Reading Local News Because I Am Too Tired And Stupid To Just Go To Bed

Local 103-year-old man lives alone, shops, drives, and still carries his baseball mitt in case anyone wants to play catch. I've always had this sense I will live a long time too (potentially disproven every day) but my attitude -- and attitude is everything -- isn't nearly as good as this guy's.

Boy Scouts help residents, help the environment, and raise money by hauling away dead Christmas trees. Very cool, but my troop's doing that too, and we didn't make the paper. We don't do 2,000 trees every year, either. In fact, we've got less than three hundred scheduled so far. I'm the coordinator this year, and spent all day today going through mailings and voicemail and mapping the tree pick-ups. Top marks to those other guys for managing seven times as many.

Local sex boutique runs up against a gaggle of concerned mothers, none of whom apparently ever got anything but cards and flowers from their husbands on Valentine's Day. They are concerned about what kinds of people the store will attract. So far it's attracted the very worst: Moralist protestors.

Time to Update

Adding a couple three bloglinks.

Thought about it yesterday when Flumadiddle gave me a nice review. I found her blog entirely by accident and it's a treasure of hilarious godlessness and I'm linking her. Go read. Go to the bathroom first.

Then today I caught This Moment in Time and decided it was time to add her as well. We were in a creative writing class in twelfth grade. We met up at a couple high school reunions, notably the last one, the 30th, took place in November (no, I never blogged it, but she did). Amazing woman, travels the world, lives mostly in Bali (the real one, not Bali, ID, as Blogger seems to insist).

Finally I can't believe I haven't linked the Webmiztris and am heretofore correcting the oversight. Man. I hope I get whipped for it.

Merry Christmas II

The news won't let go of the church in Queens that was burgled of its collection during a Christmas Mass. It's given the press an opportunity to do what it does best: create clever headlines laced in moral outrage. But the cash was there, and to someone who would take it, the fact that it's Christmas wouldn't stop them. Hell, he was probably angry that it was Christmas and he had nothing better to do than steal from a church. Being a compassionate soul, I wish him a long prison term in which to dwell on his self-loathing.

I've always believed that I live in a crime-free neighborhood. It's very quiet and we live at the end of a long-ish dead-end street. No thief with an ounce of self-preservation would venture into a trap like this to burgle anyone. They always look for an alternate escape route.

So I thought. About four o'clock Christmas morning my wife was awakened by headlights down in the cul-de-sac sweeping across our windows. Now that she was awake, she got up and turned off our outdoor lights and morphed into Santa for a minute to fill my stocking, and went back to bed.

The next day while walking the dog, she ran into a group of neighbors and learned that in the darkness of early Christmas morning, someone had broken into two of our neighbors' cars as well as a tool shed, and made off with keys and credit cards and a thousand dollars' worth of tools. Major big hassle for people. They have to cancel all their cards, re-key their house, all that. And such a violation to discover on Christmas morning!

Thought Number One: We're not so safe. This habit of never locking the house might not be such a good one. Not that I'm worried about anyone coming in when we're home. It's the middle-of-the-day thievery that concerns me; and even so, we really don't have anything. A computer, a DVD player, a television. Big deal. So long as they don't burn down the house, I can live with it. Would rather not have to, of course. And they're not likely to get my grandmother's silver: it's in a nondescript cardboard box in the garage, hidden in plain sight. How's that for security?

Thought Number Two: Why the tools? This is what I think. To work in construction, you need your own tools. They're a major investment. So you buy a pre-owned set from midnight tool supply. What else is a responsible, hard-working, and piss-poor family man to do? It just sucks for my neighbor. Big house notwithstanding, he's a construction worker. And as fun and easy-going as he is, I doubt he will get his replacements from midnight tool supply.

Thought Number Three: Mark all your tools. Heck, I got a cell phone for Christmas, I think I'll mark it too. So: Engraver, or soldering iron? Or just a big scrawl in fingernail polish?

Merry Christmas

The last presents are wrapped and the stockings stuffed and nothing but adrenaline keeps me from going to bed. That and the peace of this quiet moment.

Christmas Eve was always a magical time. We'd go home late from my grandparents' house, where we had opened presents, sleepily watching the night sky for that tiny sleigh, then crawl into bed with the fragrance of the tree and glittering lights lingering, maybe a sense of peace and wonder too if we had gone to the candlelight service. Contentment filled us, for tomorrow was a play day, the best play day of the year.

I loved recreating the magic for my children. Santa presents were always wrapped in special paper they never saw on anything else, stockings filled with candy and tiny toys and whimsy. Even as their belief gave way, it came back for a few fun moments in the morning. Today, there's no more pretense. The presents are all from us. But that doesn't make it much less magical, and the stockings are still full of fun, useful and silly things.

Now: It's dead quiet outside, cold and foggy, nary a sound. Even the cats are sleeping. I turned off the house Christmas lights, turned off the tree. The inside temperature hovers about sixty. All I hear is the ringing in my ears and a clock ticking.

What do I want for Christmas? That my kids have a fun day. I look at the pile under the tree and conclude they probably will. But none of this is stuff we couldn't get any other time of the year, and some of it is stuff, like clothes, that we do get other times of the year. Is that my wife and children have a fun, relaxing, somewhat magical day my only wish?

No. I'd like two things for Christmas. The small one is that every visitor to this pointless little site, whether out of accident or purpose, has a happy Christmas Day, whether or not it being Christmas means anything to you; that this day, in other words, is a good day, unmarred by troubles, family squabbles, heartaches, unsatisfied hungers, or anything else that will detract from its naturally perfect beauty. The other is a wish -- a silly and pointless wish, unfortunately -- that just for a little while every human heart has love and forgiveness for others, and is simply incapable of any malice. I wish that for a little while, no human being is able to bring himself or herself to hurt another. No matter what the circumstances. Just can't do it.

How long is a little while? How long does it take for a new habit to take hold? About three weeks? Then let's give this wish four weeks to do its work. Imagine if everyone now alive was open to look in their hearts and find a way to do what they believe they must do without allowing it to hurt anyone; and then made that kind of thinking a habit, and never looked back.

That's what I want for Christmas. We'll see what tomorrow brings. Time for me to go sleep on it.

Trees and Lights

We always go up to Pollock Pines -- it's about an hour up the hill, past Hangtown, up into where it snows. Pack a lunch and drive into the pine forest and stomp around in the mud awhile. Hey, if you live where it gets to a hundred and ten in the summertime, that's not such a bad deal.

Grab a saw and head off into the tree farm. They don't organize their trees in any way. It's just a patch of picked over forest, with many of the tree candidates growing second, third, fourth generation out of older root stock. None are perfect. All have personality. We have to throw snowballs at whoever's got the camera. It's a rule.


People complain about the price of trees. Fake trees is why the Troop always has to hustle for more fundraising business: We pick up dead trees after the holidays for a small fee and take them away. I'm coordinating it this year. Always, someone says, oh no, we have an artificial tree now, you don't have to come by any more. Well, I don't know if I'd pay sixty, eighty bucks for a little one-time tree either. Tree lot trees cost too much. But up where we go, it's four dollars per foot, and no charge over eight feet, plus a dollar for wrapping (makes it easier to haul); so we paid $33 for a fourteen footer, which is all that'll fit. I think that's a fair deal, with a family trip and horsing about in the mud in the bargain.

Got house lights up too. I make it up as I go.

Next couple three days are for traveling about to various family, taking panicky trips to the store, and unexpected periods of laziness. Everyone either have a fabulous Christmas, or a fabulous time enjoying not having Christmas!

Oh Come, All Ye Faithful

In this holy season, where a fresh hope is born in the dark night of the winter solstice, I would like to remind one and all in the service of world peace that tomorrow (Fri 22 Dec) is Global Orgasm Day.

This Post is Not About Christmas

This afternoon we met at the hospital and went around to a few wards and sang our mix of barbershop-style Christmas songs and close-harmony arrangements of a couple standards plus a couple pretty classical pieces, and I have to admit, my mood coming out was an incredibly huge freaking shitload better than it was going in. Singing cures every ill. But this isn't about that.

Sometime last month I went down to the Bay Area and visited an old friend and played with his kid and saw another old friend who was in town and visited his mother in the same awesomely cool old house she lived in when I was a little kid going to birthday parties, and hemmed and hawed and changed my mind three times and finally at the last minute went to my 30th high school reunion. That was fun: Talked to some folks, didn't talk to some others, stuff like that. But this isn't about that either.

That afternoon we went to the City, three men and a baby ('cept the baby was three), and walked around in San Francisco's brilliant sunshine and fresh air, and as usual I took too many pictures of buildings. What is it about buildings? One of the Three Occupations I Didn't Follow But Wish I Had is architect. I would have really enjoyed being an architect. Especially in San Fran. But no, so instead of design buildings I take pictures of them, especially the old brick ones that went up before they understood earthquakes yet have miraculously survived several.


And I take pictures of other things. Like where Sal lives. Up there somewhere under Coit Tower.


So that's what this post is about: Climbing out of the mental hell that is the mind of the hopeless corporate drone and posting a few pictures taken on a nice day in San Francisco.

Fear No Evel

Something about flaming ping-pong balls led me to comment, “Reminds me of last night, only that involved bicycles and gasoline. I'll blog about it if they ever get the video up onto YouTube.”

On the evening in question, I came home from work but had to slow up when I turned in to the lane. It was lined with small pickups and SUVs, with barely room for me to pass. More of them were strewn about my neighbor’s front yard. It was after dark and the only light came from his open garage, or from the countless little battery-powered Christmas lights that were strung on all the off-road bikes. People were milling about in their bicycling gear, using little flashlights to adjust this and mess with that.

I was in my usual good mood at the end of a workday and said, “What the fuck is all this?!” A guy in a blue windbreaker tried to direct me to an open space to park in. I ignored him and went on home.

I walked down later in a friendlier frame and found out my neighbor’s cycling club was doing its annual canned food drive. They dress up their bikes and toddler-trailers and everything in lights and little trees and whatnot and ride the couple miles down to Dovewood Ct and back. Dovewood Ct is one of those neighborhoods where everyone is required to go all out on their Christmas lights, and people come from miles around to wonder at the electric bills and drop their offerings in a couple recycling bins set up on the sidewalk. My neighbor’s club makes an unauthorized nighttime parade of the deal, stopping traffic and making people go “Ooh.” Looks like a lot of fun.

After that they come back to party awhile. Nabe had said come on by, so once everyone at my house was off to bed I did. He had a couple portable fire pits blazing on his driveway and music going and a keg flowing and finger food set out on the ping-pong table and the whole works. Of course I didn’t know a soul there so I got myself a beer and a fistful of chips and went to a fire pit and asked someone how the ride went. An hour of small talk, mooching and dodging the fire smoke then ensued.

They were a cheerful crew. Most about thirty, with a few old farts like me, and their kids. A pool table and a fusbol set were in full swing in the garage. The air outside was just about at freezing so the fires were popular. Then, as you might expect, someone got bored, and next thing some tires were stacked up by a fire and a board was laid on it and someone got on a bicycle and started jumping the flames. The ground was wet from the incessant drizzle and the hazard factor made it a very popular show, especially when a rider didn’t hit the landing well enough and wound up tumbling across the concrete. Out came the tiny digital video cameras everyone seems to have in their pocket these days and the jumps got higher and faster.

Finally the wood got stacked high and someone said, “What next, gasoline?” and the homeowner said, “Shhh!” Turned out he had a plan. His friend came pedaling furiously out of the dark and just as he hit the ramp, a spray of liquid came out of the host’s beer cup and the night air lit up like Godzilla on Guy Fawkes Night. The rider’s eyes screamed, “Oh shit!” as he passed through flames higher than his head; and then he came down and nailed the landing. The whooping and hollering after that undoubtedly woke the neighbors, if there were still any that needed waking, and crowds formed and broke for fifteen minutes after that, reliving the moment on little digital screens. My neighbor’s a cheerful drunk and kept showing people and saying, “That’s the best video ever!” It was great.

Here’s the video compilation of the last few jumps. I’m one of the stupid shadowy inebriates in the background. Good times, eh.

Cold Snap

It's lovely outside. Clear and cold. Frost adorns the lawns and draws little outlines on the leaves.

There was still ice on my windshield when I got to work. And I was late: this was after nine. The sun had been up a couple hours. As I drove, the sunlight hit the icy windshield and shattered into a hundred bright colors.

Ice is exciting and beautiful. This is why: We don't really get a lot of it around here.

I live a hundred miles in from the Pacific. It's a lot colder here in winter than at the coast, and a lot warmer in summer. The weather's a little less temperate, and winter weather takes on one of two forms: Clear and cold, or cloudy and not so cold. The clouds trap just enough heat to keep us above freezing. Thus it almost never snows. When the clouds go away, as they have for the past few days, the heat escapes to space and we get below freezing at night. But there's no precipitation and again, no snow.

We crunched in snow a few weeks ago, getting our tree. But that was up the hill a bit. Down here: none yet. Likely won't be any. The dog's plastic little swimming pool was frozen over this morning, and the cat was all puffed up and angry looking, and the chickens huddled in the rising sun. But no snow. Just frost: everything white and brown and green.

People who live where ice is a hazard and a bother: sorry. Round here, it's kind of a treat.

Forever Gone but Not In Volatile Memory

Jenny writes a moving story about a love that burst into her life and then, too soon, was forever lost. I, too, have such a story.

In 1984 I bought a Hewlett-Packard HP-11C calculator. She was truly a work of beauty. She was wide, but not tall. Questing fingers found keys easily. The keys gave just the right amount of tactile feedback. The two special function buttons never missed a beat. Her display was a simple, one-line LCD, readable even in dim light. She was knurled plastic and burnished aluminum, and the batteries lasted forever. I carried her in my pocket.

We worked together late into the night. We became a team. My fingers explored her mysteries and learned her and, without conscious thought, flew over her keys to calculate equivalent impedances and new vectors. We generated phase angles with ease. Laplace and Fourier transforms became a light dance of fingers flying, flicking, figuring.

Imaginary numbers never felt more real.

Nor did I set her aside when I graduated. Oh, no. Together we moved on into a new world of real work, real paychecks, and numbers that had an impact on the real world. Every day I took her to work in my lunchbox, and every day I took her home again. We were a pair, steadfast and inseparable.

Until 1990, and one dark autumn twilight.

I will never know what silent voice bade me turn and look. An instinct, perhaps – a sense of something missing. Something wrong. I sat at a stoplight and turned my body to glance behind me. There was a small rack on the back of my motorcycle where my lunchbox rode, secured with a bungie cord. No bungie cord has ever failed me. But this time, I failed the bungie cord. I … I forgot … forgot to put it on.

My lunchbox was gone.

My HP-11C … gone.

Tears streaming in the bitter air, I drove frantically back along my path, scanning the streets and gutters of North Highlands for my lunchbox and its precious occupant. The fading light revealed nothing. The gutters were … not clean; but they didn’t hold my lunchbox. No plastic thermal container lay in the street, buffeted by passing cars but protecting my faithful companion. All the way to the office I rode, searching wildly in all directions. Scanned the parking lot. Asked random strangers if they had seen a blue and white lunchbox lying anywhere on the ground. But it was all to no avail.

Gone.

I’ve had other calculators since. Well, one. She was not the same. Sure, she had all sorts of buttons and functions and even a graphing screen. Big deal. I was out of school now. I had a computer at my desk. I didn’t really need a calculator anymore. She was a passing fancy, a bridge, a comfort to help me move on to another stage in life. Despite the high quality of Hewlett-Packard tactile technology, we never really clicked. The new one? I don’t know where she is today. I don’t even remember her model number.

It’s a new era, I suppose, and I’ve outgrown the need for a pocket calculator. Richer, more complex vistas engage me now. But I know I’ll never forget her, and there will always be a place in the book bag of my heart for my HP-11C.

Reveal Your Blog Crush Day, Yeah Right!

So today is Reveal Your Blog Crush Day. That’s such a totally chick thing. There’s no way I would do that. No, I’m not telling. No, I don’t have a blog crush. That is so totally chick-ish. No way. Dude.

OK, here are the rules.

‘Sides I’m married so, you know. There’s that whole weird you can’t crush on someone outside your marriage thing that some people might have. Or maybe they wouldn’t. Cause it doesn’t make sense if you think about it. I guess. I guess I wouldn’t think about it. But it’s a chick thing anyway so I won’t do it. But what if I did! Who’s the most bloggerrific peep around? Yeah, you can pick more than one but that’s like so just trying to be popular. So I could say Asia (whose writing and pictures blend her melancholy world into an ongoing work of art) or Wiggy (who doesn’t have a blog) or archer (but I’m not a gay commie pinko, okay he’s not gay either, but crushing on a dude would be so gay, oh yeah it would, don’t give me that) or Jen (who’s brill and literate and a living doll) or Paula (who’s always fun and who’s satire is hilarious and well I could go on but I won’t) but no, for always making me laugh out loud my blog crush if I had one which I don't is Jenny.

R.I.P. P.B.

Truth Needn't Fear

What do Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and Israel have in common?

They outlaw speech to protect the truth. Brilliant.

Sure, Holocaust-denial is to historical scholarship what Intelligent Design is to paleontology, with a lot of gratuitous hatred of Jews tossed in for bad measure. But I never heard of a scientist who wanted Creationism made a crime.

Meanwhile, the circus in Tehran goes forward with a motley collection in attendance, not all of them necessarily raging nutjobs. The Neturei Karta folks certainly acknowledge the Holocaust; they were let in because they don't believe it is yet time for an earthly Israel. Khaled Kasab Mahameed was not let in, once the Iranians discovered he was not their type of Palestinian but instead kept an Arab-language Holocaust museum. Meanwhile, Iranian students burn pictures of Ahmadenijad for embarrassing the country, and the roughly 25,000 Jews who remain in Iran following earlier pogroms are "dismayed" by the conference, to say the very least.

I don't know what Iran will get out of this long term. Iran's point was to challenge Western hypocrisy over free speech. Well they should. But so long as the Iranians themselves can't debate their expensive and dangerous nuclear program or anything else of substance, the entire exercise is doomed to fizzle in Ahmadenijad's face. And that's a good thing. Maybe in a way this will be a turning point, in which a signal lack of violent protest outside Iran, instead just a shaking of heads, shows the folks inside Iran what an intellectual lightweight of a bully they've gone and elected. (There's something familiar about that but I'm not sure what.)

But I'm a little Grinchy this time of year, and all this turmoil gives me the chance to show my true colors. Indeed, I am sick to death of putting up with the inferiority of lesser strains. Maybe it's time to turn on the ovens!

Sightless Spending

There's a move afoot to change American paper money to different sizes, so that blind people can tell one denomination from another. Singles one size, sawbucks another, jacksons yet another. This comes from a federal judge ruling that the current universal shape for all bills discriminates against the disabled and therefore violates the Federal Rehabilitation Act. Opponents point out that this would require a retooling of countless objects -- ATMs, vending machines, cash registers, even wallets. The costs for this conversion would be huge.

As usual, I have an idea. Granted it would cost too much to resize our currency. (I'm ignoring the success in Europe of introducing the Euro. I've no idea how painful that was for each of the countries involved to retool for the new money, but they did it.) A huge basis for that cost is in all the machinery that reads dollar bills. They would be rendered mechanically obsolete and would have to be completely replaced, every single one. This is because we have introduced machine vision and automated processing to vending machines.

My question is this: Why does the existence of automated computing technology at the point of sale have to be the root cause of such an expensive problem? Does it make sense to replace every single machine in order to accomodate a small minority of people? Or does it make just as much sense to use the techology to solve its own problem? In other words, why can't we make available small bill readers that people can carry with them and use to identify their own money?

Rather than retool the entire continent, we can instead embed electronically-readable markers in the bills that a small pocket device can read. Any person, blind or not, can identify paper money by passing each bill through or next to this small and inexpensive device. The problem is then solved much less expensively, and without recourse to a disruptive transition that will take years to coordinate and more years to get over. Each individual can deal with the situation as they see fit, in their own time.

The technology would not be terribly challenging. A combination of passive radio frequency response and optical identification can be built into a simple device for about the cost of an MP3 player. All that is really required is coordination with the Treasury, so that the new but same-sized bills can be produced appropriately. Who knows, maybe the new non-counterfeitable bills are already set up for this in some way.

Anyway, my rambling point is, don't turn the broad implementation of computing into a roadblock to the solution. Use a new broad implementation of computing as a better solution. It's not that hard, folks.

Friday's Fractal Fourteen

1. There, got me a nifty shortcut icon too.
2. I call this fractal because it’s alliterative and I like the word (and the pictures), not so much because everything listed is infinitely complex, though they could be if we let them. No plans to do it again.
3. Now that the facts are out, anyone who still thinks US Airways ejecting those imams is part of some sort of war on Islam is an idiot.
4. I am so freaking annoyed by historical documentaries on History and Discovery and so on using the present tense that my kids almost can’t watch them with me anymore. It happened a LONG TIME AGO, people! McClellan does not HESITATE before Richmond, he hesitate-ED!
5. I need to lighten up about Christmas and remember the Reason for the Season is not shopping or planning parties or stressing out or stringing lights or some life-affirming mythology made up around 70AD that was a creative combination of Mithraist and Jewish beliefs but is instead a couple days off, lots of food and a bottle of Scotch. Oh, and family.
6. I never clean out the fireplace at the end of the season for having fires. I procrastinate and forget and end up cleaning it out at the beginning of the season for having fires.
7. My aunt has a shitload of almond firewood up for grabs and I don’t have time to go get any.
8. All those co-called Christians who think it was unconscionable of Mary Cheney to get pregnant piss me off. On abortion, they say it’s a child, not a choice. Well, that’s true, and guess what. It’s a child, not a symbol in your fevered paranoia of the breakdown of the so-called American family, the loving mommy-daddy part of which I’ve determined, after researching four hundred years of genealogy, is way overstated anyway.
9. Today is the grand opening of the light rail extension that goes to the Amtrak station. Woo hoo! ‘Bout time! I wanna go!
10. It was warm this morning: No ice as such on the windshield.
11. What the hell is it with parents who put four kids into Boy Scouts but are too busy with their precious real estate business to spend even two hours on a weekend helping out?
12. There is a Shi’a Muslim Cultural Center behind my house that periodically sends over the trees the most wonderful sound on Earth, that of children laughing.
13. The Kim family tragedy has hit me too. When I had small children, my biggest fear was getting stranded with them in the wilderness in winter, or trapped in a flood. Now, of course, they’re stronger swimmers and hikers than me, so no worries. But James Kim found himself in the nightmare the rest of us only feared, and did a pretty good job dealing with it. Like everyone I have my detail-oriented whys and what-ifs, but they really don’t matter now.
14. Finally, I wish for … world peace! (No, really.)

With tiny steps across the line

At eighteen I probably registered as a Democrat because, after all, I didn't know anyone who was anything else, and to a young person without much knowledge of history, the Democrats were regarded as not being responsible for the Vietnam War. That conflict had ended in disaster for everybody only a year before, and, growing up in the locus of opposition to it, I had allowed the rhetoric surrounding it to shape my perceptions.

But then I noticed that Jimmy Carter was taking advantage of the peculiar post-pardon atmosphere to push ideas even I thought were impractical if not actually wrong, and I wound up one of the few people in Berserkeley to vote for Jerry ("I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln") Ford. After four more years had passed, I had learned: a) Jimmy Carter was an ineffectual loon, b) most Republicans were more libertarian if not more liberal than most Democrats, and c) party affiliation only mattered on Primary Election Day. So in support of some would-be state legislator whom I have long since forgotten, in 1980 I re-registered as a Republican.

Not a person who embraces change swiftly, I didn't feel like a Reagan supporter at least until his second term, if ever. I never liked Bush and his party-loyal country-club ways. I thought Dole was all right but he hadn't a chance against Clinton's charisma. Bush's kid had as governor of Texas developed a reputation as someone who works across the aisle, and he reportedly had strong personal skills, and was a lot more attractive than that dour son of a corrupt senator from Tennessee; but the Presidency was water far too deep and far too hot for him, and I only voted for him again because I believed in staying the course and besides, when Kerry came out ahead in the Iowa caucuses, it was apparent that the two-faced machine that runs our country had already decided Kerry would be the Democrat fall-guy and so my interest in matters Presidential lagged.

They remain lagged, in that I don't think of GWB as the WPE (not yet: Buchanan, the first Johnson, Harding and Carter are still in contention for my vote, with Carter leading in terms of disastrous consequences in the modern era). Watching the Republican party evolve and turn away from those of its core principles that I care about has also elicited a slow reaction in me. I tend to be patient. Brain-dead ideas such as Constitutional amendments to outlaw flag-burning or abortion or gay marriage don't get my dander up because they are expressions of political fashion and rabble-rousing and have slim to no chance of ever getting enacted. I still believe that a country cannot support humanitarian principles if it is not also prosperous, and so I approve of lowered taxes and deregulation and so on as a general rule. I am also confused, frankly, as to what good reasons people might have to loosen up our laws regarding immigration (which are already much more liberal than in, say, Mexico). So I remained a Republican. But the threads got thinner and thinner. Recent debacles that led to the well-deserved mid-term pounding stretched them unto breaking.

I decided this morning, after facts came to light as to the treatment by our current government of an American citizen who has been proven only to be an ignorant punk: to hell with them. The party that allowed and enabled all this shit can no longer have my name in its lists. I trust the Democrats even less, so they can't have me either. I submitted the form and am now Decline To State.

What factors influence our political associations and loyalties? Many of us like to believe we are all rational beings and that our political expressions grow out of processing our own unique wisdom and insight. But we're wrong. Mostly we are influenced by the people around us. Someone in Orange County and someone in San Francisco may agree about everything - but the former is far less likely to join a left-leaning party. Well, I read the news and so on, but it doesn't often sink in. I have to give credit for this final straw to flesh and blood.

A Brief Story About Someone Without a Clue

At sunrise it’s now freezing outside and there’s a fine layer of frost and ice on everything, so we have the heater kick on when the house gets below sixty-two degrees. That’s plenty warm enough but this morning it felt warmer. I lay in bed half-awake because the heater didn’t seem to want to stop and the morning air was getting downright comfortable, which is bad for sleeping.

Suddenly I heard music. I looked at the clock. It was seven-thirty.

“Kid’s up early,” said I.

“That’s not us,” said she.

I got up and opened the door to the hallway. Silence. I went to the back porch and opened that door. Huey Lewis and the News came blasting over the trees at the top of the hill. Not from the Noor Center. Not from the two little old ladies who keep donkeys. Somewhere out of sight over the row of dying redwood trees.

“Well, fuck that,” said I and got dressed. Some bored punk had decided to blast his radio before eight on a Sunday. I was going to find him. I went outside and scraped the ice off my windshield and drove up the road with the window down so I could home in on the source.

Half a block away is an east-west avenue that feeds the larger boulevards. When I got over the rise to the intersection, it was blocked off and lined with people waving flags and cowbells. Down the center, folks of all ages, hues, sexes and states of fitness streamed past in running togs with numbers stapled to their chests. Down the street the music was blaring and cheerleaders were cheering, and across the way couples sat in lawn chairs sipping coffee and yelling encouragement. One of them stared at me, amused at my dropped jaw and bed-tousled hair.

I’ve lived in this house for seven years and the previous one for nine. Both are just a long home run from that avenue. What I want to know is, how, the first Sunday of each December of each of those sixteen years, did I miss the running down this avenue of the California International Marathon?

And it looked like fun. Most of the route is a nice run. It starts just a few miles from home and ends up at the State Capitol. Next year I’m just going to have to find someone who wants to do it – there’s no doubt I know someone somewhere in that long crowd – and go do it too. Or part of it. What the hell.

UPDATE: I text-searched the archive and found I wrote about it two years ago when I had that other blog. Seems I've reached the age where lapses in memory of this sort are so common as to be unworthy of note. But I'm almost certain I've never run it!

Chicago: Two for the Show

The day was characterized by wrong things going right.

I had the hotel call a taxi. They said it would be a black car. We stood outside and a big gray Lincoln pulled up. The driver was a small man with a Russian accent and unaccountably apologetic in demeanor. He ran inside, then back out, asking if we were going to McCormick Place. I said we were and he loaded my case into the trunk. As we got in I saw him go back to the hotel entrance and meet one of the clerks. He passed her something, she smiled secretly and glanced in our direction, he got behind the wheel, vaguely apologizing again, and off we went.

I noticed the car didn’t have a meter. It had no markings either. Nothing whatsoever that suggested it was a real taxicab.

But my contact reached me via cell phone and we struggled through his Italian accent and uncertain grasp of English to establish that I was on the way and sure enough, after twenty or thirty minutes, the driver pulled up to the Hyatt at McCormick and said it was fifty five bucks. I figured it would be about that and gave him sixty and he handed me a blank receipt to fill out myself, and disappeared into the hazy Illinois sunshine. We met Marco in the lobby and went around to the convention side of things.

It was a great cavernous space in the throes of chaos, shipping crates and ladders and packing materials flying everywhere. A week-long exhibition was to start the next day, countless companies from around the world peddling machines, software, supplies and services to the clinicians and hospitals who use them. A thousand shows were to happen all at once, a thousand demonstrations, a thousand sales pitches. This room the size of Soldier Field was being turned into a movie set without cameras, a thousand stages being built all at once.

I carried a Pelican case heavy with tools and spare parts. In Oregon a few weeks before I had helped build the prototypes, and when I heard they were shipping from there to Italy and then back to Chicago, I couldn’t believe that after all that they wouldn’t need fixing. They were just too fragile. I then made the mistake of saying so in a status email. The division head of engineering read that and asked everyone in the distribution list, so, who’s going to Chicago? Me and my big mouth. But there ain’t no one but me really knows how to work on the things.

We followed Marco through a sea of half-built booths where engineers hunched at screens under the ladders to get their demonstrations working and met the rest of the gang from the company I was working with, a very friendly and overworked collection of engineers and managers and marketing types dashing about to get banners hung and networks strung and make sure everything they shipped was brung. My task was very simple: Unpack the prototypes and see that they worked. If they didn’t, then I needed to set up a workspace in the midst of all the activity and totally rebuild them as needed. Since I would normally need a six-foot-long table and bright lighting for that and all I had was floor, I felt a certain relief when I powered them up and, without complaint, they indeed powered up and booted and did what they were asked.

I still had software to install so I pulled out a USB thumb-drive and did that. This was a good thing, because the task further exercised the machines and they didn’t fail. I’ve been in the biz long enough to know that every five minutes a machine works properly accomplishes two things. Yes, it brings the machine five minutes closer to failure. But it also takes the machine five minutes further beyond its threshold of infant mortality. The location of that threshold is never known, but every new machine has one, and the longer the machine runs, the more likely it will continue to run, at least for awhile. These machines didn’t need to last forever. They only needed to last a week. More precisely, they only needed to last until I was on the plane back home, and that they did.

Mission accomplished, we took our leave to go and explore the city. I listened all the day long for the cell phone to go off. The prototypes looked great but inside they were a rat’s nest of wires and used circuit boards and tape and glue and just one good drop from some ham-handed CEO’s grip to the convention center’s hard concrete floor would have me scurrying back for an operation that could last well into the night. But the phone never rang. It was a good day.

The show was RSNA 2006. None of the pictures below show or indicate who I was working with. Marco's name was changed from his real name, even though it was equally innocuous.

news.google headline of the day

Dicks not seeking Intelligence post

I've surely never known any to.

Happy St. Andrew's Day

Us Americans are famous for taking another peoples' holiday and turning it into a drunken barbecue. We did it to St. Patrick's Day, to Cinco de Mayo, to Mardi Gras (which is a drunken holiday in many parts of the world, but not so profane as with us). So I guess, per this post, we may as well leave old St. Andrew alone. But still. It's Thursday, it's November 30th, and I need a justification to replenish my single malt. Is that not reason enough? The ceilidh's at my house.

Chicago: Pot of Borshch

The lady at the hotel bar had a strong Russian accent.

Everyone on the train who didn’t speak English, spoke Russian.

Everyone on the streets downtown who didn’t speak English, spoke Russian.

Our last night, after changing out of business attire and waiting for the shuttle to take us back to the train station, I took a walk around the corner in the hotel lobby to follow the music. It was loud and compelling, all strings and balalaikas interweaving delicious Slavic minor chords. I found a banquet hall full of well-dressed people, each white tablecloth a sea of wineglasses and flower arrangements, a table of honorees upon a dais at one end. A disembodied voice spoke Russian through the loudspeakers, and people applauded and the music swelled; then it dipped, and the voice spoke again and the music swelled and dipped again with the applause. Only because I was raised on American pop culture did it sound vaguely Krasnaya Bratva or Russkaya Mafiya. I believe they were celebrating a baptism.

The wait staff transporting the salads all spoke Russian too.

Not to suggest Chicago specifically is being taken over by a new mob, for the workers at the Hertz franchise at Portland Airport as well as most of the non-English speaking kids at my wife’s school all speak Russian as well. I was just drawn to wonder why the bilingual signs at the airport etc. featured Spanish instead of, I dunno, Chinese.

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Lifted from Arleen. As I said there, this was so true I needed to flush memory and go reboot somewhere quiet.

Chicago: Not Dorks

For proof, here's the Bean ...


... and here's us at it, being well-behaved and un-dork-like.


Underneath, my enhanced ocular implants detected a temporal distortion field through which people were passing largely unharmed. I was going to draft a paper on this phenomenon, but the hotel staff (who are all Russians and thus allied with you-know-who) got wind of my plans, and to maintain the fragile truce in this galactic sector I've decided to let it go.


See? Not a dork at all.

Next: Foreign agents infiltrate the Heartland.

Chicago: Silver Kidney Bean

Got to O’Hare about five. Weather was nice. For dinner we raided the happy hour whore’s ovaries or however you spell that at the hotel bar. College basketball was on the flatscreen and my margarita kept giving me brain freeze. Almost made me nauseous, it hurt so much. We beat feet about seven so we could check this place out.

The traveling businessman’s dive near the airport where we’re staying has a twenty-four hour shuttle service. We took that back to the airport and walked down and around and caught the train, the L, or El, or Elevated, whatever, except it’s not elevated, not much. The first half hour was every bit as interesting as riding BART out to Walnut Creek, all noisy swaying down the center of the freeway, cars going about twice as fast as us. Tomorrow when I have to be downtown to meet clients I’m taking a taxi, screw this going slow shit.

But I love trains and looking out in the dark and seeing countless brick buildings in the 19th Century style roll by, some of them decrepit, most of them multiply repainted and housing families that live on real hardwood flooring and leave the curtains up on the side by the train tracks. Those old brick buildings pepper the old Gold Rush towns of my home and crop up here and there in the City, San Francisco, which we call the City because it’s the only city, every other settlement in California being a dusty trading stop that grew on oil and war money into a vast suburb without a soul. But back here halfway to the east, the old buildings are real and form actual cities all their own, and it’s strangely cool somehow to see suburbs a century older than my own, and to see them at night from a train, passing by in the dark at twenty five miles an hour. Imagination fills in the blanks and lends them a personality they possibly don’t really have, but maybe they do, I wouldn’t know, I’m a total stranger, riding the Blue Line downtown from the airport.

I grabbed my wife by the lapels and banged my forehead into hers and said, “I’m excided!” and she said, “Me too!” We realized we hadn't traveled out of state together, without children, since we were married: eighteen years ago.

We got out at the Washington St. station and wandered past a crowd of brightly lit red and white striped tents serving German food under a great big fake Christmas tree and gawked like hayseeds at the big tall buildings. The air was clean and cold and the lights were bright. State Street was awash in holiday shoppers herding this way and that with bags and children and gathering around the display windows at Macys. We did that too but they really weren’t worth the look. I wanted to see the silver kidney bean.

Just across Michigan Ave. an outdoor ice skating rink was in full swing under white lights, crowded with people going round and round the wrong way: you’re supposed to go counter-clockwise. But this was probably a Chicago thing. Most of them couldn’t really skate either. I’m no expert, I couldn’t skate if the entire Iroquois nation were after me, but I take it as given that shuffling along the ice like an old man getting used to his new colostomy bag is not an indication of skating skill, nor is flipping over onto your backside and yelling at your wife to quit with the gaw damn camera already. But it was a cool scene altogether, and hovering over it on the upper promenade was the silver kidney bean. Score!

I learned about it when Jenny left a link in comments to her pictures. We walked around and under it for ourselves. The reflections were awesome. People cavorted and office buildings were distorted. Underneath where there is concavity we found three reflections of people that looked just like us and laughed at us and pointed at us, but they weren’t us because they were acting like dorks. Tomorrow I’ll take a camera and prove it.

Shut Up and Sing

We didn’t enter the company talent show to win. We didn’t enter to prove anything. We didn’t even enter to meet chicks. We entered because there frankly isn’t a whole lot of call for the kind of stuff we sing, and hey, man, a gig is a gig.

It was all about raising money for United Way. That was the corporate line. Not that I doubt it. My employer, Infamous Megamultinational Corporation, has about a zillion irons in the fire, and not all of them are about making money. A glance at the past several years’ stock price performance proves that but even so, people like to help people, and if the mighty Corporation can support its people in helping people and get some good P.R. and maybe a tax break or two, then they are there, they are on task, they are resourced, lines up, ready to go. Organizers stepped up to organize, promoters stepped up to promote, talent stepped up to be talented, and everyone was given the green light to volunteer all the out-of-hours time they needed to get the job done.

So to ramp up and draw attention to the fund drives, they had a talent show. Loosely based on some TV show I’ve never seen with "Idol" in the title but that I’m familiar with because of the end of that Shrek movie, it was MC’d by an employee with a knack for public wisecracking and judged by three more employees with a knack for … Well, they were game. Give ‘em credit for that. Over a dozen acts appeared out of the employee pool, people with some honest to goodness ability and a willingness to shame themselves in front of their co-workers, employees, and potential hiring managers. Give them credit too. Risk-taking is one of the Corporate Values by which we are exhorted to live our work lives. Given that when it comes to public musical performance, the less the talent, the greater the risk, some of the performers truly took that particular value to heart.

For our part, it wasn’t about risk, and it wasn’t so much about United Way. It was about singing. Here was a place to do it, with an audience and microphones and everything. How could we resist? Let’s be honest, raising money for charity and all is great, but for creative types, the play’s the thing, or the book, or the song. So here’s our song.



Did it last year too. I think I mentioned it in the old blog (since extinct). We never saw a vid of ourselves, never got any useful feedback, and I think it shows. Besides, we're a bunch of engineers. But you know what? Fun! That's what.



Second from right in the first one and far right in the second one, that's me.

He Calls Me Uncle Don

Shanghai: Nanjing Lu

I flew in a taxi between the fifth floors of modern high rises, then down Yan’an Elevated Road as it swept out from between them and curved down to meet the river. Stone and concrete bank buildings built in the 1920s glowed yellow in their sodium spotlights and looked across the river at the 21st Century.

I paid off the taxi at the statue of Mao and dove into a crowd that swirled like a school of fish. The night sky was a burnt orange in color and the night air ungodly hot. I went up the steps two at a time so the boys selling brightly flashing electronic gizmos were unable to corner me. At the top, the river wall was jammed with people, mostly families on tour from other parts of China. About one in a hundred were tall overfed Australians. About one in three hundred were tall underfed young Americans, set apart by their long hair and ragged clothes.

My eyes widened at the Oriental Pearl Tower. It stood across the river like a spaceship made in some giant toy factory, white and red and violet, China’s bold stake in the ground announcing in ridiculous splendor her intent to own the future. It grinned over the shoulders of countless families getting countless portraits taken, its colored lights always moving. I walked swiftly, dodging proffered postcards and statuettes, and pushed through the crowd to the wall over the river. I stood there to breathe the air awhile.

The Huangpu licked at the stone below me. A constant stream of barges and boats drifted silently by, lit dimly by the million small lights of a hundred tall buildings. Across the water was a glittering Tomorrowland. Brand new high rises lined the opposite bank. A video screen twenty stories tall flashed pretty Chinese faces and bewildering Chinese characters. Near the base of the Tower was a globe of the world a hundred meters across, China showing prominently in red. In the back, glowing through the haze, stood the Jin Mao Tower, China’s tallest building, a 420-meter shepherd of steel and glass and lights. Behind it another tower, to be just as tall, was about halfway built.

I wondered what these thousand people around me thought, many having come in from poor rural cities, raised on communist austerity, now posing proudly before their country’s garish bid to attract global capital. Maybe they didn’t think about it much. Idealism often falls before national pride. Or maybe they were just waiting for the wealth around them trickle down. Some would be waiting a long while.

I fell in with another thousand people and we pressed our way through the pedestrian tunnel under Zhongshan Lu, the street that follows the river. Across the street, anchored by the Peace Hotel and its green peaked roof, Nanjing Lu curved away under electric Pepsi signs. I walked up Nanjing Lu in the street, pushed off the sidewalk by the crowds, and dodged a constant stream of Volkswagen Santana taxicabs. For several blocks there were open shops and street vendors and people on bicycles, people in cars, people walking, people trying to get my attention. I could have done all my Christmas shopping without breaking stride if my people had wanted faux Rolex watches, fancy pen sets, or polo shirts.

Three blocks from the river, the intersection of Nanjing Road and Central Henan Road was the only place in Shanghai I saw pedestrians obey the “no walking” signs. They crowded along the edge of the street waiting for men in green uniforms to let them go. The officers did not let anyone so much as step off the curb if the lights were against them. But once the lights changed we swarmed in all directions. Like a salmon fighting the current I dodged across the street and splashed into a pool of people who were no longer hurrying somewhere but had finally arrived, yet still drifted along in the currents and eddies of Nanjing Lu.

I walked a block. The street, paved in stone and lined with planters and trees and benches, was a canyon between eight-storey buildings. Neon signs hung off the buildings, the colors merging into a bright yellowish light. There was a constant buzz of overlapping conversation punctuated by direct appeals.

“Good evening, sir. What you want? We have many clothing.”

“Hello, sir. You look for dinner? This way please.”

“How are you? Where you from? You like girl? Come see, no pay just to see.”

I walked a second block. The hawkers, teenagers all, were left behind to try someone else. Department store lights flooded the street. Neon signs lit the upper floors. Dresses hung on racks on the second floor, people sat at tables on the third, hair was being styled on the fourth. All the way to the top, lights were on, work was happening, business was booming.

A loud beep brought me back down. A toy train chased me out of the way. It pulled little cars full of people whose feet were tired. None of them were smiling. Shopping is hard work and not very fun.

I walked a third block. More of the same. A street stage presented loud music. A piece of paper hung from a camera on a tripod, listing prices for a souvenir portrait. Families walked – father, then children, then mother. Teenagers ganged past with rockstar haircuts. Girls walked in pairs, hand in hand, arm in arm; girls who smiled at a tall foreigner and tried to make friends, who wanted to go have a drink and “practice English.” A politely smiled decline was not taken as such; but “bu yao” (“no want”) was always understood, and they trolled on elsewhere.

I fetched up in a place where the sky opens up and the lights dim: People’s Park, full of trees. There was a Metro station there, and an underground shopping mall full of cheap merchandise. I turned around and ran the gauntlet all over again, walking swiftly back down Nanjing Lu, past the strollers and the hawkers and the ropers, back to the river, for another breath of air.

For more pictures go here.

Full-scale Model Train Set

One reason I like Portland, Oregon, is it's just plain cool to have highway bridges, train yards and freighter docks all together in one place. I swear, in some respects California is boring. All I ever get is freeways.

There is a place to get good views of the train yard. Interstate 405 isn't it.

All of these were taken while trying to drive a rental in rush hour traffic in the rain, peering over the rims of a cheap pair of reading glasses at a map so I could make sure I hit the right freeway towards the airport and didn't end up halfway to Seattle.

An iron drawbridge with an electric train on it. What could be cooler than that?

Container freight beating the traffic out of town. I am easily entertained.

Final destination, where airplanes make circles around a great concrete fertility symbol. By the way, the Hertz franchise at PDX is staffed entirely by Russians. Just sayin'.

Peaks and Valleys

It's clear that the U.S. and the UK are now floundering.

Blair speaks of Iran and Syria either helping quell Iraqi violence, or face further isolation. In a satirical movie about current events, this would be a laugh line.

The U.S. plans to send a naval armada into the Gulf "to intimidate the Iranians." But the Iranians will make fun and hold demonstrations, and maybe send a few unmanned drones across the bows.

The recent election results have changed much. To many people it's all good news, of course. And maybe they are right. Maybe America's position in the world must get much weaker before we can reunify with any resolve and make her stronger again. It's all part of a much greater historical cycle that Bush's best attempts to defy could not change. The neocons have all abandoned Bush, and with good reason place the blame for how things are now going on his incompetence. Probably this fizzling retreat was inevitable, and the lesson should not only be that we should never go to war without an exit strategy, but never go to war until the American people feel the terrible necessity of it in the marrow of their bones.

But should Iran gather nuclear weapons and reshape a few Asian and European strategic alliances, thus recasting the economies and relative strengths of nations around the world and in particular favoring regimes that are violently repressive and reactionary, that will happen soon enough.

Baby Tape-out

In our biz, "tape-out" is the term used to describe the last step in the design phase of a product. It comes from the old days when a datatape was created of the design of a chip. The next step is to run that design over to the mask house -- the factory -- and start building silicon. It's the key point when logical structures are made to exist in the physical world.

Because there are so many different teams working on so many different things, we are under a constant bombardment of weekly reports, released on different days depending on which manager needs them when, forwarded on different days yet. If one chooses to read them, one can be apprised of roughly what's going on in the broader organization.

Someone's wife is expecting, so a weekly report that just came through says "Baby tape-out expected" for whomever, in bold blue type, with the usual best of luck attached.

"Baby tape-out." YUCK! This is high-tech cuteness gone too far. Or maybe it's just me, but my first image is of a newborn infested with tapeworms. I don't need that image! So here's a picture of my cat.

Suburban Ass

I first heard them when I was working on the other side of the house. There was a loud, hungry tyrannosaur in the neighborhood. Made me jump. Metal rake in hand, I went around to look.

The two old ladies who bought the lot next door had brought in their pets, and somebody's dogs had got in and were joyfully chasing them around. Who knew that a scared donkey sounded just like a goddam dinosaur?

They settled in, and for several years now they have enjoyed hanging around in the shade of the oak tree that also shelters our chicken coop. They like animals that don't bark and chase. They come say hello when I stand by the fence, and I pat their cheeks and knock dust off their backs. There's a lot of dust.

Detroit

This business about Chicago got me to thinking about another great American city I’ve never visited. But unlike Chicago, I have a personal connection with Detroit.

My maternal grandmother Olive was born in San Francisco in 1904 to a schoolteacher named Arvilla. She in turn had come west with her mother and sisters to join her father. Hazen Bartlett left Lamoine, Maine, in the 1880s after all his attempts at mining, fishing and farming failed. His father and grandfather before him hadn’t done much better.

His grandfather, David Bartlett, was born on Bartlett Island, off the coast of Maine, in 1788, the result of his father's affair with a young woman named Esther des Champs. They never married and the child moved to the mainland. Esther's mother Marguerite was of the family de la Mothe Cadillac. Her family held title to two leagues of the Maine coast that had been granted by King Louis XIV to her Acadian grandfather Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac in 1688. It was he who founded Detroit in 1701.

So for those keeping score at home, the founder of Detroit (and namesake for a line of fine automobiles) is my great great great great great great great great grandfather.

Chicago

It has a funny look, that word. Big and round at one end, with a foot trailing in the mud at the other. One of those words that makes no sense if you say it enough. Chicago shicago sh'kaago. What the hell is that? A city? A state of mind? Something unpleasant done to someone who's asked for it? I've never been within a thousand miles of it. The sound makes me think of great buildings steady against the wind, heavy woolen overcoats, an attitude of fearlessness; trains rumbling on the El, sleet chasing couples into blues bars, impossibly bright sunshine fading to blue over a freshwater inland sea. No one goes to the Chicago of my mind but to work, or to enjoy working class pleasures: food, music, baseball, football. Maybe now there is windsurfing too. Chicago is at the top center of the country, the pushpin that holds America to the bulletin board.

I've never been there. My first time will be right after Thanksgiving. I will not quite be attending a conference, doing things for my job, about which details are superfluous. How much of the weekend is spent working and how much getting to know The Loop will be determined by events. I'm taking the Mz. We're looking forward to it.

News Flash: Rummy Gets Promoted

2004: Donald shares a lighter moment while shopping for condolence cards for the families of servicemen.


2005: Donald warns against beturbaned bogeymen lurking about our homes if we don't stay the course.


2006: Donald is promoted to Galaxy Lord of Sector Seven and quits his undercover job posing as an Earthling.

News Flash: I Voted for a Democrat

Before anyone looks into my cubicle to see how things are going and thus compels me to do my job, I feel like surveying the election real quick.

I voted yesteday at 7am at a modern church with rock instruments on the stage and impressionistic paintings of a thorny-crowned Jesus on the walls. I would have gone earlier if the polls were open. Going so late made me miss my morning workout.

Everyone there that early was past sixty: the volunteers, and retired folks with a busy day to get to. The lady who handed me my test form or whatever it's called, hidden in its privacy sleeve, was a sharp-witted blonde of the sort who easily disproves the notion that a woman can't be unaccountably, viscerally attractive after six decades. I said this made my second trip to church this year, the first being the primary. She laughed and said, yep, she hadn't thought of it that way. I said they don't make them like they used to. What with the electric organ, the drum set, the stackable chairs, the motivational banners paraphrasing Tony Robbins, she had to agree.

I went to my little booth, was glad I brought a pair of drugstore cheaters -- last time, I had to squint and hope I was filling in the right circles -- and proceeded to take my test.

Schwarzenegger (R) for Governor. He's doing a good job, he's incredibly smart, and he hasn't done anything yet to piss me off. Won.

McClintock (R) for Lieutenant Governor. I admire McClintock, mostly for his eloquence defending traditional liberty (i.e. gun rights) and opposing unchecked immigration. I'm sure we disagree on some other things for he's a true-blue conservative. Lost.

McPherson (R) for Secretary of State. He's competent. Lost.

Chiang (D) for Controller. The face of the Republican fill-in had the vacant friendliness of a high school offensive tackle who thought debating class would be an easy C, while the Democratic propoganda successfully portrayed Chiang as a typical hard-working, highly-qualified, numbers-crunching Asian. Won.

Parrish (R) for Treasurer. Lockyer (D) needs badly to retire. He pissed me off countless times as Attorney General. And I am heartily sick of these mid-level politicians who bounce from elected office to elected office, building byzantine political alliances within the vast state machine as they go. Lost.

Poochigian (R) for Attorney General. I covered this earlier. Lost.

Poizner (R) for Insurance Commissioner. Bustamante (D) also needs to retire. Apparently a lot of Democrats agree. Won.

Metti (L) for U.S. Senate. L is for Libertarian, the Party Without Principle. Well, I have no use for Feinstein (D) and even less for Mountjoy (R) and would rather like to see a few Libertarians take office. It'll never happen. Lost (to Feinstein).

Warren (L) for U.S. Congress (District 4). The long-term incumbent Doolittle is as conservative as they come and of solid moral character and I'm sick of him. The Dem challenger (Charlie Brown) is a good guy but running in the wrong district. Lost (to Doolittle).

Niello (R) for CA State Assembly (District 5). Evidently the political hobbyist in a wealthy family of automobile dealership owners, he has been a conscientious local politician. Won.

There were other races I ignored for lack of any opinion, or anything to form an opinion on -- State Supreme Court Associate Justices, Park District Board Members, etc.

But the local school district is a mess, suffering from declining enrollment, declining revenue and general incompetence. I wanted the one running incumbent out of there (never mind that I once worked with her husband), and my wife said one of the candidates was a well-intentioned ex-teacher who knows what's going on, and the other guy I voted for (you pick two out of eight) had an appropriate biography somehow, so I voted for them, and they both won.

Propositions are always interesting because they are so direct. If a Proposition passes, it's bound to become law. This makes studying them and arguing them serious business. I did just that over plates of burritos carnitas with a handful of friends. In the end I voted No on them all for various reasons, excepting 1A (which places restrictions on use of gasoline taxes without raising any) and 90 (which, again, does something useful without raising taxes or floating the state a loan). The others were either bond measures, which I see as deferred taxes that the Legislature couldn't pass by themselves, or ill-advised, poorly thought-out social engineering experiments. Some passed, some didn't. The worst (85, 86) didn't.

We also had a county measure that amounted to raising sales taxes to pay for a sports arena, which I joined the majority in voting down. Seems to me if a sports arena is such a good idea, then private concerns can raise the capital for it all by themselves. Government's proper roles do not include basketball. Hurling, now. That could be a government sport. Looks like Calvinball to me. To a first-time observer, it makes about as much sense as current U.S. foreign policy. More on that later. So here's a picture of my chickens.