214. Fire, light, and literacy

Magic light

I feel guilty about this, but I am so loving the light we are getting in SF thanks to the catastrophic wildfires to the north. I'm sitting in the front window of the Market Street Peet's, and the light is shining parallel with the sidewalk, hitting the people walking toward the west full in the face. It is what is known in cinema as "Magic Hour" light, usually what you get just before sunset -- the movie Catch 22 used this light to the best effect. Only, because of the smoke in the air, we are getting it all day, or close to it. 

The around the equinox light here is pretty great anyway, but this just makes it transfixing. I can't stop looking at the faces of people walking past. A cinematographer would be so envious of this light.

Literacy

On Medium, I keep running into (thanks to an algorithm that has noticed what I click on, I realize) pieces by young people arguing the importance of reading widely. Sometimes there are lists, which can be revealing in any number of ways, but other times they are just saying you need to take the time to read as much as you can.

Of course I see in this support for my belief in a constant "10%" (Alan Kay's term) of people who actually think about things. Some of the newer books suggested would not make my list, but that doesn't mean they don't belong. One recent list surprised me by including Xenophon's book about Cyrus, which I haven't read! I am shocked and appalled that some Millennial has read a Classic I haven't. And I know he really has read it since he launched into an unnecessary defense of/preference for Xenophon over Plato. (My guess is the SF Public Library didn't have this when I was plowing through their Classics section. I read both the Anabasis and his Symposium.)

That's life

This Sunday La Cucina is back with a San Francisco Street Food Festival -- after skipping 2016 due to an overabundance of response from the public in 2015. Unfortunately, Sunday is not only the day of our next book club meeting (The Five Invitations) but I'm hosting. 

When I finally learned that the food event -- very much my kind of thing, as it is all food and in the past has been overwhelmingly busy -- I requested a special, four hour shift at the end of the day. This would be after our meeting but would only run an hour past the close of the event. My boss told the scheduling person to post this, but she never did. I let it slide as Mary was so busy the past week and more, and then the fires hit this week and two other events happening this weekend have now been cancelled (one was a half marathon). 

(And speaking of breathing, a percentage of people on the sidewalks are wearing some kind of face mask for protection against the poor quality of the air. Honestly, I haven't noticed it being that bad. I turned on my air cleaner at home because I just bought it last year and might as well use it, but this air quality would have been great when I was growing up in the Valley. The Valley equivalent of Monty Python's Yorkshiremen, "Oh, I wish we had had smoke polluted air like this when I was a lad...." I imagine there's a small poison oak component to the smoke, but it can't be that bad at this distance. Seem to be more East Asians with masks, possibly because they're used to wearing them at home.)

So now I'm thinking it's just as well my shift was forgotten, as they can now plug in some of the people who lost shifts at the other events. Sadly, this is unlikely to end like the Berkeley Kite Festival -- the other event where they screwed up and didn't give me a shift -- because I still worked the second day there and got to hear how much I had been missed the previous day. I'm unlikely to hear any feedback from this end-of-the-season event.