66. Freakish weather

Previous - 65. Confusion

Weather

For two days I've been scheduling to avoid forecast bad weather, and for two days the bad weather has been dodging us. Yesterday it simply passed south of us and then went up into the Sierra where it can actually do the most good. But today it parted over the city with streams of stormy weather passing both north and south at the same time. I kept playing with the radar images to see if I was missing something, but no. 

We got enough rain to clean the streets -- which is really important given the state of our streets -- but not the kind of deluge we were promised. Now it's late afternoon and I'm finally out at Peet's. The silver lining here is that I got a lot of work done at home, mostly updating HOA documents and doing prep for our pro forma budget, but also doing laundry and dishes and the like. I'm in good shape for the weekend. Yea?

The Mac & me

I keep forgetting to add something to what I wrote before about getting into programming back in the 1980s, but I need to start with statistics from today. Besides all the iPhones and iPads Apple sells today, to my amazement, they also sell around 5 million Macintosh computers each quarter. Since 2006 they have not sold less than a million a quarter and have exceeded the 5 million mark five times. When I bought my first Mac, Apple had produced about 500,000 of the machines. They passed the 1 million mark in September of 1987, about three years after the launch. So in the first three years they sold as many machines as they do today every month. It was such a small community back then.

I bought my Mac in 1985. I started writing about HyperTalk in 1987. I started working for Apple at the Multimedia Lab in 1988 and by 1990 I was working for Apple in Cupertino (testing a new color version of HyperCard for the Apple IIgs). In 1987 I took a little personal pilgrimage to Cupertino just to gaze at the Mariani 1 building, that the documentation for my Macintosh informed me was the company headquarters. In 1990 I was eating lunch every day at the Mariani 1 cafeteria, and some years later I was working all-nighters in that building for a system software update. 

On Market Street

Now I need to say more about the location of my new Peet's. I already said that it faces a busy stretch of Market Street, SF's main drag. The cafe is on the ground floor of the Marriott Marquis Hotel. It borders the mid-block pedestrian way that leads to the Jewish Museum and then the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts and Moscone Convention Center. On the other side of the pedestrian way is the Four Seasons Hotel & Residences. All this is setup for my next charming story.

As I was leaving Peet's after writing the text above, I was walking down the sidewalk in front of the Four Seasons when I saw a guy standing in the middle of the sidewalk with his pants down taking a dump. This time I didn't get the full defecation visual -- for which I'm grateful because I happen to know that visual sticks with you longer than you might imagine (and I've walked a lot of dogs in my life.) 

Now I don't care how crazy you are, if you shit on the sidewalk in front of the Four Seasons it's less answering the call of nature and more some kind of statement. Alas, I'm sure Michel Foucault would have something interesting to say on this subject but all I can do is report the incident.

Next - 67. Music & TV

65. Confusion

Previous - 64. Buffy and beyond

Link to Table of Contents

30 year anniversaries

The other day it occurred to me that a bunch of important anniversaries are coming up for me, in fact I've already missed a few. I started teaching myself BASIC in the mid 1980s. I switched from my cheap Timex-Sinclair ZX81 to a first generation Macintosh in 1985. But that was just setting the table. The big anniversaries start next year.

I switched from BASIC to HyperTalk (part of HyperCard, also HERE) in 1987 and this is where it gets confusing. I was trying to remember when I started writing technical books about HyperCard and HyperTalk. I'm pretty sure it was 1987, the same year the software was released and before much was published about it -- the documentation was not very good. But I figured all I had to do was go home and look at the publication date in my copies of these books, only the date given is 1989, which can't be right. 

I started working at the Apple Multimedia Lab in 1988 and my job there ended in 1989. I only got the job as a result of the work I had done on those books. There's no way the books came out after 1988 and I would still bet on 1987 since that's when I started meeting people in Silicon Valley, also as a result of the books. 

Toryism

At the gym this morning I was thinking again about toryism and what it means. This after thinking about how reading The Magic Mountain had lead to everything from Goethe's Faust to The Brothers Karamozov, The Birth of Tragedy, and The Passion of Michel Foucault, while then looping back to Mann's Doctor Faustus. But the separate (though intertwining) examination of classes and the nafarious role of the bourgeoisie, started not with Mann but with Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End. Proust has an interest in the pre-bourgeois world he personifies in name De Guermantes, but he is merely looking on voyeristically from the peanut gallery of his solidly bourgeois family. 

Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are more in line with Ford's concerns. The Brothers Karamazov is really where the two lines of inquiry (from both The Magic Mountain and Parade's End) come together and merge. But it is curious how little Mann seems to be interested in the bourgeois aspect of all this. Perhaps because he himself was so thoroughly bourgeois -- though that was true of Foucault as well. 

The only time Mann shows us the pre-bourgeois world order is in that odd passage in Doctor Faustus when we see the very worst of it, a wealthy noble woman who constantly travels, at least in part, so that she doesn't have to witness the villages that are the source of her wealth -- where the peasants are too poor to even have candles.

Naphtha mimics some of the hyper-Christian aspects of Dostoevsky's monks, but shows us nothing of the relationship between the religious (or gentry) and the common man. I think Dostoevsky would find The Magic Mountain encouraging at first but ultimately disheartening.

What is unexpected is how what starts with Ford not being clear what he means by "Tory" leads me to The Periodic Table by Primo Levi and Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks -- thanks in part to Fernand Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life which traces the origin and ebb and flow of European capitalism to the movement of the Jews following their expulsion from Iberia. Which also explains the less than friendly attitude toward the Jews we see in both The Brothers Karamazov and Parade's End. The Jews are the anti-Tories. Can you even separate anti-bourgeois attitudes from antisemitism? And what does that say about Marx. (Whoops. I see Karl Marx's family situation is remarkably like Marcel Proust's. He was Christian, though Christianity did not go very far back in his family. interesting.)

Next - 66. Freakish weather

64. Buffy and beyond

Previous - 63. Hallway

Architecture

A storm is due to arrive in a few hours so I decided to stay closer to home than usual. Instead of my new Peet's, I decided to check out the swarm of closer Starbucks I usually avoid. The one less than two blocks from me I still boycott because it was my favorite local cafe before Starbucks took over and turned it into the most boring of all their locations. The next two (three blocks away) are small and were jammed with tourists. Which brought me to this location, four blocks from my apartment. 

I walk past this location all the time -- in fact I walked past twice this morning on my way to and from the gym -- but I hadn't been inside since they remodeled this summer. They kept the counters looking out over the sidewalk (the reason I used to come here to work), but did a nice job of freshening up the space as a whole. The space, though small, seems to have had a grander past judging by the architectural details up near the ceiling. The souvenirs of that past have been left white -- possibly just a tad off-white -- while the functional Starbucks area below is a sort of black box... though with lots of windows on two sides. 

Still, all the black below means that the white above catches your eye. I certainly never noticed the details before, perhaps there was a false ceiling? Anyway, Starbucks did well by this space, everything they didn't do to that location closer to me.

From where I'm sitting in their window, I can see both the low-rise building -- finished but un-tenanted -- on the next corner...

...and that building's step sister still rising between the little restaurants on Belden and the surviving grand old buildings on Montgomery. 

The reason these buildings are related has to do with the hoops a developer has to jump through to get anything built here. The little building on the corner had to be only four stories tall with the top floor opening onto, and supplementing, St Mary's Park. 

When the yellowish fence is removed the part of the top level of the building will become an extension of the park.

The new tower refuses it's left flank, to borrow a military term I'm very fond of, so that the Russ Building next door doesn't lose its light. The facade of the Chamber of Commerce building has also been incorporated into the south side of the project. 

The "refusing the left flank" aspect is only visible if you walk further down to the right of this photo -- where I would have been blocked by trucks.

Unfortunately, after all that, the tower itself is enveloped in a glass curtain-wall that takes boring to a new level.

I was so pleasantly surprised by the mild asymmetry of the new hospital rising on Van Ness, that I foolishly allowed myself to think that perhaps that was a new fashion -- no such luck, apparently.

The wires and elevator don't make this easy to read, but the curtain-wall units do not repeat exactly, either vertically or horizontally. I would prefer a bolder asymmetry, but this is a nice alternative to the usual blandness.

Now I'm going to have to wait until I take a bunch of photos before posting this. (Done.) I'm not sure if my rediscovering my camera is a good thing or not.

Twitter

Here's what I love about Medium, about a year ago a piece was suggested to me and has been sitting in my  "Read later" folder all this time. It was a piece about the problem with Twitter. I've never used Twitter, but they are a local company and much in the news of late due to their sinking fortunes, so today I finally read it. And it turned out to be far more than I expected when I clicked to check it out. I wish it were better written (I don't think English is the author's native language) but this goes beyond Twitter to the current U.S. election and all the social dysfunction I've been reading and writing about these past few years. Here's the link.

Let me say that, for once, I have no quibbles with this author's take on the situation. I think he is right on the nose. When my little band of Buffy fans deserted the IMDB message boards for a private forum, it was because they were fed up with the trolls and the idiots. I stayed behind at first because I thought it was, to a large degree, the trolls and idiots that brought us together, and that we would be too small and too similar a group to survive long in isolation. I was neither entirely right or entirely wrong about that: Currently we are pretty quiet as most of the interesting people have offended someone and been booted, leaving an even duller collection of people. As it stands, we lack any sort of story or plot to keep things interesting. We are sometimes helpful or supportive of each other -- which is nice -- but there is no drama.

So going beyond what Haque wrote, the problem with a truly democratic Internet is that it forces you to deal with all the troubled idiots you normally can avoid in "real life." But that is more than just an online problem, as society in general needs to find some way to deal with these people. 

Even if you limit the discussion to the Internet (which I don't recommend), if you ban these people, as my Buffy group did, you end up with an inert and boring place people have no need to visit -- just as Haque claims is happening with Twitter. 

Some of my fondest memories from back in our IMDB days were when we would gang up on some troll who wandered onto the board and utterly eviscerate them. Ironically it was our Queen and pit-bull (a gay guy from Calgary who would jump in with both feet and verbally kick the shit out of trolls so that they fled, never to be heard from again) who started the new forum. I finally joined because the old IMDB board was a wasteland without my friends who had left. But of the four people who lead the exit, only one is still active. Ironically, I'm one of the more active members at the moment.

What I'm saying is that, as much as Haque's neo-Burkean analysis pleases me, I have no actual clue as to how you would address this problem. Removing the abuse from social media sounds like a good idea, but the result would drive people away due to the lack of dramatic interest. And it would further isolate the already problematic agressives. Personally, that might be nice but socially it's not a solution.

Next - 65. Confusion

63. Hallway

Previous - 62. Braunstein + Trump

Photographs

Many apartments have narrow hallways which it is a common practice to line with small photos or paintings. My tiny apartment also has a sort of tiny hallway. It is about two inches wider than my bathroom door and is just over a foot long -- or deep. 

Since I can't spread photos out horizontally in such a small space, I stack them vertically. There are group shots of friends and people I've worked with going back to the late 1970s. My pre-bookstore days, bookstore days, and various phases of my programming career are covered in these photos. Today I also noticed that a total of five of the people pictured are dead: three as a result of the AIDS epidemic and two from cancer. (I'm not still in touch with all the other people so I can't say they are all still alive, but these are the only deaths I'm aware of.) 

I think it's remarkable that I can't think of anyone I know personally who has died violently -- as a result of a car or bike accident or crime or earthquake. I know "of" people like this, I just don't know the victims myself. Historically, I suspect this is quite odd for someone in their mid-60s. 

Nostalgia

I'm at Coffee To the People in the Haight. I've worked here a number of times -- they have an excellent waste diversion layout -- but I never noticed until just now that their small tables are covered with political images (stickers and signs) from the '60s and '70s. The causes of my youth all laid out under resin -- or maybe just varnish. I suspect they are not "real" artifacts from the period but reproductions intended for coffee house tables. 

Curiously, it was the ERA table I'm sitting at (that I'm pretty sure I've sat at before) that caught my eye. The next table over, I then noticed, has a larger "What if they gave a War and nobody came..." mini-poster that I recognize from back in the day. Things seemed so simple then: War bad; Peace good. Now we really want to do something about Syria and ISIS but what, exactly, quickly becomes vague. 

It's rather like the situation with the black community and the police. The black community -- everyone, really -- wants the police to address the crime that plagues their neighborhoods... if only they could do that without harming or harassing any blacks or other minorities. It has occurred to me before that the only politically correct solution is to encourage white criminals to victimize communities of color so that the police can then deal with them without offending anyone. 

Now that the Philippines seems to be joining the new Axis of Crazy, Vietnam is looking to be our natural ally vs China in Southeast Asia. Aside from the older generation of the Vietnamese refugee community (especially in the South Bay, here) -- which is likely to become more of an embarrassment over time -- no one in the U.S. really cares much about Vietnam one way or the other. That was just some nonsense that happened a long time ago. (I would hate to have to teach that history in school. And that our "Camelot" was standing knee-deep in that political insanity makes it even worse. "Yes, the great JFK was waging a nonsensical war that was not in the interest of the country's national security because it would have looked bad politically to do otherwise." And that was back in the good old days before U.S. politics went all to hell. No wonder they don't even try to teach civics anymore... at least I think that's true.

Next - 64. Buffy and beyond

62. Braunstein + Trump

Previous - 61. Fadeaway Girl

Braunstein

I'm still plowing through my folder full of Medium story recommendations. Today I hit one that is ridiculously longer than all the others. Usually these pieces are reasonably short but this was like a New Yorker story, but very interesting, and in a way that relates to my previous blogs. 

"Friend of the Devil" is an account of the life and crimes of Peter Braunstein, a writer who had worked for Women's Wear Daily before he attacked an ex-fellow employee and plotted to kill Anna Wintour. Braunstein himself references Michel Foucault and he is very much in the Foucault camp when it comes to death, crime, and madness. 

But beyond the Foucault connection, what struck me today was how a person who could be viewed as accomplished and lucky in both his professional and personal life -- up to a point -- could view himself as a victim of a hostile establishment. This reminded me of something else, about Trump, that I ran into yesterday. 

Trump

The entire piece is HERE, but the headline is probably all you really need to read:

Trust-fund-baby-turned-billionaire-married-to-supermodel feels system unfairly rigged against him

That I get the same vibe from Trump that I get from Braunstein is the latest, and perhaps scariest, reason to fear his candidacy. 

P.S.

I had to add the quote below I just ran into on the BBC website since it seems to support what I wrote above:

In a blog post on Friday titled "Meeting Donald Trump," British tycoon Sir Richard Branson became the latest celebrity to give his thoughts on this never-ending election. And it wasn't a pitch for President Trump.

Mr Branson describes being invited by Mr Trump to his apartment in Manhattan where the New Yorker discussed his bankruptcy and the various people he had gone to for help but who had turned their backs on him.

"He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people," Mr Branson continues, before adding that he found the event "bizarre". He told Mr Trump there must be more constructive ways to spend the rest of his life. "Hopefully my advice didn't lead to him running for president!" he writes.

Next - 63. Hallway

61. Fadeaway Girl

Previous - 60. 24-40

Link to Table of Contents

Reading

Back at the same seat in Peet's on Market Street. The woman next to me at this counter/table asked me to watch her stuff and I said sure. And at first I was just doing the usual Interwebs stuff so I was paying attention to her belongings -- or at least I would have been aware if anyone came by and messed with it. But then I switched to reading a chapter of Martha Grimes's Fadeaway Girl (but also here) and someone could have sawed her part of the counter off and taken it with them and I probably wouldn't have noticed. It was a short chapter, too. And only the one because we are down to the dregs of the world of Emma Graham and I'm trying to drag it out as much as I can. 

I think this is only the second time I've read this volume, anyway I don't recall much of the plot. And the chapter I was reading was actually plot heavy, for a change. Though even here it was more about what Emma was feeling than about what was happening. But at least what was happening was germane to the chain of crimes the novels are pretending to be about. 

Market Street

Back 24 years ago when I lived way up Market in Fox Plaza, I couldn't help noticing how the buildingsx along this diagonal street, Fox Plaza in particular, frequently created eddies of trash at entrances and other points where the shape of the building interacted with the near constant (and often fierce) wind in just the right way. Today they have to model new buildings to optimize (or minimize) the way they block the wind, but back then they just built and then tried to ignore the negative results. After all, it was some janitorial employee making minimum wage who had to pick up the trash that collected in every recess of the building.

There is a similar recess at the entrance of this Peet's, but what I see constantly blowing in, sometimes through and other times coming to rest, are the people of the streets. There is a complete revitalization of Market Street scheduled for not too far in the future. The current street-scape is a result of the construction project that put BART and Muni Metro trains underneath the street in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then little has changed, but everything has aged. Hallidie Plaza, for example, was a part of that same transit project and in the years since they have had to remove all the benches and trees to reduce crime and "blight." 

The excruciatingly creative types who will be crafting the new street design will be doing a cunning dance as they attempt to tart up the Mid-Market blocks -- where Twitter and Uber and Dolby have been encouraged to settle -- while discouraging the camping of the more feral elements. I don't envy them. The Seattle Public Library approach is probably the best, give them an area to inhabit that is convenient to them while not essential to the people with more work-a-day interests. But that requires the designers (and client) be realistic and honest. I would guess that this, instead, will be a design process within a world of pretend. In any case, it will be interesting to see what they come up with.

Next - 62. Braunstein + Trump

60. 24 - 40

Previous - 59. Ryecroft + Landscaping

Time

This morning I was doing a little math in my head and thinking about how I was 24 when I moved here to SF in 1976. That's the most obvious point to divide my life into a "before" and an "after." For my first 24 years I lived in cities of my parent's choosing, since then I've lived in SF, my choice. 

Since I moved a year after graduating from university, it is also tempting to view my first 24 years as my education, followed by my 40 years of career -- or careers. But that, too, is dramatically misleading. 

I only started to read the Classics when I moved here. Even my knowledge of Greek and Roman philosophy was limited to what I had learned in a couple lower level philosophy classes at ASU. Starting to read Livy was one of those unaccountable -- but life changing -- decisions (like reading Samuel Eliot Morison's history of U.S. Navy operations in WW2 while I was in middle school) that have shaped my world view. 

I also hadn't yet read Proust, Gibbon, Mann, or Fernand Braudel. It's like moving here was the start of my (auto-didactic) graduate education. If I were to meet the "me" of 1976 I would consider him annoyingly uneducated. (Also annoyingly moody and angsty, as are some of my current Buffy Board online friends of that age.)

Even in terms of military history (the subject I know best and the only thing I feel I could teach at a moment's notice) aside from the foundation in Pacific War Naval history and a superficial knowledge of some periods of European military history, I knew almost nothing. It has been a slow, cumulative process of delving deeper and reading wider. My understanding of even the Pacific War, the subject I knew best back then, has probably changed a half dozen times in the past 40 years. (This does help to put Caesar's "over-night" success in his 50's in perspective. Perhaps he wouldn't have been "Caesar" if given an army command 20 years earlier. Just as I maintain Napoleon wasn't "Napoleon" without his chief of staff, Berthier.) 

My 40 years here in SF can still be sub-divided by careers: Student (2 years), bookstore clerk (7?), programmer (13?), greener (10?). Though, while the first and last sub-divisions have been the most learning intensive, the ones in the middle were only marginally less so -- for lack of time, mostly. 

While I sometimes have "What if?" thoughts about attending Wesleyan or one of the Great Books colleges (or Sandhurst), I think SF has proven to be an ideal post-graduate school for me. 

Peet's

I have dumped the Bank Cafe. It pains me to pay an extra dollar for my iced tea, but the impossibly slow WiFi was finally more than I could stand. Peet's opened a new, larger, location on Market a block further away, and I've been coming here now for about a week. 

I've written (a long time ago) about my fondness for Peet's interior design, which they've now updated. The front counter/table I'm now sitting at is still oak, but rough cut and not stained in the same way. I can't say I like it more, but it has it's own appeal. I'm sure this is much poorer quality oak -- probably pieces that would have been scrapped in the past -- so I like that they are doing something nice with wood that would have been wasted. Eventually, I will be writing on a sheet of paper and my pen will sink into one of the crevices and I will curse the high-concept of this surface, but for now I approve. 

The people watching at the Bank Cafe was not bad, but this Peet's overlooks Market, our main drag, with wider sidewalks and a steady flow of a little bit of everything. The crazy woman I first noticed walking here and there in front of the cafe eventually came to rest on the cafe's seating that acts as a barier between the street and the cafe. I say "rest," but she seems unable to be "still." I would guess she's Southeast Asian. She seems childlike, in a demented sort of way -- she's been lying on her back picking at her fingers and toes since she assumed this position, never quite being still. It is hard to tell to what extent she is aware of her surroundings and, in particular, of the people around her. She seems oblivious.

I don't know if this is a Peet's in general thing or just at this location, but they play a surprising amount of Brazilian music from the '60s. Not a bad thing. 

HOA

Back at my building we are in the process of seeking the origin of a leak. It is either coming from above -- though no one has any idea from where or how -- or it is rising from a poorly tiled shower in the bathroom (of that same unit that has been a thorn in my side since June.) For reasons I can only guess at, they thought it wise to paint the room before dealing with the rotted threshold between living room and bathroom. Now, understandably, they are not eager to open up that wall to find where the damage starts. We just today opened up a section of the "box" that conceals our sewer drain pipe as it traverses the bathroom to it's furthest point under the three kitchens stacked above. We determined that the water is not coming from that pipe (which would have been a nightmare to address) but that's about all we've learned. Odds are that it's coming from the shower on the other side of the bathroom wall, though, I admit, I don't quite see how. 

I've now painted the door and doorway (which I originally ignored/forgot) so my participation in this drama should be complete, unless it really is a leak from elsewhere in the building. 

I am happy to see that we are still all being quite civil, given the summer we had. We've all lost patience at one time or another, but the HOA as a whole seems to be holding it together. Still, I will be happy to see the end of this year... and that's even before taking into account the Presidential election. 

TV

To celebrate the end of my greening season, I went to Amoeba on Sunday and bought some DVDs. I finally found a copy of the version of Sense and Sensibility I love so much. And then, since they didn't have any of the TV shows I was hoping to find, I started Rizzoli & Isles. The hook for this particular murder procedural is that it focuses on a friendship between two women -- the Detective and the Medical Examiner. All of these shows have a characteristic way of starting an episode, and almost always it involves finding the body. R&I starts with a glimpse of the victim before death. I wish it didn't. But otherwise, the show has an amazingly talented cast and the core friendship is a shockingly novel thing to see on TV. (Note that this is not a new show, just new to me.)

When I say it's a talented cast, I mean you know almost everyone from previous roles. Isles was previously a beloved character on NCIS. Rizzoli was on Law & Order for years. Donnie Wahlberg played one of my favorite characters on Band of Brothers. 

Aside from two women engaging in a friendship that has little to do with men, the show seems pretty routine so far. It's like they had a TV Trope Checklist and were eager to check all the boxes. To be fair, I'm only four episodes in, but the tricks I learned for determining the murderer from watching NCIS and Bones and Castle and The Closer seem to still aply. And these tricks have nothing to do with evidence but instead with show pacing and how recognizable characters are. It's rare when the possible suspect you recognize from previous substantial TV roles, or from a long career now coming to a close, didn't do it.

I'm pretty sure I will complete the season I bought, but I'm not sure if I will trade this in for the next season. All the shows I mentioned above, had more interesting irons in the fire when they started. But I think this show is still on the air, so maybe what it has is engaging enough. This genre is so popular, you'd think someone would do something really novel -- and maybe someone has, I watch so little TV I wouldn't necessarily know. 

Next - 61. Fadeaway Girl

59. Ryecroft + Landscaping

Previous - 58. Beethoven's 9th recalled

Henry Ryecroft

Actual rain is falling from the sky. This is our first proper storm since, I think, early April. I remember that rain because I was working outside all day the first weekend of Cherry Blossom Festival. Now it's the weekend following Fleet Week and the City is finally getting a good washing. 

The past week I've been thinking again about Henry Ryecroft, and this change in the weather brings him to mind again. The change of seasons. From now on we will be descending into winter. My greening work is done for the year. Despite a perverse urge to rev up my workouts, to get back to where I was on a couple exercises I've backed off of because of wrist problems last year at this time, I'm trying to ease off the exercise just a bit. To lay fallow, as it were, and give my body time to recover. (Though while this sounds sensible, I've come through the summer in such good shape it seems a bit silly.) I'm thinking I will limit myself to twice a week until the new year and then ramp up again.

Thinking of Henry Ryecroft, something else struck me, his attitude toward his health problems. And presumably this was true of George Gissing as well. Where as today we do battle with illness, he retreated to the countryside to try to enjoy what time remained. Today this would be a startling act for anyone not destitute or deranged. And yet who really enjoys those battles in and out of hospitals? I suppose enough people win to make it seem worth the effort, but I wonder.

Landscaping

I'm now learning a great deal about landscaping with gravel. We just want a thick layer of something in the back to prevent weeds from growing there. The ideal solution seems to be something called decomposed granite (DG). The one landscaper I've managed to get here to look at the site suggested it, and I've since studied up. If you pack it down, it almost resembles paving. The landscaper recommended five inches of the stuff to cover all the roots and vines down there. 

The problem is that bags of the stuff are quite heavy (over 40 lbs) and since that landscaper never got back to me with the estimate he promised, it looks like I may have to do this myself. An alternative is red lava, which is under 30 lbs for the same volume and cheaper as well. 

A great option would be 60 bags of the red lava as a base which would then be topped off with 57 bags of DG. This would give most of the advantages of the nearly solid (weed blocking) power of the DG but with a much lighter in weight (and cost) alternative underneath, where it shouldn't make much difference. 

There are several other options: pea gravel, and a general purpose gravel that is even cheaper but still heavy. Just thinking about my back and our budget, the thought of simply having 80-100 bags of red lava delivered rather appeals to me. If it turns out that isn't quite doing what we want, we can always add a layer of DG sometime in the future.

And I just now discovered I can first put down a heavy duty tarp for under $50. So maybe just 80 bags of lava rock? I just want to get past this so I can finish up the damn painting.

Next - 60. 24-40

58. Beethoven's 9th recalled

Previous - 57. Why?

Link to Table of Contents

Doctor Faustus

I'm now re-reading the XLV chapter, the one where Adrian says,

“I find,” he said,  “that it is not to be.”

“What, Adrian, is not to be?”

“The good and noble,” he answered me; “what we call the human, although it is good, and noble. What human beings have fought for and stormed citadels, what the ecstatics exultantly announced -- that is not to be. It will be taken back. I will take it back.”

In the summer of the Trump Presidential candidacy, one is tempted to agree with Adrian. Though it's worth noting that Mann was writing not much over 100 years after Beethoven wrote his 9th Symphony. He lacked the historical perspective we have today, the feeling that there may be a historical cycle with Napoleon and Hitler and today's madmen at the low point and Beethoven's 9th as a reminder that these storms in time do pass. If only for a time.  

Next - 59. Ryecroft + Landscaping

57. Why?

Previous - 56. Fleet Week + Dreaming

A door

Why would I insist on painting a door myself when someone else was offering to have their painter do it? This is a very reasonable question to which I have only questionable answers. For starters, the person offering this painting service has a history of hiring people who do a half-assed job. For other things this wouldn't bother me as much, and I would appreciate the opportunity of dodging some work, but I have a very long history with painting and half-assed painting drives me nuts. But, in this particular case, there are at least three other reasons as well.

While I've been painting since childhood, I didn't learn how to properly paint doors until a few years ago, maybe seven years now, and, given my history of frustrating attempts at door painting with brush and pad, to properly paint a door with a mini-roller is still a thrill for me. (I have very early memories of cleaning brushes with paint thinner and then soap and water -- my father may have very early picked me out as a total sap as he had me cleaning his brushes and the hub-caps of his car only a few years after I learned to walk.)

One of the things I was concerned their painter would fail to do, was to properly prep the door. Because I originally didn't want this door painted (very nice grain in the wood), I did a through job of sanding and varnishing and sanding and varnishing until it looked really good. Unfortunately, water from our laundry room ran out under the door and not infrequently made the bottom edge of the door wet. The wood suffered. It didn't expand or fall apart (maybe in part because of all my varnishing?) but it no longer looked good. And it was always the only bit of the outside of the building not painted "Bone." So I didn't fight the owner's desire to paint the door, so long as it was painted well. Which brings me to my multi-tool.

I bought this power tool on sale years ago and have rarely had an opportunity to use it. One of it's many capabilities is something very similar to orbit sanding. I used it today to rough up the varnished surface of the door prior to priming. It seems to have worked. Just before I started typing this, I put a coat of Bone paint on top of the primer. Not sure if it will require a second coat, I rather think not. If it doesn't look good in a year it will be my fault and I will address it. 

As long as I had the multi-tool out, I put on a grinding surface and smoothed one of the "bricks" that was left too rough by the seismic retrofitters and myself when I finished their work where they had filled in where a couple bricks were destroyed for testing purposes. As I hoped, the grinding makes the surfaces look more like the older brick work. Before I touch-up the paint on those walls, I will bring out a longer extension cord and grind some more. 

And yes, I am eager for the landscaper and professional painter to come and then go, so I can get a shot at finishing up these little things. I'm even going to repaint the gate in our entry even though I think paint on galvanized steel is a lost cause. When I'm finished, the entry should look as good as it did when it was all repainted just a few years ago. (Just looked it up and it was five years! Seems like only three.), 

SF

The photograph below is by Eadweard Muybridge and was taken from near the top of my hill in 1878. 

Just below the intersection in the foreground is what appears to be a small church -- where the wood framed apartment building next door to me now stands. I had no idea there had been a church there. None of the ecclesiastical structures dominating this scene still exist. The onion domes (for lack of the proper term) on the Jewish Temple made for very picturesque debris near Union Square after the 1906 earthquake. What's as remarkable as the changes since this photo, is that all this was built in 30 years -- really less than 30 years since the town kept burning down in it's early days. And this was taken 98 years before I arrived here. 

Next - 58. Beethoven's 9th recalled

56. Fleet Week + Dreaming

Previous - 55. Medium

A brief vacation (film reference)

Yesterday with the Blue Angels roaring above me, it occurred to me that this could well be the last greening event of this season, and that I should try to get out of town. Some people would go to their house in the country, but I'm not "some people." I'm at the Barnes & Noble in Emeryville. 

This area is a step above Generica, but only a step. The quick bus ride over the Bay Bridge is always fun -- my chance to see how the demolition of the old Bay Bridge is going. (Slowly.) I picked the best three architecture and design mags off the rack, but the selection here isn't as good as it was at Borders, so it's more design and decorating. But first I need to catch up on the weekend.

Fleet Week

Saturday was hot. We only had a half dozen or so hot days this summer, and that was one of them. I was roving the fenced in and tented VIP areas (less shade than you would think) but returned to our dumpster base for bags and to drop off hazardous waste -- half full Sterno cans, and lots of them. And to refill my water. On one visit I noticed that two people were there sorting in the sun when we had a tent for shade sitting in it's bag. I quickly sold them on the idea of setting up the tent, and then finished my water break in the shade. This passes for the wisdom of age in these pathetic days.

Sunday the weather was already starting to change. When I arrived there were wisps of fog flowing through the Golden Gate, and at the end of the day there was a wall of fog. Still warm enough at mid-day, though. Today it was actually cold in the morning and we are expecting our first real rain since April by the end of the week. I can't wait.

People here either love or hate Fleet Week -- and by "Fleet Week" what most people mean is the Blue Angels' air show. I've always enjoyed the show but now that I've worked in the area with the best view for several years, I don't even watch that much of it. A large part of that is that I'm busy working. The Angels are the final act in an hours long show and that's our cue to get things wrapped up and ready for when the crowd starts to leave. 

The other reason I don't watch that much is that planes zooming about get's dull after so many viewings. I paid more attention to the F-22 demonstration because a plane with vectored thrust can do all sorts of new and unusual things. In a way, the low pass by the United Airlines 747 (an event sponsor) was as impressive as anything else. The perfect combination of Big and Loud.

Dreaming

I set my alarm unusually early this morning but I was already awake when the alarm went off. I had just startled myself awake from a great dream. Dreams never cease to amaze me. What woke me up was wanting, in the dream, to email a friend about what a great art gallery I was visiting.

Except that it wasn't an art gallery but rather a long narrow room lined with all sorts of displays. There were books, there were various collections of things, there was what I can only describe as a framed gif, only it was upside down. But what I especially liked were these framed, sculptural things each painted in one color. Often the art in my dreams is more detailed and convoluted than I can imagine creating myself, but these pieces were quite simple, like a half dozen pieces of wood lined up and placed in the frame and then all of that painted a medium green -- far from the color I would choose. And yet somehow it was totally compelling. I even backed up in my progression around the room for a second look.

Now, if you are imagining this at all, you've got it wrong. For one thing, all this was just inches above the floor, not centered on the wall. And I was somehow moving (gliding) along the floor taking all this in. It was like I was lying on a wheeled stool and pushing it along with my feet and hands, though no actual stool was visible in the dream. So that childhood fascination with being close to the ground was probably part of the appeal. 

I suppose if you are David Lynch and you have a really interesting dream, you make a movie out of it; but for the rest of us the frustration of great dreams is knowing that you can't return to them. At least I never have been able to.

Baseball

I would love for my SF Giants' to win another World Series, but at dinner today I became aware that it's possible to have a World Series with the Boston Red Sox facing the Chicago Cubs and that would be really cool to see. I don't have any particular attachment to either team, to be honest, but they play in the oldest, most famous stadiums in baseball. If the Giants have to lose I would hope it would be in the interest of such a historical match-up. Time will tell. 

Next - 57. Why?

55. Medium

Previous - 54. Kevin Durant + Fleet Week +

Too much to read

Every day Medium sends me a "Daily Digest" of pieces to read. Sometimes I read them but often they end up in a folder to read later. This summer, what with retrofit hell and everything else, even more digests have gone into that folder. At the same time, the free space in my web-mail account has been shrinking. After going through all my web-mail folders and deleting all the big files I didn't need, I still had too much junk. It finally occurred to me that these digests are bigger than I had thought and collectively are clogging my web-mail. So this week I started working though the backlog. 

It's gone fairly well -- in the sense that I've read through and deleted dozens of them -- but I'm still in February and a new one come in every day. I'm tempted to just delete them all, but I've read some really interesting stuff in the past few days. I could use them as grist for this blog, but that would make the process even slower. It's a dilemma.  

Next - 56. Fleet Week + Dreaming

54. Kevin Durant + Fleet Week +

Previous - 53. More HSB + Ethics

Novel padding

I'm now over half through the fourth of Martha Grimes's Emma Graham novels. On this, my second (or third?) reading of this book, I'm noticing how much time the author spends reminding the reader of things mentioned in previous novels. I suppose this is so people who haven't read the previous books -- or haven't read them recently -- won't be entirely lost. For me it's a bit irritating. I still don't have any kind of ebook reader, so I don't know what that experience is like or what options are available, but one thing that should be an option is a version of books that are part of a series with the reminders left out. 

I assume the author goes through the book after it's finished and adds these little reminders everywhere she mentions something that happened in a previous book. I would want her to completely finish the editing of the book before adding that padding and distribute the padded and un-padded versions separately. Or you could get them both for the same price and read the one that suits you.

My alley

For a week or so it looked like all the construction in my neighborhood was wrapping up at the same time, but that has turned out not to be the case. The alley is now filled up with trucks working next door. I'm not sure what they are doing, but truck-loads of debris are coming out of the building. It seems like a volume larger than the building itself has been hauled away over the course of the past three or four months. My neighbor says she was almost hit by a toilet flying out of a window -- which suggests major remodeling. (Though the City is also pressing everyone to replace old toilets with low-flow models. After I wrote the above I came home and found a huge pile of bags of debris piled up along the side of our building -- in that nice paved area they wouldn't let our contractors use to get materials to the rear of our building.) 

To my surprise, it looks like our timing this summer could actually have been worse. I'm even thinking we might want to put off the pending landscaping and painting until after this project -- what ever it is -- is complete. Now if I can only find someone to give me an idea when that will be. 

Fleet Week

This is also Fleet Week. The Blue Angel practice flights over the city will start tomorrow and the weather forecast is perfect for them, with the skies clear and the temps slowly getting warmer until late Sunday when it changes again. This could turn out to be the (relatively) hot weekend we dodged for HSB. Since Nike isn't holding their Women's Half Marathon this year (and we don't seem to be greening the Salesforce convention for once), Fleet Week could be the last event on our calendar. I could live with that.

End of season mid-course correction

After getting a double hamstring cramp on Monday (something I do not recommend), I have a new "Anti-cramp Plan" that will go into effect next Monday. Instead of my usual routine -- sleep in late and do little but moan and bitch -- I've scheduled a, too early, massage and then I'm going to the gym to both workout and stretch the hell out of my hamstrings. (I will finally give those foam roller things a try.) If nothing else, this should surprise the hell out of my hamstrings. We'll see if this really is better than simple rest.

Kevin Durant+

At the gym this morning I caught part of Stephen A. Smith's rant about Kevin Durant going to the Golden State Warriors. (Smith is an ESPN personality famous for articulate rants on sports related topics. Durant is considered one of the three best players in the league.) His position was that, by switching from the second best team in the West to the best team, Durant has ruined the regular season, since there will be no real competition for the now even more dominant Warriors. This after Golden State annihilated the Clippers in the second pre-season game of the year. 

I can see Smith's point, and maybe I would be more sympathetic if it wasn't my team that benefited from this change, but I don't really see preserving competion as high among the factors deciding where a player wants to be. This may also reflect my interest in greatness. 

I've always been a Giants baseball fan, but I collected the baseball cards of all the players from the great Yankee teams of the 1950s. Who wouldn't have wanted to play on those dominant teams? The same goes for the SF 49er football teams of the late 1980s and early 1990s. When all the pieces fall into place like that, each player has an opportunity to rise even higher through the synergy of greatness. 

Both Kevin Durant and Steph Curry may suffer statistically this season as they share the same basketball court -- there's only one ball to go around, after all -- but they will be part of something phenomenal. You would have to be insane to pass that up because it makes the season less exciting for ESPN. If that's even true. I think people are going to come out to see the show. 

And yes, I'm going to bring this back to military history. People will say, well of course GSW is blowing everyone off the court with the talent they have now. But most of the new personnel they've picked up since last season went for smaller paychecks just for the opportunity to be part of what should be a history making team. The talent came because all the other pieces were in place.

In military history I see the same dynamic with Alexander, Caesar, Napolean in his prime, the U.S. Pacific Fleet in WW2 (5th Fleet, but not 3rd Fleet because a piece was missing there). When it works it looks so easy. You say, well of course they won, look at all the advantages they had. Yet other military organizations with similar advantages have been failures. 

The GSWs, besides picking up those new very promising pieces, also lost many of the players that helped them last season. And for the second year in a row they lost the first assistant coach to a head coaching job elsewhere in the league -- this also happened to the 49ers in their glory years. This is not unlike the attrition armies and navies suffer in war. Will the GSW organization prove robust enough to adjust to all the changes. Will new players and coaches rise to the new opportunites? For me that will be more interesting to see than mere team competition during the regular season.

Next - 55. Medium