Staying in Yellowstone

I'll tell you one thing you should not try to do, your first night staying at 7,800 feet. You should not try to sing. Yellowstone Lake Hotel has a pianist who tears off old favorites every evening in the lobby during the season. I went down the first night, and when she got to "I Left My Heart In San Francisco", I felt that the honor of the Bay Area required me to sing along, so I did. By the time I finished it, I was so dizzy I could barely stand. There isn't enough air in the air up there! And we'd spent a couple of days around 5,000 feet, to try to get acclimated; but with asthma, you just don't have the reserves...

There are places in Yellowstone where cell phones work - I saw a lot of people using cell phones at Old Faithful Lodge, although I never could get a signal - but Yellowstone Lake Hotel has no cell phone service. Zero, zilch, nada. No television, either; no ESPN in the bar there. People talk, or read, or play cards, or do jigsaw puzzles; I saw one couple with a folding Scrabble set. Or, you can just sit and look out the window; the scenery's pretty spectacular, after all.

Yellowstone Lake Hotel is a very nice, modern hotel (built in 1891, but thoroughly updated) and they keep it warm, which must cost them a fortune, because it doesn't, as I recall, have double pane windows! (Not that thoroughly updated...) We all became aware of that on Saturday afternoon when they blew out a transformer, and it took them until about 2 AM to get the power back on. For some reason about a third of the lights still worked; but no heat, and it was in the low thirties outdoors, and the lobby is a very large space with big windows on every wall, and glass doors. By the time dinner was over it was getting pretty nippy in the lobby.

Unfortunately, that was one of the nights we had dinner reservations at the Lake Hotel. We learned later that the Hotel kitchen, as you would expect, has gas ranges; but the exhaust hoods are all electric, and they, of course, were down. This happens occasionally during summer thunderstorms, and they have a limited menu that they cook outdoors on charcoal grills; but on this evening "outdoors" was around 32 degrees, so everything they cooked came to the table cold. On paper plates (no dishwasher). And you couldn't charge the meal to the room (no computer; the waiters were going nuts trying to keep track of the orders manually). The spinach and duck breast salad was pretty good even if the meat was cold; but I also ordered a grilled portobello mushroom cap. It came to the table entirely cold, and covered with soy sauce. I haven't been able to look a portobello mushroom in the eye since... It was really sad, because this is supposed to be the best kitchen in Yellowstone; but they weren't at their best. (We ate there 2 nights later and it was excellent.)

We were out and missed it, but I gather the power went out again Sunday morning during breakfast - and there was no coffee! A ghastly thought.

I assumed, going to a national park, that we'd be hiking, right? Wrong. We didn't have snow hiking equipment (although I had my trekking poles); but worse than snow is what happens when it thaws - cold, slushy mud. Furthermore, we got to Yellowstone much earlier than we anticipated - Yellowstone Lake had just thawed earlier that week, and the ranger-led hikes didn't begin for another week or two. So we spent most of our time driving around, and getting out for an occasional photograph or nature trail. In any case, I always have to be reminded that you can't just go out and hike in these parks because of the bears - you have to be in a group of at least 5, because no group of 5 or more has ever been attacked by bears. We saw bears, too, suitably far away. No solo hikes here.

You drive a lot in Yellowstone because the place is huge. I mentioned in my last post that it's 40 miles from Yellowstone Lake Village to Old Faithful. That's the short route. The long route is 60 miles, and all of both routes are entirely inside the park, and they're both in the southern half of it. We spent much of this trip in the southern half, going up and down the Hayden Valley looking for wildlife, with a couple of excursions to Canyon and Yellowstone Falls. We saw lots of bison, several elk, but no moose this time around. The bison think they own the road; they walk right down the yellow line. I'm not sure why, but I don't remember seeing any small ground mammals at Yellowstone - no squirrels, ground squirrels, or rabbits, just lots of birds (including, I regret to say, a record number of Canada geese) and the big critters.

We got up ungodly early on Sunday morning for a "photo safari" with one Doug Hilborn, and spent the morning wandering around in a van, looking for critters to photograph. I learned that the reason I rarely see any wildlife is that I don't get up early enough - at 8 o'clock in the morning the place is hopping with elk and bison, including babies - I'd never seen a bison calf before, they're much cuter than the adults. I only saw one elk calf, and it was a sad and sobering incident: they were away across the valley, and someone said there were wolves. We broke out the binoculars and found ourselves watching a small pack of wolves take down the elk calf - one minute it was there, and then the cow was chasing a black wolf down the hill and the calf was nowhere to be seen. The 2 wolves that weren't black were nowhere to be seen either, at least with my binoculars; I clearly saw their tails in the guide's spotting scope, but their camouflage is astounding. We also spent some time watching a grizzly and her yearling cub work on some kind of carcass - they were just over the crest of a hill from us and we couldn't see what they had, but we could see them stand up occasionally. There was a whole congregation lined up along the road with binoculars and telephoto lenses watching the bears. We did the customary visit to Artists' Point to photograph the astounding colors in the lower canyon of the Yellowstone, but the animals were what made it great for me.

Vacation Weather

You normally assume, making your vacation reservations in February, that the weather in June will be good. We assumed that. And oh, my, were we wrong. The week before we left, my husband checked the Wyoming weather and said, "Wait a minute. There's 42 inches of snow still in Yellowstone." Wasn't it supposed to be summer by now? With this warning, I packed a sweater, a fleece pullover, and several long-sleeved shirts. And wool socks (a good call!).

It was raining when we got into Elko; the next morning when we left, it was raining even harder, and it was snowing maybe 500 feet above us. As we drove through the rain we could see the new snow accumulating on the hills above the town, below a very low cloud ceiling. It was an omen, but we didn't realize it. The rain (and a fiendish cross wind) chased us all the way across Utah (and through the Salt Lake City commute traffic; really bad timing!) to Brigham City.

The drive through Utah and Idaho into Wyoming was generally pretty; I especially liked Logan Canyon. With the bluff tops wreathed in cloud, and its limestone walls cracked into squared off sections and punctuated with pine trees, it looked like the model for a Japanese or Chinese woodblock print, just gorgeous. As we got to the Tetons, it began to rain seriously again, just as the roads deteriorated. Of course, since the speed limit in Tetons and Yellowstone National Parks is 45 MPH, the rain didn't delay us much.

The parking lot at Yellowstone Lake Hotel was slushy, with 4 foot high heaps of old snow, but the roads were clear and so was the sky, so we settled in and made an early dinner reservation for the Old Faithful Inn, the next night. Old Faithful is about 40 miles from the Lake, and the shortest route crosses the Continental Divide twice. We didn't think about that much, but as we began to climb Craig Pass, it started to snow; and then the snow started to stick; and then the snow started to stick to the road. By the time we got to Old Faithful, the ground was entirely covered and the snow was starting to pile up; and we began to wonder about getting back. We had our reservations, though, so in we went for dinner, shaking snow off.

Most of you know that I'm a native Californian; more, a native Bay Arean. Snow is not my thing. I was beginning to get pretty uncomfortable, especially when the folks at the Old Faithful Inn told us the Park Service had just closed the road over Craig Pass, and also one of the only other routes back to the Lake. But there we were, so we had dinner, which I spent peering out the window to see if it was still snowing. Around dessert, it did quit, and by then the word was that the Park Service was plowing the roads, so we went out and watched the geyser; and when we came back in and checked, they'd opened Craig Pass. So we got in the car and headed back to the Lake, before they changed their minds; and it started to snow again, and then the snow began sticking to the road again...

My husband did the driving; he grew up in Wisconsin, and snow doesn't bother him. He said later it wasn't that bad; but as I told him, he was in control. I was sitting in the passenger seat watching the visibility get worse by the minute, and I was pretty damn nervous. In the last couple of miles before we got to the Lake, we couldn't see the sides of the road; we were following a flat space in the snow, and a single pair of tire tracks from a car that can't have been more than 10 or 15 minutes ahead of us. I wasn't cold; I had plenty of layers on; but I kept wondering, if something did go wrong, how long it would take anybody to find us. There is no cell phone reception in that section of Yellowstone. I was amazingly glad to see that hotel.

I talked to at least one man, also staying at Yellowstone Lake Hotel, who had stayed overnight at Old Faithful rather than drive back - I hate to think what that cost him.

The next morning, they said the storm dropped two and a half inches of snow. On June 6.

That storm was actually the worst of it. It snowed several more times while we were in Yellowstone (and thawed twice, too), but never as much again. Snow covered fields make it much easier to spot wildlife; sporadic snowstorms make photography very iffy. (Take my advice: don't try to photograph a geyser going off in a snowstorm. Even with digital, it's not worth the effort.) But we also had some bright, sunny weather, which melted the new snow with amazing speed.

When we left the park on Tuesday morning, the park was snowy and covered with heavy clouds, but on the other side of the pass it was clear, sunny and windy. It was great weather for photographing the little herd of bighorn sheep right by the road (including 3 lambs), and the herd of bison (with seven calves!). We stayed in Bozeman, Montana that night, and the next morning we had to knock half an inch of snow off the car, but the snow wasn't sticking to the road, so on we went, over the Continental Divide again at Butte, and that was the last snow that fell on us. We saw plenty of snow in Glacier National Park but the weather was clear and windy.

We had one last "snow effect" - Jim hadn't bothered to check the status of the Going-to-the-Sun Road, in Glacier National Park. He'd planned to go into the park at West Glacier and take Going-to-the-Sun Road across the park to Many Glaciers Lodge, where we were staying. Of course it'd be open; it's June. In Missoula, Montana, where we stayed a couple of days between national parks, we learned that the Going-to-the-Sun Road might reopen in July. Maybe. Late July. So we suddenly had to drive an extra 80 miles or so...

I just checked the road status: Going-to-the-Sun Road is completely open, as of July 2. They don't say how long it's been open, or whether they got it clear in time for the scheduled 75th anniversary celebration on June 27. I guess it must be summer now.

Voting

Before I start on the vacation blogs, I want to rant about the election a little. Not the national election, that's a wrap for the moment; the recent state and local elections in California, and Alameda County, and the city of Oakland. These were actually quite important elections: this was the primary for every partisan office except the presidency; and both the state legislative seats and about half the Oakland City Council were all up for re-election. Both the legislative seats were open contests, too, because the seat holders were termed out.

I frequently read or hear the complaint that people don't vote because their vote "doesn't count." From the Alameda County Election Results site, I have some numbers about that:

• Total Alameda County voter registration for the June 3 election was 725,098.
• Total votes cast at the polling place? 78,753.
• Total absentee ballots cast? 138,338.

That's right - out of 725,098 registered voters, only 217,091 bothered to vote: just under 1 in 3. (The county site doesn't show the percentage of registered voters who voted in each individual contest, just for the main election.)

When you turn out and vote in a contest like that, you're a bigger frog, in a smaller pond, than you realize. A "majority of the vote" in this case could be as little as 15% of the electorate (51% of 29.94%). And those are the people who determine who will be running the joint for the next term.

So, does your vote count?? You bet it counts! And just remember - if you don't vote, and you don't like the way things go, I don't want to hear one peep out of you. You forfeit your right to complain if you don't vote.

So - next election, get your lower dorsal elevation down there and VOTE!

Basin and Range

I've never done this before, but I have my laptop with me on vacation, so I'm going to blog it "live" from time to time. We'll see how this works. I'm writing from the Crystal Inn in Brigham City, Utah, on our way to Yellowstone.

We've spent the last 2 days on I-80, crossing Nevada and Utah - the great Basin and Range country written up by John McPhee in his book of that name. If you've never driven across this country you can't imagine how hostile it is to life; I can't conceive walking across it behind an ox cart, or even riding a horse. It wasn't especially hot, rather somewhat chilly, mostly overcast, and very windy. The roads are straight and empty; no buildings line them, no trees shade them, and they stretch out before you to a vanishing point on the horizon. Sometimes they turn, and you can see the curve laid out before you for miles in advance. Between the occasional towns there is nothing. You regularly pass named freeway exits marked "no services" - Jim thinks these are isolated ranches or mines, but they have freeway access. The wind was constant, and strong enough to jolt the car sideways on the freeway now and then. It's very hard to stay awake at the wheel because it's boring - the view changes very, very slowly, and you watch the same sights for a long time. Apart from the dust devils, almost nothing moves. You're driving at 70 or 75 miles an hour (the speed limit is 75), but so is any other traffic; there was very little, just an occasional semi hauling freight. The relative motion of the vehicles is very slow, within 5 or 10 miles per hour; this gives you the odd feeling that you and the other traffic are standing still, and the empty, silent landscape is very slowly revolving past you.

When we first passed Reno and Sparks, it was different - the road follows the Truckee River valley until Fernley, the hills are right near the road, and the river bottom is lush and green. Up the hill a few feet, though, is warning of things to come: sparse sagebrush scrub on dusty brown dirt. After Fernley, the river turns north and the road continues east through great acres of salt pan, partly obscured as we drove by blowing dust in the steady wind. There's still sagebrush, but less, and it's odd to see plants next to, or in, obvious crusts of salt on the ground; huge expanses have no plants at all, just salt and dirt. These are the Humboldt Sink and part of the Forty Mile Desert, obstacles on the Emigrant Trail, which Interstate 80 more or less follows. The regular ranges of mountains are dry and treeless, their shapes rounded by the wind. This continues for around 60 miles, until you reach Lovelock.

The farther east you go, the higher (gradually) the ground rises, and the wetter (very slowly) things get, even at the bottom of the basins. After Lovelock you see occasional cattle grazing. By Elko, there are irrigated pastures and more grazing herds. But the trees are still few and stunted.

We chased a rainstorm, and vice versa, most of the way from Lovelock to Elko. In the last stretch, we drove along the edge of the rain, with black clouds to our left and the late afternoon sun to our right; we were escorted by a full arch rainbow for several miles, sliding along the desert to our left. I've never seen such a thing before.

Life on Mars

Phoenix has landed safely on Mars, to great exaltation. Now we're going to find out if there ever was life on Mars.

Why do we care so much?

Mind you, I don't object to scientific exploration for its own sake; we know a number of very useful and interesting things that we found out while just looking to see what was there. But we sent men to the Moon, and we've sent a number of exploring space craft to Mars, and we've landed three craft on Mars now, and the justification seems to be not, what does the place look like? but, is anybody else there?

So far, nobody else is there. I'll go farther and make a prediction, which the Phoenix team at JPL will be spending the next 10 years or so trying to disprove: nobody else ever was there. There has never been life on Mars. There certainly has never been our variety of life on Mars, the kind that's based on liquid water. And not on any of the other planets in this system either.

All our science fiction is based on the assumption that we're not alone. Writers have peopled "space" with a delightful and amazing population of "aliens", from Andre Norton's Zacathans to Larry Niven's K'zin to Anne McCaffrey's telepathic species and beyond (and I haven't read nearly as much sci-fi as some people), with one specification for all these unlikely creatures: we can talk to them.

Apparently, talking among ourselves isn't enough for us, despite the fact that we spend more time fighting each other than talking. Why would we think we'd do anything with "aliens" except fight them, given how we treat each other?

Based on the evidence I've seen, reading all the astronomy articles in Scientific American and other lay journals for 30 years, Ockham's Razor seems to imply that there isn't anyone else out there. We're asking these questions because of a long sequence of coincidences that produced a planet with enough water, and the right temperature range (most of the time), and the right chemicals, and so on, that over millions of years a mammalian species evolved which developed the ability to - ask questions. (And before you bring it up, no, I don't buy the argument that God created all this in 4004 B.C.) Most of the planets we've been able to observe so far are prima facie unable to support life - wrong temperature range, not enough carbon or oxygen, etc. Most of the stars we've been able to observe are prima facie unable to support life - too big, too hot, too small, too cool. Stars like our sun are a minority. They aren't rare, there are just a lot of other types.

In other words, we are unique, and we are alone, and we'd better learn how to get along with each other, because there isn't anybody else out there to get along with. As the "mindfulness" people say, wherever you go, there you are.

But it fascinates me that we're so convinced that we aren't alone, that we spend really large amounts of money and time trying to find "them." Even if, in the case of Phoenix, the definition of "them" would be some evidence the Mars may have supported liquid water in which some kind of single-celled life form may have lived long enough to reproduce for awhile.

Whatever it was, if it was, I guarantee we wouldn't have been able to talk to it.

Why are we so desperate to find "them"?? Do we think they have Answers that we don't have? Or do we just think that if "they" can survive on a planet, then we could move in and take it over from them? (An unfortunate but likely supposition; and in the case of the current Mars, patently absurd.)

If you really want to contemplate "life on Mars," go read Edgar Rice Burroughs' wonderful Mars series: John Carter, Warlord of Mars. They're great.

Roast Swan

Not long ago, the Oakland Symphony Chorus performed Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. For those of you who don't know about the 13th century manuscript collection this is based on, there's a Wikipedia article. Carl Orff wrote the modern piece, based on the manuscripts, in Germany in the middle 1930s, and that's what we did. Three times, which is a lot. And under two different conductors, which was interesting, as they didn't interpret it the same way at all.

Whenever you spend 5 months rehearsing something and then most of a solid week doing concert prep, after the concert the music doesn't necessarily stop running through your head right away. Or for a while. But there's one part of it that's stuck in my head for nothing directly to do with the music. Of the 5 parts of Carmina Burana, the long middle section is about drinking and taverns, sung by the men; and it contains an extremely weird little solo piece called, alternatively, Cignus ustus cantat or Olim lacus colueram (the first line) - which is usually referred to as "The Roast Swan."

It's significant for 2 reasons: musically it's one of the higher tenor pieces in the repertoire, the tenor has to hit a high D; and textually it's the story of a roast swan being served up for dinner, from the swan's point of view. Unless the text is published in the program or they've looked it up, the audience usually misses this, because it's sung in medieval Latin, which is less common than it once was. Here is the text, in the excellent translation provided by classical.net:

Olim lacus colueram,        Once I lived on lakes,
olim pulcher extiteram,       once I looked beautiful
dum cignus ego fueram.       when I was a swan.

(Male chorus)
Miser, miser!            Misery me!
modo niger             Now black
et ustus fortiter!         and roasting fiercely!

(Tenor)
Girat, regirat garcifer;      The servant is turning me on the spit;
me rogus urit fortiter;       I am burning fiercely on the pyre:
propinat me nunc dapifer,      the steward now serves me up.

(Male Chorus)
Miser, miser!            Misery me!
modo niger             Now black
et ustus fortiter!         and roasting fiercely!

(Tenor)
Nunc in scutella iaceo,       Now I lie on a plate,
et volitare nequeo         and cannot fly anymore,
dentes frendentes video:      I see bared teeth:

(Male Chorus)
Miser, miser!            Misery me!
modo niger             Now black
et ustus fortiter!         and roasting fiercely!

You can see where they might not always print the translation. The chorus, sung by the basses and tenors, is one of the best known parts of Carmina, it's very exciting.

In the first two concerts, the tenor stood in the usual stiff concert pose. He had a beautiful if rather light voice and hit all the notes correctly, but he didn't try to do any physical interpretation. The soloist in the third concert (under the second conductor) chose to act out the story. (He's an opera singer; in fact, his name is Brian Staufenbiel, and he's the head of the opera program at U.C. Santa Cruz.) As he sang the first verse, he waved his arms as if flying, and looked around. As he sang the second verse, he stood with his hands locked behind his back, as if trussed up. As he sang the last verse, he stood straight and stiff with his hands at his side.

It made the swan quite uncomfortably real, and I can't get it out of my head.

It didn't help that, at the dress rehearsal, the soprano and bass soloists were sitting over to the side during the solo, making synchronized cranking motions, as if turning a spit. It was funny in a very black way. From what I know about the middle ages, all of this would have been hilarious to them; so maybe this is just a measure of how much we've changed in 700 years.

But I still can't get it out of my head.

I Take It Back

I've occasionally expressed my admiration for Nancy Pelosi in this blog; she seemed to me to be doing a good job, although I didn't and don't agree with all her decisions. I officially take it back with the most recent mess over the farm bill. (And when I say "most recent": the AP article is datelined about an hour and a half ago.) She may not be personally responsible for this snafu, but she's in charge, and it happened on her watch.

To begin with, I didn't and don't support the farm bill Congress finally passed; I supported the more radical bill that Barbara Boxer introduced, which would have replaced commodity farm subsidies entirely with a disaster insurance program. (I may be hazy on the details.) I'm in the extremely unusual position of agreeing with Dubya on something: I think this bill should be vetoed.

Now to the mess. Having passed this obscene farm bill with veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress, the idiots in charge of the process sent the White House a version of the bill to sign that was ... missing 34 pages.

What?

That's right - they didn't collate the bill properly when they printed it on parchment, and they left out a 34 page section. So Bush vetoes the bill, as he said he would. But ... what he vetoed isn't what Congress passed. Is that constitutional? Is that even rational?

Congress is now scrambling around to arrange a second round of voting on the full bill, by Thursday (the current law expires on Friday), after which they'll re-submit it to the White House for another veto. After which they'll override it again? (Why do they need to vote on it again? They voted on the full bill, they just didn't print the full bill to send to the Pres. Or am I missing something?)

Can these people find their socks in the morning? If Congress wonders why their approval ratings are even lower than Dubya's, look no farther.

Biofuels

I've read a couple of different articles recently on the subject of biofuels, but I was particularly struck by this one in today's San Francisco Chronicle; Arrol Gellner regularly comments on the relationship between humans and their environment. I'm glad to see that some people are beginning to agree with me, and to speak out, on the stupidity of the whole biofuels business. It doesn't help that Congress has just passed a draft farm bill that continues to subsidize the corn farmers of the midwest beyond their wildest dreams of avarice.

We have to quit messing with biofuels. Yes, and the Europeans and everyone else have to quit it too. Our insistence that we can turn corn into fuel for cars is causing a worldwide famine, by driving up the price of food in general. I'm not sure we shouldn't just Give Up On The Whole Idea, even eliminate switchgrass as a source - because land planted for switchgrass is not land planted for edible crops.

Which is more important - driving to work, or eating? Is it more important for you to drive to work than it is for an Indian subsistance farmer's family to eat one meal?

We're killing people here, or we will be shortly. People who live on a dollar a day (or even two dollars a day) will be dying of starvation.

And it's all because we're hooked on automobiles. Nobody wants to hear this - especially nobody who commutes 60 miles a day to work because that was the closest house he could afford to buy - but we are all of us going to have to rethink how we live, and how we get places. We'll have to break our addiction to the automobile, and the ease in traveling that it gives us. It'll be really expensive; it'll be really hard, and we'll have to rebuild stuff; but the alternative will be to continue to drive cars, using increasingly expensive fuel, until we can't afford any more fuel at all; by which time we'll have overloaded the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Then we'll have to abandon the cars because we can't move them without fuel.

And then we really will have to do the hard stuff: walk. Take transit (if it exists). Move to some place where you CAN walk or take transit. Maybe we'll go back to horses; treat horses reasonably, and they'll produce new little horses for you every year, for free. Of course, you have to feed horses; and we're back to cropland again. Plant it in edibles, or biofuel sources??

And yes, we're driving to Wyoming and Montana on vacation this summer. I'm addicted to cars too. We've built a world where cars are how you get around, and there really aren't alternatives in a lot of places. But we have to start thinking about alternatives.

Voting

There's been a great deal of loose talk lately about who Democrats will and won't vote for. We have more new people registered to vote than we've seen in a generation, and they're Democrats almost 2 to 1; and yet, the word is that if "their candidate" isn't the eventual Democratic nominee, they won't vote at all. Or they'll vote for McCain. "Hillary's voters" can't possibly vote for Barack Obama. "Obama voters" will never vote for Clinton.

I'm sorry - this is childish. Of both groups. The goal here is to put the Presidency of the United States, and as much of the Congress as possible, in the hands of the Democratic Party, thereby removing it from the hands of the Republican Party which has done so much appalling damage over the last 7 years. And if the Democratic Party can hang together, they can do this; Democratic turnout in every primary has been more than twice the Republican vote.

The problem, of course, is that for the first time in U.S. history, a major political party has two candidates who are both minorities: a black man and a white woman. (I still find it bizarre that women, who constitute just over 50% of the population, are considered a "minority", but let's not get into that just now.) This provides endless opportunities for mud-slinging: if you vote for Obama, it's because you hate women. If you vote for Hillary, it's because you're a racist. And it's regrettably possible that both of these accusations are true in some cases: America's bigots (few of whom have only one prejudice) have been given a rare opportunity to decide out whom they dislike the most.

Both candidates have more to offer than the "first". Both candidates are intelligent, talented, and determined people. Despite Senator Clinton's insistance on her "experience", they actually have about the same amount of national experience: a few terms in the Senate. As Mrs. Clinton, she may well have been in the White House when momentous decisions were made; but I'm sorry, I don't count pillow talk with Bill as "experience in government," and the only time she actually tried a major project (health care reform), she blew it. She appears to have learned from the experience, but don't give me any guff about her foreign policy expertise. She doesn't have any more than Obama does. In both cases we are banking not on experience, but on native ability and smarts.

The symbolism of "the first" is causing the trouble. We can elect "the first woman president" or "the first black president" - but we can't elect both. The zealots on both sides are determined that their "first" shall be the one, to the point that they're demonizing the other "first" as a mortal threat. Materially assisted by Senator Clinton's strongly negative campaign, I might add; it's true that I support Senator Obama, but I believe it to be an objective fact that she has slung more mud than he has.

What really worries me is the possibility that the people who can't bring themselves to vote for the "wrong first" will end up causing the election of the first 71-year-old President. And we bloody well will be in Iraq for 100 years.

Burma

God help the unfortunate people of Burma. Their government seems completely disinclined to do so. The junta, of course, was completely unaffected by the storm; they moved themselves to a new capital, back in the hills. It's only the people they're supposed to be responsible for who are starving in the mud.

I lost a bet with myself. I bet that the military junta which runs Burma (I've decided that calling it "Myanmar" is simply pandering to them) would refuse international aid, because it would mean letting outsiders into the country. I see that not only have they allowed aid in from Thailand, they've allowed the U.S. to land a C-140 full of supplies. Amazing. If Ban Ki-Moon persuaded them, he's better than I gave him credit for.

The people of Burma have just had it clearly demonstrated to them that their rulers have no interest in their welfare. I wonder what they'll do about it, if anything. The rulers have the guns. The people have the numbers. Or will they continue to submit?

Crime in Oakland

Since one of the things I do for the Greater Rockridge NCPC is monitor 3 different Yahoo email groups relating to crime in the north Oakland area where I live, I haven't posted much about it here - I spend quite enough time dealing with it already. But although it's an undeniably useful community service, I'm finding that it's very hard on me.

I'm continually reminded that I live in a city where crime is almost completely out of control. If you call the police they may or may not come; if you don't call the police, the crime in essence never happened, since the only crimes they deal with are the ones that are reported through the 911 dispatch center. People within blocks of my house have been robbed by armed assailants within the last few weeks; and we live in one of the safer neighborhoods. It's very hard not to conclude that everyone you pass on the sidewalk is a potential criminal assailant; I regularly have to do a reality check and remind myself that I have never been mugged. (Knock wood.)

On the other hand, I take precautions. I don't walk along plugged into an iPod, or a cell phone. I watch my surroundings. I lock my car, and don't leave stuff visible inside it. We have house lights on timers. If I weren't monitoring all those Yahoo groups, I'd tell myself this is just part of living in a city; but when the city you live in is officially the 4th most dangerous city in the U.S., and there's a good deal of evidence that the city government (not just the police department) is completely unable to deal with it, it feels a little different.

We've lived here a long time; we like the neighborhood and the neighbors. We have a lovely house, that we're considering remodeling to make it more comfortable to live in. And yet I keep wondering: what will this be like in another 10 years? Is this just a blip, which will go away when the Oakland mayor and city council finally fire the police chief (which, IMHO, he fully deserves) and hire someone competent? (Assuming they're capable of finding someone competent?) Or is this the start of a slide that will leave us, as we're getting older and frailer, locked into a house that we can't sell because the neighborhood has gone to the dogs, and can't live in without bars on all the ground floor windows? I don't know. There's a lot to like about Oakland; but there's a lot that's really scary too. I just don't know.

Where Was I?

I'm beginning to think I may be overdoing this volunteer thing; I just realized I haven't blogged in 2 weeks. In case you wonder what I am doing, I'm:

- The secretary of the local Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council; since Oakland has just disbanded the Community Policing Advisory Board, it isn't clear what standing we still have, but we're currently planning our next monthly meeting. It's amazing how short a month is when you're planning meetings. I may be about to become the webmistress of the NCPC's new site, too.

- Director and webmistress of the Oakland Symphony Chorus (also an alto - I do sing in it). In the last 8 days this has involved 4 rehearsals (total duration about 15 hours) and 2 performances of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana (with the California Symphony); and we'll be doing it again in 2 weeks with the Young People's Symphony Orchestra, under a different conductor. (The last rehearsal was with YPSO's conductor.) Next week I have rehearsals Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights and a concert the following Sunday.

- Web designer and technical consultant for LifeRing Press, the e-commerce site of the LifeRing recovery group; I'm rebuilding it using ZenCart, in which I have found and reported a bug. I wanted to bring the rebuild live before we went on vacation in June, but it's occurred to me that it's a bad idea to bring the thing live and then leave, so it'll have to wait until I get back to babysit it.

- The LifeRing CEO also wants me to devise and implement a nationwide structure for support groups for the partners, families, loved ones, etc. of people using LifeRing for addiction recovery. Sort of like Al-Anon. The scope of this request leaves me breathless. Also, many people involved in LifeRing agree that the main LifeRing web site, unhooked.com, needs to be completely redesigned and rebuilt; but since no one can yet agree on what business functions they want the web site to provide, I'm ignoring it on the grounds of lack of specs.

- Finally, in an attempt to get myself out of the house and into the company of human beings at least once a week, I recently began volunteering with an after-school program for 3rd-5th grade girls called SMART, run by Girls, Inc. This may be one too many; I'm committed through the end of this month and then I'm going to rethink it. I'm not sure that 10 year old girls were the human beings I had in mind.

At least I'm not bored: I barely have time to read the newspaper which may explain the lack of blogging. And the library card I got? Fergeddaboudit.

Sheehan vs. Pelosi

So Cindy Sheehan, of anti-war activism fame, is running for Nancy Pelosi's seat in Congress. Sigh.

I don't have any skin in this game, since I don't live in the district. But I read the article in today's Chronicle, and I'm just shaking my head over this. This woman has no clue; she's trying to chew up more than she can bite off; and if she were to succeed, she'd do serious damage to California's interests in Congress.

I don't agree with everything Nancy Pelosi does, but she's got my serious respect as a politician who picks her fights carefully, and keeps coming back until she wins. Her argument for not going after impeachment is compelling ("it would be divisive, we couldn't get the votes, and we would have to spend all our time on it."). I'm also impressed by the way she's maintained absolute public impartiality in a lively Democratic presidential primary. I think she knows her job and does it well.

She's the speaker of the House. If Cindy Sheehan unseats her, she will be the most junior of the junior, and San Francisco's (California's) influence in Congress will be significantly diminished.

Of course I know I'm arguing in support of the current incumbent-biased system. I don't agree with it, and have voted to change it whenever I was given the chance, but absent change, you have to work with what you have. Congress is a system in which long service equals more power.

So Cindy, I'm not going to wish you good luck, because frankly, I don't think you either can or should win. You certainly have a right to try.

Beer Tax

Every so often one rolls by that just makes you say, "What??" (I've been reading the wonderful comic strip Candorville, in which people regularly say "What?")

As reported in the invaluable San Francisco Chronicle, a group of students in San Jose is revolting (that's an active verb, not an adjective. Yet.) over the fact that one of California's proposed ways to close the budget deficit is to increase the tax on beer by as much as $1.88 per six-pack. Assemblyman Jim Beall, D-San Jose, proposes to raise the beer tax from 20 cents per gallon to $2.88 per gallon.

The San Francisco State Republicans are marching around outside Assemblyman Beall's offfice in San Jose, complaining about "a tax on poor students." They're waving signs reading, "Students Opposed to Unjust Taxation!", and (I really can't believe this one) "No taxation on intoxication."

OK, let's rephrase this in simple English. A group of self-identified Republican students complain that an increase in the tax on beer is an infringement of their right to get drunk at the end of a long day of studying, because they're too poor to afford an additional $1.88 a six-pack. These are college students, so only the graduate students and some seniors can even drink beer legally; but they're acting as if they were the Sons of Liberty, dumping tea into Boston Harbor.

It's perfectly true that sin taxes, like this one, are regressive taxes on the poor, if only because all sales taxes are regressive taxes on the poor. I just find it hard to put the words "poor" and "Republican" in the same phrase, although I realize I am stereotyping. Still, "poor" and "student" are normally coupled, so we'll let that one pass.

"Fight for your right to party!" they complain. I knew the educational system was bad, but in this case it has clearly failed miserably, because these yokels can't distinguish between a "right", like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or the right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure, and a "privilege", which means that, if they are over 21 years old and have the money, they are allowed to buy and drink beer, as long as they don't drive a car afterward.

Students under 21 have no "right" to buy or drink beer at all, under any circumstances. Period. Regular readers of this blog know that my husband is a recovering alcoholic. Alcoholism is no joke, and there were reasons it was once prohibited, even though the cure turned out to be worse than the disease and was eventually repealed. There's a level at which society can't protect people from their own stupidity; but there's no social obligation to make that stupidity affordable. Or easy.

The article contains some serious statistics about the effects of underage drinking, which unfortunately these kids are not reading. One of the protest organizers says that "some of his fellow students spend as much as 60 percent of their paychecks on beer." Based on my experience, frankly, those students are at very high risk for alcoholism right now. I hope they wake up to the problem and stop before they do themselves real damage.

Bananas

I have to quote this. I just love it. Apparently some scientists at Cal have created T-shirts that read as follows:

We share 25% of our DNA with bananas. Get over yourself.

So far I can't find this on the Cal sites, it was cited in Leah Garchik's gossip column on Monday; but as the old saying goes, it's a good story. Let it stand.

But if I find out where to buy it, I'm getting one of those T-shirts.

Photograph

My former college roommate just retired from her job, and to celebrate, the two of us took in the Annie Leibowitz show at the Palace of the Legion of Honor this morning. I knew it would be fabulous, and it was; what an eye that woman has. But one photograph stopped me in my tracks. After admiring a gorgeous color portrait of Gen. Colin Powell, in full dress uniform as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I turned my head and saw it: a formal portrait of George W. Bush's first cabinet, in (I suppose) the Oval Office, right after the 2000 election. Dubya was standing casually in the center, his hands in his pants pockets, his coat pushed back. To his left, Condi Rice, seated. Colin Powell, standing at the left (viewer's perspective). Dick Cheney, seated in front of Powell. Donald Rumsfeld, seated to the right. There was one other, standing behind Rumsfeld, and I can't recall who it was (Ashcroft?). Everyone but Dubya had his or her suit coat buttoned. It was one of the few portraits done in color; Leibowitz normally works in black and white; but since all the suits were either dark gray or dark blue, only the faces and the walls had anything like color.

It was just a formal portrait, but the print was big enough that the figures were about half life-sized; they looked huge. Everybody was serious and sober; Dubya's face was serious and sober, but the stance just looked - cocky. I looked at that portrait, and thought of what those people were collectively and individually responsible for over the next seven years, and I went cold.

Geek Pleasure

It's amazing how the small things can light up your life. I just upgraded my old Dell desktop to 4 GB of memory - all by myself! This may not sound like much, but as we used to say when nobody could get the video-feed projector to work, I'm a software type: I don't do hardware. What I do, however, is Read The Fine Manual. To give the Dell his due, Dell publishes excellent, detailed online manuals including step by step instructions on how to swap out your system memory and put in new stuff; and I printed them out and followed them, and LO! I have subsecond system response again! What a pleasure!

I suppose I could have stopped running Rosetta@home in the background. In fact, a couple of times lately, I did - I don't know what kind of proteins they're analyzing this week, but even as I type this, the 2 jobs Rosetta jobs running are taking up 650 MB of memory, all by themselves. On the 1 GB of memory I had before, this hardly left enough to bring up WinXP, much less actually DO anything. So whee! I have new memory, I have a newly fast box, and I didn't fry anything in the attempt!

Thoughts on the Police

Over the last several weeks, I've been doing something new: I've been getting to know the Oakland Police Department.

No, I haven't been arrested. Although I did spend the other afternoon riding around in a police cruiser. In East Oakland.

I subscribe to a local Yahoo! newsgroup on crime in the neighborhood. (After all, I live in the 4th most dangerous city in the United States.) Through the Yahoo! group, I learned that the OPD regularly offers a free "Citizens' Academy" - a 14 week program, available to any Oakland resident who's willing to show up every Saturday from 9 to noon. (They do run background checks. I doubt they'd let you attend if you had outstanding warrants.) You get presentations on every department (traffic, patrol, vice and narcotics, crime lab, K-9, etc.), given by people with experience in the department. I'm enjoying the class thoroughly; I've been reading detective stories for 50 years or so, and at last I'm finding out how a real police department functions, as opposed to the ones in the books.

So how did I end up riding around in a cruiser? Part of the Academy is a "ride-along" - each student picks a date and a shift, and you show up at the beginning of the shift and are assigned to an officer for the duration, usually 6 hours (although the officer's shifts are 12 hours). You ride around with him (I was assigned to a guy, although OPD has female officers) and see what he does. I went in with him on several low-risk interviews (a parked car bashed by a hit-and-run; a stolen vehicle; a school administrator trying to get a restraining order for a problem parent; a woman whose neighbor complained that her pets were waking him up). I sat in the car for some edgier stuff: a bunch of middle-school kids, fighting; a traffic stop of a rolling boom box. We answered a call for support on the school fight; the officer said that we "weren't going especially fast," and he didn't use the lights or siren, but we were going a whole lot faster than I'd ever drive through that kind of traffic!

I can't discuss one call very much, since I hope it goes to court, but there was an assault and robbery; the officer took the report, and realized that the suspects might still be in the area; he called for support, and with his colleagues' help, got them into the station in handcuffs, with solid evidence. (Well, it looked solid to me.) Let's just say they were very mean, but they weren't very bright.

So what does a police officer do all day? Think a minute and you'll realize: he does paperwork. He fills out endless reports. He listens to people and writes down what they tell him, by hand, then takes it back to the station and files it. The officer I accompanied was tirelessly patient and courteous, I never heard him raise his voice. I saw him put his hand on his gun once, but he never drew it. He was also very nice about explaining to me what he was doing and why.

The class isn't my only interaction with OPD. I'm also active in the local Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council, which does liaison between police and the neighborhood; and I'm volunteering as a citizen interviewer on the oral review boards which are part of the OPD's hiring process. So one way and another, I'm meeting a lot of cops these days.

Frankly, my opinion of the OPD has changed because of this. (Not that I ever fully bought the '60's rants about "the pigs.") The officers I've met are sharp, dedicated professionals, and they love their jobs. Some of them even love (incredibly) being cops in Oakland. Some of them are Oakland natives, born and raised. Obviously there's some selection in the people who present to the class; still, the message is very consistent, and it doesn't correlate with unquestioning support of the OPD management. But the ordinary cops on the street? They're class acts. I just wish there were more of them; Oakland has half the national average of police officers for a city of 400,000; and more than twice the crime. This can't be a coincidence.

Red Rocks

One of the other things we did while visiting in Las Vegas was to drive out to the Red Rock country for a short hike. These rocks are really red, by the way; one of these days I'll get my photos developed and then you'll see. This is all BLM land, and it was as green as it ever gets, and I saw something I've never seen before: a Joshua tree in bloom. They're quite lovely if a little odd. The highway through the area is studded with signs warning about the wild horses and burros that live in the area; they sometimes mob stopped cars, looking for food, but we didn't see any that day.

Standing in the overlook, examining the Joshua tree, I noticed a woman walking down a desert path. She wore a floor-length dark dress and carried a parasol, which seemed unusually formal for a desert hike. The overlook was on a bluff and she was maybe 30 or 40 feet below me; so I hauled out my trusty binoculars and took a look. There was a wedding party on the desert floor below the overlook. All I could clearly see was a woman, not formally dressed, with a serious camera on a tripod; but through a small tree I saw a woman wearing a cream colored floor length dress with a slightly darker cream bow on her behind, and something cream or white on her head - presumably the bride.

Then a man walked out from behind the tree, into the clearing with the photographer. He was wearing a black tail coat, with vest and the usual black pants, and a top hat. He removed the top hat, revealing an entirely bald (possibly shaved) head, dropped flat on his face on the ground, and executed about 6 pushups. Then he got up again, retrieved the hat, and walked back behind the tree. I don't remember whether the photographer got any pictures of this or not, I was too startled to notice. I hope she did.

I'm still wondering why the groom in a desert wedding would choose to drop into the dust, in full wedding regalia, and do pushups.

I also wonder whether the BLM ranger who asked to borrow my binoculars for a look at all this, actually went down and kicked them out. She spoke as if she might - maybe they didn't have permits.

Standing in Line

We took a break over Easter weekend and went to Las Vegas to visit my sister and brother-in-law, who live there. Among the amusing things we did was to take in the Penn & Teller show - which I highly recommend, by the way. It's a great magic show, and you could take a 9 year old to it, if you don't mind all the questions afterward about how they did the tricks.

But aside from the show, I saw something interesting. We got to the theater about 40 minutes early, having been tipped that our wait in the theater would be lightened by the jazz pianist and his bass player. (The add said something about a "trio" but the most I ever saw was two, and I think one of them may have been Penn. It was certainly Penn playing the bass fiddle briefly, later in the show.) As we took our seats, I realized that the stage was full of people, standing in line. The pianist had just finished saying something but I missed it; he began to play again; and after awhile the line dwindled. However, after another set, the pianist stopped playing and, in the most seductive male voice you could imagine, invited the audience to "come up on the stage and participate in Penn & Teller's envelope signing."

What?

Yes, envelope signing. They had an ordinary manila envelope tacked to an easel, and to while away the wait for the show, they were inviting the audience to come up onto the stage and sign their names on the envelope. The envelope would be used in the show, the pianist explained, and Penn & Teller would like everyone in the audience to come up and participate in the show by signing the envelope.

"If you are sitting next to someone who says, 'You never take me anywhere!', bring them up onto the stage for the Penn & Teller Envelope Signing."

"Bring your loved ones."

I am not making this up. And no, I didn't sign the envelope. But for the entire 40 minutes or so we waited for the show, I watched as a fairly large section of the audience - I'm guessing maybe a third - walked up to the stage, stood more or less patiently in line, and signed their names on a 9x12 manila envelope. From what I could see, enough people signed it that it was about full by the time they took it back stage. People were signing it sideways. And every time the line began to shorten, the piano player took another short break, and issued another soothing, mellifluous invitation to come up on stage and Participate in the Penn & Teller Envelope Signing.

And the moral of the story is the amazing things that people will do, if it seems harmless, they have nothing else to do at the moment, and someone asks them to in a soothing, encouraging voice.

Welcome to Las Vegas. Come up on stage and sign the envelope.

Normalcy

Mr. Bush informs us today that "Normalcy is returning back to Iraq."

On the same page in my newspaper, articles describe Basra and Baghdad both in flames, open warfare between the Mahdi Army and the Iraqi army, and the Green Zone in Baghdad, supposedly our "secure" headquarters, under continual rocket and mortar attack. Green Zone residents have been advised to sleep only in fortified buildings, not in trailers.

This is beyond Orwellian. In what alternate universe can a state like this be described as "normal?"

The trouble is, of course, since we invaded Iraq in 2003 and overthrew Saddam Hussein, this condition has been normalcy for Iraqis. The state of relative calm which followed the troop surge last year is abnormal.

What is it about the word "normalcy" that makes only the worst presidents use it? The last president to call for a "return to normalcy" was Warren Harding...

Double Standard

Once again I'm astounded at the way the U.S. Government allows itself to function. Today's cause for amazement is an article with this delightful title:

Pentagon accidentally sent nuclear missile parts to Taiwan

Seems that, back in 2006, Taiwan ordered some spare batteries for helicopters from the Defense Logistics Agency, a separate government unit which has a warehouse in Utah for unclassified material. This seems normal. However, the shipping containers they actually got contained four electrical fuses for ICBM nose cones. These are the triggers that make a nuclear missile go "boom" (they're not nuclear themselves).

What bothers me is that the DLA doesn't seem to know how this happened. The Air Force had shipped the fuses to the DLA for storage, in 2005. The fuses, being part of a nuclear weapon, should have been stored in a classified warehouse. Also, they should have been accounted for in regular quarterly audits. Helicopter batteries, of course, are not classified and should have been in a different warehouse. And yet, when the time came to ship copter batteries to Taiwan, the boxes they pulled out had classified nuclear weapons parts in them. I think this constitutes having "lost" the nuclear triggers.

Any business that operated like this would have been toast years ago; but apparently the U.S. Government can continue to bumble on uninterrupted. Can these people even count??

Gas Tax

Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle informed us that the skyrocketing price of gasoline is driving up the income the state gets from the gasoline tax; no surprise there. However, the state legislature is squabbling over how to spend this "windfall," given that the economy is in a major recession and the state is facing a whacking deficit, which the Governator has managed to bring down to "only" $8 billion.

But they have a problem: gas tax revenues are legally earmarked to be spent on - surprise! - transportation issues. The Lege, however, sees an opportunity to plug some financial holes without having to do any actual work - all they have to do is suspend the transportation requirement, or "borrow" the funds.

I have a suggestion for our brilliant legislators: you have a surplus in transportation funds. How about fixing some roads? Upgrading some bridges? How many bridges and overpasses in California are in the same bad state as the one that collapsed last year in Minneapolis? Do you even know how many??

We need the infrastructure repairs - many roads are in a disastrous condition. Fixing roads involves hiring people for construction jobs, which would put money back into local economies.

The Assembly's position on this is pretty much summed up by this quote:

"This will be a huge issue because there aren't many moving parts of the budget that are moving up in revenue," said Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, chairman of the Budget Committee.

While as a matter of public policy it makes most sense to keep gasoline sales tax receipts for transportation projects, "we have an $8 billion hole. And if the governor is proposing cutting dental care for adults in California, how does that weigh?" Laird said.

Well, Mr. Laird, I thought that was why we paid all you legislators the big bucks. You're expected to make difficult decisions, and frankly, I thought you were expected to run the state on the money you know will come in, not on the money you think might come in if everything goes well and the economy keeps going up.

If the California Legislature will quit playing prima donna and devote some actual energy and thought to the process called "budgeting" (which most of us mortals have to do all the time), maybe we can get to a point where a drop in the economy won't cause the state to leap immediately to cut health care for poor people and their children. We might have to make do with a lower level of services in general, but if that level were stable, it would be a whole lot better than we have now.

Market Meltdown, or, The Fed Is Even Crazier

I feel the need to rant.

What in the name of sweet benevolent JESUS ON A BICYCLE does the Federal Reserve think it's doing?

Unless you live in a cave and read papyrus manuscripts by candlelight, you know that over the weekend, investment banking house Bear Sterns collapsed under the weight of its illiquid mortgage-backed securities positions and was kindly "rescued" by JP Morgan Chase, who bought it for $2 a share. (Do not weep for JP Morgan Chase. This amounts to less than the market value of the Bear Sterns headquarters building, which they now own.)

This was a straight run on the bank: Bear Sterns' customers started pulling out funds, and the firm couldn't unwind their positions fast enough to get the cash to cover. It's probably a good thing that the Fed brokered the deal; if Bear Sterns had been allowed to go entirely Tango Uniform, a lot of their counterparties would have followed them down.

It's also more or less understandable, I suppose, that JP Morgan Chase didn't want Bear Sterns' portfolio of mortgage-backed dreck. They wouldn't be able to sell it either.

I do NOT find it understandable that the Federal Reserve chose to say, in effect, "Oh, don't worry about all those nasty subprime-based securities; we'll take them off your hands." The Fed is taking on thirty BILLION dollars worth of Bear Sterns' bum portfolios!! Bear Sterns (obviously) didn't understand them; what makes the Fed think it understands them?? Do they actually think they can hold this stuff long enough for it to be worth something?

Everyone is saying, Oh, the Fed has Saved The Day! It looks to me as if the Fed has just added a gratuitous $30 billion to the Federal debt that is already coming out of my personal taxpaying pockets, and I don't appreciate it at all. Especially in light of the fact that the Fed seems to be hell-bent on lowering interest rates again, just as soon as they can. With everybody underwater in debt, making it easier to borrow is not going to help. And I don't see any of this helping the financial markets, because they're all afraid to borrow from each other because they don't understand their mortgage-backed securities either. I explained this back in September, in Too Smart For Their Own Good, and frankly, I'd rather have been wrong. I wish I'd been exaggerating. But I wasn't.

Paul Krugman is saying on money.cnn.com that he thinks the economy will be in the tank at least until 2010. I'm just wondering how much of my retirement money will be left when it's over.

Salaries

I don't usually expect philosophy from the San Francisco Chronicle, but on today's sfgate.com I saw a column with the arresting title: No Offense, but You Don't Deserve Your Salary.

Kind of catches your eye, doesn't it?

I strongly recommend the piece. I've actually considered writing something on this subject, spurred by disgust at the absurd salaries paid to CEOs and baseball players, but the columnist, Chris Colin, has really said it all much better than I could.

The reader comments are fairly interesting, too.

What the ??

The disconnects in this story are so bad that I can't even think of a coherent title for the story. But here's how it goes:

Last April, that, is almost one entire year ago, a young man was murdered, shot, in San Francisco's Tenderloin. Call him The Victim. On information from another young man, whom we will call The Witness, a third young man, The Suspect, was thrown in jail and charged; The Witness claimed that The Suspect was the shooter and that he, The Witness, had watched the whole thing. Oh, goody, an eyewitness. The court finally scheduled a preliminary hearing yesterday for the case; The Suspect has been in jail this entire time.

The Suspect, however, is now out of jail and free for the foreseeable future; the prosecutors had to drop the case. They had to drop the case because - wait for it - The Witness was deported to Honduras, from whence he came, in December. He was convicted on drug charges in November; and since he was now a felon as well as an illegal immigrant, the authorities handed him over to ICE, who sent him back to enrich the community in Honduras.

My first impulse is to ask whether the federal and local law enforcement communities do not talk to each other, except that it's so obvious on the face of it that they don't. On consideration, though, I can't really argue with ICE deporting The Witness; he was illegal in at least two positions. But: wasn't it the same court who turned The Witness over for deportation, who was eventually going to hear the case in which he was the only eyewitness??

Wouldn't it have been possible to leave The Witness here, in jail, until he could testify in the murder trial??

Does the right hand talk to the left hand, or even acknowledge that it exists??

Same-sex Marriage

I've been reading with interest the coverage of the California Supreme Court's review of Prop. 22 and the "right" of same sex couples to marry. First, I want to give Justice Moreno a huge round of applause for his simple question: "Are you saying that separate is equal here?"

Second, let's all agree that it is absolute balderdash to suggest that heterosexual marriage is somehow "threatened" by the possibility that people of the same sex might marry. People decide to marry or not for a very wide range of reasons, many of which are totally irrational, but the possibility that people of the same gender might be able to marry is just not on the table in that process. I mean, imagine the conversation: "Gee, Harry, I can't marry you, because your brother Joe just married his boyfriend Ed." Give me a break.

The real objection to same-sex marriage, which nobody wants to discuss, goes back to the fact that a lot of people still think that homosexuality is some kind of warped personal choice, which can't be accepted because "the things those people do" are so revolting. This is a personal opinion and has no business in public policy; it's just another facet of the fact that Americans as a group can't deal rationally with sex. As far as I can tell from the research, homosexuality is not a choice, it's a basic predisposition, like blue eyes or left-handedness or the inability to smell the chemical you make when you pee after eating asparagus.

Let me come down here on the side of the people (I've read several user comments to this effect on sfgate.com) who say that marriage should not be a consideration of the state. Marriage is a religious sacrament, and in the United States we have a legal separation of church and state. The state should only approve civil unions; any two people should be able to join in a civil union; and if a couple wants to go to the Catholic Church and argue that their same-sex union should be solemnized in the marriage ceremony, that's their private problem.

State approval of marriages goes back to English common law, under which the church is an arm of the state; but our Constitution forbids that. The real problem with civil unions is the fact that the federal government also has this confusion; no matter what the California court decides, unless something is done at the federal level, same-sex partners in civil unions still won't be able to have the privileges under Social Security that people who are "married" get. I've been married twice, both to men; neither function took place in a church or involved a minister of religion. In both my marriages, I had full rights to my husband's Social Security (which was moot the first time because I've made, over my lifetime, probably more money than he has...). But a same-sex couple who also has a civil ceremony not involving a minister doesn't have those rights; and they aren't necessarily recognized as "family" in the health system; and so on.

Justice Moreno is dead right: this is separate, but not equal.

And since neither of my marriages produced any children, let's also dismiss the absurd argument that marriage is "for the procreation of children." Marriage is and has been for centuries a legal arrangement for the disposal and transmission of property, generally but not exclusively through children, since until recently, no one could be sure that the children would survive. This whole romantic love business was invented in the 19th century by the Romantic movement.

Synthetic Life

In today's San Francisco Chronicle, the article on the TED conference in Monterey centered on yesterday's speech by Craig Venter. Remember him from the Human Genome Project? The guy who said - and proved, as I remember - that a profit-making organization could beat a non-profit to the goal. Mr. Venter, having followed that up by sequencing his own personal genome, is now trying to build, from scratch, the genome for a "single, sustainable, living cell." Mr. Venter imagines

Imagine an organism that consumes carbon dioxide and can be used to battle global warming.

I have really bad news for Mr. Venter. He's re-inventing the wheel. These organisms already exist - they're called "plants." If he ever came out of his laboratory, he might even see some of them.

Barack Obama and the Turban of Doom

What IS all this flap about the photo of Barack Obama in a traditional African costume, on that visit he made to Kenya in 2006?? Everybody knows about that visit. Everybody knows, as Obama himself pointed out this morning, that when dignitaries of any kind visit countries that have a distinctive traditional dress, the local officials tend to give the dignitary a local outfit as a ceremonial present, and they expect him to put it on and pose for photos.

Apparently the Drudge Report started circulating a rumor that unnamed "Clinton staffers" were sending this photo around as a slam at Obama, citing an (unquoted) email. (No, I'm not going to give a link to the Drudge Report; I got this from an AP article, see the link above. If you want to read the Drudge Report you can Google it.)

Well, so what? Big fat hairy deal. Barack Obama did a photo op in Kenya, and the world is going to come to an end??

The person with a real grievance here is Hillary Clinton, because the accusation that her staff circulated this photo, to get some kind of an edge over Obama, just makes her look small minded and negative, and really really stupid. She may have thrown some negative lines, but she's not small minded and she certainly isn't stupid. Do you suppose Drudge was trying to bring Clinton down??

Moth Spray

"I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."

The latest incarnation of this terrifying phrase is the California State Dept. of Agriculture's plan to spray the city I live in, Oakland, along with basically the entire rest of the San Francisco Bay Area, with a pesticide meant to combat the light brown apple moth. Every night this summer. And every summer for the next five years. Even though the initial spraying in Santa Cruz and Monterey last year produced hundreds of complaints about coughing, wheezing, muscle aches, eye and throat irritation, and asthma attacks.

We're doing this because the light brown apple moth "can damage" a wide range of agricultural crops and other plants. If we don't do this spraying, it'll destroy California agribusiness. The state, and the USDA, say they are trying to "head off a potential disaster."

Yeah, right. Have we got a widespread infestation of the apple moth? Well, no. They've found a few moths in about 11 counties. Does the apple moth cripple agriculture? Well, not visibly in Australia, where it originated; OK, maybe it has natural enemies there. But it's also been introduced into New Zealand, New Caledonia, the British Isles, and Hawaii. I haven't personally heard of the agricultural industry in those places being crippled by this moth; have I missed something??

Look, they propose to fly crop-dusters over the city of Oakland, at a height of 200 feet or less, and spray a chemical called CheckMate over the city (and about every other city in the Bay Area), every night, all summer. To read a professional analysis of the ingredients of CheckMate, review this article in today's San Francisco Chronicle, from Richard Fagerland, of "Ask the Bugman." It is scary. It is very scary. The USDA says the amount of pesticide they want to use "shouldn't pose severe health risks." I'd like to know how they determine what health risks are "severe."

I'm an asthmatic; I also have eye problems due to other chronic conditions. I am seriously concerned about my health if I have to live with this crap falling out of the sky for the next five years. There are bills in the California legislature right now to block this spraying, and I think my next step is to go to my legislators' web sites and encourage them to pass those bills.

This is an attempt to protect California agribusiness at the expense of the health of the majority of the northern California urban population. Well, boys, there are more of us than there are of them, and we vote for you. Or we don't; your choice.

Imaginary Monsters

I have a very vivid imagination. Always have had. The trouble with a vivid imagination is that it imagines things you don't really want to consider, and then you can't get them out of your head.

Why do we always imagine disasters? Crime has been really bad in Oakland lately - but I'm a seasoned urban paranoid: I don't walk at night, or with an iPod plugged in, or while talking on a cell phone (all behaviors that increase your likelihood of being mugged). Why then does my imagination create detailed mental scenarios in which I'm being mugged by 10 armed street thugs? (Because, of course, somebody in my neighborhood was mugged by 10 armed street thugs a couple of weeks ago, while walking home from BART at 10 o'clock at night...) I carefully avoid situations that might get me into trouble - why do I build such detailed mental images of stuff happening to me?

And then there's "medical student syndrome" - you know what I mean. You read about some disease in the newspaper and the next thing you know, you're convinced you have the symptoms. My imagination is convinced that I'm developing some incurable disease that my HMO won't catch. In fact, all my blood tests come back normal and my cholesterol is great (result of going to the gym multiple times a week); the worst thing wrong with me is probably my asthma.

In order to reduce my car insurance premium, I'm taking a "mature driver's safety course" (I think I'm the youngest student in the class). After the first session I'm now convinced that my peripheral vision is shot, my reaction time is practically nil, I can't drive at night, and I'm going to lose my driver's license and have to depend on the Bay Area's crummy public transit. Considered rationally, I'm actually a good, careful, defensive driver; but my imagination is at it again.

It was worse when I was younger; my sister was convinced that clairvoyance ran in the family and that she, and our late aunt, both had it. So of course I wondered if I had it. My parents used to take long driving vacations across the country. While they were gone, I would imagine all sorts of horrific things going wrong with them (car accidents; floods; armed robberies), and then I'd have to take emergency time off work and race to their rescue. These mental images are very real - they trigger adrenaline rushes. Your pulse pounds, you start to sweat, you go into flight-or-fight mode.

After a while, I realized that none of the things I imagined ever happened; I'm a good, careful, defensive driver because that's how my father drove, and that's why he never had any trouble. People who believe in clairvoyance simply haven't kept the records properly - for every disaster they saw coming, they also foresaw fourteen or twenty-seven disasters which never happened. But nobody remembers the clairvoyant predictions that never panned out.

Also, nobody ever seems to be clairvoyant about good things. If clairvoyance is real, why would you not foresee good luck as well as bad? But you never hear about anyone who had a successful premonition that he'd get the good promotion, or win the vacation cruise to Cabo.

When you name something you control it; I finally came up with a name for this syndrome. I called it "manufacturing monsters"; and then I could say to myself, "You're manufacturing monsters again, stop it." And most of the time, that would stop it. In fact for many years, I had only minor problems with it.

Then I hit menopause, and damn if it didn't all come back. But don't ask me - I just live in this brain, I don't understand it.

Book Tag Meme

By virtue of having read this post at Disgusted Beyond Belief's blog, I've been tagged with a meme. Specifically, the book tag requires:


1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the 5th Sentence.
4. Post the next 3 sentences.
5. Tag 5 people.

OK, for the fun of it, I will play the game. Both DBB and the person who tagged him chose to do the meme at a time when they could pick the book, so as to get a "cool" extract. I am sitting at my computer and have chosen a book I could reach, on the shelf next to the computer. Since this is a book my husband picked up in an airport, that I haven't gotten around to reading yet, I have no clue what I'm going to get. Here we go, the prescribed 3 sentences:

"It is important. Where were you?"
"That is none of your concern."

For the curious, the book I pulled for the meme was An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears.

At the moment, I'm going to follow DBB's lead and suggest that if you have read this post, you should consider yourself tagged. I may do some more active tagging later but it's late now.

Boop-oop-a-doop

Courtesy of the Pacific Film Archives, I spent a solid hour this afternoon watching Betty Boop cartoons, and what a treasure those were. If the only cartoons you've ever seen are Disney, or Looney Toons (aka Bugs Bunny), you have no clue what a cartoon can really look like.

The first description that comes to my mind is "pre-Code". Movies, we all know, have been formally censored since the 1930s - they can't "lower the moral standards" of the audience, they must present "correct standards of life," they must not ridicule "natural or human law." Wikipedia's article on the Hays code, as it's also called, is quite interesting.

We're still living with this code, by the way - the R and X rating of movies that include nudity are directly related to it. And the sanitized cartoons of Disney and Warner Brothers, where only the violence is unrestricted, are related to this. (Nowhere in the code do I see any prohibition of violence. Violence is fine.)

Betty Boop cartoons are not sanitized. Betty is sexy - she has little boobs, she wears short frilly skirts and a strapless top, you can see her garter. In one cartoon, her dress falls down and shows her bra, and she pulls it back up; this happens about 4 times. And she flirts. Since Betty is sexy and flirty, male characters in the cartoons hit on her - often, she's delighted, but in one cartoon, her boss puts the make on her and threatens to fire her if she doesn't cooperate, in a sequence that would get a live human employer convicted for sexual harassment today. But her cartoon boyfriend (a clown) races to the rescue and the sexual assault disappears behind a cloud of cartoon violence.

One of the cartoons had Betty in a cameo role (as a hula dancer in a carnival) in what was actually a Popeye cartoon - that had plenty of violence, with Popeye fighting the evil Bluto for Olive Oyl. But you should have seen Popeye up on the stage doing the hula with Betty - in a grass skirt made of a beard which he pulled off the bearded lady in the next booth.

There were several carnivals in the Betty cartoons, with the usual carny games, and in the carnival in the Popeye cartoon, the "throw the baseball, win a prize" game used a target of a little black boy, a la Black Sambo, whose head was stuck through a hole in the back wall of the booth. You wouldn't see that in a later cartoon; but racism was just part of Betty's world.

Betty Boop cartoons are very musical - specifically, they are jazzy. This was the jazz age, and in a Betty cartoon, the mice and dogs pick up trumpets and blow hot licks, and inanimate objects turn into clarinets and do jazz riffs. I've now seen 2 Betty cartoons (one at the Paramount in Oakland) in which Cab Calloway sings the background - in the one today, he sang the Saint James Infirmary Blues and it was fabulous. In the last cartoon, Ethel Merman (not in animation) sang Let Me Call You Sweetheart in an introductory sequence and then afterward in a "sing along with the bouncing ball" - I've never seen Ethel Merman on film before.

I think of Betty Boop as black and white (if you've seen Who Killed Roger Rabbit? you know what I mean), but they showed one that was done in "cinecolor" - they did Betty as a redhead, for some reason. The story was "Cinderella", interpreted fairly straight (for a Betty cartoon), and it was actually one of the least interesting they showed.

Betty cartoons are fantastical, they're another universe. Inanimate objects get up and dance, and talk back. The rag man in Any Rags goes down the street pulling the uniform off the policeman, and the pants off a guy sleeping behind a tree. Dishes dance on the table. Cats and dogs and fish dance and play jazz. People turn into monsters, and vice versa. Buildings rearrange their fire escapes into roller coaster tracks so Betty and her little boy can have a ride. Some of the characters are human and some aren't. It's a fluid world, in which things don't stay the way they appear for long and you never know what will happen next. But it's a lot of fun.

Speedy

Courtesy of the Pacific Film Archives, I spent last Saturday afternoon watching a jewel - a print of Speedy, a Harold Lloyd silent comedy from 1928. It must have been one of his last silents - The Jazz Singer came out the year before.

Apart from Lloyd's reliably funny physical comedy, this film had several wonderful benefits: it was set and filmed in New York City, so you get to see what New York City looked like in 1928. There's a whole sequence where Harold ("Speedy") takes his girl to Coney Island, so you get to see what Coney Island looked like in 1928, including the nighttime lights - fabulous! And there's a cameo appearance by Babe Ruth, playing himself (he only appeared in 3 feature films), and a short sequence of a ball game at Yankee Stadium. I mean, what more can you ask? Plus a great live accompaniment by a very accomplished pianist, Mr. Bruce Loeb. In one of those great Berkeley moments, I was discussing the film's views of New York with a trio of Even Older People, and one of the women commented that she was in New York in 1928 - she was in school then! (May I look that good when I get to that age!)

On top of all this, Speedy contains one of the greatest chase sequences I've personally seen in movies. (Do remember that I don't see that many movies, so don't haul out all your great hard-techno action sequences and throw them at me. I don't watch hard-techno movies.) I put this one up there with the chases in Around the World in 80 Days and the Seven Percent Solution, where they were tearing up the (train, boat) and feeding the pieces into the boiler to keep up steam. This one has no boiler, but Lloyd races a horse-drawn street car across New York in the middle of traffic. A better comparison might be Buster Keaton in The General, chasing his train.

We all walked out of the theater smiling, and that's just priceless.

BlackBerry Outage

Sigh - the news brings fond memories of days gone by. When I worked, the entire universe, including me, had BlackBerries. They were so bad some managers forbade people to bring them to meetings, because nobody paid any attention to what was going on in the room. When BlackBerry went down the world ended. I see it ended again today for awhile - in fact, as of around 7:30 ET it was still down with no estimate for a fix. May as well declare tomorrow a holiday - BlackBerry's out. Nobody can work.

Bird Fight

After several weeks of cold clear weather, and cold rainy weather, and cold cloudy weather (ok, ok - cold for northern California! All right??), last week the weather changed and we had warm sunny weather. By "warm", here, I mean, mid-60's! (Yes!)

So in the warm sunny weather I found myself walking home from the transit station last Friday, and I saw the damndest bird behavior I'd ever seen - there were two scrub jays apparently fighting on a lawn:

They were squawking madly at each other, scrabbling around in the grass.

You sort of expect to see birds fighting in the air, yes? I don't know - all I've ever seen scrub jays do is steal food.








They were scratching at each other's stomachs with their feet, and occasionally pecking at each other:

With no particular evidence (scrub jays aren't especially sexually dimorphic), I assume this was a pair of males fighting over a female - there was a third jay sitting on a wire overhead, squawking regularly. I cast that one for the role of female. Could this be some kind of courtship display or are they really fighting over the female?

I got one more picture that looks a little more affectionate, but believe me, the birds weren't acting affectionate:


They kept at it long enough for me to shoot these pictures with my cell phone (I really have to think about getting a functional digital camera); and then they all flew away, including the one on the wire.

If any of my genius readers can confirm what they were doing, I'd appreciate it.

Oh, Yes - the Election

I did vote, even though I hadn't had a decent night's sleep in nearly a week (see the last post). And I've accumulated the following comments on the California election:

I was disappointed that Obama didn't do better, but he didn't do badly, and as I've said before, I will happily back either him or Hillary in the general. The whole process has caused a lot of people to consider the existing electoral process in much more detail than usual, and if we're lucky, this will lead to some changes. Given the comparative turnout on Tuesday between Democrats and Republicans, and given the fact that McCain has so pissed off the "conservative base" that some of the mouthier ones are suggesting they will stay home in November and wait for a "real" conservative to run (you do that, boys; just do it), I think that if the Democrats can avoid any obvious stupidity and neither of the candidates breaks any laws on national TV, we may just have a Democrat in the White House this time next year. And he/she may even visit California from time to time.

Oh, Lord, the proposals. I've gotten so tired of the side effects of trying to run the state budget through the initiative process, that I automatically vote "no" on any proposition that locks up funding for anything on a statewide ballot. You guys in the community colleges, in case you wondered why you lost? That's why. Budgeting should be done in the legislature. (Yes, I know they're incompetent and don't do it; but that isn't the point.)

And I voted against the term limits revision. That's something that does have to be done by initiative, since the original term limits were done that way. Now, I am opposed to term limits. I voted against the original proposition. If we don't like the guy, we get a chance to vote for someone else every 2 or 4 years; and I think it may be useful to elect an occasional Green or Libertarian and let them see how it works firsthand. But term limits (AKA the "get rid of Willie Brown" act) passed, and we're stuck with it - and now the legislators have realized what I could have told them back then: running a state this size is a big job that takes a while to learn. You need more than 4 or 6 years. So why my "no" this time? Because I object to Don Perata and Fabian Nunez writing themselves, and a whole load of their buddies, a "get out of jail free" card in one of the later paragraphs. If they'd just changed the term limits, without trying to keep themselves in power, I would have gone for it. And I'll bet I'm not the only person who reacted that way.

I also voted against all 4 Indian gaming propositions. I voted in favor of the original Indian gaming proposal, and have regretted it ever since. Yes, I realize that Arnold has negotiated an actual slice of the take this time (although I don't think many people realize that it seems to be only of the take from the extra slot machines), as opposed to the pittance that Gray Davis agreed to back when. But this is gambling. Gambling is a tax on the poor; it's even more regressive than a sales tax. Gambling is also an addiction. And I don't think we should be taking our state operating funds out of the hides of the poor and the addicted. If we need more money to run the state, RAISE THE GODDAMN INCOME TAX. Which is a progressive tax, where the less you take in, the less tax you pay, and the converse. We haven't had a serious income tax increase in a dunnamany years, and the state is growing like Jack's beanstalk and running on baling wire and prayer. The trouble is, the unspeakable Republicans will block any tax increase, simply because they can, and because they have no useful ideas of their own except to cut funding for the poor and disabled (who wouldn't ever vote for them anyway).

We are running the state of California on credit, exactly as we're running the U.S.A. on credit, and as we're all running our households on credit (well, with a few exceptions) - and as I've said elsewhere, sooner or later, the bills come due, and if the money isn't there to pay them, what then??