Ed note: Did you hear yesterday’s NPR program or see today’s NY Times about the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registrar? Well, it’s not hard to believe, but Lorraine’s Afghan Music field recordings from 1966-67 and 1971-73 made it on the list! Congratulations Lorraine!
Hiromi Lorraine Sakata with Hazara women in Khadir, Afghanistan, c. 1972. Courtesy: Hiromi Lorraine Sakata
This collection of over 50 hours of important and unique field recordings from Afghanistan was the research of ethnomusicologist Hiromi Lorraine Sakata. Sakata first researched in Afghanistan in 1966-67 and captured 25 hours of recordings of singers and instrumentalists from the provinces of Kabul, Khandahar, Urozgan, Nangarhar, Herat, Balkh and Nuristan. Her second trip, from 1971 to 1973, resulted in 26 additional hours of recordings from Herat, Kabul, Badakhshan, Hazarajat and Kandahar. As she wrote in her book “Music in the Mind: The Concepts of Music and Musician in Afghanistan” (2002), these recordings document a time and place that are now completely gone. Invasion, civil war and social upheaval have disrupted and, in some cases, destroyed the musical life she documented between 1966 and 1973. Sakata, a well-known expert in the music of Afghanistan, taught at the University of Washington and the University of California (Los Angeles) for decades. These important recordings are now deposited at the Ethnomusicology Archives at the University of Washington.
Thanks to Alice Wesley for letting us know a bright side of the current crisis. I suspect many acts of kindness are in the air. In fact, if some are going to receive a “stimulus check” from the government, where should it go if it’s really not needed–a chance for reflection and giving forward.Can we also consider giving help with an unsolicited check?
All ministers know about congregational curmudgeons.
Nothing can please them. They regularly inform the minister of their
displeasure.
I read our “Ministers’ Chat” on line. It’s
heartening to read how many curmudgeons have this week sent in an unsolicited
generous check for the minister’s discretionary fund, because during the
pandemic many more people need the church’s help.
Posted inEssays, Religion|Comments Off on Can a crisis reform a curmudgeon!?
Are you missing seeing your neighbors? Longing for something to do? Here is the perfect activity for you. You can do this while you stay in your apartment. Surely you have a favorite cake, chicken dish, appetizer or dessert, for example, from your past. Contribute those recipes to Skyline Legacy Recipes and let them live on.
Skyline Legacy Recipes will be a collection of recipes from our individual backgrounds that might disappear with us. Keep those recipes alive! I am thinking of Hollis Williams’ Persimmon Pudding, and of Al McCrae’s mother’s Scottish Shortbread, and of my mother’s remarkable Italian Ravioli, and of Cornelius Rosse’s mother’s Hungarian recipes. Della Lium and Lilyan Snow both have enough delicious recipes to fill an entire book on their own.
All you need to do is send your recipe(s) to Joan Conlon (conlonj@colorado.edu) or Lil Snow (lsnow27@hotmail.com), either in written form or via email, and we will go from there. Think of the unique quality of the final product!
About this blog post
The goal for this blog posting is to increase the connections among people who live at Skyline in whatever ways make sense. Any announcements that fit with that goal are welcome.
On Wednesdays, Put Barber will compile any announcements sent to skyline.notices@gmail.com into a list of notices above, which will then be posted to “Skyline 725 Happenings” (https://www.skyline725.com/) early Thursday morning. Please include your contact information in your message and, if f you prefer to be contacted in some way (text, email, phone, or at a specific time), please include your preference as well.
Please send anything you would like to suggest to be included before 5
pm on Wednesdays to skyline.notices@gmail.com.
Hosted by Seattle Foundation, the COVID-19 Response Fund will provide flexible resources to organizations in our region working with communities who are disproportionately impacted by coronavirus and the economic consequences of this outbreak. One-time operating grants will fund organizations that have deep roots in community and strong experience working with residents without health insurance and/or access to sick days, people with limited English language proficiency, healthcare and gig economy workers, and communities of color, among others. The Fund is designed to complement the work of public health officials and expand local capacity to address all aspects of the outbreak as efficiently as possible.
The first phase of rapid-response grants will increase resiliency in disproportionately affected communities by addressing the economic impact of reduced and lost work due to the broader COVID-19 outbreak, the immediate needs of economically vulnerable populations caused by COVID-19 related closures, the increased demand for medical information and support, and fear and confusion about the outbreak among our most vulnerable residents. The Fund expects to move an initial round of grants within the next few weeks.
Seattle Foundation will administer grants from the Fund in partnership with United Way of King County and in close collaboration with King County’s Pandemic Community Advisory Group. Together we will proactively identify potential grant recipients, solicit guidance on potential recipients from community advisors, and recommend final awards. Funds will be released on a rolling basis as fundraising continues throughout the outbreak and recovery phases of the crisis, making it possible to move resources quickly and adapt to evolving needs in subsequent funding phases.
I’m sending this off Friday 3/27 to the usual op-ed outlets. Comments would be most appreciated (wcalvin@uw.edu).
Post-pandemic times will feel like a new era, once we can rub shoulders again. Relief, yes—but the world will also work differently after such a sudden shock to our way of life.
The world of work will have seen what large-scale telecommuting
can do (and cannot do). Businesses that succeeded with work-from-home will
discover that they don’t need as much office space. Finding a parking space
might become easier. We might have less cross-town traffic congestion because
so many people became accustomed to on-line grocery shopping with delivery. Many
pharmacies will continue to deliver. On the other hand, a reluctance to ride crowded
public transit may carry over into post-pandemic times.
My home office near downtown Seattle is surrounded by four tower
cranes, busy blocking our views with one floor higher each week. Will their
financing disappear, causing the apartment buildings to be topped out at half
height? To the extent that the elderly die or end up in skilled nursing and
assisted living from Covid-19, a lot of existing apartments may open up. Suburban
homes, not so much.
When the lockdown ends, we will take stock. At one level, there
will be Congressional investigations about the screwup at the top concerning such
essentials as ventilators and nCoV test kits. Ten weeks, frittered away,
compared to South Korea—which listened to its scientists and acted promptly.
But at a more meta level, we will be taking stock of what we
should expect government to do. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Will
America finally adopt a European or Canadian model for paying for medical care?
Or provide a guaranteed annual income that can end homelessness? Abolish the
need for student loans? We will have seen government actions in each of those
areas during the pandemic crisis; will they be carried over into post-pandemic
times?
Then there is the economy and taxation. Were measures “Too
little, too late?” Each time that I have met an economist, I have asked if there
was such a subspecialty as emergency economics. “You know, like the price
management during World War Two that John Kenneth Galbraith ran.” I’ve yet to
hear of anyone studying the subject. In post-pandemic times, we will be
debating how much to keep of the emergency economic innovations.
In what ways will the political scene change? Many communities
will permanently adopt vote-by-mail, if the pandemic lasts long enough for them
to experience what Washington State has been doing for many years. The
budget-cutting, small-government-is-better types will have their past
statements thrown back at them, in light of the consequences. Their opponents
will run ads on the “penny wise, pound foolish” theme. Or maybe “Asleep at the
wheel.” I think that we will see more Congressional retirements. Their
replacements will likely favor a more activist government that spends more on prevention
and on staying prepared for sudden hits.
I hope that our experience critiquing the government’s pandemic performance will carry over into promoting effective government action against climate change. If we are to successfully stave off climate disasters, it will require the same large-scale government coordination and prodding. The needed public support might be coming, concern carried over from the pandemic experience.
While some aspects of the new climate arrive slowly, mega
heat waves can appear as suddenly as a new virus and overload hospitals just as
badly. The one in Europe in 2003 killed 70,000 people; the Russian one in 2010
killed 56,000 people. The heat also ruined nearly a third of the Russian grain
crop, usually exported. When winter arrived, the shortage triggered bread riots
all around the Mediterranean; it’s what we remember as the “Arab Spring
Uprisings.”
Are we preparing for an “American Mega”? Not obviously, and
our sluggish response to the pandemic suggests that we will do poorly when a
mega hits. What would soften the blow is more vigorous governmental leadership beforehand.
William H. Calvin,
Ph.D., isthe president of CO2Foundation.org
and a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Medicine in
Seattle. Forthcoming is his seventeenth book, “Extreme weather and what to do about it.”
The message is getting out: #StayHome. In this early phase of the coronavirus pandemic, with undetected cases accelerating transmission even as testing ramps up, that is critical. But there are many people whom the country needs to keep going into work—grocery cashiers, first responders, factory workers for critical businesses. Most obviously, we need health-care workers to care for the sick, even though their jobs carry the greatest risk of exposure. How do we keep them seeing patients rather than becoming patients?
In the index outbreak in Wuhan, thirteen hundred health-care workers became infected; their likelihood of infection was more than three times as high as the general population. When they went back home to their families, they became prime vectors of transmission. The city began to run out of doctors and nurses. Forty-two thousand more had to be brought in from elsewhere to treat the sick. Luckily, methods were found that protected all the new health-care workers: none—zero—were infected.
But those methods were Draconian. As the city was locked down and cut off from outside visitors, health-care workers seeing at-risk patients were housed away from their families. They wore full-body protective gear, including goggles, complete head coverings, N95 particle-filtering masks, and hazmat-style suits. Could we do that here? Not a chance. Health-care facilities don’t remotely have the supplies that would allow staff members to see every patient with all that gear on. In Massachusetts, where I practice surgery, the virus is circulating in at least eleven of our fourteen counties, and cases are climbing rapidly. So what happens if you are exposed to a coronavirus patient and you don’t have the ability to go full Wuhan? My hospital system, Partners HealthCare, has already sent more than a hundred staff members home for fourteen days of self-quarantine because they were exposed to the coronavirus without complete protection. If we had to quarantine every health-care worker who might have come into contact with a covid-19 patient, we’d soon have no health-care workers left.
Can we truly make use of the time on our hands? First, I’d suggest not indulging in the 24/7 news cycle more than one hour a day. Second, call old friends. Then, set a schedule for yourself–exercise, read, or play games. Lastly, discuss important issues with your loved ones–what matters most to you.
Would you like to take a free on-line college level course with no strings attached–from Yale? Click here for the link. Thanks to Mike C. for finding this.
Posted inEducation|Comments Off on Free on-line courses from Yale University
Creative people will not only survive, they will create. byLouis Fantasi
Thanks to Ann M for sending this timely piece
A
19th-century engraving imagining William Shakespeare’s family life. (Credit:
Wikimedia Commons)
In
July 1564, William Shakespeare was three months old when the plague hit his
parent’s Henley Street neighborhood in Stratford-on-Avon. Mary Arden and John
Shakespeare locked their doors and sealed their windows to try and keep the
disease at bay, and whether through good fortune, basic hygiene, or snug window
frames and door jambs, the future Bard of Avon and his family were spared.
Some
40 years later, at the height of his creative powers, Shakespeare was in
London, living in a small room on Silver Street, near St. Giles Church.
According to Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro and others, Shakespeare had
another “near death” experience with the plague, one that produced unexpectedly
“tragic” consequences: the Sonnets and two great tragedies may owe their existence
to Elizabethan public health policies.
The Queen’s Master of the Revels had closed the theatres
as a means of preventing the spread of an outbreak of plague. Shakespeare’s
Globe theatre could hold as many 2500 people, who attended not only matinee stage
plays, but morning bouts of bull and bear baiting. The Globe, Curtain, Swan,
Fortune, Rose and other theatres could accommodate as much as 2 percent of the
entire population of London in a day. Not only were the close (and unsanitary)
quarters of the theater a health issue, but transmissions through contact with
ferry boatmen, coachmen, the cooks, servants and hostesses in pubs and inns,
not to mention in the “stews” or brothels that the theatre district of
Southwark was noted for, were highly likely and impossible to stop.
With
the London theater closed, Shakespeare and his company, so some speculate,
toured the countryside and even, possibly, Germany. Others think this was the
period in which Shakespeare worked on many of his Sonnets (which were printed
in 1609). In any event, during the period of 1605 to 1606, Shakespeare wrote
two of his greatest tragedies: Antony
& Cleopatra and King
Lear.
Shakespeare’s
company, The King’s Men, were also able to take over the indoor Blackfriars
theater because the plague had decimated the boy companies that had played
there. The fact that Shakespeare returned to post-plague London to write more
intimate indoor plays (as opposed to those for the open air Globe) gave us his
late “Romances”: Pericles, The Winter’s Tale,
and The Tempest among
them.
So…
Broadway is dark. Local theaters are closed. Productions, readings, concerts
(including some of my own) are cancelled, which will, undoubtably, not only
bring significant hardship to theaters and individual artists, performers, and
technicians, but also to the taxi, Lyft and Uber drivers, parking attendants,
restaurant owners and their staffs, baby-sitters, bartenders and many more.
Still…
My point is that there will be a silver lining, even if we cannot see it at
this moment. Creative people will not only survive, they will create. As
Bertolt Brecht wrote in one of his poems:
In
the dark times
Will
there also be singing?
Yes,
there will also be singing.
About
the dark times.
Louis
Fantasia was the first American to direct a play on the reconstructed London
Globe stage with a workshop production of Much Ado about Nothing in 1996. He is
Artistic Associate of the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles and general editor
of Playing Shakespeare’s Characters, a new theater series from Peter Lang
Publishers.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on Shakespeare Got Through It. We Will, Too.
Kinsa Health has sold or given away more than a million smart thermometers to households in which two million people reside, and thus can record fevers almost as soon as consumers experience them.
The thermometer data “acts as an early warning system for illness spreading,” said Inder Singh, the company’s founder. The C.D.C.’s system lags because it relies on weekly reports from hundreds of doctors’ offices and hospital emergency rooms about what symptoms they are seeing in patients.
Company scientists are uniquely positioned to identify unusual clusters of fever because they have years of data for expected flu cases in each ZIP code. A sudden spike that far exceeds estimates for flu for a given date may well indicate the coronavirus has arrived.
Medical experts were enthusiastic about the possibility that smart thermometers could be used to track the virus in the United States. Having millions of data points allows Kinsa to produce daily maps showing which counties are seeing spiking fevers.
The most common symptoms of infection with the coronavirus is a fever — about 90 percent of patients suffer from it, according to the World Health Organization.
Posted inHealth|Comments Off on Can Smart Thermometers Track the Spread of the Coronavirus?
Put B. has sent along this link for comparative local grocery shopping. I think we are all having different experiences. I’ve got an order into COSTCO on Instacart but it won’t be here until Thursday.
I hope it’s more accurate that my Safeway order. Safeway was fast (within 5 hours) but weird. Three items were removed because of unavailability but the soup, the onion, and other items made it. The weird part was that it included two jars of pasta sauce and a salad mix. Actually that was great. We had a spaghetti dinner tonight!
Please share your other shopping experiences. We’re all on a learning curve.
Thanks to Mike C. and, yes, we need to be able to smile!
We know what art critics think of that 46-foot-tall head, the sculpture that is installed at the Olympic Sculpture Park: Magnifique. Jaume Plensa, the Spanish artist who made it, has a slew of awards, such as France’s Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.
Posted inArt, Humor|Comments Off on Plensa’s precautions in the Sculpture Garden
Here at Emerald Heights, there has been a shortage of face masks for the nursing staff. In response, residents have been making them using a pattern designed by one of our residents, Joan Glass. Joan is a retired nurse and educator from Bellevue’s Overlake Hospital. She also a devoted quilter, and her pattern is more than acceptable to medical personnel. This could be a great project for residents of your CCRC. Our various sewing groups have spearheaded the project. If your CCRC has such a group, please feel free to share the instructions and pictures. Stay safe, wash your hands often, and practice safe distancing! Donna KristaponisWACCRA President-ElectCommunications Chair
Want to shop at COSTCO, QFC, Safeway or many other stores and get same day delivery. This looks like a cool app but there is a 5% delivery fee or you can a monthly fee for free deliveries. The app is Instacart: www.instacart.com. Some folks have families or friends dropping off groceries. I’m sure other ideas work as well.
The novel (new) coronavirus is formally named “SARS-CoV-2.” SARS stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. The disease it causes has been named “coronavirus disease 2019” (abbreviated as COVID-19) by the World Health Organization.
What is coronavirus?
Coronavirus is a family of viruses that have been known to infect humans. Viruses in the family are known to cause the common cold, SARS, and MERS. The virus that causes COVID-19 infects people and is easily spread person-to-person but is far less virulent than SARS. Cases have been detected in most countries worldwide, including the United States, and has officially been declared a pandemic, or a global disease outbreak. COVID-19 causes a respiratory disease that may be identifiable by dry coughing, breathing difficulties, and fever. Those that suspect they are infected with coronavirus should call their health provider first and should not go to a health care facility unless directed to do so.
(Note: fever was present in only 50% of the symptomatic cases in Seattle whereas cough was present in 88%. At Skyline, if you have fever or severe cough, check with Jeannie and, when indicated, you may be sent for a test). Recent data shows the death rate in China was much lower than first estimated. It’s about 1.4% overall in their data (higher in the elderly as would be expected). More is being learned daily. Drug trials are underway so it’s too soon to know if an old drug like hydroxychloroquine is effective. It will take weeks to months to get reliable data. Despite promises from our President, it will take 12-18 months for a vaccine to come on-line. A hero named Dr. Tony Fauci is the best source of realistic information. At age 79, he is the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He was a strong force getting us through the HIV and SARS eras. He has been interviewed by multiple media sources.)
Why did the CDC recommend an 8-week moratorium on in-person gatherings?
On Monday the US government officially recommended that people should avoid in-person gatherings of 10 or more people.[1] This recommendation is supported by evidence from South Korea and China, both of which appear to slowly be returning to life as normal after 8 weeks of anti-coronavirus measures.[2] On March 10, China closed the last of its temporary emergency hospitals[3] after seeing a dramatic decrease in new cases over the past couple of weeks.[4] Likewise, South Korea has experienced a substantial decrease in new cases over the past week.[5]
As the United States contends with this new and evolving situation, it appears likely that many businesses, offices, and schools will remain closed for longer than two weeks.
This is a time to support one another and to be creative about how we interact. Our family is having a virtual dinner together soon. We will be doing this by having our daughter invite us on the Zoom computer app. For now, call old friends, reach out to others by phone or computer. Go to museums on line. Take a walk or attend Sail classes on the portal.
Get away from the constant news. Once a day tuning in should be enough. Test all your mechanisms for resilience–humor, prayer, trust, forgoing the need to control, helping others in need.
Please send in thoughts you may have about coping with this unique pandemic.
Posted inHealth|Comments Off on Thoughts about the pandemic
