Why do I write? (11/23/2021)

Why do I write, or more specifically, why do I write my blog? I am not sure where I heard something similar asked the other day, either on the radio from someone on why they make music or maybe it was on XM. I know this is a subject I have visited before <here>, and it is the number one post on my site. I am still not completely sure; so I question why do we do what we are doing for a hobby or work? Do I want the attention, “preach” my (liberal or environmental) believes (now that is different from my previous blog post)? It sometimes seems that I act too much like a fool, make fun of situations, don’t take things seriously. Whenever a serious situation presents itself, I may even have a difficult time being serious or handling it in a serious matter.

Wow, this first paragraph was not where I wanted to go at all with this post today. So back up.

My posts are mostly serious, I hope. But who do I write them for? Myself, or who do I phantom my audience to be, you, who reads my ramblings? I started out my public persona behind a microphone on a radio station: KGLP FM, Gallup Public Radio. I remember it like yesterday. We built the radio station and the first minute it went on the air (I think it was 1992), Frank, who was hired as station manager by the Community College signed in and stuck the microphone in front of my face and said: “say something Jan.” The rest was history, I was hooked. Soon I had three daily radio programs for at least a year (a classical afternoon show, the Frank and Jan “All things reconsidered” show, and an evening jazz show). When Frank left, I temporarily took over as station manager for a half year or so before we left Gallup for a “real” job in Cincinnati. I missed being on the radio ever since.

Talking into a microphone to an anonymous audience was comforting. Friends listened of course, but others did not know me, and I did not know them. I could be whatever and whomever I wanted to be. Sometimes I feel this blog is the natural continuation of my short radio career, which I absolutely enjoyed so much. Very few friends know that I blog, and I really do not advertise my writing. You are one of the lucky ones if you happen to find it, read it, or even follow me. Lucky maybe exaggerated, but you get the drift. I am the lucky one if you read it!

This graph shows you where my readers came from over the years.  I started my blog on June 23, 2013.  Just over 67% of my readers were from the US.  The Indonesian readership was 0.9%.  After that, the numbers were too small to show on the graph.  I always seemed to get a lot of Russian hits whenever I mentioned tRump. 

At the time KGLP was a volunteer radio station and I did not earn a dime being assistant and later as temporary fill-in, full-time manager. It was a labor of love. I raced to the station when the station went down to fix things. In a way that is how I run this blog; I don’t make a damn penny on this blog. Yes, I know, I have complained about it at times and threatened that I will start putting adds on my blog in the hope to make a few pennies with my rambling. And there comes the point, I sometimes question who the heck do I write this thing for?

Was the radio thing and now this blog just one big ego thing, one big form of self-gratification? Am I just doing this for me? Am I just a big, fucking egocentric dick and should I just stop all this nonsense? What am I contributing to society? Am I wasting my valuable time sitting with my laptop on my lap hammering these worthless letters on the keyboard? I really don’t know.

I have written two sermons to share with folks in our UU congregation, hopefully partially educating, being empathetic, spiritual and a team player. The radio was a cheap thrill, but also something I did for the community. Both these things and other volunteer work I do, I do with the excuse that I want to give back to the community that is willing to put up with me. Maybe that is a good excuse: With this blog I am trying to give back to the world community that is willing to put up with me. Ha, ha, ha. I told you I can be funny, cynical at times.

So why am I really doing this? It is a form of diary, I guess. It started out as a daily photo blog and quickly turned into something more. I wanted to educate folks about what was dear to me, sailing, plants, nature, the environment. Then came my work, the teaching, my bonsai, and just simple life’s observations. Finally, this all was followed by politics; and there was the rabbit hole! Especially with the election of tRump. When writing about politics I was trying to challenge the right wing, the proud babies and alike. See if I could get their goat. But no, they are too interested in their own little dumb shortsighted chatrooms than to read the hopefully slightly more broadminded intellectual blog that I write.

So why do I put myself out there? I still don’t know. I don’t want or need the attention, but then like everyone else, I do check the number of hits I get on this blog, and the likes I get on my Instagram and Facebook posts. So maybe it is for self-gratification. However, I hope that some of my readers learn some thing and walk away from my posts having picked up something valuable or entertaining. However, probably not from anything I wrote in this particular post. I just had to do some public soul searching and reminiscing, but hopefully this post stimulated that in you as well.

For those who cannot remember the past (11/09/2021)

This weekend I was reminded of the saying often attributed to the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I was being interviewed by a fairly close friend for her school project about my career in environmental sciences; how I got to where I am now. My friend is relatively young, I think in her mid to late thirties, and is trying to finish her college degree on-line. This was part of one of her final projects. I find her a go-getter, very intelligent and overall, a very nice gentle person. It was fun to be interviewed by her. This is in no way an editorial or a judgement on her.

There was one point; however, where she drew a blank. I mentioned Idi Amin and she had no idea who I was talking about. Maybe not surprising since he was a ruthless African dictator who ruled a relatively small country from approximately 1971 to 1979 (way before she was born). My wife and I lived in Uganda during that time and went through the bloody civil war that ousted Amin in 1979. Back then everybody talked about the “Conqueror of the British Empire” as he called himself. He even inspired two movies, one based on the raid of Entebbe where the Israeli commandos freed hostages from an airplane hostage taking; the other “The Last King of Scotland” was based on the first few years of Amin’s reign. It was after the Entebbe raid when my wife and I moved to Uganda to work at the leprosy center in Kumi.

My concern is not my friend or Amin, but I realized we have a collective amnesia with the past. Whether it is the climate, yes, we may make fun when grandpa talks about having to walk to school through three-foot-deep snow and other fairy tales. Or was there really a holocaust, a guy named Hitler who was a demagog, a landing on the moon? Before long we will forget we will forget we lost a war in Viet Nam or even Afghanistan. Did the US really support dictators in Central America? Never heard of a guy named Samosa. Let’s not talk about Gaddafi, Mugabe, Marcos, just to name a few. Then we should never mention how the CIA assisted in overthrowing governments like the one of Allende in Chile.

To me the worst of it all is the attempted overthrowing of the election on January 6, and let’s not talk about this weird idea of critical race theory that is floating around. We definitely do not want to teach our kids that it was their grandparents who were standing in front of the public schools and universities yelling and shouting the N-word and trying to prevent these institutions from integrating and allowing students of color a proper education. Let alone their grandparents were openly members of a group that were wearing hoods and burning crosses onto lawns of folks who were for the integration of society. No, we do not want our children to know that grandpa and grandma were these folks and that we, your parents, were raised by them to by like them and we (secretly?) hate minorities, as well.

This is what I realized this weekend! We live in such a sheltered U.S. centric society, where we do not learn about our past, let alone the global international past, or we purposely want to ignore it. We do not learn world history, or we purposely want to ignore it. Conversely, instead of ignoring it, we spin it to fit our narrative, with the result: a demagog and an aspiring dictator was able to get elected. He and his henchmen are still out there, and we must be careful. We need to study and learn from history in order not to repeat it!

This is one of my baby bonsai trees in its fall colors.  It is a forest planting of two dawn redwoods.  Dawn redwoods are among the oldest trees in existence.  Once thought to be extinct and only found in fossil records, a small forest of them was found in a valley in China and from there they concurred the world as horticultural specimens.  Obviously, this species would have a long memory and able to tell us a lot about world and human history.

Mushrooms (11/04/2021)

In our area autumn is a great time to walk in the woods and hunt for mushrooms. No, I don’t hunt for edible ones, my wife is way to skittish and we would meet an agonizing end to our lives munching on a poisonous fungal cap of some kind. However, this past week I have been laying on my stomach in the woods examining them and taking pictures.

Here I am laying on the ground in the woods examining a cluster of oyster mushrooms.  These are edible; although since these are mature (as big as my head), they are tough!

My view from below, the oyster mushroom.

I was always impressed by mushrooms; I took a short course in mushroom growing in 1976 and got a certificate in it (official “mushroom grower”). From horse poop to your plate. It was part of my Agricultural Engineering degree. It was a week’s course and at the end you brought home a mushroom kit to grow them at home, under your bed. Boy, we feasted on mushrooms for months. I finally got rid of the textbook a few months ago.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s I had a post-doctoral job where I worked on mistletoe. Now mistletoe is not a mushroom, but as part of the job I assisted in teaching a class on parasitic plants, plant epiphytes and symbionts. Mistletoes being the parasites and mushrooms being symbionts. We were still starting to understand the whole mycorrhizal world of fungi, and after a stint in the mining industry I more or less left the field. I did a lot of ecosystem restoration, in particular wetland restoration but mycorrhizae were somewhat pushed back in my brain. Only when I started teaching and talking about stockpiling topsoil did it pop back up. Finally, the book “Finding the Mother Tree” by Suzanne Simard explained a lot of what had expired in the past 30 years in mycorrhizae research, and it only had gotten better. My appetite was awakened by the book called “Overstory” by Richard Powers, who has a character who is very loosely based on Suzanne Simard.

Mold, fungi are a powerful group of organisms in the world. They are the ultimate undertakers. It is amazing, over time they are able to break down everything that is organic. But then, at the same time it appears they form this almost neural underground network between plants that give forests almost a sense of intelligence. Trees seem to be able to communicate with each other, feed each other nutrients and water, by way of mycorrhizal fungi. These fungi have invaded the roots of the plants and thus connect one plant with another. There are two types ecto- and endo- mycorrhizae. If you are interested look up what the difference is. Maybe one of these days I’ll write more about that. However, today I want to write about mushrooms.

Because all those mushrooms we see pop up in the woods, in our lawn etc. are the fruiting bodies of the mycorrhizal fungi and some other fungi living in the soil. When the temperature, soil moisture and humidity are just rights, strands of fungi get together and decide it is time to procreate, make babies. That is what those mushrooms are all about. Just like under my bed. They bundle together, pop out of the ground, out of a log or whatever, and loo there is a mushroom. Mushrooms have gills and in those gills is where the babies are. Thousands if not millions of spores which get disseminated by the wind and when the land in the right spot, they become mold threads again and infect wood or tree and plant roots, helping the forest do its thing.

Some more photos that I took this past week in the woods.

Far too often when I walk my neighborhood and see sick or dying trees I wonder, has the homeowner been treating their lawns with fungicides and killing all the mycorrhizae in their yard, basically cutting their trees off from their peers? This of course can not be proven unless we dig the trees up. But this is why I do not use pesticides and fungicides in my yard. I want a healthy soil where I can and will allow that worldwide underground web to exist and allow those trees to communicate and help each other. Together they much more capable to fight drought, disease, insect attacks than alone and deprived of their mycorrhizal support network.