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‘My good people’

We took a tour of Johannesburg today. A nice young man in a crisp black wardrobe and a simple gold chain picked us up at our hotel. We climbed into his car and we did the initial small talk of names and nations and how long you’ve been here. He said he was going to show us the good, the bad, and the ugly of Johannesburg. He did just that.

We started with Nelson Mandela Square, near our hotel in Sandton. It’s a shopping center, named in his honor in 2004. It is one of the largest on the continent. It felt like a shopping center, but there’s a giant statue. He’s dancing.

The statue was installed to mark the 10th anniversary of South Africa’s first democratic elections, and the first one honoring Mandela. It weighs some 5,000 pounds, considerably more than the miniature that is located nearby for the seeing impaired.

Along the ground in the square are short quotes of things that Mandela wrote, or said over the years. I took photos of a few of those, of course.

We made a quick stop at the overlook on Munro Drive. We’d done the same last night, but it’s worth seeing earlier in the day. Click to embiggen.

Munro Drive is a road that connects two suburbs (you’re looking on the northern suburbs here) and has a short punchy climb, a U-bend and slices through quartz to connect the neighborhoods. It is named after John Munro, director of Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company. And, somehow, just from the name, you feel like there could be a problem there. You could be right, JCI was a huge 19th century South African company invested in the mining, property and engineering sectors. As we learned from our guide, who called us “My good people,” all day, the land here is rich in everything mineral. We drove by exhausted mines were people are still descending, as trespassers, looking for gold and various other things. We saw them do it. And they’re not doing it if they’re coming up empty. The story of South Africa is one of great riches, and of horrible exploitation. At a macro level, we might be aware of that. But at the JCI level, there were always allegations. The one that helped bring them down was an investigation which seemed to point to almost a half billion dollars (American) worth of fraud. Oh, and also murder.

We drove along the way from here to there to what they tell the Americans is the Beverly Hills of Johannesburg. It’s neighborhoods of high walls obscuring what might be well manicured lawns. Some, our guide told us, were lived in. Others have become generational B&Bs. Others mostly abandoned, and squatters have taken up residence. We drove them some of this yesterday, too, and all you can see are the walls.

Then we dove into some of the recent history of South Africa. “Welcome, my good people, to Constitution Hill.” I do not know how many places in the world have put its aspirations right next to its horrors, but they have done so here. This was originally a fort and repurposed as a prison in 1892. Boer military leaders were housed here. It was a prison for white men. And then, during apartheid, it became a detention center for political prisoners, strikers, anyone “anti-establishment.” Mahatma Gandhi was imprisoned here, as was Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, and others. The site housed prisoners until 1983, when it was closed. We toured the infamous Number Four.

This room was designed to keep 50 prisoners. At times, it held many more. The museum docent talked pointed out there were no windows, told us about the two blankets prisoners received, and the hierarchy within the cell. The cell boss usually got those blankets. There were 16 people in this room when we were there, just enough people to allow you the sense of a fetid crush of humanity you might experience in larger numbers.

When you leave the communal quarters you go into another room which is dominated by this large sign hanging on the far wall.

Along the side walls are smaller signs, one each for the men photographed above. Each sign shares their name, the time of their incarceration, and why they were held here. And, in this way, the museum asks you to make decisions for yourself. Not all of these men were held here for the same reasons, but you bring your same sensibilities, or your own nation’s laws, or your hopes for modernity, with you to each. It is hard for most people to think someone violating a Pass Law should be held in such conditions. It is hard for many, including most Americans, to think there should be such a thing as a Pass Law to begin with.

Pass laws served as an internal passport system designed to racially segregate the population, restrict movement of individuals, and allocate low-wage migrant labor. Also known as the natives’ law, these laws severely restricted the movements of Black South Africans, Indian South Africans and Cape Coloureds by confining them to designated areas. Initially applied to Indigenous African men, attempts to enforce pass laws on women between the 1910s and 1950s sparked significant protests. Pass laws remained a key aspect of the country’s apartheid system until their effective termination in 1986.

For more than 200 years people lived under these rules. Authorities would stop people on the street. And if, like one or two of the men in the large photo above you didn’t have your pass on you, you were sent here. In March of 1960 Nelson Mandela famously burned his pass book in protest after police massacred 69 people protesting the dompas laws. It is easy, in retrospect, to say these things that were so unsavory they don’t exist anymore shouldn’t be something that brings a person to a place like this. Not everyone was held here for the same reasons, and something like 80 percent of the people who were here found themselves here simply because of the color of their skin. It is a lesson of history screaming at us about our future.

And the conditions were brutal. There was a limited, segregated diet, poor medical facilities, one shower a week, no privacy, public humiliation, with prisoners being hired out as cheap labor, and it’s all just as grim as you can possibly imagine, but you’re only getting a quick glimpse.

Mahatma Gandhi came to South Africa, as a young man, to practice a little law. When the case he was originally here for wrapped up he was preparing to return home, but had a change of heart. He wound up spending 21 years in the country, and it was here that he shaped his politics and and his personal ethics, his notion of Satyagraha (a devotion to truth) and the nonviolent protest concepts that come as a defense of dignity and personal autonomy. He was also imprisoned here, in 1906. His is one of the headshots above. And in one room, there are a few displays that talk more about the pass books, and Gandhi’s time here. Also, there’s this typewriter. You’re meant to think that this was in his office. You could infer that he typed upon it. But it’s just sitting on a table in an open air room and I doubt that.

We’re skipping over the shower and toilet facilities. They were limited and almost as humiliating as the personal inspections required when prisoners came back in from their work. All of it was designed to rob a person of their dignity, to remind them of their place, and to make those in power feel a bit better about themselves.

Nelson Mandela, who once stood in the places I stood today, and suffered in the places where I merely felt eerie, famously channeled a Dostoyevsky and said “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”

He was most assuredly thinking of political prisoners when he said that. He was surely thinking about this place.

He stood here, a short walk from the open air plumbing, where there is today an accessibility ramp, but probably three or four steps when this was a prison. He might have been brought down those steps. He might have looked up into the blue or grey sky. This is where prisoners were held in solitary confinement. They had a barbed wire ceiling. And through it, somehow, you could see the sky.

This is one of the rooms where people were held in solitary. The signage explains that there were rules about how long a person could be kept there. The signage also explains that that rule was often ignored.

Here’s a row of those solitary confinement rooms. They go the other direction, as well. I counted 27 of them. One, it was explained, was where they brought people to torture them. In there, people were tortured to death. To stand there, alone, in the quiet. To consider that.

I do not know how many places in the world have put its aspirations right next to its horrors, but they have done so here. Just 450 feet from there sits the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the high court of the land. Established into law in 1993, it the constitutional court held its first session in 1995. The 11 judges have presided here since moving to this complex in 2004.

That photo is from the humble press area. It’s a tiny brick balcony with a few chairs and folding tables. From here the media look down upon all of the issues that the court care to hear. Everything — from the way the light comes into the room, to the hides before the judges, to the orientation of all of the seats, to those windows behind the judges, where the jurists can see the feet of the people they serve — everything you can see from here is steeped in ritual symbolism.

And the exterior walls are made up of the bricks that were a part of the prison.

We left Constitution Hill and did a quick drive by the Calabash. FNB Stadium is primarily for soccer and rugby. It has hosted other big events, like Mandela’s first speech after his prison release in 1990, the 2010 World Cup, and Mandela’s last public appearance. They can put 94,000 people in there for a match, more for concerts.

The design is meant to be evocative of an African pot, hence the nickname, the calabash. The exterior cladding mosaic of fire and earthen colors simulates fire underneath the pot. Inside, all of the views are accessible, and you’re never more than 100 yards from the action.

Then we drove into Soweto, and into the township there. “You are safe, my good people, because I am from there,” our guide said. We stopped to see what looks like a modern standard middle class neighborhood. We drove by some structures which, if I understood correctly, were former company town housing which is basically middle class, but not the way you’d think of it in America. And then we drove by the famous nuclear reactor cooling towers, which are now a sought after advertising canvas. Just up the street we stopped in the dense cluster of structures that were barely-standing buildings. I didn’t take any photos here. This was one of the more exploitive aspects of the day, honestly, but also eye-opening. You can explore it on Google.

We walked through part of it, soberly, quietly. We met a few people that lived there. The only dog we saw all day followed us around. Each of these buildings is perhaps 80 square feet. There’s enough room for a small bed, a countertop, a kerosene stove and a short stack of pots and pans. The floors are dirt. The roofs are also that same tin. When it is cold, it is cold. When it is hot, it is hot. Today was an earlier winter day, but it was still hot. There’s communal running water, communal toilet facilities, a few stores, but probably not anything like you’re imagining.

Throughout the day we’ve been talking about the problems of Johannesburg. The biggest, we were told, is unemployment. Others include abandoned buildings, police corruption, immigration, and so on. Not everything is horrible, there are haves and have nots, there are people that work hard, and people that want more than what opportunity has offered them. If you are in a township, life can be rather hand-to-mouth. Part of the issue in this spot, we were told, is the need for housing. The government is in charge of that, apparently. People sit and wait for the government to get that done. How long can it take, how long could you be here? I asked.

A lifetime, our guide whispered.

We visited one of the Mandela’s former homes. I am standing in Nelson Mandela’s courtyard. He planted this tree.

It is a museum. There are many guests. We had a docent. It is an odd mixture of a living home, but a museum and somehow that makes it seem like it is neither of those things. Or perhaps the Mandela family stuffed their shelves and filled their walls with memorabilia. It is hard to know.

Our guide guess well about his good people. He took us a short drive from that Mandela museum to the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the site where the Soweto Uprising took place in 1976. All three of these places are within 1.3 miles of one another, and they all felt like they were worlds apart.

The street where the uprising began is a busy and bustling two-lane road. There’s an elaborate courtyard where the uprising took place. And then there is the museum. I didn’t take any photos there, for some reason. This is what happened.

In 1976, the government decided they would teach students Afrikaans. The teachers were apparently ill-equipped and untrained to teach the language. And this would have been the third or fourth language some of the students learned, but this one suddenly, and poorly put upon them. Students revolted. They got together, wrote a letter, and were prepared to march it from A to B to deliver their protests. But the police gathered and stood in their way. Eventually, a few shots rang out. One of the kids, a kid, that was killed was Hector Pieterson. He was 12 at the time. He was standing on the street corner on that June day in Soweto, waiting for his sister, so they could walk on home. A police officer squeezed off a round and, standing in that court yard you can see where the officer was, where Pieterson was, and stand on a brick line that marks the ballistic line of the round.

Another boy scooped up Pieterson and tried to hustle him to help. Pieterson’s sister arrived and ran along side him, wailing. A photographer took a photo of this, which was smuggled out of town and horrified the world. Pieterson was proclaimed, by the media, as the first to die. But another student, Hastings Ndlovu was the first murdered in the street by the police. All of this set off a days long massacre, which killed at least 176.

This we learned standing outside of the museum, near this sign.

Our guide walked us in, and into a courtyard, where we pumped into Hector Pieterson’s sister who, 50 years on, is still giving tours about the uprising and the death of her younger brother. (Their mom started this place, and she stayed on for years. Apparently, even after she finally retired she stopped by regularly to make sure things were going well.

In that inner-courtyard there are a bunch of markers, like you would find in a cemetery. On them, in small print, where the names and ages of people that were killed in the larger internal conflict. I’m not sure how much of this is supposed to be a part of the tour, but you know how I can be. I got our guide to tell his good people more than he was prepared to discuss. And if he has it right it sounds for all the world like they were just a bad handful of choices from being in a full on civil war.

Our guide let his guard down in front of his good people, and eventually realized just how much he was telling us. To be fair, I, being me, was pulling it out of him. It was a real and frank conversation, not at all official. I’m not clear if he works for a company or for himself, so I won’t say too much about it, other than to say I was glad for the talk and his perspective and trust. He sent us into the museum, which has a strict no-photographs policy. It’s a great museum, featuring life-sized photos, video and television from the period, plenty of signage and testimonials explaining almost everything else about the Soweto uprising and its aftermath. It’s a fantastic museum and a memorable way to end the day’s tour. Our good guide gave us a tremendous experience.

We had a fine steak dinner at The Bull Run, the restaurant attached to our hotel. Tomorrow we’re getting up early. We’re going on safari.

adventures / Ireland / maps / photo / video / weekend — Comments Off
21
Mar 26

Northernmost Ireland

This is still at Malin Head, and this was our last visit before pointing south, to Dublin. There’s a place tomorrow morning with our name on it … well, two seats … metaphorically speaking. Unless Delta has started seat embroidery in these last few days. Anyway, that’s tomorrow. There’s a long drive this evening, but, first, this.

When you come to Malin Head you go to Hells Hole about 450 meters in one direction, and to this spot some 215 meters the other way. And, up here, you are at the northernmost point of Ireland. If you could see about 109 miles into the sea you’d see an island off the west coast of Scotland. If you could see another 700 miles beyond that, it’s the Arctic Circle.

And that’s our trip. It’s been an incredible one.

If you want to reproduce it, and obviously you should, the route looks roughly something like this.

Slán go fóill.

adventures / Ireland / maps / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
17
Mar 26

The Wild Atlantic Way — between Westport and Gweesalia

There’s a lot to see and cover, so I think I’m going to break things up into individual posts for the week. We’ll see how that goes. This is how it went today. We woke up and had breakfast at Knockranny House‘s Fern Grill, just a few tables over from where we had dinner last night. The is as lovely as they say, the hotel sits on a hill overlooking much of Westport and they highlight that with the restaurant’s picture windows. The food was good, too.

After a light Irish breakfast we packed up our things, loaded the car and set out to see more sites. This, roughly, was our route for the day. Just about every spot along the way between here and there offered a feast for the eyes, including the places that don’t get special signage or tourist advertising or places to stop your car.

Here’s a video of the highlights. Truly, I’ve got enough material for a half-dozen or more highlights, and I’ll post those, too. Until then, enjoy this.

It was cool and windy today. We got rained on in spots, but the sun also broke through, and you got the feeling that perhaps this was the day that the battle was won and the seasons changed. That’d be perfect timing for the days ahead. But, first, more about today in several individual posts.

adventures / history / Ireland / maps / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
16
Mar 26

Up the west coast a bit

We woke up in Dublin on Sunday, which was great, because that’s where we went to sleep on Saturday night. The conference was over. I had spent time grading and working and finishing and delivering presentations. My lovely bride had spent her time running the conference and presenting and generally being awesome. (I never have that last requirement, which comes as some relief.) So, come Sunday, we were ready for a day with less to do, which meant, of course, we packed up our things, hailed a cab, and drove to the airport. There, we rented a car and departed the airport, reacquainting ourselves with driving on the left.

It’s an alien thing, and we’re now taking bets on who messes this up first by driving on the wrong side of some road. Also, we’re working on the terminology for the turns, which is the real challenge. Driving on the left and turning left makes sense, but you still have to wind up in the ~~right~~ correct spot. So it’s “tight left.” Driving on the left and turning right is fundamentally at odds with gravity, religion and the economy. So far, we are using “wide right” as our reminder to one another.

Anyway, we drove through some real countryside, heading across the island to Galway. Roughly, this route.

In the middle of nothing we found the need to satisfy hunger pangs and happened across a gas station that had a miniature food court stapled on to it. It was crowded because the local villages were holding weekend St. Patrick’s Day. While we waited — and waited — for your our food, St. Patrick himself wandered in. Good outfit, giant staff, clean white synthetic beard, awfully modern sneakers.

We arrived at our hotel, The Twelve, a fine modern hotel suite experience, where we stayed for approximately 17 hours, all of which was working, or sleeping. Before dinner I bent over the computer working on my TRP contract for work. It’s your self-report. Your what-have-you-been-doing-these-last-few-years report. I’ve been writing all of this for weeks and it’s actually a useful exercise. There are places where you can be reflective and philosophical and, if you allow for it, you can perhaps learn something about what you’re doing. Its the creative process of writing and self-discovery. Those parts were what was already done. Last night I was just putting all of the parts together, creating the internal links, making the PDFs. And then it was dinner time. We set out to meet our friend Sally Ann, her husband, and her student who presented at the conference. We went to a fish and chips joint and had a lovely time. Then it was back to the hotel, and back to work. After a few more hours I realized that the entire day’s work was for not. All that I have been coached to do is not what the CMS demands. That was a little moment of joy. Well, gather yourself, jot off a few emails, tear down the product you’ve made and send it in its individual parts. This document has grown to 88 pages. That’s what I’ve done the last two years. And much of that time felt like it was working on this. But it is submitted. One more thing off the list. And no small thing. Happy to have done it, happy to be finished with it. Wish I’d timed the whole effort, just to see what it took.

I didn’t even think about it at all over breakfast.

A good Irish breakfast is a fine thing. Lots of flavors. Some of them make no sense to my American sensibilities, but all of this was good. And it’s filling. I didn’t want anything until dinnertime, which is good, because after breakfast, after getting out of the room (hampered by a broken shower and solved by going to the room right next door) we were in the car and on our way.

We are driving about the northern portion of Ireland to see The Wild Atlantic Way. Here is a little video montage of the day. More below.

First, we hit Silverstrand Beach, which might not be on the Wild Atlantic Way. It’s about 250 meters of beach, meeting Galway Bay and stiff winds out of the west. Also, on the other side of a jettied pile of rocks lies this lovely cliff face.

(Click to embiggen.)

We’re finding a lot of shells with holes in them like this. Maybe we should make a necklace.

We stopped by Trá an Dóilín, Coral Strand, a beach filled with the remains of a seaweed called maerl, which has been pushed ashore, crushed by the water and bleached by the sun, it looks like coral. Maerl, when it is living, is a nice purple-pink color and in large quantities creates a spiky underwater floor. Scallops shelter in this prickly little carpet.

In the summer, this place will be dotted with snorkelers, looking for jellyfish and wrasse in these clear, cold waters. Historically, vessels called hookers would be at sea here. The shallow draft of the hookers meant they were good for the bays and the inlets, shallow waters and rougher seas. They’re not work boats these days, but for the last 50 or so years they’ve been pleasure craft. They host regattas for the hookers these days. It’s a small three-sail boat, with a lot of heart. One sailed all the way to New York in the 1980s.

Here’s a wider view of Trá an Dóilín.

(Click to embiggen.)

Then, we visited Glinsce. Not big enough to be a village, but important enough for a quick stop. The nearby sign had a helpful pronouncer, “gl – EENSH keh.” This area is important for its local fishing economy. The coastline here is quite rugged, and there are piers sprinkled along the coast up and down. We’re at one of them here.

Fishermen went out on row boats called currachs, simple wooden framed vessels that had a hide or canvas stretched over it. During the Drochshaol, the Great Famine of the mid-19th century, the government encouraged more production out of the fishing industry, and so they built these piers and boat launches and the local boatbuilding industry took off.

The fishermen named their boats after saints sometimes, like Caillin, a 6th century Irishman. He is said to have studied in Rome, returned home, to this area, and started a monastery. Every other thing you can find out about him is fantastical, but scholars are apparently certain he was actual person. The boat builders put a little bottle of water from St. Caillin’s holy well into the keel off the vessels.

Let’s go see a castle!

No, that’s not it. That’s just some modern piece that’s meant to hide the house and BMW just behind it. Only kidding, this medieval-style gate dates back to 1815. The castle, about a half a mile walk down a sodden, muddy path, was built between 1812 and 1818. (There was a house and a Beamer right behind the gate, though.) Please stare at these cattle we passed on our way down that path as I tell you the tale.

She was not pleased with me getting so close and kept throwing hay at me until I got the message. It takes me a while to get the message.

Anyway, these castle ruins are near the town of Clifden. It was built for a man named John D’Arcy, whose family had owned thousands and thousands of acres in this area for centuries. Indeed, the original estate of Clifden Castle originally covered more than 17,000 acres. D’Arcy, a balding man with a prominent nose and worried eyes, grew this little area, and government funds helped the impoverished. By 1832, some 1,257 lived in 196 houses in Clifden, which also boasted schools, churches, a brewery and other industries. But a lot of this came at great personal expense. He died in 1839 and the land passed to his son, who wasn’t quite as good at managing things as his old man. Then again, it might not have been entirely the younger D’Arcy’s fault. The Great Famine came along just a few years later. Many of the people living on the lands fled or died, and the family went bankrupt.

Some wealthy Englishmen bought the castle, and it was a holiday escape for their family for several decades. Ultimately, it fell into ruin before the Great War. A local butcher bought the land for grazing, but that leads to an entirely different story we don’t tell around the cattle.

We walked carefully down the rutted tractor path, downhill and up, curving this way and that, trying in vain to keep water from seeping into our shoes. And then, at the final bend, we were stopped by water that was shin deep. I know this because I watched a man in rain boots walk back up from the castle toward his car. He said it would not be worth walking the rest of the way down, and I trusted his advice. This was our best view.

And then we headed on up Sky Road.

We’d been on Sky Road for a bit, but just after the castle it forks and you can take the Lower or the Upper Sky Road. Guess which one we did. And I don’t know that the steepness gives the road it’s name, but I don’t know that to not be the case, either. Up here, you get a grand view from up here over Clifden Bay and the offshore islands, Carricklahan East.

And you get the wind. Big gusts. All day long the wind would move you around. When we got here, the car was pointed downwind, and the breeze ripped the car door out of my hands and very nearly off its brand new hinges. This, believe it or not, was a relatively calm moment near the top of Sky Road.

It tops out at about 492 feet above sea level, which is, of course, just off to your left as you drive in this direction. In addition to the Atlantic, and the islands, you can also enjoy views of the fields, cut up into patches of heaths and grasses. The shoreline gets rugged here, as we are drawing a bit closer to the northwestern corner of the island, and the seabirds are making themselves ready for the spring. They’ve been told the sun may come out this week.

Improbably, especially given today’s wind, we saw a sign that described a growing national cycle network and this area has four loops, ranging from 16 to 40 kilometers. Today, the wind was blowing at close to 50 miles per hour. There were no cyclists, to be found … but only because we couldn’t find a place to rent bikes.

Our last stop, in the day’s dying light, was at the Aasleagh Falls, a picturesque place between where we’d been and where we were going. I was driving, following the GPS, and missed the turn. But I took the next turn, which worked out better because we went through a parking lot and down a path that went from charming country villa access to deeply rutted single track road, surprisingly quickly, before meeting an equally eroded path at a severe angle. You could only turn right. The GPS recalculates, and it wanted me to go left, but there’s no way I was making the angle in a car I’d only just met, while also driving on the wrong side of the car. So we got out and walked that direction while I pondered how I was going to back a car up out of the mess I’d just put us in. And then we found that there was a gate that was locked on that original road, so this worked out better anyway. So long as we could exit. And so long as no one locked the other gate.

We have a bag full of protein bars and warm clothes and a tank full of petrol. We could rough it.

The falls were lovely, you saw them from the side in the video, above, and you can see them in the distance here.

This is the Erriff River, which flows into Killary Harbour and then the Atlantic Ocean. So, if you come at the right time of year, you’ll see salmon jumping those falls. But I know you want to know how we got out of there. We didn’t! I am writing this from the back seat of the car! Guess who is mad at me?

No one, because we did not get stuck. I drove to the right, found a turnaround spot, and then gunned it back up that rutted path. We traveled on to the fabulous Knockranny House Hotel, an incredibly charming place in Westport. The only problem was getting in, because we timed it such that just before us in came a group of people who were very drunk, or who had never stayed in a hotel before, or quite possibly both.

I don’t know what the Irish version of “Count to 10 customer service” is, but the poor woman at the welcome desk was doing just that. Fortunately, those people got situated, after much trouble and deliberation, and went to the right. We checked in in under three minutes — I timed it — and went to the left. Here at Knockranny they have a restaurant that, a few years back, was somehow judged the best hotel restaurant in the world. This sort of honor seems silly and exclusionary. (There’s a lot of hotels in the world, and there’s a great little diner attached to the side of one in Tangier you just have to try …) But let me just say, this restaurant, The Fern Grill, was quite extraordinary. We’ll eat breakfast there in the morning before we set out for more adventures.

But, first, I have to write some students. I wonder if I should tell them where I am.

cycling / maps / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
28
Jan 26

I am so far ahead I can see tomorrow

Lovely day, if you like living at a pole, and the color white, and ice everywhere. I’ve been trying to count how many times I’ve experienced a snow that persisted — this snow came down Sunday and will be with us for at least another week. It is a small number of experiences. And now there’s talk of another snow system this weekend.

I’d like to just … not. I still have shovel shoulders from Sunday and Monday.

Productive day, today. Emails were fired off with abandon. I prepared two lectures. This was made all the trickier because we did not have classes on Tuesday, and because we are right at the beginning of the term, where I am trying to set up the definitions and paradigms we’ll be using throughout the semester.

For my Criticism class, where I told them I would lecture this week and they would see why the rest of the semester is conversation-based, I’ll have 75 minutes to try to make the points that should take up about two hours worth of material. Also, I am Frankensteining two lectures to do that. Duct tape and PowerPoint presentations will see me through. What could go wrong? In my Rituals and Traditions class I will combine a brief guest appearance with some further elaboration on the slides I sent them online on Tuesday. Again, two days in one, just to set the tone for the entire class. What could go wrong?

Students in my online class received the second of three notes they’ll get from me this week. This one was a 791-word, tightly written, well-edited walkthrough of a sequence of the course that amounts to 20 percent of their grade. I put a lot of time into that letter because I know how much students are inclined to read these days. And I’ve been working on it over the course of three semesters now. (Given my process for these messages, that means it’s gone through at least nine editing passes at this point.) It is a good letter. Helpful, expressive, detailed, precisely to the point at hand. I send it to their inbox and post it on our class CMS. Now I just have to hope they’ll give it a look.

Perhaps the most productive thing I did today, though, was lay out the rest of my week. The least productive thing I’ll do the rest of the week is ignore most of that plan.

The best thing I’ll do is highlight the kitties, because they’re famous and popular, just ask them. So let’s do that.

If you like belly rubs, raise your paw.

Phoebe really likes belly rubs. She held her paw up for a good long while … just so long as the belly rubs continued.

The birds are feasting at the feeder, because, I think, several of their food sources are under a lot of snow and ice.
And so BirbTV has been a big hit around here. So much so that Poseidon doesn’t even care what he’s standing on, so long as he gets a closer look.

The cats are doing just fine. Though they would also like it to be just a bit warmer.

I wonder how it registers when they look out of the windows and see how different things are with so much white stuff on the ground. Lately, though, I’ve noticed they’re not as keen on trying to get outside as normal. It feels like four below out as I write this.

This evening I got away from the cold and went to Torano, Italy, where it is somehow 30 degrees warmer than here. I’m not saying we’re packing up and moving, but this was a delightful little valley ride. You can see it here.

Rouvy puts you in a video that someone recorded, and layers your avatar over the footage. As you can see from this screengrab, I was riding in the Italian summer.

And look at that mountain up ahead, there’s still snow up there. Here’s a few of that same feature, a few miles farther along in my ride.

Those cyclists are not a part of my ride. They are real people that were captured on the video. If I rode this route again, I suspect I’d seem them at pretty much the same spot, no matter how slow or fast I’d gone. (I averaged about 24 miles per hour on this ride (it had some nice downhills), which is the best ride I’ve had in a while. I churned out almost 600 watts for a bit, and regretted it the rest of the way.) Same for the other two people I caught up to, who I caught at a left-hand turn. They put out their hands to signal the turn and it looked like they were waving at me as I went by. I’ll see them in that valley again, should I visit. Or so I suppose. And my avatar would catch the same red light in Grosotto, or Lovero, whichever little village I was breezing through. My avatar just disappeared for a moment, while the video (and the car or whatever was shooting the footage) worked through the stop. A blip that felt like a Twilight Zone moment, which would be fun, if everyday didn’t already have a hefty dose of them.

Tomorrow, we’ll go to campus. I wonder what the roads will be like.