305.So much random

Jury Duty 2018

It isn’t easy to get to our Hall of Justice, but I managed it, despite unexpected street construction that forced me to walk an extra couple blocks. They finally noticed that juries started trials pissed off at having had their time wasted for days on end, and now there are far fewer potential jurors hanging around the building. And the police station in the building has been moved to a safer structure, so there are fewer cops around. As a result, the options for lunch have dropped to very few. I went to the place I’ve always gone, that is more expensive and caters to the lawyers. Even it is not thriving.

I just missed out on being selected for a jury for a misdemeanor prescription drug case that was a complete mystery. Did this guy piss on the side of a police car or what? It seemed to be a waste of everyone’s time, though, as it worked out, only one day of my time.

Since I had some time on my hands while we were waiting to be sent to a courtroom, I did what I usually do at such moments and started thinking about metaphysics. Recently I’ve been watching some excellent YouTube videos about String theory, the Multiverse, and the possibility that our universe is a simulation. The difference between Simulation and Pantheism is pretty subtle. You could easily rewrite the Devi creation story as a Simulation -- though this doesn’t get you any closer to answering questions about the origin of “everything.” 

We always come back to that ass Descartes when traveling this road -- the only thing we can know for sure is that we think. That we are aware. We can’t experience reality directly. We know that even our consciousness is a construct (see Korsakoff Syndrome). It would be nice to know what our bodies know. Are we dually sentient? We sort of know that each lobe of the brain has its own awareness, but is there another awareness that manages our perception, among other things? People are always trying to communicate with animals or space aliens, but it would be far more valuable to know what our brains/minds know that our consciousness doesn’t.

Random

Because it’s a Sunday and my options are limited, I walked the route rarely traveled, the bee-line to the Peet’s on Market Street. This takes me through Union Square proper, which is getting ready for the Christmas season. The work required to provide the wood “foundation” for the ice rink is rather more impressive than I had imagined. A lot of lumber and a lot of effort goes into this preparation. And I wonder where all this stuff is stored from Christmas to Christmas? 

Next I hit the new subway station at the SE corner of the square. It is slowly taking shape, but I don’t see why it isn’t already enclosed -- before the rains start. Apparently the construction people don’t think that way. I can see stairs and the bed for the escalator down to the actual train platforms, deep below the street. My view wasn’t good but it almost looked like there was only room for one escalator. I would think that couldn’t be true, but this is a Muni project. The tunnel is around 100 feet below the street.

Finally I walked down the last two blocks of Stockton Street. These blocks have been a construction zone for many years (except for when they are briefly pedestrianized at Christmas). The 2nd block is still dirt with a large hole with elevator down to the tunnel below. But the 1st block is ready to be paved and returned to normal use. Currently it’s being used for staging of construction equipment. And, honestly, there’s not that much reason to rush it back into service until the two blocks above are complete. Mostly this would be handy for taxis and Ubers. But psychologically it would be huge as it would suggest the construction nightmare was close to being over. And the surviving businesses on that block of Stockton would love it.

The street level construction mess is mirrored under the streets. Though not the same street, for the most part. Powell Street Station is the longest of our Market Street train stations serving both BART and Muni Metro, and it has been gutted and partly blocked off for as long as the streets have been torn up. Not entirely sure why. The main change will be that the existing (1970s) station will be connected to the new Central Subway station under Stockton. The new tunnel was bored beneath the original trench with BART below Muni. But that doesn’t explain why they had to gut the entire station. (Which also serves as a homeless camp.) Personally, finally completing the station work will improve my life more than putting the streets above back into service.

And as long as I’ve brought you down here to Market across from the "Medium" headquarters Phelan Building, this Christmas there will be two new popular attractions for the hoi polloi: The Ice Cream Museum has been doing an astonishing business since last Fall, and now “Candytopia” has opened in one of the retail spaces of the Four Seasons Hotel. By next year I expect to see “Crack-a-polousa” and “The Meth Museum.” It seems like we should at least live up to our usual reputation and have "The Kale Experience" and "Tofu You."

This really is the best Peet’s for people watching. The crowds out on this side of Market are noticeably altered by the two new attractions, especially the Candytopia that is just next door. Where are these suburbanites coming from? They don’t even look like the usual tourists. Someone had a great idea for pulling in the sugar craving crowds. Perhaps it’s sponsored by childhood diabetes. There’s still a vacated Walgreen’s across the street that could be converted into a Chuck E Cheese.

The other thing happening in my “hood” is the big Marriott hotel workers strike. I knew there were a lot of Marriott hotels around, but there are even more than I thought. And they all have had loud 24/7 protests for weeks now. I think the union ill timed the strike. This is a busy season, Oracle OpenWorld was last week (I only ended up working one shift) and every room in the city will be booked. People are not going to cancel at the Marriott because of the strike -- which they might do at a slower time of year when there would be vacancies elsewhere. My guess is that the strike is a pain for local management but might actually be saving the corporation some money. 

I’m still a fan of our new Mayor Breed. She seems to be taking some positive steps to deal with the problem on our streets. And the good news is that she’s on the clock. She won the election to fill our late Mayor’s term, but she will have to run again soon and people will want to see that she has accomplished something. That all the other mayors before her were unsuccessful at this, won’t help her. Her timing seems to be good. The process to gain conservatorship for some of the completely helpless people on the street seems to have reached a point where something might actually happen. And most everyone (with some vocal exceptions) is pretty fed up. And it’s not like she has to turn the city into Disneyland. Any noticeable improvement will be celebrated like the 2nd Coming. She’s in a good position. I’d give here 50/50 odds.

After Oracle

Well, I was wrong. My greening season ended with a whimper after all. Not only is a shift spent monitoring an infrequently visited eco-station for a convention lunch boring and pointless, but in the end I only was required to work one day out of the four. A mere blip of a whimper. The novelty of working on what is usually a busy downtown street wore off years and years ago. It was a lovely day and I was in the shade, so it could have been worse. 

I did have plenty of time for greening conversations with the handful of people curious about what we were doing. One guy even gave me a reusable metal straw -- with cleaning brush! Which is nice but, there are very few times I want a straw. Not counting the times I manage to drench myself following an ice blockage incident. Smoothies and milkshakes do require a fat straw, or at least a straw makes drinking them easier. And a straw is handy for stirring Thai iced tea. Otherwise, I don’t see the point.

Feynman

There’s a calf/ankle exercise I do at home next to my shelf of “special” books. While exercising today I was noticing how handsome the spine of my copy of QED by Richard Feynman is, which got me wishing that there was a companion Q?D, also by Feynman to go with it. I write Q?D and not QCD because what I have in mind is a book started by Murray Gell-man and then rewritten by Feynman. I’m confident (without any reason for this confidence) that Feynman, while rewriting Gell-man’s text, would come up with a better analogy than “chroma” for what’s going on with quarks. If this usage -- color is based on electrodynamic frequency which is an aspect of QED -- annoys me this much, it must have bothered Feynman even more. So what I want is a companion volume that explains “QCD” but in a whole new way, so that the “C” has to be replaced with another letter.

From this my mind wandered to Feynman’s habit of working, both physics and drawing, in topless bars in LA. I have no doubt that any number of print and electronic journalists thought to question the girls about how it affected them to be sketched by a Nobel Prize winning physicist. And I’m sure their replies were as interesting as the usual answers of athletes to questions that go beyond their sport. Not very. But I do wonder. You could imagine a sort of “Good Will Hunting” with the brilliant young woman just trying to feed her kids but rediscovering her math genius. Or she could be genius on the bongo drums. That would work, too.

215. Post street

Mid-century Dwell

Today I'm at a Peet's I rarely visit, on Van Ness (it is of the old, oak and granite style, but so small it's hard to get a seat.) For a time I was blinded by the sun, so had to abandon my laptop for the Dwell magazine I had almost forgotten about in my backpack. 

I have mixed feelings about Dwell magazine, but you have to admire their dedication to Mid-Century Modernism. The "finishing touch" this issue (the little stand-alone feature on the page before the penultimate page, if you're counting the back cover as the final page... I'm confused now) is about Jean Prouvé and a recently published monograph cunningly titled, Jean Prouvé by Raymond Guidot. 

Prouvé is another of those outstanding figures with formal training in neither architecture nor engineering. Seeing his work does take me back to that time, but while I like the strength and simplicity of his furnature, it seems to me to lack the grace one finds in the work of the Eameses and in some of the Scandinavians and Finns.

The final regular feature in this (September-October 2017) issue is of a condo unit on the 31st floor of a Chicago building on the lake. Here they've done a splendid job of recreating everything about Mid-Century Modernism I hated at the time, and I find my taste has not changed. I think it's one of  the most ghastly dwellings Dwell has ever presented. Turn this unit over to me and I would be the one bringing in the crew to gut the place and start fresh, something that usually drives me nuts.

Another feature in this issue shows a smallish apartment in Buenos Aires where the owners (he an architect) gutted the place and found, of course, interesting floors, ceilings, and battered masonry walls in the entry -- all of which they preserved. Now I would have preserved them too, but I would have had mixed feelings about it. The ceiling is interesting, but busy and impossible to keep clean. Ditto the entry. 

It's just as well I can't afford to take on a project like this as I would inevitably be confronted with either preserving something I liked -- but didn't really want here -- or spending money and bringing in more building materials to cover that thing. This would be in some hypothetical space, not my own place. 

A couple days later...

Bank Cafe

My original plans for today haven't worked out, and so I have been pulled here by my desire for a Bun Mee crispy tofu sandwich later this afternoon. On my way home I will hit the Chinatown branch library to return one book and pick up my next. This rarely works out so well, and it would have been even sweeter if the library had opened before 1pm, so I could have hit it on my way here.

This location on Kearny has always been marginal. Kearny is the seam between Union Square and the Financial District -- which works perfectly for a bank cafe but this block of Post has been in transition for years, ever since the Rizzoli Bookstore next door closed. But that is about to change again.

Shreve's (our premier local jewelry store) recently moved from their temporary location where Rizzoli had been, to their new location across the street. And now Britex Fabrics (our premier local fabric store) is transforming the old Rizzoli space for their new location. And since that is next door to (actually the same building as) Gumps (our premier local expensive housewares emporium), this block is suddenly turning into a major destination for people with money. 

I don't know if this has anything to do with the bank cafe's plans to remodel next month, but it might. Honestly, I don't see much overlap in the Gumps/Shreve/Britex crowd and the laptop dependent crowd here in the cafe, but at least the block should be without urine attracting gaps for a change.

All this change might be better for the Mechanic's Institute, which is in the next block down Post toward the subway station. I do expect to join there at some point, but I suspect you would be more likely to find their members in those three other SF traditions than here at the cafe. 

And I do wonder how this retail location musical chairs will play out once the subway under Stockton Street is complete in 2019 (or whenever). Businesses have been chased from Stockton like nervous rodents, causing the retail heart of Union Square to shift to Grant Street. When Stockton Street returns to civic life -- and with another subway station spurring the flow of people at both the Market Street and Union Square (proper) ends -- Stockton will suddenly return to being the most desirable location in the area. Will the shops reshuffle again? 

I don't expect the new subway station (on the Central Line) to do much business at first, so the main benefit will be easier access for people who have been avoiding the construction zone for all these years. Eventually, in ten years or more, Rose Pak's subway will make economic sense and businesses that can afford it will try to cluster around Stockton. Assuming retail shops are still a thing in ten years.

They are now talking about opening just the section of the Central Subway from Union Square to the south in a couple years, to provide better access to the Warrior's new arena (which project has hardly even begun but will probably happen faster than the government projects.) This makes total sense, but I don't think anyone would have suggested it prior to Rose Pak's sudden death this year. I hope her coffin is well secured as I'm sure the thought of her subway opening without the connection to Chinatown proper would have driven her wild. 

I've never been a fan of zombie stories, but I understand there are fast and slow zombies. Rose would be a nasty zombie.