382. Cherry Blossom Festival 2022 & Time

      

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Time, again 

Day 745/290 - 4/1/2022 

I’m caught up with everything published in Bloggity. Which means that I now have to start posting again and really catch up. I also may get around to my chronological review of Pirenne’s book. Always worth the effort.

I’m really enjoying my “fetal” perspective on celebrating birthdays. The wisdom of age can be a wonderful thing. 

Day 757/302 - 4/13/2022  

I’m happily working in the Bank Cafe after a solid two days of working the first Cherry Blossom Festival since 2019. I was very cold the last day but otherwise working the event in my seventies was no different than from my sixties. I have added a new exercise to my daily routine to make it easier for me to climb into trucks. We will see how that goes.

The event itself was smaller than usual with fewer food vendors. Since this is also the warm up event for me -- the first greening work I do this season -- the lighter load was appreciated. And none of us will miss the parade that is not being held next Sunday. On the other hand, the person acting as the end-of-the-day crew chief now needs more help than the previous person did, so I have to work longer than I have in the past. From a half hour to a full hour on Saturday. Such is life when you work for a group that almost inevitably loses its best workers over time.

It was nice to work again with three of our other regulars. Two of us happened to approach the seme ecostation at the moment a festival goer was dumping her food related trash. She got it so wrong it would have been amazing if we hadn’t seen it so often. Our eyes met in acknowledgement of what we had both seen, but neither of us bothered to say anything, what’s the point? The great thing about wearing masks is that they hide our facial expressions for the most part. The eyes can still reveal a lot. Another one of us was trying to work with the food vendors to get them to sort their own trash properly. He couldn’t see my smile as he reported this. These particular vendors are among the worst we deal with and I’ve learned that the most you can hope for is that they bring you their mixed bags so that you can properly sort them. And that is my job.

There were lots of great dogs at the event and so many people now have chest or back carriers for their smaller dogs. It’s a pleasant surprise to be eye to eye with so many dogs as I pass through the crowd. And so many Akitas. I prefer the Pitties, but Akitas are more appropriate to the context.

I also noted that the little cafe on the SW corner of Sutter and Buchanan, where I used to eat breakfast on occasion back in the ‘70s was closed. There were posters in the windows wishing the owners a happy retirement. So little is left now from the SF businesses I knew back then. Of course that’s also true about the business I frequented in the ‘90s. 

Day 763/308 - 4/19/22

On Time - We will see how much this is a call-out to The Magic Mountain...

This month has been the first time since 2019 that I’ve worked both weekend days twice in a row. Physically I’m fine -- all my exercising paid off, in some ways my legs are stronger than before and I’ve added a new exercise to address the way they are not as strong as before -- but I feel like I’ve gotten behind on housekeeping and errands and like. Just this morning I had to remind myself that I’m semi-retired (and I live alone) so it really doesn’t matter. But I also found myself almost envying pandemic time of mid-2020 when I had nothing but time on my hands. Now I try to squeeze my fitness work into everything else whereas then I tried to spread out my workouts to give me more things to do. Rather than napping.

Hans’s situation was different in that he had staff to deal with what takes up most of my time: shopping for and preparing food, housekeeping. But his situation, once he eased into life on the mountain, was not unlike my semi-retired situation. This is what most incensed Settembrini. Aside from his “taking stock,” it didn’t much matter if he did a thing today or tomorrow or not until next week or next month. 

If I didn’t prefer to work here (the Bank Cafe, where it’s warm and expansive) rather than in my tiny ground floor garret, I would have almost pandemic time on my hands. This is like imagining how much money I could save by preparing all my own meals. Maybe later... if necessary. 

Cherry Blossom Festival update

The second weekend of CBF is now past. It was surprisingly busy. I did my usual thing with the vendors and had that situation under control early. Can’t say the same for the situation on the other street where we were still picking up piles of bags as my shift ended. I took advantage of my “senior” status to clock out and go home on time when the others were working overtime. While I did still have to get out my building’s trash -- remarkably contaminated for some reason -- the real reason I didn’t want to stay was that I think it’s absurd that they hadn’t done a better job of breaking that street down earlier. I’m sure this had something to do with all the idiot vendors, but I’m pretty sure most of those bags had been sitting out there for hours. 

Anyway, my part of the event went well and I’m all ready for a near normal season of waste diversion.

335. CBF 2019

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Cherry Blossom Festival 2019

This past weekend [I am months out of sync. I blame Genji.] was my first greening event of the new season, Cherry Blossom Festival in Japantown. We’ve worked it for years now and I have it down to a science. Last year was thrown off by my getting a bad cold and by rain, but even so it worked out. 

I tend to dominate any food area, but this event is large enough -- an entire block of Webster street with seating areas at each end and the center divide lined with vendor booths facing each side of the street -- that I do need a couple other people to help keep it under control mid-day. Unfortunately, I can’t shut down most of our eco-stations at the end of the day because I switch to riding herd on the vendors. On Saturday they got the jump on us by starting to breakdown earlier than we were anticipating. They trashed the numerous stations we put out for them, by tossing in black bags full of unsorted trash (into any of the three bins) and then filling the others with boxes that hadn’t been flattened. And they dragged more black bags to our HQ and even threw a couple on top of the compost dumpster. I caught that guy in the act and made him climb up and retrieve them before taking them back to his area -- with him in tow -- to sort the bags. 

Sunday we (Jonny and I) nailed it. We started shutting down some peripheral stations as soon as the crowd started thinning and quickly shut down all the vendor stations except the one where I was working. I steadily sorted all the black bags as they came in and processed them into a neat pile of sorted bags for Jonny to haul away. Meanwhile our other people were taking down the other stations. I ended up leaving a half hour early as there were plenty of young’uns around to do the final packing up of the truck.

And for one more event, I didn’t kill a vendor or recycling thief -- this is probably the most important thing. There was one “canner,” as the others started calling them last year, infesting the vendor area -- which is literally an island, the landscaped island in the middle of Webster street. I did lose my temper with her when I caught her attempting to tear open the bottom of one of my bags to get to a can or bottle. Dog is not strong enough in me perhaps, or perhaps I’m slipping over to the Dark Side of Dog. Anyway, something I need to work on as it isn’t going to get any better. It doesn’t help that she was always laughing and thanking me for letting her steal our CRV items. I’m thinking of having one of our Cantonese speakers teach me how to say, “I’d have you arrested if I could.” I wonder if that’s in a Cantonese guide for travelers I could find. And I need to “let it go” with the vendors as well. And the idiot event goers who put things in the wrong bins. Giving everyone the stink-eye just doesn’t help. 

Many many years ago, possibly the first year we worked this event, the event organizers took advantage of us to clear out all the junk in their offices. After we had cleaned up all the trash from the event we suddenly discovered a pile of office junk on the sidewalk -- virtually none of it anything but landfill -- that we had to haul back to the dumpsters. But this year we actually got a surprise gift in one of the dumpsters left on the street -- a bunch of wood frames covered with chicken wire. This would be just an annoying addition to the landfill except that the boss now has chickens. We hauled it back to Santa Rosa for it’s new life... no idea what it was being used for before it was dumped on us.

While I haven’t worked since October -- trying to rehab my shoulder -- Green Mary the company has managed to stay busy the entire “off” season. This means we have more of the good people from last season still working. There were only a few unfamiliar faces at CBF. So it was easier to figure who was tossing the wrong bags into the compost dumpster. (These weren’t the vendor’s black bags.) This is just one of the reasons I’m so sensitive to the social problems of seriously intellectually limited people. There’s plenty about what we do that is complicated, but when you have a dumpster full of green bags filled with food and paper, and then think your clear bag filled with recycling or landfill might belong with those green bags, I have my doubts that more training will help. 

There are still plenty of hauling and other tasks that this person could probably handle, but there’s a cost of increased supervision. It was actually worse in the old days when we did table sorting. Sorting requires a fair amount of knowledge and some judgment. Some of us still disagree about certain things, like how dirty a can or aluminum tray can be to go into recycling, or when a cup might be better in compost. I’ve worked with people who couldn’t master the basics. Where I spent too much of my time fishing plastic out of the compost. 

The main reason I’m writing all this is to remind myself how far we’ve come. CBF 2019 was a typical event for us. We were all done within two hours of the event being over. And most of that two hours was spent moving around equipment and packing the truck. In the old days, we would have just been getting busy as the event ended, and would still be at the table sorting for hours -- while still having to move around the equipment. 

The worst event we ever worked -- and the event that would later inspire our new method -- was a Pink Saturday street party where we sorted until almost dawn. Granted, this was an event that ended late and most of the crew was either ill or too stoned to stand, but still... As far as I know, I was the only one to do actual sorting this weekend (slight exaggeration) and that was only for those hours at the end of each day when I dealt with the vendors. Yes, I was roving-sorting all day, but that’s easy -- you just pull out the easy stuff and never have to mess with the worst part of any bag sort, which is the bottom of the bag. 

2nd weekend
Saturday went about the same but Sunday was different. Sunday is both the parade and the final day of the event. We have more staff and the final shutdown involves even more vendor black bags. How, exactly, is a mystery.

Because there was an abundance of staff, after lunch Jonny and I agreed I would stick with the vendors and try to get ahead of the closing-down trash dump. This seemed to be working well as I was collecting bags and even sorting trash at some vendor areas -- something I do at other events but that I haven’t done here before. I foolishly thought the ending was going to be easy. I really don’t know where all the black bags came from but, with a little help right at the end, I got through them. Both Jeffry and Ryan, who have assisted me at HSB were working so I should have tried to get one of them assigned to me sooner, but as I say, the pile of bags was a surprise. Jeffry finally did show up and helped with the last three or four bags and some other people helped haul everything to the dumpsters and close down my sorting station. I still left half an hour early.

Sunday probably was the best weather of the event. The gale force winds of the previous day had calmed down but were still cooling as it was a warm and sunny day. I didn’t manage to see any of the parade, but I’ve seen it before. 

Today is Earth Day, but we -- or at least I -- don’t have an event. Though I do have a dentist appointment. Saving the earth, one dental cleaning at a time.

270. We return with some greening

I'm about to resume Pirenne. I have a bunch of chapters lined up -- though I'm currently reading a book club book instead, The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin so I'm hesitating to resume publishing until I return to reading Pirenne. Until this gets resolved, here's something different.

Cherry Blossom Festival

It's fitting that our event greening season begins with this festival in Japantown. And there are actual cherry blossoms in the trees this year.

This is our only event that spans two weekends, and, given the season, we often get a day with rain -- the first Sunday it poured for several hours at the end of the day, so check that off the list. I managed to get a very ill timed cold, so I missed the second Saturday entirely and only went in for three and a half hours at the end of Sunday, so I could do my vendor bag sorting specialty. (Vendors think they can put everything into a securely tied black bag and it can then go into anything that looks like a trash container. No. We, I, have to open each bag and sort out the best of the compost and the recycling. These are the worst bags we have to deal with. Over the -- many -- years I've developed a technique for expediting the sorting of these bags. But it's still a pain and I end up hating the vendors.)

So, all things considered, it went well enough and, most important for all the events to come, I'm now back to being able to tie can liners (to decrease their circumference and make them fit the container more securely) with my gloves on. It usually takes three to four days of work to regain this vital skill.

Taste of Temescal

Last night I worked Taste of Temescal, an event we first worked last September. It's a tiny, two person, event that requires setting up our eco-stations in front of a large number of restaurants spread over too many blocks of an "interesting" neighborhood in Oakland. Then we make sure the stations don't overflow for the several hours of the event, and then take it all down again and haul away the sorted trash.

I worked it last September with a crew-chief I'm fond of, but she wasn't available this time so, even though I'm still recovering from my cold, I agreed to work it as it's good to have at least one person with experience of an event. And I'm happy to say the guy who acted as crew-chief (they have to deal with getting the truck, loading it with supplies, and then returning the supplies and disposing of the bags of sorted waste -- none of which I'm keen to do) was very appreciative. I had learned a bunch of lessons from last time so it went really smoothly and we even had time to eat some of the great food that is the reason for the event -- including my favorite, Burmese tea leaf salad.

The guy acting as crew-chief called his girlfriend, who was one of my favorite crew-chiefs of last year (she managed to get a full time environmental job), so she came down and we hit several of the restaurants together. 

And then I rode BART home where I discovered I somehow managed to lose a good pair of gloves at the end of the shift -- probably while blowing my damn nose.

Dutch King Day

April is proving a particularly busy month for us this year. Or at least for me. The final weekend started with Dutch King Day, an event I've worked many times before, but not last year. This festival of orange is celebrated around the south windmill, just short of the beach in Golden Gate Park. 

Thanks to my reading of Pirenne, this year, for the first time, I had questions for the event staffers (many of whom are associated with the consulate general's staff). As an American, I'm happy to say that they were no more familiar with their history than Americans seem to be about the comparatively short history of our delusional democracy -- the home of the free, forsooth.

When I got home I did my own research and answered the questions, "When did the Netherlands become a kingdom?" since where I am in A History of Europe they are still a bunch of principalities within  Valois Burgundy. And, "How did they become a kingdom?" as, since Carolingian times it has been the Papacy that has raised princes to kings, and I can't imagine the Papacy doing this for the Protestant House of Orange.

The best answer to the first question I got at the event was, "Sometime in the 17th century." Wrong. Napoleon (and he is also the answer to my second question) created the Kingdom of Holland for his brother Louis in 1806. After Napoleon fell, the Congress of Vienna created the Kingdom of the Netherlands as a northern check on the power of France. (If they had been really serious about that they would have included Belgium to create a modern Lotharingia. But I suspect a Protestant Netherlands and a Catholic Belgium were seen as a fair religious compromise -- I wonder if Talleyrand had a finger in this pie?)

I'm surprised I didn't know this because King Louis I's queen was Hortence de Beauharnais, and their son King Louis II was the older brother of Napoleon III.

Meanwhile back in the park... The day was delightful. The crowd wasn't overly crowded but it was busy enough to keep boredom at bay. The fenced in celebration area has shrunk over the years, and that is a very good thing. Also, amazingly, it wasn't windy this year. I take some credit for this. I recalled previous years when I had to chase down wind-blown toters loaded with trash and eco-station materials, and reminded Mary of this problem so close to the ocean. We brought bricks and carefully weighted down the boxes used for collecting the trash. This technique works, up to a point, but it works even better when our preparation stays the wind. 

There were four of us working the event, not too few or too many, and at the end of the day we loaded the truck with all the bags of sorted waste (almost all compost) and our boxes, signs, and bricks. We even left early.

Bay Area Book Festival

The next day was a charming little book festival I'd never worked in Berkeley's tiny civic center, a convenient block from BART. For this event we were over staffed, for a change... until the end. I usually avoid closing down events if I can, but I'm glad I was there to help with this one. 

As is my way, I stormed the food vendor area as soon as I arrived -- like a Napoleonic Marshal taking the high ground. After all these years, it still amazes me how few people really appreciate (to the extent of emulating me) what I do at these events. Even crew chiefs who appreciate having me around -- and there were three of them working this Sunday -- don't seem to get this. I spend my first hour or two sorting and hauling multiple toter loads of cardboard and compost from behind the food vendors, after I had been assured there was nothing really to do. 

I tried to keep up with the vendors all day, in part because there really was almost nothing to do in the public realm, but also because I wanted to stay ahead of them so we could wrap up faster at the end. And the plan mostly worked. There was only one of the typical, black, "fuck-you" bags the food vendors always leave behind right before they drive off. I sorted that and took down all the stations and we should have been done. 

The problem with events like this with lots of (non-food) vendors, is that they almost always leave behind random stuff they don't feel like taking home. As our shifts were coming to an end, we still had all that junk, in areas of the event I hadn't even visited, still to deal with. I stayed an extra half hour and collected almost everything. Other people were still taking down the tents and tables, so there would be stuff to clear later if we wanted to wait an hour or so. I didn't. Both the crew chief and I passed on dealing with one booth which had left behind boxes of books. Books are not recyclable and they are heavy. Neither of us wanted to haul them to the library or the Goodwill. 

After we filled up almost all of the (I think) eleven small dumpsters, I walked the block to the BART station and caught the train home. That should be the end of the story, but no.

Sunday night is when I take out the landfill and recycling for the building. When I got home I found both toters full to overflowing. The residents in my building are, with two exceptions, myself included, Millennials who make enough money to live in these surprisingly expensive apartments. And yet, the occult technique of box flattening continues to elude them. I wouldn't mind (as much) if they just said to themselves, "while I lack the intelligence to flatten this largish box, I will set it here next to the recycling toter so some god or wizard will see it and flatten it for me." Instead, they put it in the toter which it nearly fills. And then pile more empty boxes on top.

So I come home, empty out all the boxes, flatten them, reload as much as I can, and haul both toters up the stairs to the alley. In the morning, around 7am, the Recology crew (we're on good terms as I gave them my spare key to the locks they put on some toters and dumpsters) will haul our toters down the alley, empty them, and return them to near our front gate. We pay for this service. Or that's the way it usually works. But not on this Monday morning.

Instead, the cleaning service hired by our next door neighbors takes our toters along with their's to the street and bring them back empty. Except that they put them all -- except for our one locked recycling toter -- in their back yard. The recycling toter, which they don't have a key to, they leave in the middle of the alley. At least I can find it and drag it back home. I spend the next several hours making calls, leaving messages and texts, trying to get our black toter back and trying to make sure this doesn't happen again. Finally, I notice that the cleaners (or someone) failed to lock their back gate. I go down and grab one of the black toters and drag it up their stairs and then down ours. Something that should have taken a few minutes (in my pajamas) has taken most of the morning.

And that brings to a close my tale of greening and trash hauling in the glorious month of April, 2018.

151. CBF and Sisters

Previous - 150. Original sin

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Vertigo

"Il ritorno in patria"

p193-194 The elaboration here of the furniture and necessary accouterments of the German petite bourgeois makes me wonder how these habits started. Why did the narrator's parents have a bone china tea service they never used? Why do I have my family's silver and silver plate and china that is very rarely used -- like the suburban living rooms that we all had and that I only recall my family using on the day after my father died. (And I imagine we sat there then because it lacked associations with my father.) 

I do know, or at least I have a working theory, why we have the silver spoons and cups given to bourgeois infants -- silver has natural antibacterial characteristics and should have been safer than other materials for children with developing immune systems. (I may even be right, see here.) What I don't know -- because I never thought to ask -- is if these items were actually used. Some of the little cups are pretty battered, which would argue for use, but perhaps they were only played with and not used for eating and drinking. Does anyone still do this? I can't imagine it. 

This is the part of the book where the narrator's -- Sebald's -- memory is most on display. His memory of his childhood in W., and of all the details of W., is quite wonderful, though I can't say it leaves Proust or even James Thurber behind. 

Here's an interesting passage where the narrator finally calls on someone, from his youth, still living in the village,

p210 ...He had seen me coming out of the Engelwirt [inn where he is staying] several times, he told me straight away, but although I had somehow seemed familiar, he had not quite been able to place me, perhaps because I reminded him not so much of the child I once was as of my grandfather who had the same gait and, whenever he stepped out of the house, would pause for a moment to peer up into the sky to see what the weather was doing, just as I always did. I felt my visit pleased Lukas, for after working as a tin-roofer until his fiftieth year he had been forced into retirement by the arthritis that was gradually crippling him... He would never have believed, he observed, how long the days, and time, and life itself could be when one had been shunted aside... He particularly agreed when I said that over the years I had puzzled out a good deal in my own mind, [about his past in W.] but in spite of that, far from becoming clearer, things now appeared to me more incomprehensible than ever. The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.... [Reading Proust Was a Neuroscientist wouldn't have made Sebald feel any better.]

Cherry Blossom Festival

My weekend didn't turn out the way I had expected. I was supposed to work another day around the food court (a block of Webster Street) at CBF and then switch to Sisters in the Park (Golden Gate) on Sunday. I did start the day in Hellman Hollow, but it was raining -- not hard but steadily -- and almost no one showed up. Instead of 10,000 people we had a hundred or so and most of them seemed to be Sisters (of Perpetual Indulgence). 

I really hate just standing around, and standing around in the rain is even worse. One of my favorites was crew chiefing this event, so I suggested she check with the crew chief at CBF to see how they were doing. It seems two people didn't show up for their shifts so I was sent back to Japantown (by car service, more on this in a moment.)

So I got the mid-day shift I prefer and I still got to close out CBF, which I like to do every year. We were a little wet, it's true, but it wasn't that bad and there were no bags left to sort when I left. That's success in this business. But back to Golden Gate Park for a moment. 

I hadn't been to Hellman Hollow (formerly Speedway Meadow) since Hardly Strictly Bluegrass last October. The park is stunning at any time, but by the end of summer it looks like California -- brown except where people water. At least that's true at ground level, the trees stay green. Jump ahead almost half a year now near the end of a very wet rainy season and the park, like California in general, is lush. Green is the color of this season just as brown is the color of the dry season.

The last time I stood in that meadow (in the daylight) it was filled with a hundred thousand people and there was dust and dry undergrowth under the trees. And it was hot. On Sunday it was green and wet and cool and most of the crowd were Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in full drag. (Not real Sisters, I'm bound to say, since they, the originals in normal nun's habits, usually roller skates, mostly died in the AIDS epidemic.)

I hope we work another event here before October, but if not I tried to capture the place as it is in April so I can call that image up in October when it's in the 90sF and I'm ready to kill the vendors and concert goers. I'm almost a Buddha.

When I was reassigned to CBF, my first thought was to take the bus over, which is how I had come to Golden Gate Park, but the crew chief suggested the car service and, being aware of how what should take 30 minutes can turn into far longer with Muni, especially on a Sunday, I agreed. It was some ride sharing service that pools riders. I was the first pickup, but he picked up two more people and dropped off one before dropping me off. It wasn't a big time saver, (over 30 minutes) but then again I was sitting inside a nice car instead of waiting (in the rain) for buses and then riding in those buses. (And the 38 line is one of the most crowded in the system.) 

But what interested me was that, years ago, I had imagined a better taxi/shuttle service just like this. It was like seeing an idea realized without having to do any of the work.

The funny thing was that the third person to be picked up was in the other side of the park where my company was working a third event -- Eggstravaganza. This is an Easter event for kids I worked several years ago. It's charming but slow. I prefer the busyness of CBF.

Finally, I kept thinking on Sunday about how I now have an event overlay for so many parts of the City. This is similar to, but not quite the same as, my City-that-was overlay. The latter comes into play when you walk out of a restaurant wondering where the car is parked and someone recalls that we parked in front of Winterland -- a famous music venue that was redeveloped decades ago. What I'm talking about is when we are in the park not for HSB yet refer to locations by what stage is there for HSB. Or when I walk through Japantown on the way to a film and see the eco stations I maintained or the mountain of bags I collected for the last, totally insane, J-Pop Festival held there. Even at Union Square in my neighborhood, every time I walk past I think of all the trash toters I've wheeled around these sidewalks and I can see, as though I had X-ray vision, where the dumpsters are down in the garage and where the restroom is that the public doesn't have access to.

QCD

I've been struggling with gluons this afternoon... I know, who isn't these days? A massless "particle" (what does that even mean) that is confined to a hadron but supposedly travels at c. Previously I had ignored this abomination when puzzling over hadrons thinking it was just a way of talking about the strong force that holds quarks together, but it seems these little nasties participate in the chromatic craziness. 

I wasn't surprised when I jumped to Wiki and noticed that Murray Gell-Mann is the man responsible for gluons. (I can't help smiling every time I run into another Feynman diagram used to illustrate QCD.) 

I so wish Feynman had tackled QCD. I'm sure he could have come up with something better than this chroma metaphor. 

Next - 152. 420

149. Candide, God, and Evil

Previous - 148. Kafka and memory

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A new year

I survived the first weekend of Cherry Blossom Festival. Aside from my allergies, it was no problem. And everyone on our crew had experience from last year, so things went smoother than normal. And we didn't get rained on this year -- like last year -- so that was a plus. 

The good thing about double dosing myself with antihistamines was that I felt less homicidal when it came to attendees and vendors not following the sorting rules. Perhaps I'm also growing as a person. Ha. 

It was my intention starting out to be as mellow as possible, but at the end of the day when the "fuck you" bags start coming in from the vendor -- the ones where they don't even pretend to follow any of the rules, throw everything into one black bag and then bury it in a random bin -- the antihistamines might have helped. The vendors even wait until the last minute, right before their trucks pull away to play this, their final card of the day.

Next week I'm only working CBF Saturday and I picked up an event in Golden Gate Park for Sunday. That was a ploy to get my usual middle of the day shift for CBF, but it hasn't worked as yet. I don't have any objection to spending Sunday in lovely Hellman Hollow. 

Your tax dollars at play

I believe I've mentioned the Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit scheme now under construction here. This was years in the planning (I stopped attending meetings years ago because I thought it was stupid) and now it seems that they failed to anticipate birds nesting in the spring. So now they are having to work around trees with nests. 

This means that the same crews, that have now cleared most of the median, will have to return in the future to clear the little islands of green they had to leave behind. 

Looking north from Sutter where the median has been excised.

Looking south from Sutter, island of green mid-block.

And while I'm showing the ever changing face of SF, here's Salesforce Tower, now topped out and just waiting to be fully enveloped in steel and glass.

Salesforce Tower topped out from the street above mine.

And, just because it was in my camera, here's a shot up the street showing that I have a thing for old lighting fixtures,

Powell @ Washington.

Candide

"The Quality of Candide" by J. G. Weightman
...

p156 ...Voltaire was never at any time fair-minded, and there seems every reason to believe that he did not bother to reread, or even read, Leibniz's Theodice before writing his satire. As both [Andre] Morize and [W.H.] Barber point out, he mixes up the two main forms of the theory of optimism: the belief that evil is an effect of the human angle of vision, and the belief that evil is a necessary part of creation... Leibniz neither denied the existence of evil nor held the simple finalistic views which Voltaire attributes to Pangloss. Also, as Barber shows, Leibniz was an activist whose purpose was to encourage men to virtuous initiative withing the all-embracing framework of God's will, and as such he was, in a sense, on Voltaire's side...
...

The Angel Jesrad in Zadig, which comes before Candide, is on the whole Leibnizian in his statement that a world without evil would be another kind of world... In other works of his later years... Voltaire contradicts himself, saying in one place that God is obviously limited and repeating in another that evil exists only from the human point of view and must be unknown to God in His perfection. 

...Here was a man who... gradually came to be obsessed with the scandal of the presence of evil in the universe. At the same time, with his clear and vigorous brain he could only suppose that God was an immeasurably greater Voltaire who had organized the universe on rational lines and was not, ultimately, responsible for evil. How could God have willed evil since Voltaire, like any decent person, found it intolerable? Yet evil existed, and God must be good. But how could a good God . . . etc... The lesson of Candide is the permanent one that there is no... intellectual solution to the problem of evil, but that we go on living even so, and even when we think we have no faith.

p157 ...He himself [Voltaire] is Pangloss, just as he is Candide, Martin, and Pococurante. The book is a transposition of his inner debate... To the question: 'Why, if God is good (and we must suppose that He is), does evil exist?' there is no articulate answer which is not a juggling with words. Book VII of St Augustine's Confessions is quite elaborate, but are its logical fallacies not obvious? Chapter VII of Book III of St Thomas's Summa Contra Gentiles seems no less purely verbal. And when we open Leibniz to see how Voltaire misunderstood him, we find this sort of argument:

For God sees from the beginning of time that there will be a certain Judas... in general one can say that since God found it proper that he should exist in spite of the sin He foresaw, it must be that this evil will be repaid with interest somewhere else in the universe, that God will derive a greater good from it, and in short it will be found that the sequence of events which includes the existence of this sinner is the most perfect of all those which is possible. But to explain... the admirable economy of a particular choice, that cannot be done while we inhabit this transitory sphere; it suffices to know it without understanding it. 

Sounds like Pangloss to me.
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p158 ...As Barber says:

Leibniz . . . never really abandons a priori argument. He bases his knowledge of God's nature on a priori rational considerations . . . and once God's infinite goodness and wisdom have thus been established, all else follows deductively... To all [Pierre] Bayle's paradoxes he [Leibniz] has... only one reply... the world as it is is God's creation, therefore no better would is possible.

Why am I going on and on about this? Mostly because it's fun to see other people supporting positions I've held since my undergraduate days. I always found this a priori reasoning about God infuriating. 

On the other hand, reading about 18th century philosophy is similar to reading about 18th century chemistry, in that there are still other shoes left to drop. I have the feeling Voltaire, while rejecting so much, still clings to some remnant of a belief in moral phlogiston.

...Candide is not... a message of hope, or at least not exactly in the way suggested by some critics who take a favorable view of it. Morize, Barber and René Pomeau, the author of La Religion de Voltaire, all seem to me to underestimate the virulence of the work. Morize writes:

The world is in shambles, blood flows, Jesuits and Molinists rage, innocents are slaughtered and dupes exploited; but there are in the world delicious asylums, where life remains possible, joyous, and sweet: let us cultivate our garden.

This suggests an ability to shut out the spectacle of the world which Voltaire never possessed... According to Barber:

p159 The practical philosophy to which Candide finally attains is the application to the limited field of personal activity of that esperance {hope} which Voltaire had offered to humanity on a transcendental level in the conclusion of the Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne.

In rejecting the doctrines of Pangloss and his like . . . he is seeking . . . a safe foundation in an insecure world for that profound belief in the value of activity which is characteristic of European man and was particularly strong in him. 

Am I mistaken in reading a bit of Faust into that?

... There is no evidence in Candide, and very little in his biography, that he [Voltaire] had a profound belief in the value of activity. He believed in man's need for activity and he himself had a tremendous urge to be active... Would it not be more plausible to suppose that his feverish busyness was the only relief he could find for his acute awareness of evil? Pomeau speaks of the "epicurean motive for action which is the last word of the tale" and says that Voltaire "will make a philosophy of activity . . . A lesson revolutionary in its banality." No doubt, Voltaire borrowed the image of the garden from Epicurus, [Footnote: "Epicurus, the classical philosopher who made pleasure the supreme goal of life, had a famous garden where he lived an impressively moderate and contemplative existence {Editor}. Well put.] but he has no trace of Epicurean serenity or moderation. 

I have to pause here... Faust and Goethe and Epicurus are shouting in my ear. Epicurus's garden was an alternative to the life of action, of seeking wealth and power and status. It was also a statement about the times in which he lived and reminds me of a quote from Confucius, "...When the Way does not prevail in your land, then count it a disgrace to be rich and honored." And this was exactly what Lucullus was doing when he returned from Asia -- though he dropped the moderation. Voltaire, at his estates around Geneva, does seem to have been living in this tradition, though more like Lucullus, with his theater and large dinner parties, and with a striving to transform the world through his writing that almost suggests Faust.
...

Only one critic appears to have stressed unequivocally the strength of the dark side of Voltaire's temperament, which is so obvious in Candide and in the correspondence. This is Andre Delattre, in his stimulating little book, Voltaire l'impetueux, where we read:

p160 It is only when, in Candide, he accepts certain perspectives of Pascal's, it is only when he ceases to strain against a dark and healthy pessimism, and ceases to hold open the empty sack of his optimism, that he finally creates, after his sixtieth year, his real masterpiece.

...Candide is not just a clever, unfair satire on optimism which concludes with the bracing recommendation that we should do what we can to improve matters in our immediate vicinity. It is a work in which an unappeasable sense of the mystery and horror of life is accompanied, at every step, by an instinctive animal resilience... [This sounds like The Brothers K] Voltaire has a faith, but it is not a political faith nor an easily defined religious one. It is the sort of faith that keeps the severed fractions of a worm still wriggling...
...

p162 ...Candide has, of course, a clear literary ancestry; he is adapted from the hero of the picaresque novel of adventurer... More immediately, he is Voltaire himself, who was declasse {a social outcast} like the picaresque hero, had been beaten and snubbed... {"trembled like a philosopher"} and had been frequently on the move. But he is also a symbol of the central part of the human soul which never loses its original innocence and, as Simone Weil says, always goes on expecting that good will be done to it rather than evil... he is {the outsider}, a fatherless bastard whose cozy sense of belonging to a coherent society and a comprehensible universe is a childhood illusion, soon to be shattered at the onset of puberty. Cunegonde is at first Eve who tempts him, with the result that he is driven out of the early paradise by the irate master of his little world. Then Conegonde becomes the symbol of a lost happiness which will be recoverable in the future, when the world falls again into some pattern reminiscent of the patriarchal social cell which preceded adulthood. But gradually it becomes clear that the world has no pattern... and the best Candide can do is to reconstitute the battered Westphalian society of his childhood as a refugee colony on the borders of barbarism, with himself as its disillusioned head... The second half [following the stay in El Dorado] is... different from the first in two important respects. Candide is no longer an underdog; he has acquired money and he sees the world from a new angle... The hero has mastered life to some small extent... but this... leaves him freer to contemplate the sufferings of others. ...Candide has become a spectator, but it is psychologically true... that adulthood involves awareness of general evil.

p163 ...Each [character] is killed once or more but bobs up again with heartening inconsequentiality. Voltaire expresses the strength of man's unconquerable soul by making Pangloss and the Baron... step out of the galley and begin at once behaving with characteristic  foolishness... A minority of human beings are, like... [Candide], decent and well-meaning, the majority are selfish and stupid, but the implication is that all are involved in evil in more or less the same way. In this respect, Candide is both fiercely critical of human nature and curiously tolerant.
... 

p166 ...it is remarkable that, in Candide, the distinction between evil which is an act of God (and therefore from the human point of view gratuitous) and evil which is an effect of human wickedness or stupidity, is not clearly maintained... [I have a problem with this distinction since I don't recognize the "evil" that derives from "acts" of God. For me, the significant thing here is that Voltaire is opposed to "the Church" and not a true atheist. Which point is made even more clearly if Pennsylvania is substituted for El Dorado.] It seems almost as if Voltaire were unwilling to come out into the open and accuse God... That happy country [El Dorado], where the inhabitants never quarrel and worship God without a church, does not provide a fair contrast with the ordinary world; how would the people of El Dorado retain their serenity if their capital were shattered by an earthquake? [There are any number of religions and philosophies that handle disasters of this sort well by subtracting the element of "evil" from them by denying God or through the fiction of a wrathful God.] The only way to justify the El Dorado chapters is to suppose that they are really a conscious or unconscious criticism of God. They occur as a sunny interlude... to show how happy and pious we might have been, had God not given us our ungovernable natures and put us into a world containing inexplicable evil... Voltaire, like Diderot, had not made up his mind about free-will, because the determinism/free-will dilemma is just another formulation of the God/no-God issue... 

I don't see that at all -- though it might well have been true for them. What I do see is that no-God implies no-Evil, just as Dostoevsky feared.
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p167 ...in this short tale... [Voltaire] managed to hold fundamental opposites in suspense and so produced, from the heart of a century that wished to deny evil, an allegorical prose poem about evil which is still perfectly apt... two hundred years later. 

But only if you believe in God.

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