Metaplasmus

Apple's Outrage

2012-01-27T12:31:00.000-08:00

Responding to the New York Times stories, which we itemized and commented on in today’s column, CEO Tim Cook sent out an e-mail to all Apple employees.
“Unfortunately some people are questioning Apple’s values today, and I’d like to address this with you directly,” he says.
“Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are. For the many hundreds of you who are based at our suppliers’ manufacturing sites around the world, or spend long stretches working there away from your families, I know you are as outraged by this as I am.”

Bringing to mind Captain Renault:

I know they have to put on these pretenses for public consumption, but really, the notion that Apple was somehow unaware of the implications of their manufacturing choices strains credulity to the breaking point. They just hoped we wouldn't notice, while they pocketed the profits.

They'll talk about needing to trim manufacturing costs to keep prices low, but truly, how can you make that argument with a straight face in light of their recent quarterly earnings:

Apple reported a net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 a share.

A naive person like me might suspect that without sacrificing too much of their $13 billion profit, Apple could build iPhones and iPads and MacBooks in better conditions. Heck, they could probably build them in Cupertino and still turn a merely huge profit instead of an outrageous one. Perhaps it's time to Occupy Apple.

Meanwhile, here's the Times expose mentioned. And refer back to my earlier entry about Mike Daisey's monologue on the subject. Mike is all over this stuff, which is very cool. He's making a difference.

Mike Daisey on the Radio

2012-01-13T15:18:00.000-08:00

Mike Daisey does amazing monologue performances. And now, he's been adapted for the radio on NPR's This American Life. I haven't listened to it yet, but just reading about it makes it sound fascinating. I have seen the original version on stage, called The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, and it was great.

Check out Mike and his work if you can.

Controlling People With Pain

2011-11-22T10:45:00.000-08:00

Digby has been covering the excessive and inappropriate use of tasers for a long time. Now the Occupy movement is raising awareness of some of the brutal techniques being used to control people and the militarization of American police forces in general. She has a great post today about the use of pain to control and achieve compliance.

A couple of months ago I was really surprised by the sheer numbers of San Francisco police in riot gear sent out in response to (and in anticipation of) the OpBART protests. But the nationwide response to the overwhelmingly peaceful protests with riot police, pepper spray, batons, tasers, tear gas, sound cannons, and flash grenades is just stunning.

The notion that people gathered in peaceful protest can or should be brutalized is appalling. This is the same mentality that justifies torture. Torturing people to elicit information is wrong, as I have written repeatedly. Torturing people to make them compliant is just as wrong.

I used to think we'd come a long way from the days of using fire hoses and police dogs to intimidate and control protesters. It now appears we have come a long way, but in the wrong direction: we now have higher-tech methods of abusively controlling people, and seem to have little compunction about applying them.

The More Things Change...

2011-11-08T10:53:00.000-08:00

...the more they go back to the way they've always been.

Or, yet another example of why Tom Tomorrow is brilliant.

Irony is SO Dead...

2011-10-17T16:35:00.000-07:00

I can't really elaborate on the headline:

Gap and Banana Republic to open in Latin America

H/T LGM

Oh, Dear

2011-10-07T09:52:00.000-07:00

For me, the baseball season is over. I know there are playoffs going on and a World Series coming up, but I'm still licking the wounds from watching my much-injured Giants falter and finally fall.

But the off-season has its benefits, and one today is reading Grant Brisbee's take on the new baseball stadium in Miami, and particularly their new home run celebration device:

Behold. This is what will happen when the Marlins hit a home run. It's what Bernie Brewer thinks he's sliding down after a couple buttons of peyote.

There is more. The picture is worth the visit. I can't bring myself to copy it here. But really, click over to see it. Even if you don't care about baseball, you really should see this thing. Really.

Wow.

Sad State of Affairs

2011-09-20T11:38:00.000-07:00

Apparently banks have too much money. They can't give it away.

"Banks and credit unions are doing everything they can to get rid of the cash except make loans," said Mike Moebs, a Lake Bluff, Ill., banking consultant.

Poor, helpless banks.

Bankers such as Robert H. Smith, former chairman of L.A.'s Security Pacific Corp., say the industry is being throttled by a combination of the weak economy and regulations that were tightened in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

Really? We're going to blame this on regulation? Like, that's some immutable force that can't be changed?

Change the rules. Lend some money. Create some jobs. Get the economy moving.

Good grief.

Commentary on Science

2011-09-15T17:21:00.000-07:00

I stumbled onto this story via Twitter. Apparently some scientists have discovered a crystaline planet out there somewhere: essentially, a planet made of diamond. This catches people's fancy, and they accept the science behind it without question.

The discoverer points out that, were he to have made a discovery about, say, the climate of Earth, it would have gone through the same scientific process, but many people would choose to dismiss his conclusions, though they be just as valid scientifically.

The secton at the end discusses method, including this:

But on occasion those from the fringe of the scientific community will push a position that is simply not credible against the weight of evidence.

This occurs within any discipline. But it seems it’s only in the field of climate science that such people are given airtime and column inches to espouse their views.

Those who want to ignore what’s happening to Earth feel they need to be able to quote “alternative studies”, regardless of the scientific merit of those studies.

In all fields of science, papers are challenged and statistics are debated. If there is any basis to these challenges they stand, but if not they fall by the wayside and the field continues to advance.

When big theories fall, it isn’t because of business or political pressures – it’s because of the scientific process.

At times like this, I hear the echoes of one of my Rhetoric professors, quoting David Hume in his A Treatise of Human Nature:

Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

In short, we believe what we want to believe. Seems like people are fine with science, as long as it doesn't tell them they need to change their behavior. There is also a link to another article on the same site about the value of peer review. That excites considerable discussion.

By the way, several of the commenters on the "diamond planet" article are quite good. There is a discussion of analogous situations. Find the one about people falling out of planes and believing in gravity. I particularly like this add-on:

the variation is the faller who calls out $1000, $5000, $20000, $100000 ...... in the belief that once he price gets high enough, market forces will produce a parachute

Indeed. I like the concept of the Free(-Falling) Market.

Let Your Geek Flag Fly

2011-09-02T09:24:00.000-07:00

I just saw a link to this t-shirt site on Pharyngula. I've always thought scientists and other great thinkers should get more of the rock-star treatment. Other than a few who have sneaked into the popular culture, like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, most are largely unknown outside their field.

I'm thinking I might need a Niels Bohr t-shirt.

Brief Baseball Rant

2011-08-10T16:37:00.000-07:00

Ouch. Painful loss for my Giants today. Perhaps best summed up in this rant from Grant at McCovey Chronicles:

I'm through figuring out how to make the lineup better. It's like trying to build a combustion engine out of shredded cheese. Just stop.

I would laugh, if I weren't busy crying inside.

At least tomorrow is an off day. Maybe that will hurt less. I can hope.

Theater Overdose

2011-08-09T01:08:00.000-07:00

This weekend we kind of tested whether it is possible to get too much theater. The venue was the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and this was our second long weekend trip there this summer. Back in June we took the whole family, and we each saw three or four plays over three days. That was pretty nice. This time was a bit more intense. With our daughter away at summer camp, my wife and my mother-in-law and I managed to see six plays in three days.

The good news is: no problem! We really enjoyed all six plays. The bad news is...um...I guess we got pretty tired. Really, it was quite stunning how good it was. Six good plays.

We drove up Thursday night after work, and aside from some road work that slowed us down, it was a smooth, easy drive. Arriving about 1:00 am, we decided to sleep late Friday morning, which was fine, as we didn't have anywhere to be until our first play at 1:30 pm.

Quick breakfast at Brothers (with enough leftovers for at least one more breakfast), including very delicious scones, then off to the theater.

The first play on the docket was "The African Company Presents Richard III," a quite fascinating historical piece about an African-American theater company in New York City in the 1820s, presenting high-quality productions on a shoestring budget and its interactions with some rival, mainstream theaters. Very solid production, thought-provoking and interesting. The character "Papa Shakespeare" was particularly good, especially his scene being a "griot" translator.

After a tasty dinner at Tabu, we returned to see "Love's Labor's Lost" in the outdoor Elizabethan theater. That was a fun, solid production of one of Shakespeare's earliest plays. One one hand, you can see it's not as polished a script as some of the later works. On the other hand, the word play is rampant, which makes it particularly fun.

One thing I'm starting to appreciate about OSF is that they are a true repertory company. Not only do they use many of the same actors season after season and for different plays over the course of the season, the schedule is such that an actor may play roles in multiple plays in the same day. There were several who appeared in both of our Friday plays, including Charles Robinson, who had played "Papa Shakespeare" in the afternoon, and then appeared as Sir Nathaniel, the Curate in LLL. With much less makeup in the latter play, I finally recognized him from his role on the TV show "Night Court." Funny guy, and a fine stage actor, which is not always the case for TV actors.

Saturday we slept in again, then went back to the theater to see "Julius Caesar" in the New Theater, the smallest and most intimate of the OSF venues. This was an extremely cool production, performed in the round (or square, really), with the players rarely leaving the stage, taking seats in or near the audience. It was a very powerful experience, especially since we were in the front row (I think there are only 7-8 rows, anyway). With the actors dressed in contemporary costumes and talking with us before the show started (among other things, Cassius warned us that we were potentially in the "splash zone," but that the fake blood has detergent in it, so it should wash right out), it drew us right in, and with the scenes playing out literally in our faces, and characters sitting right next to us. I admit it's a bit unnerving to have Ceasar's ghost sitting right at my elbow. She (yes, she) was intense.

I would say that performance was the highlight (among many great experiences) of the weekend.

Jan went for a massage after the play, and we met up later at the Caldera Tap Room (outstanding beers, rather slow service) for beer, burgers, and sweet potato fries. Then back to the theater for "Measure for Measure." Really good production, cool staging, set in the 1970s. Lucio is portrayed as a jive pimp. And it works.

Sunday arrives, and we're back to the New Theater for "Ghost Light," a new play that we're also going to see next season at Berkeley Repertory Theater. It was, in a word, fabulous. It was particularly poignant to those of us who lived through the triggering event and aftermath, and probably more so to those of us who lost our fathers at a young age, too. This is a great, great play, and I look forward to seeing it again.

And finally, we concluded with "August: Osage County." It's really a tour de force and a marathon. It's disturbing and kind of vicious, and at times hilarious. It takes 3.5 hours and two intermissions, but it was really good.

So, a few of conclusions at the end of the weekend:

OSF has amazing actors, and this season, some incredible plays. We love going to the theater, but we're usually resigned to the notion that some fragment of the shows we go to will just not click for us. I saw ten shows in Ashland this year, and all were good, and some amazingly so.
Normally at the theater, especially when I'm tired, I find myself glancing at my watch to see how long until the end of the act, play, etc. Not once this weekend, through six plays, did I even think of doing that. In fact, I was generally surprised when intermission arrived, having been so immersed in the play that time had flown by. Similarly, by the end, although I could tell that the plot had been resolved and such, it seemed impossible that I had actually sat through 3+ hours already. That, to me, is a sign of great theater.
Finally, I am forever amazed at the skill and versatility of the actors at OSF. At one point, we realized we'd see the same actor in three consecutive plays, with fairly major roles in two of them. Just amazing.

As you can tell, we had a great weekend. I have to conclude at this point that with high enough quality plays, I can pretty much sit through as much as the theater will provide. And that summarizes our second weekend at OSF this year. Great stuff. I'd go back in a heartbeat, but will have to wait until next year.

New Respect for Old Politics

2011-07-21T10:37:00.000-07:00

I was really impressed by a post by Digby yesterday. In addition to her usual wonderful writing, she quoted a terrific (and amazingly timely) speech by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt from 1936. And like her, I am impressed with FDR's rhetoric:

It's a great speech, filled with all the rhetoric a lot of us would love to hear today.I particularly enjoyed the explanatory pieces, which speak to the people like adults and doesn't use improper metaphors.

It's well worth clicking through to the text of the FDR speech, posted on Michael Moore's site. It's almost incomprehensible that a politician would make such a detailed, comprehensive speech nowadays.

Digby also had a great piece up the previous day, demonstrating how dramatically President Obama's rhetoric today has changed from that of Candidate Obama, circa 2008:

What's wrong with his commentary is his telling those young people that they should see his argument as a template for their own role as engaged citizens. I can't think of anything more antithetical to his message in 2008 than "don't set up a situation where you're guaranteed to be disappointed." It's actually rather stunning.

And it's completely wrong in terms of the role of average citizens (and especially young activists) in the political process. They are supposed to push for what they believe in with passion and single minded commitment. They shouldn't worry about "what can pass" congress or the limits of the political process. That's the job of politicians and political hacks.

As a former political hack, I certainly understand the need to formulate a policy that can actually be adopted and accomplish something, and I understand that incrementalism is sometimes a necessary approach to long-term problem solving.

But now as an outsider, an average citizen, I also understand the importance of differing and even extreme positions. After all, if only one side in a debate takes an extreme position, that moves the "center," or the range of possible compromises, in that side's directions.

It's been really interesting (in an abstract sense) to watch what used to be extremist, far-out positions espoused by the likes of Newt Gingrich in the 1980s become a consensus position within his party, while simultaneously decrying anything other than the mainstream, corporatist pablum as extremist, socialist, communist, and so on. By deligitimizing positions that were until recently quite commonplace, they continue to move the center of the debate farther to the right.

As a former congressional staffer and Washingtonian, I read with interest an article by Congress scholar Norman Ornstein today called "Worst. Congress. Ever.":

When I came to Washington in 1969, for example, the city was riven with division and antagonism over the Vietnam War, which segued into the impeachment of a president, followed by many other difficult and contentious moments. In this case, though, Carvey's old man would be right: The hard reality is that for all their rancor, those times were more functional, or at least considerably less dysfunctional, than what we face with Congress today.

Ornstein contends that both major political parties have become more homogeneous and that their ideologies no longer overlap: they are more partisan. Although I agree to an extent, and certainly concur that on the whole, the Republicans today sit far to the right of the party of 40 years ago, I find it arguable at best to say that the Democrats as a whole, even minus the "Boll Weevils" and "Blue Dogs" who have largely crossed the aisle and fit solidly into the mainstream of the new Republican party, have become more liberal. Indeed, despite the defection of the more conservative members, the stances represented by the current crop of Democrats largely fall to the right of the mainstream of the mid-late 20th century.

Although I agree that the environment is more partisan, it is also quite clear that the center of the debate has moved considerably to the right. It's harder to get anything done, but what gets done is very, very different than it used to be.

Maybe if we had politicians willing to talk sense to us, that would be different.

Politics as Cargo Cult

2011-07-19T09:37:00.000-07:00

I think this (unfortunately) catches a lot of the dynamics of the moment:

President Obama, responsibly acceding to the reality of divided government, is now the leading champion of fiscal austerity, and his proposals contain very little in the way of job creation. More important, he no longer uses his office’s most powerful tool, rhetorical suasion, to keep the country focussed on the continued need for government activism. His opponents’ approach to job creation is that of a cargo cult—just keep repeating “tax cuts”—even though the economic evidence of the past three decades refutes such magical thinking. What does either side have to offer the tens of millions of Americans who have settled into a semi-permanent state of economic depression? Virtually nothing.

I wasn't in Washington or politics very long, but at least we had some notion that we were doing something. The current clashes of ideologies just seem like so much pointless theater. Sound and fury, etc.

Stories That Must Be Told

2011-07-01T15:11:00.000-07:00

You just never know what will prompt me to blog. I've been meaning to, really, and even had posts composed in my head, but no.

Then my friend (known to some of you as "DenDen") pointed me to this story.

me: The 5-foot tall one was $300, marked down to $100. That’s like, $200 worth of chicken for free.

Laura: You’d be crazy not to buy that. I mean, look at it. IT’S FULL OF WHIMSY.

I'm still chuckling. Some of the comments are wonderful, too.

Arguably the Happiest Day of the Year

2011-03-31T16:32:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's that most magical of days: Opening Day. Baseball begins again in earnest. The games count. The weather (here) is awesome, all is right with the world.

One of my colleagues pointed me to a good blog post from NPR about the feuding "schools" of baseball fans:

In short, there is, at this point in history, an entirely unnecessary conflict between people who supposedly appreciate the art/ballet/magic/wizardry/magic-8-ball qualities of baseball and people who supposedly only like the boring/nerdy/soulless/drained-of-life qualities of baseball.

I think that sums it up nicely, and unsurprisingly, I find myself with at least one foot planted firmly in each camp. There is (and ought to be) more than one way to appreciate and enjoy anything, including baseball. I love being able to crunch numbers (or ponder the numbers others have crunched) to try to understand the game a bit more. But I also love to sit out on a sunny day with an adult beverage, an unhealthy meal, and a child's wonder to watch players do things I could only ever dream of.

I'm sure the same is true of opera (maybe without hot dogs and nachos, but still) and many other endeavors. There is technical appreciation and aesthetic joy, and sometimes a blend of the two. I doubt there are enough fans of either sort (for either baseball or opera) to sustain the enterprise. These exhibitions have to appeal to a broad base of patrons to exist. And that's a good thing.

The NPR piece refers to the (sadly, defunct) blog Fire Joe Morgan, which I used to read all the time (and I still link to it over on the right!). I read it because it was interesting. I read it because it was funny. And I read it because it helped me to develop my own understanding and appreciation of baseball. I laughed. I kept reading. Much like I keep going to baseball games and talking with all sorts of different fans. It's fun. I like it.

I realize I haven't gotten around to writing about my trip to Spring Training this year. It was great. I will have to do that. Not only did I get to see my favorite team several times, I also got to see ballgames just for the fun of it, games I had no real rooting interest in. And it was joyous.

So today, we get to say it for real: "Play ball!"

Oh, and we get to say, for at least the next six months or so, "Ladies and gentlemen, the 2010 World Series Champions, your San Francisco Giants!" Can't get enough of that.

Yet Another New Firefox

2011-03-23T16:39:00.000-07:00

I upgraded my browser yesterday to Firefox 4, and I have to say that in general I'm quite pleased with it. New features, fast, etc.

As with the Firefox 3.5 upgrade a couple of years ago, Mozilla has a cool page to monitor the downloads worldwide, and once again, it is powered under the covers by my company, SQLstream.

In case you feel like learning how we do our part of the magic, one of my coworkers has written a very good explanation of how it works. Yay!

Words Fail Me

2011-02-22T09:09:00.000-08:00

Six months. Really.

It has come to my attention, via some of my throng of loyal followers, that I haven't posted anything for six months. Is it possible that I have seen nothing interesting that I wanted to share? That I've done nothing and been nowhere and simply have nothing to say?

As I look back at the limited posting I did last year, it's clear to me that I was not in a good place, posting-wise. Truly, 2010 was a pretty awful year for me. Indeed, had it not been for my San Francisco Giants winning the World Series (I managed to not blog about that...amazing!), I would happily wipe the whole year from my memory.

I meant to write about things, really. But I didn't.

So what happened? Lots. Most of which you don't want to hear about, and I don't care to write about (school turmoil, home remodeling, busy at work, child-care fun). You know...life. No big deal. But what really sucked the words out of me was this: my mom died. Indeed, I was managing to maintain my meager blogging efforts for the year right up to the point that Mom died. And then, nothing. My last blog post was on August 6th. Mom passed away on August 22nd, and then...nothing.

Sure, there was a lot going on: planning and executing memorial services, clearing the apartment, tidying up financial matters. That takes some time. But surely I could eke out a few moments to write something. Couldn't I?

Apparently not.

So when someone pointed out that it's been six months, and I really should write something, I spent some time pondering just why I have not been writing. I've decided to pin it on my mother. I don't blame her, but she's responsible.

You see, whatever I am as a writer I can pretty much attribute to my mother. She was a teacher, primarily of English, and particularly of writing. She instilled and nurtured in me a love of stories, of books, of libraries, of language. For a time I even worked as a writer and editor, pretty much entirely because she gave me the idea.

So I suppose it's ironic that she probably never read my blog, and probably wasn't even aware that I was writing one. I'm not even clear that she knew what a blog is. But no matter. What's sneaked into my consciousness is that at some level, I associate writing with my mother, much as I associate my day job (programming) with my dad. My parents represent very well the yin and yang of my existence, and I think losing Mom caused me to lose touch with that aspect of myself for a bit. At some level, even though she wasn't reading my writing, it appears I was writing for her, and without her there, I just didn't write.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is something else I'm missing. I suppose I'll figure that out. In any case, it's kind of nice to be writing again.

Thanks for the push. I hope I find something worthwhile to write about. I know I will have some words about Mom and Parkinson's Disease (oh, boy...you thought I went on about cancer!). But that's later. Right now, it's just worth it to break the ice, let you know I still exist, and get one post under my belt. More will follow.

We are All So Doomed

2010-08-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

I guess I need to stop looking at the web. It's depressing enough to read stuff like Glenn Greenwald's description of what collapsing empires look like (here's a hint...look in the mirror). Cutting basic services in the name of austerity while spending profligately on foreign wars of choice, for example. Coddling the wealthy while making life harder for the common people.

But then I notice a link on the side of that piece that takes me to a very brief one:

What we see is at once hilarious, sad and perhaps deeply worrying. Do I need to explain? This is the state of airport security in the United States of America, and we, as American citizens, have allowed this to happen. Not only have we become willingly subjugated cowards, we've clearly lost our minds.

*sigh*

Bloggers from History

2010-07-16T01:24:00.000-07:00

I keep wanting to post stuff, but time gets in the way. Well, work and time.

Anyway, now and then I get inspired. I liked this line from PZ Myers:

Mark Twain would have been an awesome blogger.

He's right. Twain would have been great. Oscar Wilde, too. Will Rogers. Smart, opinionated, well-informed, and witty. Sounds like a great recipe for a blogger.

Who else?

Melancholy

2010-06-01T23:38:00.000-07:00

I miss my dad today.

I mean, I miss him every day, but today should have been his 85th birthday. Unfortunately, he only got to celebrate 56 birthdays. So it's kind of hard to imagine what he would have been like at 85.

So I guess it's time for one more reminder: Take care of yourselves and each other. And do what the doctor tells you.

And if you have a little extra (time, energy, stuff), please consider sharing some of it with the American Cancer Society. They do amazing work supporting people with cancer and their families, as well as supporting research so that maybe fewer people will have to miss their dads (moms, siblings, cousins, friends...).

You get the picture. Thanks for listening.

Abstinence FAIL

2010-05-20T12:16:00.000-07:00

My niece and I were chuckling (well, laughing out loud, really) over news coverage of a U.S. Congressman who resigned this week over an affair with a staff member.

The most amusing part was that the staffer in question had hosted a video interview with the Congressman on the topic of...wait for it...abstinence.

My niece turned a video still I found online of that fine piece of work into a motivational poster that she said I could share:

It Has Come to This

2010-05-04T09:17:00.000-07:00

I wasn't aware of this incident until I saw this piece at Digby's blog.

During Monday's Phillies game, a person in attendance at Citizen Bank Park ran onto the field while the Cardinals were up to bat. According to those at the game, this fan was promptly tasered.

This is just amazing to me. We seem to have lost all sense of proportion. Having a young child myself, I'm used to hearing kids threaten death and dismemberment for all sorts of minor transgressions. That's developmentally appropriate at a certain age, but eventually we're supposed to grow out of it as we come to understand both physical and social realities. By the time we're adults (or even teens), we are supposed to have developed some sense of measured response.

But really. Fans (usually inebriated ones) have been running onto fields for a long time: At least as long as games have been televised. And I am old enough to remember the "streaking" fad. For those who are fans and want to watch the game, these things are an annoyance, but a minor one at most. You have a delay while the intruder eludes a few security guards or police for a few minutes, then they subdue the person, remove them from the premises, and the game resumes.

In my experience, the intruder usually eludes being captured for a few minutes, probably causing a little embarrassment for the pursuer, but truly nothing of consequence is happening here.

So why is it even remotely reasonable to use a weapon of any kind, much less a taser, to subdue such a person? Delaying a sporting event isn't a serious offense. No one is in serious danger of attack (though there have been assaults on players an coaches, nothing that remotely justifies this kind of response to someone just running around). Embarrassing security personnel isn't smart, but again, it can't possibly justify subjecting the interloper to this level of physical danger.

[As someone once wrote about the decision to run out on the field, it probably seems like fun at first, but once you get removed from public view, you may get a lesson on differing interpretations of the term "reasonable force," especially if you've made the security guard or off-duty police officer run around and look a little foolish. But that was talking about a little roughness, not electrical shocks.]

My hat is off to Digby for her ongoing coverage of the taser issue. The taser is a great example of how our society has become inured to violence and torture and how the threshold for these things has gotten ridiculously low. Are we really so culturally immature that we believe this kind of behavior is reasonable?

Climate Change and Economics

2010-04-10T11:51:00.000-07:00

I nearly always enjoy reading Paul Krugman's work. Not only is he a brilliant thinker, but he's a very good writer, with a knack for making complex subjects understandable.

So I was most pleased to see his piece today on climate change.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. It was climate change and what we referred to at the time as the "greenhouse effect" that led me to study environmental science in college and to focus on the public policy aspects of that field. The intersection of science, economics, and politics is a fascinating, complex, and rewarding area, but not without its frustrations.

I recommend that you read Krugman's article. He concludes with what I think is meant to be a hopeful summary:

We know how to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. We have a good sense of the costs — and they’re manageable. All we need now is the political will.

Unfortunately, as he demonstrates earlier in his analysis, political will is hard to come by these days. Recent events haven't demonstrated to me that either the American body politic or its "leaders" have either the understanding or the backbone to make difficult choices. I fear we will dither ourselves into catastrophe.

Units of Measure

2010-03-13T12:48:00.000-08:00

And while I'm uncharacteristically blogging, I ought to mention another fine Berkeley guy: Art Rosenfeld. He started out as a particle physicist, but the energy crisis of the 70s spurred him to turn his attention to energy efficiency.

He's now retiring after a long and distinguished career, and some of his colleagues have proposed naming a unit of measure (specifically a measure of energy conservation) after him.

Regardless of whether that takes hold, Rosenfeld has had an enormous influence over our world. For example, his research on reducing the size of the ballasts used by fluorescent lights led to the development of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), which currently save huge amounts of electricity.

Rosenfeld also gets a lot of credit for the "California miracle," also known as the "Rosenfeld effect": California's per-capita electricity consumption has remained essentially the same since 1970, where that of the rest of the country has increased by about half. Through a combination of technologies, building codes, and other public policies, California has led the way, largely propelled by Rosenfeld.

My wife, who works in energy efficiency, got to go to Rosenfeld's retirement dinner this week, and it must have been a great event. His influence will continue to be felt both in the state and throughout the world.

Remembering Mario

2010-03-13T12:28:00.000-08:00

No, not Super Mario: Mario Savio.

I never got to meet Mario, but as a student at Berkeley, I lived in a world that he helped shape. Walking through Sproul Plaza almost daily, it was easy to see the impact of Savio and the Free Speech Movement.

Even today, the FSM is remembered at the cafe in the undergraduate library.

Anyway, the linked review from The Nation is interesting, and makes me want to read the book.

What's in a Name?

2010-02-02T13:39:00.000-08:00

A friend just pointed out to me that one can look up one's name in the Urban Dictionary. I thought the results for my nickname were particularly hilarious. I quite like:

2. v. as 'chard something up'. To, by error or misfortune, destroy iredeemably a situation that might otherwise have been promising or a suitestormme (see suitestormme).

Life is fun sometimes.

Crocodile Tears--For What?

2010-01-12T11:12:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the "big news" was that Mark McGwire finally admitted to using steroids during his baseball career.

Frankly, I have trouble seeing this as anything newsworthy, other than maybe the fact that a baseball team is actually hiring McGwire to work for them again. I'm all for forgiveness and redemption and all that, but really, you don't go hiring Al Capone to run BATF.

OK, here's my big problem with the McGwire admission: he's not sorry. He cheated through much of his career, and he clearly feels bad about it, but seems to think he was doing it for a good reason, so we should just forgive him. This, for me, was the money quote:

“I did this for health purposes. There’s no way I did this for any type of strength purposes,” he said.

Uh-huh. And why is that OK? You weren't trying to be a stronger ballplayer, you just wanted to recover quicker, or heal or prevent injuries. It's not like that would give him a competitive advantage over other players or anything. And then, he doesn't even take responsibility--it was the times, you see:

“It was a wrong thing what I did. I totally regret it. I just wish I was never in that era,” he said.

Yeah, because if there hadn't been those illegal drugs tempting you, you just would have lived with your injuries, put your tail between your legs and gone quietly home while someone else played ball. Bull. You cheated. You knew what you were doing, and you did it anyway.

And finally, the weaseling in his press statement about why he didn't come clean five years ago when he "testified" before Congress:

After all this time, I want to come clean. I was not in a position to do that five years ago in my congressional testimony, but now I feel an obligation to discuss this and to answer questions about it.

Uh, "not in a position"? What better position than when you have the attention of the whole country, broadcast live on C-SPAN and ESPN? I guess it's better to wait five years, then put out a press statement to clear the air for your new job. After all, it's all about you.

And that's bad. But even worse to me is the guy who is hiring him, again: Tony LaRussa. LaRussa was McGwire's manager when he broke into the majors with Oakland, then brought him to St. Louis later on. And now he's hiring him as his batting coach in St. Louis. LaRussa has insisted until yesterday that he had no knowledge, no idea that McGwire was juicing all those years. That doesn't even come close to passing the sniff test. LaRussa has been covering for McGwire (and therefore himself) for years. LaRussa has a fabulous (and IMHO, inflated) reputation as a baseball "genius" (I mean, he has a law degree from Florida State!) and humanitarian (largely for his work in animal rescue). But somehow he was unaware that the man he worked with for fifteen years was ballooning himself like a cartoon character and then lying about it. I offer you the opinions of baseball columnists Terence Moore and Ray Ratto. Neither seems to find LaRussa credible on this issue, either.

I have been accused of having a blind spot on this issue, having rooted for Barry Bonds for so many years. I will admit having suspicions for a long time, despite Bonds' denials. I will say this: he has been consistent with his stance that he did not knowingly use banned or illegal substances. That may not prove true, but I have no knowledge one way or the other. What I do know is that it was apparent during that era that some, indeed many, players were juicing. The fact that Bonds stood out among them does not diminish for me the achievements. He was the exciting player in an era of exciting players, some or all of whom may have been enhanced.

To me the bottom line is that one can never know all the details of who did what or just how much it helped them. McGwire claims he would have hit just as many home runs without enhancements. We'll never know, and that's too bad. What we do know is what happened: We saw, we cheered, we enjoyed. It's time to stop looking for which numbers need to have asterisks by them. Instead of moralizing about the past, we should learn from it and move on.

Baseball and other sports have always had their share of people trying to find advantages outside the game itself: doctored balls, amphetamines, steroids, altered bats. In a "game of inches," even tiny changes can make a big difference.

What we need to look out for is those who excuse or condone such behavior. People like Tony LaRussa or Bud Selig, the owners, managers, agents, and players who either supported or feigned ignorance of the drug problem that was making them rich, need to come clean about their culpability.

My Broken State, Part WAY Too Many

2010-01-06T08:47:00.000-08:00

It's not getting any better.

The Left Coaster has a good piece today about the ongoing death spiral that is California these days:

Anyway, that’s basically it, nothing has been solved in California in all of 2009, there are no solutions in sight to solve any element of our revenue problems, and we will continue to abuse our little people in a stupid, cruel twist of human life that was never, ever necessary. As always, it was so easy to be so much better than this, the problems we face aren’t difficult to solve, but the Republicans have abandoned public service altogether, they’ll bring all of us down if they can’t get their way.

This on the tail of last month's news that California's roads, once the envy of the world, have almost slipped to the worst in the country. And the worst are in the major metropolitan areas.

Mark Watt, executive director of Transportation California, a labor and heavy construction industry group that works with TRIP, said the state's failure to raise the gasoline tax since 1990 combined with the recession-related decline in driving leaves the state with far too little money to maintain and rehabilitate highways.

"We've got to come to grips that we have to pay for it or we have to live with it," he said. "We need new revenues to dig through the backlog we're building."

It just keeps rolling. Downhill. You don't get what you don't pay for....

Terror, Paranoia, and Silliness

2010-01-05T08:57:00.000-08:00

I always wondered when the Underpants Gnomes were going to go bad. Apparently many others fear this a lot more than I do.

As usual, Tom Tomorrow has his finger on the crazy.

Friends and Family

2009-12-31T17:58:00.001-08:00

Time for one last post this year, I guess!

Sometime in the fall of 1987, I got my first apartment on my own. I had been sharing apartments with others for years, so I needed to acquire a lot of furnishings. As luck would have it, my friend Rod had recently moved into a house, and the previous owner had left a couple of pieces in the basement that Rod didn't want, so I inherited a big, solid woodblock chair and a credenza.

The credenza I ultimately gave away a couple of years later before I moved back to California. But I kept the chair. And it has followed me through several more moves, and eventually settled in our living room, where it became a favorite place for my daughter to curl up and read. It was quite worn and shabby, but the cushions and upholstery were really soft, so she liked it.

When we bought a ski house this summer, we decided the chair should move up there, and my mother-in-law took it upon herself to make the chair nicer. I had been thinking of reupholstering and restuffing the cushions, but she took it to a whole new level. Not only did she find terrific fabric with bears and moose on it, but she took the whole chair apart, refinished the wood, and just did a tremendous job of making it a whole new chair.

And here is the final result:

Not the best photo in the world (all I had with me was my iPhone), but you can see how cool it is! I know Rod, in particular, will appreciate the appropriateness of the moose motif. Hard to believe that this chair that has been cast off a couple of times and dragged across the country and around the state now has a whole new life. It's a really comfortable place to site and read or work.

So thanks again, Rod, and thanks to Cathy and her minions who made the whole refinishing and reconstruction project come off so well. I plan to enjoy this chair for many more years to come!

Who Could Have Predicted?

2009-12-10T21:14:00.000-08:00

A year ago I was gloating about President-elect Obama's choice of John Holdren to be his science advisor. And I'm still quite pleased with the choice.

But it appears that Holdren is in the cross-hairs of the anti-science crowd:

But thanks to the magic of the Internet, right-wing blogs, newspapers, and television networks have seized on Holdren's old work and painted him as a wild-eyed environmental extremist — a crazed, misanthropic ideologue bent on controlling our lives and mass sterilization.

But the reality isn't quite like that:

Holdren and Erhlich considered a variety of other options for limiting population growth. Perhaps we could slip sterilization drugs into the water or food supply. Or force the mothers of illegitimate children to give them up for adoption. Or force pregnant single women to marry or have abortions. Ultimately, they decided that such options probably won't work. But they didn't exactly recoil from the ideas in moral horror. And therein lies the rub.

The article does a good job talking about the nature of scientific investigation, and how politics doesn't handle that well. For example:

At a time when populists distrust expertise, every scientific endeavor is politicized, and the Internet preserves your every utterance, it's getting harder and harder for scientists to do what they're supposed to: think out loud.

And this:

Nothing is more complicated than the weather, and as scientists try to predict the future of climate change, they're bound to make mistakes. But Holdren is operating in a different world now — a world where complexity is a liability or an irritant, where nuance is ignored, and activists on all sides strip away context as they search for something that can kill your career when framed in the right way.

Good article, especially for the local alt-weekly. It does a good job of comparing Holdren's situation with that of Van Jones, who shares local roots.

Anyone who has actually met or talked with John Holdren, even a little bit, knows that he's not a crazed, genocidal, eco-terrorist. He's a calm, thoughtful, and intellectually honest man who doesn't shy away from the findings of science or the hard policy choices they might dictate. At the same time, it's easy to envision him dispassionately evaluating even extreme policy options and dismissing them without getting riled up. He's a scientist. That's what they do.

One of my favorite memories of Holdren's class at Berkeley was his lecture on carcinogens. Instead of either dismissing or hyping the risks, it was all about evaluating the research and the numbers, even if it meant that peanut butter or tasty, dark beer might turn out to be seriously dangerous. He was trying to teach us to think like scientists and evaluate the evidence.

But our current political discourse doesn't have much room for nuance or dispassion. It's all about sound and fury, which has no place in scientific discussion.

I know Holdren is capable of handling the storms that are already swarming around him. I just hope the same is true of those around him, because I think he can be a tremendous contributor to solving some of the key issues facing the country and the world.

What Digby Said

2009-12-09T09:22:00.000-08:00

I think Atrios or someone should have a copyright on that title, but whatever: Digby is right, as usual:

There were those who warned that allowing anyone president to have unaccountable powers would lead to every successor to fight to maintain them. But no one wanted to believe that a nice Democrat would ever do such a thing. Ahem:

Read it. And weep.

For Real This Time

2009-12-09T00:47:00.000-08:00

Real ski weekend this time.

Started off with Opening Day at Alpine Meadows on Saturday. Although they only had two lifts running, the runs they had groomed were in really good shape. They had a few glitches with the new RFID gates at the lifts, but overall, things went well, and it was really fun. I'm glad we had a few practice turns last weekend at Northstar.

Rumor was that there would be snow pretty much after we left on Sunday, but the snow came early. And since we needed to get home early on Sunday, we decided to blow off the skiing and head out early. But a couple of accidents had closed the highway, so we decided to buy some groceries, head back to the house, and hunker down.

Here's what the deck looked like early on Sunday afternoon (it had been clear in the morning):
Then it really started snowing. Ski resorts were closed due to high wind. We stayed hunkered down. And when I got up Monday morning, the deck looked like this:
Needless to say, no heading home. Jan did go ski at Alpine, where she said the powder was excellent. I was under the weather with a headache, and besides, I needed to work. By today the roads were clear and we could drive home easily. So we've already had many of the season's experiences.

Looks like a great start to the season's snow, though. I can't wait to get back up on the hill!

Taming Snow

2009-11-28T00:31:00.000-08:00

We couldn't help it. We really wanted to go skiing. In November. The opportunity rarely arises.

So we went to Northstar-at-Tahoe, which has minimal snow coverage so far. In fact, it was kind of surreal riding the lifts and seeing bare ground all around the groomed runs. Basically, they seem to have been making snow every night they could, and grooming the heck out of it.

So I have to say I was kind of surprised that the skiing was actually pretty good. There were only a few lifts and one or two ways down from each, and nothing very challenging, but hey, it was snow, and we were skiing!

On the other hand, there was this sort of weird feeling that we were skiing on a movie set or something, that if you ventured a few inches off to the side, you'd go through the scenery and there would be nothing there.

On still another hand, they were charging full price to use a very small portion of the hill, which felt a little like a rip-off. But did I mention we got to go skiing on Thanksgiving weekend?

And in one more week, we can hope for some real snow when Alpine Meadows opens.

Another Sad Passing

2009-11-02T19:01:00.000-08:00

I just saw the news that Norton Buffalo has passed away from cancer:

Mr. Buffalo, who appeared on more than 180 albums and spent 33 years as a member of the Steve Miller Band, was diagnosed with cancer in September.

Buffalo was an extremely gifted and versatile musician, and I enjoyed hearing him live many times as well as listening to many of the recordings he either led or backed up on. I'm glad there is such a store of recordings, but I wish there could be more.

I haven't blogged about cancer much lately (yes, I know, or about anything else very much), but this one is very sad. 58 is much too young to be dying, especially from cancer.

So remember to take care of yourselves, get checked up, and help out where you can.

Twits and Twitter

2009-10-30T17:21:00.000-07:00

Oh, dear. Some people just don't know when to, like, shut up:

A highlight of her invective was, perhaps: "Because people, like, honestly, like, I mean people wanna know why, like, you're, like, unhealthy, and, like, you need, like, get out and do stuff and, like, be in the world instead of being like this (pretends to be hunched over a keyboard) all the time. And, like, all I did was, like, lay in bed all the time."

I know there will be some who might fear that Miley has removed herself from Twitter because the 140 character limit did not allow her full expression of her likes and thoughts.

In case you weren't, like, totally sure, that was, like, Miley Cyrus opining on the future of Twitter, or rather her preferred lack of same.

It is unclear to my why I would care what she thinks about Twitter, but then, I'm pretty much a Twitter naysayer. I have a Twitter account. I think I've "tweeted" about 6 or 8 times in a couple of years. I rarely look at what others tweet. Perhaps I'm not spending enough time hunched over a keyboard.

I realize that celebrities are entitled to their opinions, just like everybody else. And I'm entitled to, like, ignore them, just like everybody else.

I know this wasn't important, but I thought the article quoted above had some high-quality snark, which I always enjoy. I couldn't bring myself to watch the video, but the text amused me.

Small World

2009-10-29T18:26:00.000-07:00

Now and then you cross paths with someone from a long time ago.

That happened to me a lot this past weekend, but you expect it at a high school reunion. I didn't expect to see NPR interviewing one of my favorite teachers from college:

SARAH GARDNER: Well, laugh all you want, Sam, but old, dead tree stumps are actually clues to climate past. Listen to this:

SCOTT STINE: These stumps tell us that California is capable of experiencing droughts more profound and more persistent than anything that we've seen during the last 150 years.

GARDNER: Now, that's paleoclimatologist Scott Stine. He looks at past climate to help figure out future climate. And scientists are really interested in this kind of work because, if they can understand climate shifts in the past, the hope is that that will help them more accurately project what may be in store for us this time around.

Scott was a lecturer in Environmental Science when I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley. His class on Bay Area Environments was memorable for many reasons, not least of which was Scott himself. He was like a walking encyclopedia of natural history for the area, and it's nice to see that his ongoing research on Mono Lake and other places is still paying off for him.

Check out the slide show linked from the NPR page. Hearing Scott's narration was fun, and it brought back lots of memories from taking his classes. Coincidentally, I had been talking about Scott this weekend with one of my high school friends who also took his class in college. Small world, indeed!

Cruciferous Vegetables

2009-09-25T11:56:00.001-07:00

I just need to get this off my chest: What's with broccoflower? And more to the point, why is it that Japanese restaurants insist on hiding it in their vegetable tempura? I bite into something that looks like a nice, tasty piece of tempura broccoli, and it turns out to be a disgusting, green cauliflower.

Is broccoflower just some sort of attempt to woo people who won't eat disgusting cauliflower by making it look like some kind of tasty green vegetable?

Yuck. I know cauliflower is supposed to be good for you, so I assume broccoflower is, too. But really: yuck.

My broken State, Part V

2009-09-25T11:30:00.000-07:00

We used to educate our children. Now, not so much:

And all of this was going to be free for Californians. It was an investment in the future, and it paid off, big-time. The quality graduates that came out of this public education system helped to grow the California economy at a pace far outstripping the rest of the nation. Some like to call the 20th Century the American Century, well, if that was true, the last half of the 20th Century was the California Century.
But like all good centuries, they come to an end. And with the election of Ronald Reagan, and later Deukmejian and Wilson, and to an extent, even Brown's son Jerry, the Master Plan has been gradually chipped away. As we stand right now, of the approximately $18 Billion UC budget, around $3 Billion now comes from the state.

In other words, the state university system is merely a somewhat-state-subsidized system, and barely that.

Great quote at the end of the piece from George Lakoff:

Lakoff, UC Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and author of several popular and scholarly books on the language of politics, said in a letter to UCB's Townsend Center that "the privatization issue goes well beyond public education. It is about whether we have a democracy that works for the common good, or a plutocracy that privileges the wealthy and powerful. Privatizing the world's greatest public university is a giant step away from democracy."(Berkeley Daily Planet 9/17/09)

As a product of California's public-education heyday, all the way from kindergarten through college, I have a great appreciation for what we used to have. And I'm appalled that the state (both the people and their elected government) no longer seems to value public education.

Journalism

2009-09-17T14:03:00.000-07:00

Sorry for not writing much of late. Not that I don't have a lot to say; just don't have time to write it down here.

Stumbled across this piece, though, which I thought did a good job of explaining why you have to be very dubious of everything you read and hear. The people we grew up trusting to tell us what was going on in the world don't do their job very well. It's much less an issue of bias (although some exists) and more a case of laziness mixed with incompetence.

Excellent stuff at the end of the piece:

At the beginning of his article, Von Drehle referred to a recent poll that found "record-low levels of public trust of the mainstream media." Guess what? Articles like this are why nobody trusts the media. When you pretend that obviously false claims about crowd sizes are valid, people won't trust you. When you pretend that only liberals say 70,000 people actually attended last week's protest, people won't trust you. They shouldn't trust you. You aren't trustworthy. You are doing your job dishonestly and incompetently.

And that dishonesty, that incompetence, is what enables Glenn Beck. When Glenn Beck says 1.7 million people were at the protest, and the Washington, D.C., Fire Department says 70,000, and Time runs an article saying conservatives and liberals disagree about the crowd size, that enables Glenn Beck's lies.

Being a mouthpiece for liars of any political stripe is not journalism. Reporting the lies without saying whether they are, objectively speaking, true, is not journalism, either. *sigh*

Apparently some people (including people who are supposed to be journalists) really believe that everything is just a matter of opinion, that there are no objective facts. They are wrong.

Another Dramatic Day

2009-08-22T23:38:00.000-07:00

Following another delicious breakfast at Morning Glory (I had a coconut almond waffle with lemon butter...wonderful!) we headed off to a last busy day at the Shakespeare Festival. First was the afternoon with "All's Well that Ends Well." This was a good production, although not entirely to the liking of our 8-year-old. She got it, though. She and Grandma had done some studying last night while we were off seeing Henry VIII, so she knew what to expect. Some bits (particularly when the French king got a bit long-winded) were not really able to hold her interest.

I thought the play was pretty well done. My favorite actor was probably Lafew, who had wonderful stage presence and great, expressive eyes. The repertory aspect was in view again, as the Clown/narrator (an invention of the director, which worked well) turned out to be none other than Don Quixote from our first play of this trip. He was amusing in this role, and worked very hard, too.

After a brief stroll through the art and craft fair along Ashland Creek, we had some ice cream at Mix, then a quick visit to the Tudor Guild gift shop, as we wanted to pick up a couple of items.

We then dropped off Grandma and our daughter for a visit with some cousins, and Jan and I went to dinner. We started with a little wine tasting at the EdenVale Enoteca, but weren't too impressed with any of the wines. So we stolled off to dine at the Ashland Bistro Cafe, which was quite good. Jan's scallop carbonara was particularly good.

Then to the final play of this trip, "Equivocation." In many ways this was the perfect conclusion to the trip, and it particularly helped to have seen Macbeth and Henry VIII beforehand. All in all, it was outstanding, with a cast of six players, five of whom play many, many roles. I believe we had seen all of them in other productions during the week, notably Anthony Heald (who we'd previously seen as Mayor Shinn in The Music Man and Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII) as Shagspeare and Jonathan Haugen (Gardiner in Henry VIII) as (mostly) Robert Cecil.

Intense, thought-provoking, and clever, I thought this was the best play we saw overall, and probably worth the trip all by itself. Two big thumbs up!

Now the theater part of the trip is done, and we're driving home tomorrow. I doubt I'll have anything to write about that, but one never knows.

Wandering Through History

2009-08-21T23:46:00.000-07:00

Today was largely a day off, with free time to explore town. Since we didn't have theater tickets until evening, we spent a leisurely morning at the house, then headed across town to try breakfast at Brother's. The breakfast was okay, nothing really special, but the hot chai was quite excellent and the house-made scones were stellar. Tomorrow we'll probably be back at Morning Glory, mostly because of proximity.

Since we were in town after breakfast, we decided it was time to venture into some of the used book stores. First stop, Book Exchange, which is my kind of bookstore: unpretentious, and obviously staffed by bibliophiles. All four of us had a grand time shopping around, and I think each of us came out with at least two books. I found a Fred Pohl book I was previously unaware of, and another book by Allen Steele. I definitely need to read more science fiction!

Next stop was a pilgrimage to the Dagoba Organic Chocolate outlet, just outside town. Dagoba makes tasty organic chocolate, and they have quite a bit out for tasting. The woman running the tasting room was friendly and knowledgeable, and went out of her way to give us tastes of a couple of things that were not already set out. We bought quite a few bars of different flavors, several of which we were previously unaware of.

On from there to what bills itself as the world's biggest, best-stocked game store, Fun Again. I guess they have a well-stocked warehouse behind the retail section, but the store itself is not huge (though it is very well-stocked). Ultimately we didn't decide to buy any games, but it was fun to look around.

Then across the parking lot to yet another (mostly) used book store, Bookwagon. I thought they had less overall selection than Book Exchange, and not nearly the ambiance, but we did manage to find several more books to buy. My favorite, which I stumbled across on the new arrivals rack, was a copy of John Muir's The Velvet Monkey Wrench. I learned most of what I know about automobiles from Muir's classic "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive," so I've always been intrigued to read his Utopian prescription for living. We'll see how that turns out.

After a brief stopover at the house to rest up and change clothes, we ventured out to dinner. Somehow, after brunch and chocolate tasting, no one was all that hungry, but we knew we wouldn't survive the evening's play without sustenance. So we decided to try Greenleaf restaurant. The food was pretty ordinary, but might have seemed more impressive had we chosen to sit outside, along the creek. The BLT was worth eating, though.

And at last, off to the theater, where Jan and I saw "Henry VIII" at the Elizabethan Stage. It was quite impressive. We had to overcome a little cognitive dissonance, as the early scenes featured Buckingham, who last night was Professor Harold Hill, and Cardinal Wolsey, who was last night's tongue-tied mayor. Of course, this is both one of the joys and one of the drawbacks to a repertory company. It was momentarily distracting, but ultimately fine.

It's quite a staging of the play, majestic and full of pomp. In the end, I suppose the play is really more about Wolsey and Queen Katherine than about Henry, really (though he's obviously an important part). And more than any of the characters, it's about England and the struggle between the Catholic church and protestantism, which would quite literally tear at the fabric of the country for at least a couple more centuries. Of all the Shakespeare histories, this one might be the most complex in that it deals with such recent events at the time of its writing. (Forgive me if all this is obvious; I hadn't read or seen this play before tonight!)

Anyway, some very strong performances here. Wolsey was particularly good in the second act, when he's largely in monologue mode. He had some trip-ups in the first act with dialogue, but really shone in his solo spotlights. Katherine was quite powerful (although I thought he deathbed scene was probably the weakest part of the play). And Henry had his moments. I thought his silent scene during Katherine's speech at her trial was particularly good. He really conveyed a lot by his physical reactions.

All in all, a very worthy effort. We really enjoyed the play, and it hardly seemed to take an hour, much less two-and-a-half!

We ended the evening with a quick visit to Zoey's Cafe for ice cream. Very tasty gelato. I had the mystery rotator tonight, which was a chocolate and marshmallow with coconut. Very yummy!

One more long day tomorrow, with two plays, then we head home Sunday.

A Study in Contrasts

2009-08-20T23:53:00.000-07:00

Nice day today. A little cooler than yesterday (though still quite hot by my coastal standards). Yet another breakfast at Morning Glory, where I learned that gingerbread waffles are indeed as good as they sound on the menu!

Best news of the day is that my daughter's bee-stung foot is much, much better. Indeed, she's bouncing around as good as new. This makes for a much happier day for all!

Today was a two-play day for some of us, which is a lot of sitting in the theater, but the two plays couldn't be much more different, so that helped.

The afternoon play was "Macbeth." Macbeth and I go way back. I read it in high school English class, and have seen it produced a couple of times since, most memorably in the outdoor glade at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, back when I lived down that way. An outdoor, nighttime performance is a great setting for Macbeth, with all its witches and general mayhem.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's rendition of Macbeth is somewhat updated, at least in costuming. And I frankly had a little trouble following all they were trying to do with the costumes. But the power and intensity of the play really comes through. Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were tremendous, and gave a depth and variety to their performances that was intriguing and kept one's interest focused.

I should add a note about the superstition surrounding Macbeth. I gather some in the theater believe the play to be jinxed, and refuse to say the name of it out loud, just calling it "The Scottish Play." I find this amusing. I learned about the superstition from some friends in conjunction with another, while sitting at a baseball game. I made an oblique reference to the fact that a pitcher had not allowed any hits by the other team (I think it was about the fifth or sixth inning by then), and was soundly admonished by a neighbor that I was not to refer to such things, as I would jinx it. Another neighbor, overhearing, suddenly burst out with "It's the Scottish play! It's the Scottish play!" Took me a while to get the full explanation, and I was surprised to learn of this supposed jinx.

For what it's worth, I have still never seen a no-hitter live, and I'm sure some will blame the fact that I am willing to talk about the possibility, even while the game is still under way. But I don't believe in jinxes. Sorry for anyone disappointed by that.

In between we went to dinner at the Standing Stone Brewing Company, which has very good beer and quick enough service that we were able to make it up to the show with time to spare. The burgers were OK, but nothing special. We liked the sweet potato fries, of course.

In the evening we all went to see "The Music Man," which is obviously much lighter and more fun. The actor playing Professor Harold Hill was quite good, with a strong voice and good stage presence. He makes a fine con man! His counterpart playing Marion Paroo has a lovely voice, though perhaps not as clearly articulated as I might want (though I know the songs well enough that I didn't lose much). I have to say she also seems just a bit...well...old for the part. She's meant to be 26, and I peg her for quite a few years more than that. As Jan put it, a bit old to be playing the ingenue.

But the play just works. I like the staging, despite being a relatively small stage (indeed, the exact same stage on which we saw Macbeth just hours earlier). They manage to fill it without making it seem crowded, so the small town of River City seems fairly realistic (within stage conventions, of course). I also really liked the way the started with the whole town and its people being entirely gray and drab, with little bits of color introduced as Hill and his scheme take hold in town. By the end, the whole town is a gay festival, and the contrast is quite striking.

This is our first venture into Oregon Shakespeare Festival, but I gather that musicals are relatively rare here. If that's true, then I thought they did it quite well. The music was good, and most of the singing quite good. I thought the adaptation of the space to include a spot for the conductor to poke up was well done and unobtrusive. All in all, I really liked the way they were able to pop different scenes in without breaking the flow of the play.

So it was a day of very stark contrast between the plays, but interestingly, I found myself drawing more comparisons between Music Man and Don Quixote than with Macbeth. In part, I suppose it's because they touch on somewhat similar themes, each dealing with the difference (or lack thereof) between reality and imagination, or the ability of imagination and belief to shape reality. Ultimately, I guess that is a theme that resonates with me more than Macbeth's venture into ambition, prophecy, and gore. I thought Macbeth was the best performance of the three shows we've seen so far (with three more to go), and it will certainly stick with me. But I like the other two a lot more, if that makes sense.

All in all a good day, but a tiring one. Tomorrow is an easy day, with only an evening performance of "Henry VIII" for a couple of us. Then Saturday will be another two-play day. So I better get some rest!

Hot as Hell in Ashland

2009-08-19T23:21:00.000-07:00

We drove up to Ashland, Oregon, last night because we have a bunch of tickets to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This is a particular treat, not only because it's our only family vacation for the summer, but also because Jan and I have been meaning to come up here for years, and only this year managed to arrange it.

So, first a few road trip notes, then we'll talk theater.

The drive up isn't too bad. We made it in 6.5 hours, including a stop for dinner and refueling. The first part is pretty much rote for us, as it's the same route we take to go skiing, but then branches northward through the central valley, and that was territory I've never driven, and only been a passenger on long, long ago. Might have been prettier in the daytime, but it was certainly cooler in the evening.

After an uneventful drive (with a soundtrack of the books-on-CD of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"), we arrived in Ashland just before 1:00 am, greeted enthusiastically by our daughter, who has been off traveling with Grandma for a couple of weeks. She gave us the grand tour of the little house we've swapped for, and eventually we all settled down and headed for bed.

Needless to say (I hope), we all slept in quite late in the morning, and after checking a few recommendations from my Facebook friends, headed out for the short walk to brunch at the Morning Glory Restaurant. That was a great find, especially as it is only about two blocks from the house. On the plus side, great food (marionberry syrup!!!) and nice service. On the minus side, it was flippin' HOT out. I mean, well into the 90s (F). Obnoxiously hot, really. No wonder they call the place Ashland--it's obviously all burned up long ago. Sheesh!

It being hot, some of us thought we ought to go out and find some way to cool off in the afternoon (and perhaps work off some of the big brunch). After checking out the nearby city park that has a small water play area (it looked way too hot, despite the water) we decided to head up to the reservoir outside town. The water level's pretty low, but it was a fun little swim for those (unlike yours truly) who had remembered to pack swim suits. I sat under a shade tree and read a book about avalanches.

All was well until after the swimming, when our daughter ran afoul of a bee or two, and got stung on two toes. Ouch! We managed to get some first-aid help from the park ranger, but decided it was best to head home, where some ice and rest seemed to make things better.

As we headed out to get some dinner before our first play, it became clear that additional first aid was necessary. The nearby Safeway pharmacy had nothing helpful, but we had ten minutes to get to the real pharmacy downtown, and we made it. They had some helpful salve and dressings, and all seemed in order. We got to the festival area, found a quick bite at Martino's (lobster ravioli!) and made it into the play with a few minutes to spare.

Tonight we were seeing "Don Quixote" at the open-air Elizabethan Stage. It's a nice theater, and I'm looking forward to seeing some actual Shakespeare there later in the week (Henry VIII, I think). It would be really hot in there in the daytime, but for an evening show it was great. Never having read or seen Don Quixote or any of its derivatives (I've heard the soundtrack to Man of La Mancha, but never seen it), I wasn't sure what to expect. And the more people told me, the more I questioned bringing an 8-year-old with us.

As it turned out, she didn't like it, and got quite bored early in the first act. She and Jan went out at intermission to explore the neighborhood, so Grandma and I watched the second act without them. They had a grand time checking out places, including the sweet shop, and met us at the end of the play with some cupcakes they'd gotten for free at closing time!

So, about the play. It's quite an interesting presentation. It captures well the difficulty of distinguishing reality from imagination, especially where fiction is involved. Many of the imaginary bits are played with puppets, many of which are clever and cute. The players walk a tight line between the clownish and the sincerely comical, and for the most part it works well. The character I found most interesting in many ways is the one labeled "The Cervantes Avatar," who keeps returning in various incarnations, often making awful puns.

It was fun (in spite of the boredom of the younger generation), and a fine introduction to the festival. Tomorrow we have two plays: Jan and I see "Macbeth" in the afternoon, and the whole family will see "The Music Man" in the evening.

Reform What, Exactly?

2009-08-14T19:37:00.000-07:00

The most frustrating thing about the ongoing current "debates" over "health care reform" is that there isn't actually any discussion of reforming health care. At most, it's a discussion of health-care finance reform. But with the best option for that excluded. So maybe, just maybe, we could call it health insurance reform. But we won't, and people will get frightened that somehow this will get in the way of their relationship with their doctor. When in fact, the current insurance system does a lot more of that. My doctor complains all the time about all the paperwork he has to do in lieu of actually caring for patients.

Imagine that...we could fix the financing system so that doctors could spend more of their time and attention dealing with actual health care!

Yet another surreal moment in our political discourse.

Such as it is.

Police FAIL

2009-08-13T08:36:00.000-07:00

Riding through downtown San Francisco yesterday on the way to a trade show at Moscone Center, we noticed what appeared to be some college-age guys riding on the back of a van. Not too smart that. As we got closer, we noticed a couple of things about this stunt: a) the riders were doing this without the knowledge or permission of the driver, and b) the van belongs to the SFPD.

Sorry about the finger in the picture. I only had a moment to fish out the phone and snap the photo; both cars were moving at the time.

My best guess is that this was a fraternity initiation or something similar. Riding the back bumper of a van through city traffic is extremely dangerous, of course, but just the sort of thing kids of that age would try. But on the back of a police van? And what does it say about the driver that she was unaware of what was going on? As the hipsters say on the Interwebs these days: FAIL.

My Broken State, Part IV

2009-07-20T22:25:00.000-07:00

It's bad. It's really bad. As usual, Digby says it better than just about anyone:

The system is broken and nobody couldn't have headed this off entirely. But I'm afraid that we are going to have to reform more than the state constitution to fix things. We need to reform politics itself somehow, convince people that it isn't American Idol or the World Series, or the ruling class will always be able to afford to put on a show whenever they need to manipulate the folks and the folks will probably fall for it.

She also refers to a Calitics post from this morning, detailing the degree of damage being done to the state today:

Democrats have caved and given Arnold Schwarzenegger what he wanted - a cuts-only budget that does massive and lasting damage to the state of California, to the people who live here, and to our collective future. It's taken 31 years, but Howard Jarvis is finally going to get the wholesale destruction of public services he always wanted.

As a nearly lifelong resident of the state, it pains me to see the deterioration in services and facilities. We had wonderful schools, parks, and programs when I was growing up, and now we have potholes, graffiti, and homeless people living in the streets. There is still a lot of great stuff here, but we've got some big, big messes to clean up.

I hope we can muster the will.

Truth, Stranger than Fiction

2009-07-08T23:53:00.000-07:00

This is an amazing story. Even if you don't like baseball, there are some amazing elements.

It's impossible to know with certainty, of course, but considering all the evidence, it's very likely that Steve Dalkowski was the hardest-throwing pitcher in the history of baseball.

Wow. How come I never heard of him? He never reached the major leagues! How is that? Oh...

Quite simply, the problem was Dalkowski's control, or more precisely his utter lack of it. If there's reason to question whether Dalkowski's velocity was unmatched in history, there's really none to doubt his wildness. Not only has there never been another professional pitcher who achieved feats of wildness equal to Dalkowski's, there's never been another pitcher who came remotely close.

The page then recounts an amazing litany of accomplishments, starting with this:

- In high school, he had an 18-strikeout, 18-walk no-hitter.

But even more:

- In one extra-inning game in the Eastern League, Dalkowski struck out 27 batters and walked 16 while throwing 283 pitches.

- One time he was pulled in the second inning after throwing 120 pitches.

It just keeps going. And to top it off, there is a litany of brutal alcohol abuse and such. Just an amazing story, and all true.

Thanks to Paul Campos at LGM for pointing out this great item. I like his closing comment:

Apparently he didn't hit many batters, which I suppose is a tribute to the speed of human reflexes when survival is at stake.

What could I add to that?

My Broken State, Part III

2009-07-07T08:10:00.001-07:00

Oh, wait...it's not just about my state anymore (h/t to Atrios):

California is the state in the worst shape, and it’s also the state no one wants to help, because its problems stem from terrible institutions and a horribly dysfunctional government. They’re not just cyclically screwed; they worked very hard to get themselves into this mess, and the rest of America, quite reasonably, doesn’t want to bail them out. But this is a problem for the rest of America, because rare is the state that couldn’t use some additional help right about now.

It's true. California is so broken that it's going to make it really, really hard to fix the national economy. It's not going to be pretty, people.

New Firefox with a Personal Twist

2009-06-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5 today. It's no secret to anyone who has perused this blog page that I'm a Firefox fan, and I'm pleased to see that 3.5 will be faster and more memory conscious.

As an additional, personal note, Mozilla has added a dashboard page (that will not work with Internet Explorer, because it doesn't support the open standards that enable the live page updates) that lets you see in real time how many Firefox downloads are happening and where they are going.

I mention this because at the bottom of the page is a logo that says "Powered by SQLstream," which is my little startup company. It's our first real public splash like that, and we're quite excited about it.

What's in a Nickname?

2009-06-23T09:28:00.000-07:00

I was tickled to see this article, pointed out by a friend I worked with in D.C., years ago:

If you want to score a meeting with Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), know this: His scheduler/office manager, Elizabeth Becton, is to be addressed by her full name — not Liz or any other variant.

It goes on to detail a rather lengthy and heated exchange over how this person wishes to be addressed. And while I don't particularly appreciate the heat of some of the messages in the exchange (there is definitely a level at which this particular issue is getting in the way of her doing her job effectively), I can certainly relate to the level of frustration.

Probably the single most irritating thing about working on Capitol Hill for me was the glad-handing and false intimacy that was affected by many, and especially lobbyists. Dealing with lobbyists is part of the game, of course, but that doesn't mean they should be able to just assume they can call you by the nickname of their choice.

I realize that some of this is generational, but when I introduced myself as "Richard," it was irritating in the extreme to have the introducee come back and call me "Dick." Not my nickname: never was, never will be. My friends knew I was "Chard," but professionally, I would use my more formal name, if only to avoid having to explain my nom de vegetable to someone who was only a casual acquaintance.

I suppose part of it is an introvert thing: I don't share personal stuff with just anyone. Letting someone call me by my chosen nickname is a way of controlling my personal space. People who call me Chard (mostly) know me. People who call me Dick definitely do not.

I won't claim this is the only or even the main reason I decided to get out of the political life, but it was certainly a factor. The whole question of who owns my identity is actually important to me, and I didn't like the assumption by others that they could decide who I was.

It makes for an interesting step into a forum such as this blog, where my ramblings are available to virtually anyone. In practice, the only ones reading this are, in fact, my friends and family, and you all know me as Chard. Heaven forbid this should ever become "popular," leading all the unwashed masses to my doorstep, armed with my preferred name.

No danger there, I think.

But it's true that this is a personal blog, a place where it's safe to be Chard. I would have to think really hard about what to do if I were to write serious or professional material here. Luckily for you, I don't step into that very often!

Programmer Humor

2009-06-09T18:12:00.001-07:00

Just skip this if you're not a geek. Really.

Cute blog post someone pointed me to a couple of weeks ago, and I'm just now getting to pass it along. It's a humorous time line of programming languages.

I quite liked this bit:

1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.
1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

Update: I just clicked through to another post the same guy wrote about diving with a whale shark. He's a pretty amusing writer:

But this was one big krill swilling machine. He was big enough that an accidental bump would be like an accidental bump from a large dump truck - a large dump truck with a mouth the size of a Volkswagen.

Still, Brian and I were determined. So we quickly squashed down our near-pathological fear of dump trucks and swam towards the magnificent creature.

My Broken State, Part II

2009-06-09T16:37:00.000-07:00

There will be plenty more where this comes from, sad to say.

Good posting on Calitics today by Robert Cruickshank about why raising taxes is preferable to (the inevitable, common wisdom) cutting spending (credit to Atrios, an actual economist, for pointing it out). Short take:

How will budget cuts help promote economic growth?
It's a question that I rarely ever see asked, and one that is never answered, certainly not in a state where the conventional wisdom is that revenue increases are impossible, even though we've never tried to make them happen. Instead the supposed "political reality" of no new taxes is trumping the economic reality that taxes are preferable to spending cuts in a recession. The result is that spending cuts are treated as inevitable even though they are a sure path to Depression.

I'm not saying he's absolutely right or anything, but I'd say it's a clear sign of how broken things are that no one is even raising the question as part of the "debate" on what to do about the broken budget.

Here's a hint for those in the state legislature: You can't win if you don't even play the game. It's unclear that they even know they're supposed to be in one.

Happy World Oceans Day!

2009-06-08T12:10:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post because I'm busy, but I wanted to make sure I mentioned World Oceans Day. This year marks the first time World Oceans Day is an officially-recognized, international holiday.

The short history is that Canada proposed World Ocean Day in 1992 at the Earth Summit, and various folks have been celebrating and observing it for a number of years (including local celebrations coordinated by a group I work with, COARE). Just this year the United Nations declared World Oceans Day (including adding the "s" to "Ocean") as a worldwide holiday to celebrate the ocean.

So take a moment today to ponder the ocean that covers nearly 3/4 of the surface of our planet. This is not a political event or an excuse to support a particular cause. The ocean means something different to everyone, but it's also critically important to everyone in the world. So regardless of whether you agree with my particular issues (such as shark conservation, marine protected areas, ocean-bound waste, marine mammal conservation, coral reef protection), this is a great day to think about what the ocean means to you and your life, and think about what you can do for it.

Portrait of an Obscure Vegetable

2009-06-04T11:00:00.000-07:00

My friend Rod passed this along. I thought it was relatively hilarious:

In our last episode of “Weird Veggies I Have Known and Learned to Love”, we talked kohlrabi; today it’s that ‘not quite celery – where’s the beet’ thing called Swiss Chard. Chard suffers from a branding problem - how good does it feel saying the word “chard”?

I think my favorite bit is the notion that someone has a series of "Weird Veggies I Have Known," etc. But I'm unclear on what's so unpleasant about that particular name.

And this:

Try it. Then try it again. Learn to like chard. If you have to tell yourself ‘It’s good for me’, then so be it. It IS good for you. Put more colorful and flavorful veggies into your diet. It really IS good for you.

I have a confession: I've never liked the stuff, myself. But it is very good for you. You should buy it or grow it and eat it. Lots of it.

This post reminded me of a column by Gerald Nachman I read back when I was in high school. (I had no idea he was from Oakland!) I believe it started with the sentence, "Unfortunately, chard is very good for you." It later quoted laboratory rats who were part of FDA tests as saying "I'd rather be dead than eat this stuff anymore." Quite humorous.

Anyway, chard is a fine vegetable and gets a bad rap. Just because I don't like it, there's no reason you shouldn't eat a lot of it. Now go and be healthy.

When Good Dragons Go Bad

2009-05-25T19:28:00.001-07:00

Just saw this in the news, and thought I'd pass it along to my millions of dragon-loving followers:

Komodo dragons have shark-like teeth and poisonous venom that can kill a person within hours of a bite. Yet villagers who have lived for generations alongside the world's largest lizard were not afraid — until the dragons started to attack.

It's unclear to me just how much more dangerous these guys really are. But it's interesting to see the different theories being put forth and the responses to them.

Perhaps it's just a slow news day. But if you happen to be in the neighborhood, better watch out!

My Broken State

2009-05-19T08:49:00.000-07:00

I have had the privilege of living in California most of my life. There are many wonderful things about the place, and I have chosen it over some other terrific options. One of the not-so great aspects of living here, however, is that the state government is horribly broken.

This article from The Economist gets a lot of what's not working, and talks a bit about some efforts to fix or replace it. Here's a pretty good summary:

The broken budget mechanism and the twin failures in California’s representative and direct democracy are enough to guarantee dysfunction. The sheer complexity of the state exacerbates it. Peter Schrag, the author of “California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment”, has counted about 7,000 overlapping jurisdictions, from counties and cities to school and water districts, fire and park commissions, utility and mosquito-abatement boards, many with their own elected officials. The surprise is that anything works at all.
As a result, there is now a consensus among the political elite that California’s governance is “fundamentally broken” and that the state is “ungovernable, unless we make tough choices”, as Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles and a likely candidate for governor next year, puts it.

I hope we'll be able to pull it together. The city I live in (Oakland) is pretty dysfunctional at this point, too. Interesting times....

Popular Depictions of Torture

2009-05-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

Torture is a standard trope in many forms of popular entertainment. Frankly, it's so common that I don't think some writers even realize what they're including in their material. For example, the very fun (and mostly kid-appropriate) movie The Incredibles has some very intense scenes of torture. I realize that's a staple for superhero movies, but it didn't seem necessary in that otherwise terrific film. And it made me regret that my daughter saw the film, as I felt she was too young to understand that part (but old enough to be troubled by it).

Now, in my youth I saw plenty of "torture," too, but mostly in silly contexts such as cartoons or the Batman TV series, where the "danger" was usually so comical as to be laughable. I mean, Batman being fed to a giant "man-eating clam" is just too silly for even a child to take seriously. We get the message that the bad guy is trying to "torture" Batman, either to extract some information or to make his (highly dubious) demise slow and painful. And I suppose one could argue that such easy depictions of something truly awful might actually lessen one's horror at the real thing (though in my case, that obviously wasn't the outcome).

This is all brought to mind by my seeing the new Star Trek movie over the weekend. I really enjoyed it, both because it was a fun movie from end to end and because I can't even remember the last time I saw any movie on its opening weekend, even standing in line with friends to get good seats. What fun!

As many Star Trek episodes do, this one has some torture in it (though less graphic than much of what's out there these days). I can barely remember an episode of the original series where Captain Kirk or one of his crew didn't get abused in some way by someone. (And is it just coincidence that that series overlapped with Batman in the mid-1960s?) But I had forgotten the really excellent (and excruciating) episode in Star Trek: The Next Generation where Captain Picard is tortured at length by the Cardassians.

There's a great discussion of it at length in this article from Slate by Juliet Lapidos (hat tip to Josh Marshall at TPM). Read the whole thing; it's very good. Here's a highlight:

The extended torture sessions take a toll not just on Picard but on his interrogator as well. The more time the Cardassian spends with Picard, the more he becomes fixated on breaking his prisoner. And so the supposed goal of torture—information—is sidelined, while the means by which the goal will theoretically be achieved—mental submission—becomes an end in itself. As Picard puts it, "Torture has never been a reliable means of extracting information. It is ultimately self-defeating as a means of control. One wonders it is still practiced."

One gets the impression watching Dick Cheney recently that big chunks of the U.S. government crossed that line at some point (like waterboarding the same guy scores of times). Eventually the already dubious goal of forcefully extracting information gets lost in the mission of breaking the victim. Instead of the ends justifying the means (though they still insist that's what's behind it), the means themselves are merely trying to justify their own use. (If you can't break the subject, what's the point of trying to? Thus, you must keep trying.) Ultimately, torture demeans both the torturer and the victim, and for no good outcome.

The good news is that this stuff is only a minor subplot in the whole Star Trek movie. I highly recommend it to those who like the old Trek: the new angles on the familiar characters are a lot of fun. I'll avoid further comment so as not to spoil it for anyone. But go read the Slate article.

Sea Creature Update

2009-05-06T23:14:00.000-07:00

No actual further news on the psychedelic frog fish or the barreleye fish, but I just stumbled across both of them on the Rocketboom blog in a post about the 15 most bizarre sea creatures. Definitely other cool stuff there.

And speaking of Rocketboom, I haven't been paying attention, and was disappointed to see that Joanne Colan left as presenter last month. She was great fun to watch. I'm sure her replacement will also be good.

The Good Old Days

2009-05-06T22:18:00.000-07:00

I have long complained that baseball players, and particularly pitchers, seem to be pampered to a degree today that I think diminishes the game and the achievements of the players. In particular, starting pitchers are coddled, pitch less often and for shorter stints than they did a generation ago.

The 20-game winner is nearly extinct. Pitchers rarely finish games, settling for so-called "quality starts" of 6 innings or so. They shoot for 200 innings in a season, where 300 used to be relatively common. I'm not suggesting that they don't work hard or anything (though some, such as Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus, contend that pitchers pitch too infrequently in games, and too often between times).

It is comforting, of course, to know that this is not a new issue. For example, this quote from a retired pitcher:

The game of baseball hasn't changed much in the past fifty years, but the players have a different philosophy toward the game. They want to make a lot of money and retire. ... We played for the love of the game; there were few holdouts. We wanted to pitch every day; to win more games than the other guy--not for the money, but for the glory of winning.

It's great stuff, and it comes from Hall of Famer Kid Nichols in Baseball Digest, January 1948 (hat tip to Paul Campos at LGM). Here are some more gems:

...modern-day clubs carry too many pitchers, which prevents the hurlers from working enough to bring out the best that is in them. The old-time clubs carried three pitchers; today, they have 10. ...

Sometimes we pitched every other day. Twice I pitched three days in succession and went the distance in each game. ...

We worked hard, but I wouldn't say we were overworked. During my twelve years with Boston, I took part in 517 games, averaging twenty-seven and three-tenths wins per season. ... If I was overworked, it didn't affect my arm. I spent seventeen years in organized ball, far above the average of present-day hurlers.

It's short, but a good read. Anyway, I guess the more things change, the farther we get from the "good old days," whatever we believe them to have been. And yet, baseball is still pretty wonderful!

I'll just be wandering off in my walker now.

Talking About Torture

2009-04-28T08:44:00.000-07:00

First, my apologies for being so silent this month. It's not that there aren't things I want to write. I just found myself immersed in a project for work that ate up all my time. Now that I have at least somewhat caught up on little things like sleep and family, I can once again start to share with y'all!

So we're back to one of our long-time topics here, torture. To summarize for those who arrived late: I'm against it.

But the "debate" goes on. The release of the White House "torture memos" this month has made quite clear that some truly despicable acts were approved and applied. I can think of no explanation for waterboarding someone dozens of times that doesn't involve sadism, desperation, or cluelessness. All of which are completely inexcusable.

Probably the most bizarre aspect of the discussion to me is the focus on whether these tactics "worked." As if somehow, some nugget of information extracted by torture justifies grossly immoral, inhuman, and patently illegal behavior. The "effectiveness" of torture (about which I have ranted many times) is a completely tangential issue. Torturing people is wrong, and to claim that it is necessary or otherwise justified just defies both rationality and decency.

The worst and most lasting legacy of the last few years may not be the state of global economic ruin; that will recover. But the pervasive post-hoc justification of unthinkable, unspeakable acts will be hard to wean people from. A generation that grows up believing that ends justify means will be difficult to live with.

The always excellent Tom Tomorrow gives a good slant on the torture "debate" in this week's comic.

Lunch Thoughts

2009-04-01T23:19:00.000-07:00

Haven't had much time for blogging since we got back from Indonesia. Lots of work piled up while we were away.

Today I went off to run some errands at lunchtime, and found myself in a position to grab a fast-food burger on the way back to the office. So I stopped in the Carl's Jr at Hallidie Plaza. It's pretty rare that I have a hamburger for lunch (or dinner, really), but I've always kind of liked Carl's "Six Dollar Burger."

As I ate mine today, it occurred to me that before too long, that name may have to change. The list price for the Six Dollar Burger now exceeds $5. I wonder what they'll do about that.

And I have to say I was a bit disappointed in my Western Bacon Six Dollar Burger. It was rather dry, and I don't think I've ever seen bacon sliced that thin. Ah, well.

The Long Ride Home

2009-03-20T11:34:00.000-07:00

[Note: I'll update later with some pictures!]

The last legs of this trip are all in the air. From Makassar we fly to Bali, have a brief stopover, then off to Taipei, another stopover, and then home to San Francisco. Because of our friend the International Date Line, the trip starts in Makassar on Thursday morning, and after about 24 hours in transit, it's Thursday evening in San Francisco.

The hard part, of course, is figuring out how to do the trip without ending up hopelessly jet-lagged next week at work. So we'll try a combination of staying awake (my favorite solution to jet lag), and the homeopathic No Jet Lag pills. I've got books to read, and we'll see what fine cinematic treats China Airlines has in store.

Much later...

And it all turns out fine. Jan wasn't feeling too well, so she slept much of the trip. Christopher and I managed to stay awake most of the way, and the airline showed us some decent movies (unlike the trip over, where the "highlight" was a TV movie called "The Librarian"): Madagascar II on the Bali-Taipei leg, then Quantum of Solace (not my favorite Bond flick, but diverting enough for a plane) and Slumdog Millionaire, which I actually wanted to see, on the long transoceanic leg.

On the layover in Bali, we did a little shopping to use up the last of our Indonesian money, then ate lunch at the same Japanese restaurant we went to last September before catching our flight home. That gave us a chance to say goodbye to a few of our friends.

During the stop in Taipei, we had time to walk around and see some of the shops, including a gift shop from the national museum. Unfortunately, we also found shark fins for sale at several shops. But there was also nice tea, art, and some cool electronic gizmos. So that kept us busy. Another intriguing aspect was some rest areas they had decorated to resemble some of the natural areas one might visit in Taiwan. Kind of an interesting way to advertise, and a pleasant little respite from the commercial and travel facilities.

Oh, and they had a bunch of decorated art cows. The decorations were by school children. They were very bright and colorful and very cool looking!

All in all, our very long travel day passed relatively quickly, and the great reward came when we arrived in San Francisco, where we were greeted by our very eager, happy daughter. That was a most welcome end to a great trip.

Interlude in Makassar

2009-03-19T21:40:00.000-07:00

Because of domestic flight schedules, we got to spend about a day in Makassar. We had flown through Makassar on the way to Raja Ampat, but this time we got to go into town and stay overnight.

Several interesting points. I noted on the way through the first time that the city and/or the airport seem to have two apparently interchangeable names, Makassar and Ujung Pandang. Some quick Googling now tells me that Ujung Pandang was a somewhat short-lived official name of the city at the end of the 20th century, but it is now Makassar again. I should note that a lot of the place names in Indonesia seem to change now and then. The province of Papua, which includes Raja Ampat, was at some point Iryan Jaya. But not anymore.

Second, Makassar is a commercial and shipping center, but not a tourist destination. It is practically at the geographical center of the Indonesian archipelago. We had a nice hotel, the Imperial Aryaduta. Nice facilities, but it's odd to be in a place where even the hotel staff speaks fairly limited English. Makassar definitely is not set up to cater to American tourists.

Third, this is our first stop in Indonesia where you really get the feeling of how deeply Muslim this country is. There are mosques seemingly everywhere, including one right across the street from our hotel. This means we can hear the call to prayer five times a day (and the hotel room has an indicator to show us where Mecca lies). The hotel information book includes a prayer-time schedule for the entire year.

Going out to lunch was a bit of an adventure. Aside from the fact that we had a bit of difficulty understanding the verbal directions from the hotel staff, we also didn't have any clue where we were going. So we found a restaurant and decided to go in. The menu was only in Indonesian, and the wait staff spoke only a tiny bit of English. Luckily I had learned enough of the names of food items on the boat that I could identify chicken, fish, rice, noodles, and a few other items. And beer. We perhaps didn't expect eight big bottles, but it was a hot day, and they went down great. The food was really tasty, and cheap. No complaints.

Dinner was pretty amusing, too. In the basement of the hotel there is a Brazilian-Mexican Pub and Restaurant called Salsa. The homesick Californians decided to see what Indonesian Mexican food is. We're still wondering, because the menu had no Mexican items. At all. Go figure. So we mostly ordered pizza!

I guess most important, the hotel had Internet service for me, and massages for Jan. Something for all of us, and a nice little experience that served as a transition on the way home.

Diving Recap

2009-03-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

Wow...it's over. Lots and lots of diving, and it's done. So let's look back at what we've done:

43 dives, and I think Jan and I were the only ones who did them all. I spent nearly 52 hours under water, or an average of about an hour and twelve minutes for each dive. And Jan averaged about 7 minutes more per dive, which adds up to almost a full five extra hours under water over the two weeks. Amazing!

I guess we're kinda seriously waterlogged by now. But it's OK. A few days ago I was concerned that my ears weren't going to be happy with a dive trip this long, but they seem to have made it through just fine.

So, short summary is that we've done more diving on this single trip than we've ever done at one take before. Was it worth it?

I guess the obvious answer is, "Duh." I can't believe we'd have spent that much time if we weren't enjoying the dives. Although I have to say, we did a night dive the other night that was just dismal. Even the cruise director called it "crappy." And we were still down about an hour. So I guess it's plausible that we might have done a huge amount of mediocre diving, especially having traveled halfway around the world to do so.

Fact is, Raja Ampat and the surrounding area are amazing. I have never seen the sheer variety of corals and colors as we observed here. Just spectacular. And fish! Large numbers of fishes, big schools, great variety, and so on. And the reefs were quite healthy and robust.

Even in those cases where we didn't have spectacular conditions, such as the last few days in the north where the visibility was murky, we saw some great stuff (and could tell that in good conditions, it would be truly awesome).

Looking back, I realize I haven't said much about the dive boat. We sailed on the Archipelago Adventurer II, of the Archipelago Fleet. And I believe the cabin shown in the little slide show on the page is the cabin we actually stayed in. I have to admit to having some mixed feelings about the operation. I can break it down into three separate areas: the diver operation, the business, and the boat itself.

The dive operation is top-notch. The dive guides are terrific (especially Ali and Made), they know the sites and conditions very well. The tenders, tender crews, and deck crew are great. We had some issues with the management of the operation--how they chose sites or limited dive times--but that didn't mar the diving itself. The cruise directors are relatively new on the job, and this is their first time running a liveaboard.

On the business side, I was really impressed with Archipelago Fleet. They arranged all our domestic transfers and lodgings, and all that worked very smoothly. I don't think we could have managed all that by ourselves. It was particularly helpful to have locals there to negotiate all our baggage transfers and fees at the airports. This was all a cut above what I've experienced with other dive companies.

Lastly, the boat itself. The website describes it as "newly constructed," but frankly, it's a bit run down (and I'm told it's going into dry dock in June for some much-needed repairs). The public areas are nice. Both of the dining salons (one of which is used as the camera and TV room) are pleasant, and the dining deck outside the upper dining salon is lovely. The sun deck has no covering, so it's really a SUN deck. Really, it's too hot up there most of the time, so we ended up either indoors or at least under cover on a lower deck. Several of the cabins leaked when it rained. Some of the fixtures and finishing in the cabins were in less-than-perfect repair.

Overall, then, I'm a little conflicted. On the whole, I liked the dive operation and the boat crew and the business operations. On the other hand, the boat itself isn't really up to the standard of other "luxury" liveaboards we've been on.

So Raja Ampat gets a big thumbs-up for the diving. Archipelago Fleet really impressed me as a company and overall operation. I have real reservations about the Archipelago Adventurer II, though. So I would certainly consider going back, but would want to see that the boat had gotten some real upgrades. There are other boats operating in the area, and I would have to look at them, too.

Return Engagements

2009-03-17T14:48:00.000-07:00

I've always been of the school that says great experiences aren't repeatable. Your second trip to Disneyland can never be as magical as the first. And if you win the lottery, you should stop buying tickets.

Along those lines, the passengers on our boat last night chose to head back to the sites where we dove with manta rays and under the piers the other day. In the light of not-so-favorable conditions where we'd been diving, the group elected to bypass the signature dive site of the region in favor of sites that had given us great dives. The danger, of course, being that it might not be as good this time. Indeed, I mentioned to Jan last night that we could sit and wait for mantas with no luck, or find that the fish had abandoned the piers and a current was ripping through or something. Ever the optimist, no?

So we arrived early at Manta Sandy to check for favorable currents and such, planning to dive at 8:00 am. Of course, another boat shows up and drops their divers in at 7:30. So we rescheduled to 8:30, so as not to overcrowd the site.

At 8:30 we dropped in, and lo, there are mantas at the cleaning station already, and we had as many as six at a time swooping through for the next hour-and-a-half or more. Marvelous! As good as the first time, and maybe even better in some ways.

Getting back on our boat, we learned that the other boat that had jumped in ahead of us had waited 40 minutes before seeing any mantas, and then had only three. So we definitely got the best of that exchange! They were coming back to the site as we left, so maybe they had something good later.

Then on to the piers, where we dropped in and...no fish. Really. Just desolate. Ghost town. We poked around the reef for a while, finding some pretty nice fish and things, and eventually headed back to the piers. The anchovies had returned, as had the school of trevally jacks that like to hunt there. But no sign of the scads that were so plentiful the last visit.

On the plus side, someone found a little farm of giant tridachna clams (Jan counted 19 of them), including some quite large. Always nice to see big, healthy giant clams.

All in all, it was worth coming back. No great disappointments, and the mantas were at least as good the second time around. We were fortunate.

Great Expectations

2009-03-16T23:28:00.000-07:00

All trip long we've been hearing about how great the north was going to be: great visibility, big fish, and so on. And indeed, it's quite different from both the early muck diving we did and the reefs as we worked our way up here.

On the other hand, conditions have been somewhat poor, with unusual currents bringing in murky, yellow water much of the time. The nutrient-rich water is great for the reefs and the critters who live on and around them, but it makes the diving less than spectacular. It's nice to see a school of 100 fish, but frustrating to know that you could see 1000 or more if the water were clearer.

This suggests that perhaps our cruise director should have been a little more circumspect about what we would find here. Yes, we're all experienced divers and know that the conditions are at the whim of the ocean. But we can't help but get our hopes up when we constantly hear how great it's going to be.

It's a little disappointing, but we are still seeing some great stuff. No complaints about the diving; it's just not quite what we'd been led to expect.

Personal Bests

2009-03-16T22:50:00.000-07:00

One thing that fascinates me about diving is that the longer I do it, the more I learn about myself. I have, over the years, learned to slow my breathing to the point that I could almost always make a standard tank of air last for an hour under most circumstances. Earlier this week, I faced a challenge, in that some of the folks I was diving with were pushing for longer dive times, up to and sometimes exceeding an hour and a half.

And I utterly surprised myself by managing to do it, too. It was a stretch at times, and I came up with nearly empty tanks a couple of times, but darned if by the end of the trip, I'm not finding 80-90 minutes a very reachable goal nearly all the time. And a couple of times I got to find out what happens when my dive computer runs out of digits to count the dive time. It only uses two digits, so when we aimed for 100 minutes a couple of times, I was curious to see what it would do.

Turns out I can't dive more than 99 minutes on my computer. It just stops counting at 99 (or at least, stops displaying additional time. This seems bad, as it's really, really important to know how much time has elapsed. It was one of a couple of limitations I ran into this week with my old computer. I think I'm going to have to invest in a new one before we do another serious dive trip. Luckily, that gives me a little time to save my pennies.

Reef Encounters

2009-03-14T15:59:00.000-07:00

Neat stuff today, in rather unexpected venues. First dive in the morning was a manta dive at a site called "Manta Sandy." As the name implies, it's a sandy sea mount with little coral, but one area is a known cleaning station for big manta rays. And after we sat there for about 15 minutes, here came several big rays. The first ones, I'd guess, we maybe 8-12 feet across their wingspans. Later we saw some that must have been more like 15-18 feet: just massive. They come in, swooping and swirling, with remoras attached, so the cleaner fish can do their jobs. Truly fun to watch, and we had about an hour of that, so it was definitely worth the wait.

Next stop was at the pier at a little island called Airborek (or maybe Air Borek). The main attraction is huge schools of little bait fish (scads, mostly, but also anchovies) that hang out under the pier. Those were spectacular: fun to swim with a great photo and video subjects. The big surprises awaited us on the coral heads nearby. Ali, one of the dive guides, found two pygmy seahorses that he hadn't known about before. Then one of the divers, Mary, found a little blue-ringed octopus.

Basically, I had very low expectations for both of those dives, and both turned out to be great. This is one of the reasons I almost never skip a dive: you never know what you might miss. There's always risk with going to a spot to see one particular thing, since it might not be there. On the other hand, you could always see something great you didn't expect!

The Plural of Octopus

2009-03-13T14:30:00.000-07:00

Considerable discussion among the pedants in our group about the proper plural of "octopus." I had never really thought about it, and never looked it up. Apparently,"octopi" is incorrect. Indeed, my spell-checker has just flagged it as an error.

The correct word is apparently "octopodes," although "octopuses" is also acceptable (and the only version my spell checker -- and Blogger's -- seems to accept).

Mixed Results

2009-03-10T21:51:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest changes in diving since I started almost 15 years ago is the common adoption of mixed-gas diving. It used to be that the tank on your back held compressed air, and while that is still sometimes true, on most of these tropical dive boats the tanks are mostly filled with Nitrox now.

"Nitrox" is a generic term for "enriched air" which is air with more oxygen added. Oxygen is generally very good for your body. We've all see tired athletes breathing oxygen to recover, and various kinds of patients breathing it under a doctor's care.

Divers have tried lots of modifications of breathing gas over the years. Ultimately there are two (or three) issues they are trying to solve:

Air contains 79% nitrogen (versus 21% oxygen), and nitrogen bubbles can cause "the bends." The less nitrogen, the better.
Oxygen at high pressure can be toxic. So not too much of that in the mix, especially as you dive deeper.
Breathing too much pressurized oxygen over the course of a day can also be toxic (but in a different way).

I'll spare you all the science behind all this. Suffice it to say that it's desirable to displace some of the nitrogen in breathing gas with another gas. Under many conditions, oxygen is a good choice, but if one is diving very deep (and therefore under very high pressure), that could be deadly, so an inert gas such as helium or argon is generally used instead.

I remember vividly seeing film of divers years ago in a bathysphere breathing a gas with lots of helium added. The resulting "helium voice" was quite memorable. There is still "heliox" in use, but divers more commonly use the heavier (but also inert) argon now.

Fairly recently, recreational divers started using Nitrox (air with additional oxygen), which for most diving provides a margin of safety and comfort.

The drawback for me is that one needs a special dive computer to handle the necessary calculations for allowable depth and time given a particular mix of gases. Most modern dive computers handle this pretty elegantly, but my rather outdated one requires that I set it for the percentage of oxygen in the Nitrox for every single dive. And if I should forget, it defaults to assuming I'm using a 50% oxygen gas for my next dive, rather than the more reasonable assumption that I'll be using whatever I used the last time (usually between 30 and 32% oxygen).

So of course, I have now twice forgotten to set the computer before a dive on this trip, and it has been a huge hassle. I think I've handled it well and responsibly, by occasionally lying to the computer and telling it I was breathing plain air instead of Nitrox, so as to balance out the calculations. But I should not have to do this.

Before I do any more serious diving, I will probably need to invest in a new dive computer. Not that I mind new toys (especially computers!), but I basically like the one I have, but for this one thing. Annoying.

Misool Eco Resort

2009-03-09T22:17:00.000-07:00

Been so busy diving the last couple of days, I haven't gotten to write at all! Diving's been really good, though.

This afternoon a few of us had the chance to pay a brief visit to a new dive resort here in Misool, the Misool Eco Resort. To say it's beautiful is an understatement. It's a lovely lagoon, and actually incorporates a small island in the lagoon via a wooden bridge.

The idea of the resort is the be as "green" and sustainable as possible. Thorben Niemann, who designed and built much of the resort, gave us a little tour and pointed out many features, such as the fact that all the wood used in construction was driftwood. They capture and use waste water for gardening. And they will soon have solar panels to generate much of the daily electricity (though not enough for, say, the air compressor in the dive center). And they've created a marine preserve around the resort, so there's no fishing and the like. We saw fish and small reef sharks swimming right in the lagoon.

It's quite beautiful and impressive. My pictures don't do it justice; you should click through to their website which does a much better job. I did get one cool shot of the inside of the roof at the resort's restaurant, though my little camera doesn't do it justice:

All I can say personally is that in the brief time we were there, we were accosted by some of the largest mosquitoes I have ever seen. They were fierce! We had forgotten to put on any repellent, but I have to say it would be a very different experience staying at the resort than on a boat as we are (with no mosquitoes!).

But it's really nice to see someone creating a very different kind of resort.

Motoring from Ambon

2009-03-06T22:35:00.000-08:00

After our night dive tonight, we pulled the anchor and started on our way north. Tomorrow morning we'll be at a small island with a fringing reef north of here. We'll do a couple of dives there, then around noon we'll head for Raja Ampat itself, specifically the island of Misool.

Raja Ampat literally means "four kings." It refers to four native kings who controlled the spice trade back in the 17th century. They divided up the spice islands, including the area we're going to now.

Raja Ampat includes one of the largest marine protected areas in the world, and should be quite spectacular. It is known for having the greatest diversity of both coral and fish life of any area known on the planet.

Diving in the Muck

2009-03-06T14:07:00.000-08:00

Today's diving is what we call "muck diving," which means searching for creatures (usually small ones), often amongst rubble, sand, or detritus. In fact, some of the best substrate for muck diving is human flotsam, such as bottles, discarded clothing, and such.

We have already seen, after only two dives, some very cool stuff. One highlight is that we've found several pairs of small cuttlefish, and have observed them both eating and mating. Wow! I'd only seem that on video before. We've also encountered more stonefish than I've probably ever observed before. Stonefish are very hard to see, as they blend in with their surroundings. But they pack a punch: very toxic spines that can kill humans. So it's good to know there are a lot of them around, if only to make us really, really careful.

Frogfish Update

2009-03-06T10:43:00.000-08:00

Just had a chat with James, one of the cruise directors. He says the much-anticipated psychedelic frogfish hasn't actually been seen by anyone in about a year. As noted in my earlier post, it was first found some twenty years ago, then "misplaced" until last year, at which time it was seen a fair amount for several months, but not since.

We've declared a bounty on finding this fish: free beer for the remainder of the trip for whoever locates it. If that doesn't find it, nothing will!

We did a nice dive this morning, kind of a check-out dive, but we saw good stuff.

Off to Ambon

2009-03-05T20:39:00.000-08:00

Today was a transit day. We said goodbye to Bali, and headed off to Ambon, where we would meet the dive boat. One of the joys of flying different airlines these days is the varying restrictions they put on baggage. For example, on China Airlines to get over here, they restricted us to two checked bags each, with a weight limit of 20 kg per bag. That's a pretty tight restriction for divers, especially for those bringing cameras and lenses and underwater housings and such.

Then this morning we took our first flight leg from Bali to Makassar (or Ujung Pandang; I need to learn why the place has two names) on Garuda Indonesia. Their limit is 20 kg per passenger. So now we're facing excess baggage fees. Luckily, they discounted a bit, as we were about 10 kg over each, and they only charged us for about 10 total.

Then we had to change airlines to get from Makassar to Ambon, so we got to do the whole baggage dance again with Lion Air. They, too, wanted to limit us to 20 kg per passenger, and again we were over, but again we got a bit of a discount.

At some level it begins to feel like kind of a racket, designed to charge one for the same overage, over and over. Unfortunately, to get to the particular corner of Indonesia we want, we have to take different airlines for each leg, so we have to cope.

Also at Makassar, we met up with the rest of the group we'll be diving with for the next couple of weeks. That includes old friends like Liz and Josh, the trip organizers from Undersea Productions, and also some new acquaintances who will soon be friends, too.

Arriving in Ambon we were told the airline hadn't been able to include all of the checked baggage. This meant that three of the bags for our group didn't make it. Luckily, all of Jan's and my bags showed up. Some other people will be a little short of fresh clothing, or in one case, short a camera housing, until we can get the additional bags in the morning.

Boarding the boat was interesting. We had to take taxis for 45 minutes or more to get from the airport to the harbor. I was quite impressed with the quality of the road the whole way. Ambon is not exactly a major metropolitan center by global standards, but it has a good main road, at least. Certainly better than many we've encountered in some other countries.

And a good thing, too, because midway through the ride, it started to rain. And we're talking major tropical downpour, with water running down the streets, kids floating boats in the gutters, and sometimes little visibility from the car. But it never felt dangerous, despite the closeness of the traffic, including the ubiquitous scooters.

The dive boat was docked (perhaps "wedged" is more accurate) between a cement barge and a tanker of some sort, so they had rigged “gangplanks” (just boards,really) to get us onto the barge, and from there onto the dive boat. It was a bit precarious, especially as it was still raining, but the crew was very helpful and we all made it aboard without incident.

And they greeted us with fresh coconuts to drink the water from. This is going to be great!

"Holiday, No Problem"

2009-03-04T21:21:00.000-08:00

As planned, a quiet day around the resort. Got up at a reasonable time, which bodes well for adjusting to the 20-hour time change. Complementary breakfast buffet was pretty good: lots of fresh fruit, fresh bread for toast, eggs, bacon, Tater Tots...you name it.

Then everyone else in the group went off to the spa for various "treatments," so I headed out to the beach to relax and read. All the nice, shady spots were already claimed, so I found a decent spot near the pool and read for a bit. The sun eventually got a bit strong so I headed over by the lounge where they have computers, Internet, and wifi, and got on the net to read a few e-mails.

Lunch was a decent cheeseburger (figure we might not see another until we get home), then a little more lazing about. We took a late afternoon stroll along the beach walk, which went by some other resorts, lots of beach bars and restaurants, and some pretty scenery. We got back just as it started to rain.

Then it rained some more. I know I wrote a bit about the rain in Ubud when we were here last year. Boy, when it decides to rain, it really rains. Welcome to the tropics! We got good and soaked on our way to dinner. Our friends decided not to even go out, just stayed in their room. I guess this will be a good test of my new deck shoes (made by OTB), which are supposed to drain well (they do) and dry fast (we'll see).

Christopher's Austrian friend who is currently living in Ubud for a couple of years drove down in the rain to visit. They joined us as we were finishing dinner, and ordered drinks. When the waiter brought her mineral water, it was too cold, and she asked for one "not cold." His response summed up the day for me: "Holiday, no problem." He brought her another, not cold.

So I've decided that's the theme of this trip for me. I'm on holiday, so I'm not going to let anything be a problem. I will let other people take care of things that might otherwise be problems. I'm just going to enjoy.

Beach Stop

2009-03-03T18:03:00.000-08:00

Sitting on the beach here is very pleasant. There is nominally free wifi out here, but I haven't found the key yet. Here, by the way, is the Puri Santrian resort in Sanur, Bali. We arrived quite uneventfully after about 20 hours in transit: 13+ hours from San Francisco to Taipei, Taiwan, then after a couple of hours in the transit lounge there, another five hours from Taipei to Denpasar, Bali.

Flights were on China Airlines, and were quite painless. Good service, lousy video, but we slept a lot of the way. Food was even pretty decent.

Being met at the airport by folks from the dive operation was a nice touch. Just knowing we didn't have to fuss with a cab and such was worth a lot.

Bali is much the way we remember it, of course. Makes sense, since it's only five months since we were last here. Very pleasant people, hot weather (30 C this afternoon, muggy). Puri Santrian is very nice, right on the beach, with a huge pool and lots of great places to sit on the beach. We seem to be considerably younger than the average couple here, and a lot less German. Don't know whether that's real, a sampling error on the beach, or a skew in the demographics in the late afternoon.

Jan has already made spa arrangements for tomorrow. I plan to relax, read, write, and maybe figure out the wifi. A couple of our friends who will be on the dive portion of the trip are also staying here. We may meet them for dinner. Or not. We're definitely slipping into vacation mode quickly.

And Speaking of Cool Fish

2009-02-27T22:39:00.000-08:00

I had actually meant to blog about this other cool fish before I found out about the psychedelic frogfish:

The fishy denizens of the deep are many, varied and strange, and among the strangest are the barreleyes, swift little hunters with tunnel-shaped eyes that live in the darkness of the deepest waters of Monterey Bay and in other seas worldwide.

For decades, biologists have puzzled over those fishes' eyes, because apparently they could look in only one direction - upward - and have wondered at the role of the mysterious transparent shield that covers their heads much like the cockpits of jet fighter planes.

These are just among the very cool and interesting marine creatures that are being discovered and studied by the folks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). We see some of the products of the research at the aquarium itself, but it's always interesting to learn what they're up to.

Check out the full press release at MBARI's website.

I like science.

Psychedelic Frogfish!

2009-02-27T21:51:00.000-08:00

This is awesome, and the timing couldn't be better. News today of the discovery of a new kind of frogfish, called the psychedelic frogfish (good picture here):

A brightly-coloured fish which bounces along the seabed has been hailed as a new species by scientists - who have dubbed it "psychedelica".

Best of all is where they found it:

...the fish was spotted by scuba divers off the island of Ambon in eastern Indonesia.

As it turns out, that's exactly where we're headed next week. Our dive cruise through Raja Ampat starts at Ambon. I guess I shall have to demand that they show us this new fish!

But really, as the AP article points out (quoting Mark Erdman from Conservation International):

"It also speaks to the tremendous diversity in this region and to fact that there are still a lot of unknowns here — in Indonesia and in the Coral Triangle in general."

That is why we go to these places. Cool stuff!

This is Ominous

2009-02-27T18:17:00.000-08:00

As Turkana at The Left Coaster points out, this is not just some senator, it's a member of the Intelligence Committee speaking. He knows things.

I have a feeling I may be glad I'm going to be out of the country while this stuff starts coming out. Brace yourselves.

Fluffy Toilet Paper

2009-02-27T11:30:00.000-08:00

I noticed that one of my pet peeves made the news yesterday:

Americans like their toilet tissue soft: exotic confections that are silken, thick and hot-air-fluffed.
...
But fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada

.I realize that soft, fluffy toilet paper is nice, but it is definitely a luxury, and one I decided long ago I couldn't justify. There are certainly purposes for which cutting down trees is justifiable. Wiping my tush is not one of them.

As usual, your mileage may vary, but the statistics cited in the article are quite dramatic.

By the way, I'm very pleased to see that Costco now stocks recycled T.P. in addition to the super-ultra-fluffed stuff. That's a step.

Reefer Madness or Real Science?

2009-02-09T16:13:00.000-08:00

Just saw an article via Yahoo! News linking marijuana use with testicular cancer. Long-time readers know that I have an interest in cancer and cancer research, and testicular cancer in particular, as my dad had it (the first of several cancers in his life).

I have to admit that any correlation between pot smoking and testicular cancer seems a bit odd to my non-medically-trained self (though my degree in Environmental Science is not entirely inapplicable here). What's really interesting to me here is looking at how the study is reported from several different wire services and other sources.

Here's the lede from the HealthDay News story I initially saw:

Smoking marijuana over an extended period of time appears to greatly boost a young man's risk for developing a particularly aggressive form of testicular cancer, a new study reveals.

That sounds pretty definitive, doesn't it? They do include some cautions from study authors later on:

Though Daling emphasized that the findings are preliminary, she suggested that attention should be paid.

"We know very little about the long-term health consequences of marijuana smoking," she cautioned. "So, although this is the first time this association has been studied and found -- and the finding does need to be replicated before we are really sure what's going on -- this does give some evidence that testicular cancer may be one result from the frequent use of marijuana. And that is something that young people should keep in mind."

And this:

"But certainly, the idea that cannabis may cause cancer cells to proliferate is interesting," Schwartz acknowledged. "It could, however, also be that recreational drug use is simply a marker for affluence, since we know that testicular cancer is traditionally a disease that is more common among the affluent. Or it could be a marker for some other event that comes along with it, that triggers lesions that lead to tumors. So, at this point, it's just not clear to me how exactly the association between marijuana and testicular cancer would work."

Now, the AFP story is much shorter, and carries this lede:

Smoking marijuana may increase the risk of testicular cancer by as much as 70 percent, a study published on Monday suggested.

Although they do quote Dr. Schwartz, there is no indication of the preliminary nature of the findings, or any suggestion that there might be other factors involved:

"Our study is not the first to suggest that some aspect of a man's lifestyle or environment is a risk factor for testicular cancer, but it is the first that has looked at marijuana use," said Stephen Schwartz, an epidemiologist and one of the report's principle authors.

Now, here's the Reuters lede:

Marijuana use may increase the risk of developing testicular cancer, in particular a more aggressive form of the disease, according to a U.S. study published on Monday.

And their quote from Schwartz is much more circumspect:

"This is the first study to look at this question, and by itself is not definitive. And there's a lot more research that would have to be done in order to be more confident that marijuana use really is important in a man's risk of developing testicular cancer," Schwartz said in a telephone interview.

CNN has the most balanced lede, and actually interviews scientists other than the study authors:

Do men who frequently smoke pot have a higher risk of testicular cancer than those who do not? It's possible, according to a new study. However, the researchers say the link is currently a "hypothesis" that needs further testing.

UPI (touting their "100 years of journalistic excellence") has a much briefer and less detailed story that starts with this:

Being a marijuana smoker at the time of diagnosis was associated with a 70 percent increased risk of testicular cancer, U.S. researchers said.

Perhaps more disturbing is the article title on that one: "Pot increases testicular cancer risk".

A blog at Scientific American starts with this:

Fellas, you might want to think, well, twice about following Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps' lead. A study published today in the journal Cancer linked frequent marijuana use to the possibility of a slim increased risk of testicular cancer.

The rest of the post is less folksy and more balanced and analytical, including these disclaimers:

The prevailing belief has been that a man's chances of developing testicular cancer is largely determined in the womb, as cells in the fetus are developing and those known as germ cells (which later develop into sperm cells) fail to mature properly. This work shows the possibility that marijuana use–an environmental factor–might also play a role. But researchers acknowledge that it does not prove a definitive link–and that there were weaknesses to the study, including that it was based on a relatively small group of men and relied on self-reported drug use, which can be iffy.
...
"We're not exactly sure what role the marijuana is playing," Daling says, but it has come out as a possible factor that warrants further investigation.

Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, says that the study is a potentially promising clue, but that is by no means a firm conclusion.

Long story short: it makes a big difference where you get your health and science information. My take is that journalists are rarely trained in science at all, and tend to jump to whatever conclusion a study suggests, without necessarily reporting the scientific nuances and disclaimers (which I'm guessing they don't understand, or at least don't understand the importance of).

Probably most annoying to me is that none of the stories contained any links to the study itself or any way to get more information about it, other than either other new reports of the same study (which is how I started down this path today) or to past reports on related topics. A few mentioned that the study was published (some said "online") in the journal Cancer, but none indicated how to find that.

And for comparison purposes, here's the original press release from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. It, too, says the study is published online, but doesn't say how to get there.

Adding to the Blogroll

2009-02-08T21:50:00.000-08:00

Those of you who are paying attention (and I know you all follow the details of this blog minutely) will see that I've added a new blog under my list of friends who blog. This one is by Jothy Rosenberg, who I worked with many years ago at Borland International.

His blog focuses on a lot of the issues of (dis)ability, a subject he knows a lot about. Jothy lost a leg to cancer as a teenager, and later part of a lung. But that hasn't stopped him from being an excellent biker, skier, swimmer, and more, on top of being a successful serial high-tech entrepreneur.

Although we didn't work together directly, our offices were near one another, so we got to know each other a bit. I was quite impressed when I played volleyball against him (although I still maintain that crutches gave him a big advantage in certain respects!), and he eventually played on my softball team, which is when I really got to know him.

His blog includes a number of really thought-provoking posts, and I look forward to reading it further.

Chard says, check it out!

Spanglish

2009-02-03T21:51:00.000-08:00

A friend just restored to me a local tourist paper we picked up in Quito last year. I had wanted to share a particularly confusing bit of translation.

It's an advertisement for a seafood restaurant called Las Redes with Spanish and English text, side by side. After a paragraph that seems pretty accurately translated to say that I will get a pleasant surprise when I visit Ecuador, citing its fine geography, nature, culture and friendly people, it then says this:

Las Redes lo sorprenderá deliciosamente por sus especialidades.

The English translation reads exactly as follows:

You will also recieve a delicious surprice fom with it's grat foot

We were in our last moments in town when we read this, otherwise we might have had to go find out what "delicious surprices" awaited us, courtesy of "it's grat foot."

Googaritaville

2009-02-03T15:34:00.000-08:00

Coolness abounds. Yesterday I got an e-mail about the upcoming Jimmy Buffett tour. He's playing this year at a more convenient venue for me, the Sleep Train Pavilion, formerly Chronicle Pavilion, formerly Concord Pavilion, which is, in fact, in Concord.

One of the things the e-mail emphasized was that one could now track Buffett's tour using Google Earth. Today I get a blog update from a friend at Google highlighting not only the Buffett tour, but the tools for making your own.

I've not been a big Google Earth user, but I might have to be now, just to make y'all extra jealous of my next vacation! Since it's a dive trip, I'll have to see whether I can combine this tour thing with their new underwater maps.... Geek nirvana meets Margaritaville!

You Don't Need a Weatherman

2009-02-02T23:34:00.000-08:00

I know I can't deduce too much about global climate change from local observations, but hey, it's Groundhog Day, and our Japanese plum trees are all blossoming, thinking it's spring. I realize that we're entering the third year of a drought, which is no big thing in the Bay Area, but really.

The snow (PDF) up at Tahoe this weekend was getting pretty thin. They've had one small snowstorm in the last month, and even it was preceded by some rain. The snow pack is way below what it should be, and I'm not just talking from the perspective of someone who wants to ski.

Twenty-five years ago, when I was studying climate, my professors said that the first indications of global climate change would be greater variability and more extremes: more droughts and floods, extreme freezes and heat waves. And that's all out there, worldwide.

As the famous meteorologist Robert Zimmerman once noted, "The climes, they are a-changin'":

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Dumbest. Company. Ever.

2009-01-26T16:24:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to switch from DSL to cable internet for a while. My DSL service is too expensive for what it gives me, and my former local ISP has been sold to some larger entity, which is never a good thing. So the things that bound me to my existing service no longer apply.

And after ignoring AT&T's entreaties for some time about their services, I finally realized that they weren't, in fact, trying to sign me up for video over phone lines, but actually trying to get me to switch to their fiber-optic system, called U-Verse. Lame name, but whatever. The service and price points are pretty appealing, so I start to look into it.

I go online to sign up, it looks good. Until I get to the page where it says, "Sorry!" Because they see that my existing phone line is shared with my DSL service. Well, yeah. That's why I want to change. Duh. But they can't take the order online.

So I call them, figuring they can just override that. Oh boy, was I wrong. They run into exactly the same issue. They can't order the switchover because I have "shared service" on my existing phone line. It's not that there's any technical reason they can't switch me over, just that the order system won't let them enter the order, either.

So my option is to cancel my existing DSL service, and then order U-Verse as a replacement. Meaning I'll be without Internet access for a while. Yeah, great solution guys. Or I can just go with the cable company option, which costs more and gives me less service. And sends me to their competition.

Brain-dead. I can't be the only one in this situation, but they have no solution for me.

Ice? Who Needs Ice?

2009-01-21T11:39:00.000-08:00

This cannot be good news:

Scientists on Wednesday unveiled evidence to suggest global warming is affecting all of Antarctica, home to the world's mightiest store of ice.
...
The research, published in the British journal Nature, takes a fresh look at one of the great unknowns -- and dreads -- in climate science.

Any significant thaw of Antarctica could drown many coastal cities and delta regions. Bigger than Australia, Antarctica holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by 57 metres (185 feet).

Maybe my house will be beachfront property before too long.

Skiing While Canine

2009-01-20T21:25:00.000-08:00

Had a new experience this weekend while skiing at Alpine Meadows. My wife and I had just taken the Sherwood Express chair for the first time, and as we paused to put on our pole straps and such, I noticed a very nice looking dog standing off to the side. Then I noticed that it was wearing a little bib of some sort, which I recognized as being for the Ski Patrol.

Then I looked away for a few moments, and next thing I knew I felt something warm rubbing against my leg. The dog had come for a little love. It started making its way around the skiers, getting lots of attention, then walked over to my wife, who patted him on the head nicely, prompting him to sit right down on her ski.

We chuckled as several kids came over to pat the dog, then decided we really wanted to go ski. So my wife tried to convince the dog that she was going to leave (no reaction). So she started to slide her ski out from under him, at which point he just lay down across both skis. Much hilarity all around, as now more skiers come to admire the dog and his captive. (Forgive the picture quality; my little old mobile phone has a terrible camera.)

Eventually a couple of the Ski Patrol humans took pity and called the dog over, but it took a lot of prompting. Apparently Trevor (or Mr. T) does this sort of thing fairly often. He gives the impression of having been there a long time, and is very sweet and good-natured.

In any case, I can now tease my wife about having been stopped by the Ski Patrol. And a quick visit to Google reveals that there are ten ski patrol dogs at Alpine, and they have their own trading cards! Here's a video about the dogs and their training, and lots of fine portraits on Flickr.

Fantasy and Reality

2009-01-13T09:26:00.000-08:00

Maybe it's because I never watch the show, but I just don't get the phenomenon that is the television series "24." I mean, I get that it's an exciting drama and all that. What I don't get is the way so many people (including pandering politicians who should know better) seem to think it's reflective of real life:

Bauer’s fictional defense of torture and his fictional claims of its effectiveness are having very real consequences. Over the last two days, right-wing commentators have cheered Bauer’s belligerent Senate testimony, wondering how Congress could be so ungrateful to a torture advocate like Bauer. Often their commentary has been directed at critics of the Bush administration’s torture policies and suggests that the “average person” would approve of Bauer’s conduct.

Maybe people need to drag themselves away from the teevee a little more and get out in the real world with real people. The fear culture that is gripping this country is not healthy. People grossly overestimate the danger to themselves and their families from criminals, terrorists, child molesters, kidnappers, and so on.

I'm not suggesting that these things aren't real or that there aren't precautions one should take against them. But when the perception of risk is out of proportion with the actual risk, we end up doing things like overprotecting children so they can't even go outside to play or giving up fundamental rights and freedoms in exchange for protection from overinflated risks.

I realize that crime dramas and such can be very compelling, but they're not real.

I'm reminded of a line by Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller about people misunderstanding media (my emphasis):

We believe violence is exciting in entertainment. In America we have the First Amendment; there are no censors. But there are anti-violence censorship letter-writers. They want to make sure you'll never see anything that they wouldn't want to see. They say that if we had nothing on TV but shows like thirtysomething and Growing Pains all the world problems would be worked out in an adult, peaceful manner. They don't understand EVERYTHING's fake on TV. Homer Simpson doesn't work in a nuclear power plant! Homer Simpson is just an actor!

It seemed funny at the time. Perhaps, like many entertainers, he was just prescient.

Overdue Book Review

2009-01-12T23:28:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to write this up ever since I finished reading it. Life got in the way, as usual.

Anyway, my dear friend Laura Goodin recently got her first story published in a book called Canterbury 2100. As far as I know, the book isn't yet available in the U.S., but Laura was kind enough to send me a copy for Christmas (along with two packs of Tim Tams!!!). So the least I can do is tell you about it.

The premise of the book as a whole is sort of an update on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: a bunch of people making a pilgrimage by train to Canterbury in a post-apocalyptic future (in oh, about the year 2100). The train stops, the passengers pass the time by telling stories.

In this case, each tale is written by a different author, and the whole thing is strung together by editor Dirk Flinthart. He manages to make it all pretty cohesive, which is impressive.

Now, here I have to admit that I have never read Chaucer's stories (though I do own a copy, at the behest of another writer friend who wrote her thesis on Chaucer, and I still plan to read it), so I can't tell you whether Flinthart did a great job of fitting this tale into the mould of the original. But for me, the overall flow worked pretty well, especially considering that there are eighteen different writers involved.

As you might expect from a collaborative effort of this sort, the quality is a bit uneven. The good news is that nothing is bad enough to be unreadable, and most are really pretty good. If I have a general complaint, it is that too many of the tales are written like short stories (as opposed to episodes in a larger tale): they try to have a little twist at the end, and most are too predictable.

I should mention Laura's contribution, "The Miner's Tale," in particular. And not only because she's my friend. Her story manages to avoid the pitfalls I've mentioned above. I resisted the urge to read it first, and instead read it in the flow of the book. Because the story and its characters don't really rely on anything particularly special about the ficton, the story just works. It's a good story about good people trying to do right in a difficult situation. Very human, very nicely written.

Some of the other tales get a bit too tied up in magic and/or religion and/or technology that doesn't quite fit the overall picture. My favorite stories are those like Laura's (and the Doctor's and Hunter's Tales) that are stories about human nature and how the people react to the situation forced on them, rather than being about the situation itself.

All in all, I enjoyed the book, and look forward to reading Laura's next effort. And it made me want to go read my Chaucer. Not right away, but it is back in the queue.

They Obviously Want Me

2009-01-12T23:10:00.000-08:00

Just came across this little job opening:

The Caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef is a newly created position. There are a few minor tasks that need to be taken care of, but the most important duty is to report back to Tourism Queensland (and the world) and let us know what’s taking place on the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.

Right. One blog entry per week. I can do that. Heck, I'm even qualified for this job!

We’re looking for someone with an adventurous attitude, passion for the outdoors and good communication skills. A broad range of experience is considered and Tourism Queensland will be selecting applicants based on:

- Enthusiasm for the role

- Entertainment value (personality and creativity)

- Presentation skills (being media-friendly)

- At least one year's relevant experience

I am so there!

Yumbolicious

2009-01-12T22:11:00.000-08:00

That is the word my fine foodie friend used to describe this.

One can just feel the arteries hardening while reading it. But in a good way.

Oh, No! Not Liberals!

2009-01-05T23:36:00.000-08:00

I missed this one while I was out of town. Apparently there is much wringing of hands over the notion that President-elect Obama might be listening to...liberals. I rather agree with Steve Soto's take on this:

Their candidate just ran on their platform and got his head handed to him by a centrist Democrat, who is allowing the broadest possible input into his policies and agenda, and still there are knuckle-dragging goons who are unhappy that Obama isn’t only listening to slugs like them.
Well slugs, let me clue you in: You lost, and so did your agenda and your policies.

Except of course, I wouldn't call them slugs (in public). But really, who did they think Obama was going to ask for advice? Them?

And then I might point out that the Washington Post article that Steve refers to (it's just one example) is a particularly pathetic exercise, both from a journalism standpoint and from the flimsiness of the argument put forth by the quoted conservative spokesperson. The article cites just the one spokesman, and he apparently doesn't know that there are liberals out there, but he's heard there are:

"It is disturbing," said Roger Clegg, a conservative opponent of Lee's appointment who is now watching the Obama advisers at the Justice Department. "The transition team as described to me was made up of nothing but people on the far left. Though Obama is more moderate, that makes you wonder what kind of advice the president is given, and what range of choices he'll be given when it comes time to make appointments."

That's it. That's all he's got. Not that some raving lunatics are taking over the asylum, but an unnamed person or persons described the transition team as being really, really liberal. But wait, there's less! The article describes two controversial Clinton nominees who are advising Obama. One is gay, and one is Chinese American and supports affirmative action. Oh, and someone from the NAACP is reviewing civil rights. Clearly these people must be plotting the radical overthrow of all we hold dear!

Apparently it wasn't enough for these folks to engage in all the fear mongering while they held power the last eight years or during the campaign season. They now apparently want to make us all afraid of ourselves. But the voters didn't seem to buy it, and I'm guessing they won't look at the moderately liberal government we're about to see with any degree of trepidation. Mostly they want their jobs, their health care, and their homes. Most of them are not terribly concerned with the labels attached to the people who help them out with that stuff.

Skiing While Ursine

2009-01-05T17:15:00.000-08:00

We spent the weekend visiting friends and skiing at Bear Valley. Most of you probably know that I'm a long-time fan of bears in general (and my California Golden Bears in particular). Bear Valley is kinda wonderful in that it's one of the few places where you can find lots of bear pictures and other decor items without it seeming forced or kitschy.

In addition, the ski resort has named all of its lifts (and some of the runs) after bears (Cub, Bear, Pooh, etc.). My only objection is that one lift is called "Koala," and of course, that's not a bear at all. On the other hand, I was initially confused by the lift named "Kuma," until a quick visit to the Google informed me that "Kuma" is Japanese for "bear."

One highlight was skiing down toward one of the lifts on our first run down the back side, and having my daughter look up in surprise and say, "That lift is Pooh!" And indeed, right there on the lift, it says its name is Pooh. Very cute.

Anyhow, the skiing was quite nice. Friday was a blustery, snowy day, but that produced a lot of good snow. Saturday was cold, so the powder stayed good. Sunday, most of the people disappeared even though the snow was still great. I guess they'd all had enough on the holiday weekend, so we had the run of the mountain in great conditions.

Holiday Composition

2008-12-31T21:34:00.000-08:00

Tonight we had a little family sushi dinner at Tachibana, and somehow got inspired to write a topical version of the Twelve Days of Christmas song. I'll just present the twelfth day:

The SUSHI Twelve Days of Christmas

Twelve Cups of Sake
Eleven Pairs of Chopsticks
Ten Zaru Soba
Nine Tuna Toro
Eight Pickled Ginger
Seven Edamame
Six Amaebi
Five Wasabi
Four Tempura Shrimp
Three Soy Sauce
Two Turtle Rolls
And a Big California Roll

Happy holidays, y'all!

Stunningly Superficial

2008-12-30T09:18:00.001-08:00

That's about the best summary of a TV "news" talking head I can imagine.

What's really impressive is that Scarborough doesn't get why he's being taken to task. He keeps saying that he reads the newspapers and Foreign Affairs, so obviously he knows what's going on.

It brings to mind a snippet of dialogue from the wonderful movie "A Fish Called Wanda":

Wanda: But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?

Otto: Apes don't read philosophy.

Wanda: Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it! Let me correct you on a few things; Aristotle was not Belgian! The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself!" And the London Underground is not a political movement! Those are all mistakes. I looked them up.

I think it's safe to say that Joe Scarborough is not an intellectual, either.

Update: Purely coincidental, but TBogg used that same exchange as the title of a post on a completely unrelated incident.

Presents for Feet

2008-12-29T23:18:00.000-08:00

Did I mention that I got ski boots for Christmas? I have never bought a pair of new ski boots before. When I went skiing as a kid, I always had used boots, since they weren't going to last long on my growing feet, anyway. And as a teen, I think I had hand-me-downs.

So since we started skiing last winter, I've been renting boots (and skis) with only limited success. I have very ordinary feet, but somehow, the boots nearly always manage to be uncomfortable. And when the feet, ankles, shins, etc. are unhappy, the skier is unhappy.

My new boots are very nice. I wore them in the store for quite a while. I'm looking forward to trying them out this weekend! My only disappointment is the color. They come in red/black, which is not my favorite. But they're comfortable, and I don't plan to look at them very much.

Nice present. My wife loves me, and wants my feet to be happy.

All Things Must End

2008-12-29T23:13:00.000-08:00

Still not much explanation for the whole thing, but the guy who was camped out in the Mexico City airport for the last few months is gone.

I still have nothing cogent to say about it, but I like to follow up when I can.

You're welcome.