January 21st, 2018
For the last four years the core mission of our non-profit has been to fulfill the terms of our 20-year lease with the City of San Luis Obispo: to manage the 15 acres of arable land at the Calle Joaquin Agricultural Reserve so as to 1) facilitate production of crops by small commercial organic farmers and 2) to provide educational programs about local agriculture to students and the general public.
During 2017 the City Farm School Project has continued for the fourth year to provide innovative instruction for academic credit to students in the “Farm” class at Pacific Beach Continuation High School with the enthusiastic support of students, teachers and administration. Throughout the year and during summer school, students walk to the farm with their instructors from their nearby campus twice a week to engage in hands-on learning about soil, irrigation, planting, cultivating, harvesting, cooking and eating the food they grow. Read the rest of this entry »
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June 21st, 2017
“The universal tendency of things to become disordered is a fundamental law of physics”the second law of thermodynamics”which states that in the universe or in any isolated system, the degree of disorder always increases.
¦it is a common experience that one’s living space will become increasingly disordered without intentional effort: the movement toward disorder is a spontaneous process requiring a periodic effort to reverse it.
Living cells”by surviving, growing, and forming complex organisms”are generating order and thus might appear to defy the second law of thermodynamics. How is this possible? The answer is that a cell is not an isolated system: it takes in energy from its environment in the form of food¦..It then uses this energy to generate order within itself.¦a direct linkage of the “controlled burning” of food molecules is required for cells to create and maintain an island of order in a universe tending toward chaos.”
Bruce Alberts, Alexander Johnson, Julian Lewis et.al., Molecular Biology of the Cell, Garland Science Publishers, 2015, pages 52-54.
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May 27th, 2017
A couple of days before the conference in Jerusalem for which this paper was written, I woke up before dawn to avoid the crowds and went down to the Old City to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Under a dark and cavernous rotunda, before the shrine covering the tomb from which Jesus is said to have been resurrected, priests in splendid vestments swung censers, sang prayers and placed communion wafers in the mouths of the few worshippers in attendance. During the performance of that ceremony I sensed the tangible power of their faith. Though I didn’t share it, I was alerted to the gravity of the subject of my upcoming talk. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Miscellaneous, Scholarship, Shakespeare, Teaching | No Comments
May 26th, 2017
The knowledge that we’ll be getting up at 3:30 in the morning to go to the airport and we’ll be enroute home for 30 hours makes this last day especially precious.
We enter the Old City through the Muslim quarter at the Damascus gate, where there’s been a suicide attack on soldiers a few days ago, also mindful of the recent terrible incident in Manchester England.
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May 25th, 2017
Photo Album for Day 16
The conference participants, who hail from Italy, Canada, England, USA and Israel, share breakfast in the hotel and then go their separate ways. With many of us it’s a poignant farewell since we bonded over the rigorousness of the schedule, our specialized expertise, the excitement of talking about the Bible in the City of Jerusalem, and the enjoyment of our generous welcome. Read the rest of this entry »
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May 24th, 2017
A cab took us across town to the Prima Park, a less posh but comfortable and well situated location for the rest of our stay. We celebrated the Sabbath by resting and reflecting upon the intense and varied experiences of the last week.
Sunday morning, feeling free and a little abandoned, we walked on our own to the nearby tram stop, struggled with the ticket machine and rode the three stops to the Mehane Jehuda Market, where we mixed with local residents wandering through the stalls and found a lively restaurant for lunch. In the afternoon we reconnoitered the path to the Hebrew University, weaving our way through a maze of construction of the new light rail line that would soon be serving it. Read the rest of this entry »
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May 19th, 2017
Photo Album for Day 10
After reading a draft of the paper about Shakespeare’s adaptation of the Bible’s resurrection narrative in The Winter’s Tale I’ll be presenting in a few days at the Conference, my friend George has suggested I provide the opening with more punch. This morning I get up early to avoid the crowds and walk through the deserted City back to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to seek inspiration.
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May 18th, 2017
Photo album for Day 9
Our bus circumnavigates the Old City’s walls, passing the Mount of Olives, with the garden of Gethsemane at its base, and the Jewish cemetery, every inch packed with graves from 3000 years ago to the present.
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May 17th, 2017
Photo Album for Day 8
We start the day at the lavish breakfast buffet on the eleventh floor of The Herbert Samuel“-named for a late 19th c. English colonial governor active in early efforts to prepare the way for making Palestine a Jewish homeland.
First stop is the Israel Museum, a huge complex near the Hebrew University where my conference will take place in a few days. Gabi leads us to a model of the City during the first century BCE centered around the Second Temple, whose massive reconstruction was sponsored by Herod the Great.
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May 16th, 2017
Picture Gallery for Day 7
The natural fortress of Masada stands apart from the escarpment of barren mountains that rise above the Dead Sea depression.
Our bus pulls up to the elegant visitor center at its base, all pavement and walls faced with the “Jerusalem stone” that seems both to reflect and absorb light in a warm blend reminding me of the travertine marble of the Getty Center in LA.
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