Saturday, 27 September 2003
Being a California Golden Bears fan is a bit like being a Cubs fan or a Red Sox fan: Your team never goes all the way and seems to have a problem with bad luck, but every now and then they pull off something that makes all the heartache worth it. I can't say it any better than the team did in an e-mail I just received:
The California Golden Bears upset the #3-ranked USC Trojans on Saturday evening before 51,208 fans at Memorial Stadium and a national television audience. The win marks the first time the Bears have defeated a Top 5 nationally-ranked team in more than 28 years.
Let me add that the game
was won in triple overtime. It was amazing, and I'm psyched to have been there. I also think I know what gave the Bears an edge: One of the first things the super-obnoxious Trojan band did was play Stanfurd's fight song, "All Right Now." I'm sorry, but if you're going to pull shit like that, you deserve a trip to the shed and a long bus-ride home.
Friday, 26 September 2003
Close up yer wounds when a bear attacks you!
[found on Fark]
I have got to
try this the next time I'm in New York with someone.
Wednesday, 24 September 2003
I'd like to think that the average American can spot the problem with what our president
says here, but I think that would be naive.
"I appreciate people's opinions, but I'm more interested in news," the president said. "And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."
Right. Cuz when you think
objective you immediately think
Rumsfeld and
Rice and
Ashcroft.
[found at Billmon's Whiskey Bar]
Tuesday, 23 September 2003
We got rid of DDT, and we've banned PCBs, but the "better living through chemistry" folks have another acronym up their sleeve.
And it's everywhere.
When Oakland resident Katrina Friedman, 31, agreed to join the study, she assumed that her healthy diet, yoga and a clean job at Hot Studio, a small San Francisco design firm, was producing chemical-free milk for her baby daughter, Ruby.
But Friedman had PBDE levels in her milk at 79 parts per billion, higher than the number that triggered a ban of the flame retardants in Europe.
"I love my child more than anything. I want to protect her from broken glass, bullies at school and invisible poisons like this one. But I'm powerless. These chemicals aren't banned in the United States, and we're just continuing to add them in the environment," Friedman said.
Monday, 22 September 2003
A lonely woman in Florida
drinks herself to death and leaves behind only bits and scraps of woe:
There were three yellow Post-its on the fridge. One said: "By myself, with myself." Another said: "Broke and alone." And the third said: "Higher purpose?"
On the dining room table was the start of a personal ad she had written in a lined notepad: "Single and ready to experience..."
She stopped before she figured out what she was ready to experience. On the next page, she had written: "Can't. I'm not willing at this time."
Sunday, 21 September 2003
I took
this picture back in August but forgot to post it.
Thursday, 18 September 2003
There's a
new Beatles album coming out in November. I knew this was in the works, but I didn't know the release date or the stupid name they've given it.
I already have un-Spectorized versions of the stuff on
Let It Be, and it's all definitely superior to what was originally released back in 1970, but there's still no getting around the fact that the band was not making great music during these sessions. They filled their work environment with anger and acrimony until coming together one last time to craft
Abbey Road, where the magic is palpable one last time.
[thanks to AK for the link]
Wednesday, 17 September 2003
Wandering ever-so-slightly off the beaten path in southwest Berkeley last Saturday, I found a building that was really a
ghost.
Tuesday, 16 September 2003
I took Political Science 101 as a senior in high school. My professor was a dude by the name of Carl Luna, and he was a better lecturer than any professor I encountered in my four years in the Poli Sci department at U.C. Berkeley.
Now Dr. Luna is authoring a
blog on California's recall for the
San Diego Union-Tribune. Good, informed rants, and well worth the read if you're a political junkie.
Monday, 15 September 2003
. . . is
Yellowstone National Park:
"The impact of a Yellowstone eruption is terrifying to comprehend," says Professor McGuire. "Magma would be flung 50 kilometers into the atmosphere. Within a thousand kilometers virtually all life would be killed by falling ash, lava flows, and the sheer explosive force of the eruption. One thousand cubic kilometers of lava would pour out of the volcano, enough to coat the whole of the USA with a layer 5 inches thick. The explosion would be the loudest noise heard by man for 75,000 years."
In my new hood, last Friday night . . .
Friday, 12 September 2003
Find out how rich you are (money-wise) compared to the rest of the world at the
Global Rich List. Humbling stuff: If you're making more than $33,700, you're better off than 99 percent of your brothers and sisters on the planet.
Thursday, 11 September 2003
Tonight I went through three shoebox-sized boxes of "miscellaneous important stuff" that followed me here to the new digs. These seem to be functioning as a time capsule of sorts. Among the items I have stashed away in these boxes over the years:
- The San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, May 30, 1996, the front page of which uncharacteristically sported Herb Caen's column. This was the day Caen told his readers he was dying.
- A printout of a job posting on IDG.com, dated 11/10/98, for "Associate Editor, Here's How Online / PC World, Online Services Group." In pencil is my shit-I'm-excited scrawl reading 11:00 A.M. FRIDAY. That must've been the interview.
- A $98 credit at Fry's Electronics, dated June 11, 2001. I was issued this as a result of the Fry's Low Price Guarantee, but after receiving it, I went through a long period of buying no goodies at Fry's, and I forgot I had it. Then I remembered I had it, but by then, I didn't know where it was anymore. Now here it is. It has no expiration date on it. They should accept it, right?
- The New Yorker, September 24, 2001 issue. Front cover: Black towers on a black background. Two years ago now. Heavens. There is a mailing label on the cover. It lists a place where I no longer reside.
Tuesday, 09 September 2003
Opus is
returning to the Sunday comics, and I ain't talking reruns, here.
[found on Slashdot]
Monday, 08 September 2003
I have never had to wash my dishes by hand. Every non-dorm place I have ever lived in has had a dishwasher, until now. This makes for an interesting adjustment.
Luckily, I have a sink that is very conducive to quick and efficient washing, if you feel like being serious about things. It's a small double sink, so you can very quickly flood one of 'em with soapy water, dump the dishes in, go at it all with a brush or whatever your own favorite implement of destruction is, then rinse in the other sink, and then dump everything into the drying tray on the counter next to the sink.
I did some semi-serious cooking this evening, so it called for some semi-serious dishwashing. I was in the middle of the aforementioned procedure when I flashed back to when I was sixteen. I used to work eight hour dishwashing shifts at San Diego's
Sea World. In the summertime, during tourist season. Back then, I had three very large sinks in my arsenal, along with a dedicated garbage disposal that had its own mini-sink. Plus industrial soap, and bleach that I could use for sanitizing things in the third sink, if protocol required it and I felt relatively un-mistreated by my employer that day.
So tonight I was scrubbing a small sauté pan when some long-forgotten muscle memory kicked in, and my hands awakened and reminded me that years ago, I would scrub ten-gallon copper caramel pots and such for days and days. I tripped on that for a bit, standing there in my tiny kitchen here at the new digs, washing dishes by hand for the first time in a dozen years.
Friday, 05 September 2003
Fifteen years after his death, Robert A. Heinlein's
long-lost first novel is being published. Posthumous productions are generally
disappointing, but Heinlein, in death, has amazed me before: The uncut edition of
Stranger in a Strange Land is one of my all-time favorite reads. (I have what I think is a killer film adaptation rumbling around in my head. Perhaps someday I'll let it pour out.)
Thursday, 04 September 2003
So one dear friend gives me a copy of the movie poster for
Gigantic (a documentary about
They Might Be Giants, New
York band extraordinaire) as a housewarming gift. And I realize that it needs to go on the side of the fridge, a very visible spot in my new digs. Now, how to affix it there? Oh, how 'bout with the handcrafted New York subway magnets that another dear friend gave me for Christmas last year? Perfect!
It's interesting how various possessions are playing entirely new roles here at the new digs. Magnets that never before had an important function now have one; a bedroom bookshelf moves out of the bedroom; a phone that has not been used for years suddenly comes in handy because it fits where others will not, and I realize for the first time how pleasing its real-bell ring is compared to modern electronic chirps. Anything is possible when even an object as mundane as a lamp suddenly takes on a whole new and exciting and fantastic function.
There is rebirth all around me, everywhere I look. I am living in easterland, and I feel it warming me from within.
"I don't think either one of us knows why we split up. It was like, say you're going to a nightclub one night with your friends and you're in line and the next thing you know there are guys with helicopters and there's machine-gun fire and you don't know what happened. And that's kind of like what our breakup was like."
Wednesday, 03 September 2003
You cook dinner and melted cheese drips onto the oven floor for the first time. You put a scratch in the wood floor. You replace a lightbulb with another of lower intensity. You learn where the floor squeaks, and how the breeze comes in most strongly through a particular window. You cart people over and ask them what they would do with a problemmatic room. You make your house a home.
That's the only word a friend had when I asked how Burning Man was this year. Pictures like
these and
these make me want to experience it next year.
Wandering ever-so-slightly off the beaten path in southwest Berkeley last Saturday, I found a building that was really a ghost.
