no Eki (No. 6 Station)

There's a scene early on in Miyazaki's Spirited Away when day suddenly turns to night--a sweep of nightfall crossing the scene, and with the darkness come the spirits, disembarking to visit the tea house. Chihiro's reality changes around her in an instant.

This happened to me yesterday evening when I was waiting at international arrivals in Logan Airport for Wakanomori's plane to touch town. It wasn't crowded--a few people sitting on chairs in the waiting area, a few random people like me, airport staff. I decided to walk the length of the arrivals floor. Down one way, then back to the center, where a big door with "Customs and Immigration: Do Not Enter" disgorges new arrivals, and then down the other direction, past where people were sitting on chairs and on the floor.

Oh but wait. This was a lot of people. And an awful lot of small kids. It was families. And each family had a bright-colored fleece blanket on the floor, sometimes two. Some children were sleeping. There were big plastic bags here and there.

( another world )

If only all the world's trauma could all be addressed with a kit.

The teacher I used to work with in Holyoke asked me back to give a talk on writing to her high school-aged students, who are working on personal narratives. These are all kids for whom regular high school hasn't worked out, but they are still fighting for an education and a future, and the teachers at this program are 100 percent dedicated to helping them with that.

This happened in front of the building housing the program. This is these kids' daily life.

We talked about what makes writing hard, and how you have to strive to write in a way that your readers will understand and feel what you're sharing--even if your reader is only your future self. It's too easy to be cryptic or use a sort of shorthand that speaks to you in the moment but not later. And of course if your audience is going to include people other than yourself, you have to work even harder. Learning what you need to improve is good--but we also need reassurance and praise for what we're doing.

( the writing exercise I did with them )

Afterward, I answered questions and the talk drifted to (among other things) languages. I think I maybe went overboard talking about how learning languages made me positively high, but it led to a touching conversation on my way out with a student who confided that he'd started teaching himself Hebrew.

"Oh wow, Hebrew!" I said. "How did you choose that? Is it part of your heritage?"

"No. It's because of ... You know. The news. I thought of doing Arabic, too, but the letters seemed too hard."

I felt so much love for that kid in that moment. What a profound response to what's going on. What an instinct for healing.

So take heart, everyone. You can be a kid growing up in a neighborhood where stray bullets kill babies, and yet you're teaching yourself language to Tikkun Olam the hell out of our broken world.

I get a lot of hope and ideas for ways things can be better from stories about what people are doing in so-called developing countries. Often they seem like things I myself could tackle, or I with a few friends--like writing a newspaper to cover events of interest or concern in my local neighborhood. Unlike Mohammad Hasan Parvez, I could even do it with aid from a computer. He writes out the newspaper by hand.

Parvez lives in a small village in southern Bangladesh, and to earn money, he does various jobs--works as a brickmaker or goes to sea to fish. There are no newspapers in his area, and in any case the national papers have no interest in reporting on what goes on there, but a mentor of Parvez's, an award-winning journalist, suggested to him that he himself could publish a paper.

He calls his paper Andharmanik:

The river Andharmanik is known for some characteristics. The most common myth about it is that if someone splashes the river water in the dark, it emits light and creates an arc.

“Andharmanik means a ruby that lights up the dark. I want my paper to be like that — a beacon of hope for our community,” Parvez said.

The paper has been running since May 1, 2019:

In the past four years, Parvez has cultivated a team of 15 volunteers — labourers, farmers, and fishermen — who work as newspaper reporters, feeding Parvez with the daily happenings in different corners of their district. Once a month, they have a team meeting where Parvez gathers all the news from his volunteers.

Parvez writes headlines and gets them printed out in a big font from a local cyber cafe. He then pastes the headlines onto A3-size papers and writes the rest of the content with a fountain pen. He prints at least 300 copies from a Xerox machine. His volunteers also act as hawkers and distribute the paper in different villages.

You can read the whole story here, in a story by Faisal Mahmud, a journalist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The story is published in a Turkish newspaper. I discovered it because it was tweeted by the mentor, Rafiqul Montu (and retweeted into my timeline by my friend Jaspreet Kindra).

I'm grateful to everyone along that chain, and Parvez himself, for this work and for the spark of energy it gives.

Parvez at work

Mohammad Hasan Parvez writing the newspaper

The Boston Globe broke a story on Tuesday about busting up a Russian smuggling network and arresting a key link--a 35-year-old in New Hampshire who was receiving high-end US tech in the mail, repackaging it, and sending it to Estonia, where another agent would take it across the border to Russia.

Today they had two stories describing how the smuggling operation worked in detail, including the long-term investment in agents and their embeddedness in the United States. It's all so spy movie!

"What the NH Smuggling Arrest Says about the Russian War Machine," by Hanna Krueger, gets into why the Russians need to smuggle this tech in:
[Note: all the articles are paywalled and the Globe doesn't allow for gift articles, but I'm a subscriber and I've copied all three articles into Word documents, so if you'd like any, message me]

The Kremlin’s war machine has always been dependent on Western technology, materials that the country has struggled to produce itself. In 1963, the KGB established a division called Directorate T — t for technology — that was tasked with acquiring Western electronics. As Silicon Valley emerged as a hotbed for technological innovation, Russia sent some of its best espionage talent to California.

“The San Francisco consulate continues to be staffed with the creme de la creme, even more than Washington,” one Russian defector said in a 1981 Newsweek article.

Russia tried to develop domestic production in its own, but according to the article, the efforts always "fizzled out":

“You can’t solve this problem by just throwing money at it because it requires research and development talent and against the background of brain drain. They’ll be forever trying to copy, rather than develop,” said Maria Shagina, an expert on international sanctions at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.

So instead Russia allegedly planted this guy, Alexey Brayman, in a New Hampshire town, which, as the article says, is expensive:

But at the heart of the procurement networks are human agents, who are expensive and time-consuming to develop. Byrne believes that Brayman, who ran a crafts company with his wife that made decorative lights, is actually “a trained intelligence agent who’s been living as an illegal in the country for a long time.”

The article from Tuesday (by Dugan Arnett, Hanna Krueger, and Brendan McCarthy) puts it like this:

As the Braymans lived a seemingly quintessential American lifestyle — attending Celtics games, vacationing in Florida, visiting local arts festivals — Alexey Brayman allegedly received a steady stream of “advanced electronics and sophisticated testing equipment used in quantum computing, hypersonic and nuclear weapons development and other military and space-based military applications,” according to the indictment unsealed in the Eastern District of New York.

The wife is not arrested, so maybe she didn't know? One wonders.

If you would like to know how to blend into a suburban New Hampshire town (and who wouldn't?), here are some pointers:

Alexey and Daria Brayman, a pair of thirtysomething Eastern European emigres, blended well into this land of shared casseroles, poker nights, and neighborhood book clubs. They ... stood out largely for their generosity and good will.

“They are the nicest family,” said a delivery driver who frequently stops at the home, dropping off packages of various shapes and sizes. “They’ll leave gift cards out around the holidays. And snacks.”

Two of the articles include this Facebook photo of the Braymans:

So there you go! Spy v. Spy in Anno Domini 2022!

As I say, feel free to message me if you're not a Boston Globe subscriber and would like to read the articles. (It bothers me that it's so hard to share articles that I subscribe to.) But it's also probably all over the news from other sources now, too.

I learned about this story from

amaebi, who said it's like part of a folktale, and she's right.

"Treasure Washes up on Venezuela's Shore, Bringing Gold and Hope to a Village,"
by Anatoly Kurmanaev and Isayen Herrera; photos by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez
New York Times December 12, 2020.

Such a story! All this gold, washing up in a poor fishing village. True to folktale form, the first thing to turn up was a gold medallion with an image of the Virgin Mary on it:

The fisherman, Yolman Lares, saw something glisten along the shore. Raking his hand through the sand, he pulled up a gold medallion with an image of the Virgin Mary ... “I began to shake, I cried from joy,” said Mr. Lares, 25. “It was the first time something special has happened to me.”

After that, people found all sorts of things--"hundreds of pieces of gold and silver jewelry, ornaments, and golden nuggets."

Some people think it's ancient pirate treasure, others a miracle from God, others the wreck from some modern-day smugglers' ship, or a government operation to pacify dissatisfaction (... may I just say that I love the idea of the government's nefarious plot involving ... seeding the shore with gold?)

The New York Times commissioned a test on one of the findings, and the results indicated it was probably produced in Europe, and probably in the mid-20th century. So probably not ancient pirate treasure, unless they're time traveling pirates. But the other explanations are all still on the table.

Yolman Lares sold what he found and used the money to buy food--so the family can eat two meals a day for a while instead of just one--some sweets for his kids, and a used speaker to go with the TV he fixed, so the family can enjoy some entertainment. He kept a pair of gold earrings, though:

a pair of simple gold earrings decorated with a star. Despite the pressing need, he doesn’t want to part with them because they remind him of the ancient navigators who crossed the Caribbean guided by the stars.

“It is the only pretty thing that I have,” he said.

The photos accompanying the article are beautiful. These are just two of them, but the others, showing things like a haul of sardines or the inside of a house, are wonderful too.

Venezuela gold story-Adriana Loureiro Fernandez

Venezuela gold story-photo by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez

Last night, late, I heard this story on the CBC: the tale of Christian Lyons, a lawyer in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, who noticed, as he took a shortcut home through the woods behind the local high school, that there were a number of foxes about. He saw five. And then...

Lyons waited for them to cross the path and carry on through the woods. They did, and he carried on his way.

"Lo and behold, as I came over a ridge, I saw that these, at least five foxes, had circled back and were back on the trail."

He began to feel disconcerted. The foxes weren't fleeing or trying to avoid him.

"It's almost like they looped back to come in front of me so I took stock of the situation. I'm not afraid of foxes. Who would be?"

The animals began to approach as a pack, loping towards him from about 10 metres away.

"I just kind of jogged backwards in retreat. Not in full-panic flight at this point."

Another five metres down the road, Lyons turned back.

"They were then closing the gap toward me with some intent," says Lyons.

At this point, he says, "it was unequivocal flight response. I just started to sprint away from these things."

Source: "Pack of Foxes Chase Yellowknife Man in Residential Area."

Some kept up the chase even after he crossed a road, and one pursued him to the door of his house.

Christian Lyons

Was it because he himself has a ruddy, foxlike look? (Perhaps he has fox blood and doesn't know it?)

Your mission, should you choose to accept it¹, is to spin a brief tale explaining the foxes' pursuit of Mr. Lyons.

An alternate mission is to mention other town names that are as cool as Yellowknife. I would love to be able to say I came from a place called Yellowknife.

¹Coincidentally, Mr. Lyons had been returning from seeing Mission Impossible with friends.

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

On the news, talking about fires in California, they said 1400 people were evacuated. (Or maybe it was 1200--it was either twelve or fourteen. Hundred.) I always assume, when I hear a number like that, that it's rounded off. The chances that it's a perfect fourteen hundred--not 1,396, not 1,407 or 1,421--seem low to me, though I suppose it's possible.

But if it's rounded off, that means the actual number is either higher or lower. If it's higher, that means there are displaced people who aren't counted--how would you like to be among the unnumbered? You are an untidy extra, a scrap cut off the piecrust.

And if it's lower, that means there are phantom people swelling the ranks. Imagine sitting at the shelter, maybe having a package of Funyuns that have been handed out, and next to you are these barely visible disturbances in your visual field, like heat ripples--the ghostly extras who have been added to round out the number.

I'm not really distressed. I understand the necessity and practicality of rounded numbers: truly! But still--it's thought provoking.

My time management skills are getting worse as I get older.

I have a writing goal and a nonwriting goal for the week. The writing goal is to finish this thing about bridges that I'm writing. It's short! I should finish it.

( The nonwriting goal is to find out more about ISIS. )

I was saying on Twitter that I eat molasses in, among other things, peanut butter sandwiches. It was part of my attempt to broaden the things I paired with peanut butter. My two older kids suffered through mainly just peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in their school lunches, but by the time the third was in high school, I was trying to vary the routine a little more. Here are things I combined with peanut butter:

--apple slices
--dried coconut
--chocolate chips
--banana slices
--molasses
--honey
--brown sugar
--chocolate syrup
--golden syrup (i.e. syrup from cane sugar)
--dried cranberries

ETA: also raisins! And in comments

littlemoremasks has some suggestions for nonsweet combos.

What stuff have you tried?

Current Music: Lana del Rey: Old Money

Tonle Sap is a lake in Cambodia that expands and contracts dramatically, depending on whether it's the rainy season or the dry season--it goes from being no more than a meter deep and 2,700 square kilometers in area to being 9 meters deep and 16,000 square kilometers in area (says Wikipedia). The floating villages of Siem Reap, on one of its feeder rivers, are well known, but on the lake itself there are also floating villages. When

dudeshoes saw this New York Times article ("A Push to Save Cambodia's Tonle Sap Lake," by Chris Berdik), about how the lake was threatened, she sent me the link, knowing I'd be interested.

Girl from the floating village of Akol, Cambodia. Photo by Chris Berdik for the New York Times

The article is largely about the creation of a model to try to predict what will happen to the lake and how much influence the various factors have, and about the problems in designing the model, and with the model more generally. I was more interested, though, in other aspects of the story--in the fact that farmers displaced by grants to agribusiness have come to make a living on the lake, in the mysterious statement that "tropical dams typically generate power for just a few decades" (why is that?), in the fact that there are tiny fish there called money fish, and sharks that will fit in the palm of your hand.

The black shark, Labeo chrysophekadion. Photo by Chris Berdik for the New York Times

1.5 million people depend on the Tonle Sap. Climate change, hydro dams, increased population pressures--all these things spell change for the lake. Since change is coming, it's best to be planning for it:

A food-security expert, Dr. Fraser has studied some of history’s worst famines, as well as those prevented by tactics like stockpiling food and distributing drought-resistant seeds. His research suggests that no matter how the Tonle Sap changes in the coming years, the right adaptive strategies could mean the difference between a tolerable transition and a disaster.

“The policy and development challenge is one of managing the transition,” he said. “There’s no way to stop it.”

Current Music: hatiras: "You Are a Memory"

Among the many good things Mandela did, he advocated for the release of Timorese freedom-fighter Xanana Gusmão from prison:

Mandela not only called for the release of Xanana Gusmao, but also insisted on meeting with the latter – and got his way […] Soeharto at first refused Mandela’s request to meet Xanana with the question ‘Why do you want to meet him? He is only a common criminal.’ When Mandela responded by saying ‘that is exactly what they said about me for 25 years,’ Soeharto promptly and magnanimously responded by arranging for Xanana to be brought from prison to the State Guest House for an intimate dinner with Mandela.
--Jamsheed Marker, East Timor: A Memoir of the Negotiations for Independence, quoted in Aboeprijadi Santoso, “Mandela, Indonesia and the liberation of Timor Leste,” Jakarta Post, 22 July 2013

I always enjoy going by this house; the people living in it seem, by their accoutrements, to be exuberant. They had a Puerto Rican flag flying for a while, and now they have an American one. They are creating a flower garden in the front yard, with all kinds of little statues and mini pathways. They have a New York Yankees sign--which, in Massachusetts, is a sure sign of bravado (or trolling, or both). Beside the house, where there's space for parking cars, they have a basketball hoop and a barbecue grill.

Today they also have this:

Current Music: Lindsey Stirling: Crystallize

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

I love that the British government is sending out warships to bring its stranded citizens home. I also love that in British English touring buses are called coaches, because then, when the BBC says that they are also sending coaches to help bring people home, you can picture this huge gathering of teams of coaches-and-six, horses stamping, people climbing in.

Let's hear it for international emergencies that (a) don't involve one group of people hurting another and (b) involve (as far as I know?) no loss of life. Really just huge inconveniences. But what an adventure! I suppose I'd be pretty stressed out if I were stranded in a foreign country, but if I wasn't about to have a baby or in need of medical attention, I think it would be exciting, all things considered. Thrown together with other people, maybe being the recipient of the kindness of strangers... neat.

When 9-11 happened, we hosted some stranded tourists, friends of my husband's parents, who had been seeing the sights in New England and were stuck here. 9-11 was awful, but hosting people in an emergency was wonderful and warm.

There were two space-related news stories I loved this week. One was the story of the M.I.T. students who sent a point-and-click digital camera into space and got photos of the curvature of the earth, for total cost of just under $150 dollars, and the other was the story of the proposal to explore the oceanic surface of Titan by ship. Not sailing ship, of course (though who doesn't have that image at first?), seeing as the temperature on Titan is almost three hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit, but some kind of Major-Tom-esque tin can, floating on it.

The liquid on Titan is methane, not water, but the news story talked about how liquid methane behaves like water, raining down from the sky, forming rivers, filling up the seas.

Titan's much farther away from the sun than Earth is, so it must be rather dark there, though. If you could get out of the capsule (if you could stand on the deck of the weatherized sailing ship), would the light from the distant sun be enough to let you see the waves? Would they shine by the light of the stars, or by Saturn?

Current Music: Patrick Wolf: Damaris

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Page Summary

Maria Herrick Bray--emergency lighthouse tender, naturalist, activist
(c) The Los Cedros Cloud Forest
day into night
"I'm teaching myself Hebrew"
A handwritten newspaper
"But they always said hello and stopped to chat"
a mysterious treasure
Christian Lyons and the Five Foxes
You cannot change the direction
1400 people….
goals for the week; peanut butter and ?
Floating villages in the Tonle Sap
Mandela and Xanana
in the yard of a house on the highway
Lottie Williams, beating the odds
by coach and boat we'll bear you home
I can see Earth's curve from here! --and the dark seas of Titan

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Asakiyume mita

Entries tagged with news

Maria Herrick Bray--emergency lighthouse tender, naturalist, activist

(c) The Los Cedros Cloud Forest

day into night

"I'm teaching myself Hebrew"

A handwritten newspaper

"But they always said hello and stopped to chat"

a mysterious treasure

Christian Lyons and the Five Foxes

You cannot change the direction

1400 people….

goals for the week; peanut butter and ?

Floating villages in the Tonle Sap

Mandela and Xanana

in the yard of a house on the highway

Lottie Williams, beating the odds

by coach and boat we'll bear you home

I can see Earth's curve from here! --and the dark seas of Titan