346. Final Greening 2019, maybe

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Greening 2019

Dragon Boat Races 2019
Another year, another DBR. There are a couple reasons I enjoy this event: It’s the warm up for HSB; and it’s the last event I work with James each year. Also, while Lake Merritt isn’t as dramatic as the old Treasure island venue was, it is still pretty great. This year the weather was milder than normal -- not as hot. The crowds were supposed to be smaller though I couldn’t vouch for that. As always, I showed up each day about an hour before whoever was supposed to be crew chiefing, so James and I had everything under control before anyone else showed up. We were taken by surprise by the number of one day teams who closed down their camps Saturday night. I was expecting that to be an easy time and it was actually worse than Sunday. But as a result, I adapted the CBF approach to closing down vendors to the rowing camps which seemed to work quite well. Next year we can do a version of that on Saturday -- maybe.

The bad news was that my “new” (this season) picker was stolen (or at least I lost it) on Sunday. I’ve already bought a new one.

I’m writing this on the Thursday after, so the day before HSB starts. I’ve done about everything I can to prepare for the next three days, including hitting the gym twice. As usual, I don’t know what resources I’m going to find when I make it to Hellman Hollow tomorrow morning. There’s a critical need for strong compost containers, but these are usually in short supply. I’m promised 25 bag rolls of the standard bags used for landfill and recycling which I will believe when I have them in my hand. I’ve been working on getting those for at least two years. (All these things actually happened!)


Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival 2019
It went really well. Thanks to the 2nd amendment, this year there were new security restrictions that drastically reduced the glass bottles coming into the event. This was great for us. Hauling all those tons of glass was the single hardest thing about this event. This is an event where I ignore the big picture and focus on just my small part. I have no idea what goes on at the stables where the main dumpster array is located -- haven’t been there in years. I don’t go beyond the bounds of Hellman Hollow and the satellite dumpster array there. This is a philosophical decision... though, for once, not in the sense of “Philosophy” even though I did spend my odd free time working on an interesting idea about how Epicurean metaphysics (of all things) may have suggested an idea from quantum mechanics.

Instead I focus on the line of food vendors at the old Arrow Stage location and the backstage area for the tiny Bandstand Stage. This went so smoothly I didn’t even mind when they threw me off last night by loading out the vendors slower than they have in the past -- which meant we were stuck there until 9pm since I wanted to see the damn job completed. The other, less helpful, aspect of the security measures was that it was harder for me to get between the vendor area and the public field. Especially on Friday this was a problem, but they added a new gate on Saturday that I took advantage of on Sunday so I was able to do more of my usual contribution to maintaining the public as well as vendor areas. Which meant that I went through a satisfying number of compost bag rolls on Sunday.

The past two years, on Friday night, the paella stand was left with a huge amount of product they couldn’t sell and couldn’t keep. We had to dump 30-50 gallons of very heavy food. We’ve been struggling to come up with better ways of dealing with this problem for years up to last week. And then this year the problem just went away because they had a female crew that was really on top of things and didn’t make more than they could sell (or give away at the end of the day). I love it when other people solve your (actually their) problem for you. 

I didn’t bring my camera this year -- I was working from a smaller, clear plastic (children’s) backpack because of the security measures -- but my Sunday co-worker got a great shot of the sunset I’m trying to get a link to. 

Sunday was the hottest day for the Bay Area, but the west end of the park started getting clouds mid-afternoon which gave us some shade while also setting the stage for a lovely sunset. We so rarely get clouds during the dry season, that this was more of a delight than people in other climates might imagine. We are still a month or two away from seeing real weather.

It is now the Tuesday after HSB and I’m struck by how good I feel. I did do less roving sorting on Friday and Saturday, but still... My back is great. My shoulder is great. My feet are fine. It’s almost disappointing. Not bad for being sixty-seven. And my new (recycled) child’s clear backpack is so much more comfortable for resting higher on my back. Last year my backpack was overloaded and sitting too low and caused me the most discomfort. I’m becoming such a Pollyanna, but even mass shootings can have a personal silver lining. Maybe I should write a Seneca style letter to the parents of slain children -- not really.


La Cocina 2019
This event is a shadow of what it was in its prime, but it is still a mess at the end when all the food vendors bring out their hidden trash. But this year my boss screwed up the shift assignments so I wasn’t there to deal with all that. I left an hour early when everything was under control and caught an immediate train home -- where I got to deal with a strange new problem in the building.

While it wasn’t particularly hot on this Saturday, there was no shade and it also wasn’t cool. It seemed like I spent as much time hydrating as sorting. I was also able to do a fair amount of education, which is always a pleasant surprise. None of that on Sunday.


Fleet Week 2019
I only worked the last day of Fleet Week, which was also fine by me. The crowd is there to see an air show and they don’t care about waste diversion. I realized, after the fact, that for both these events I only brought by B game. After HSB I’m ready to call it a season -- in fact there were years when I immediately hopped a train for Seattle or Portland right after HSB. Now I would rather wait for November to head for Portland, but I’m still ready to be done. I’ve now added some notes about this so maybe I can improve next year and stay on top of the damn vendors to the end. At least I was really happy with the way I took care of and then shut down my area of the Marina Green where the public were. 

I don’t pay much attention to the air show. They’ve replaced the F22 with an F35 which was interesting. The F22 has features that are fun to see in an air show setting. With the F35, all the reasons it exists are things you can’t see at an air show. All they could do was run it most of the time on full afterburner so it was incredibly loud. That seems to have been the goal and it seems to have succeeded. I didn’t actually catch if it was an F35A or F35C, probably an A since this is usually the Air Force part of the show. It would make for a better show, and tie in better with Fleet Week, if they demonstrated the F35B instead. Maybe they could let the Air Force fly a bomber in instead.

Besides the planes, this is also a great opportunity to watch the formations of pelicans constantly circling the bay at this time of year. I don’t think they liked the planes, but it didn’t stop them from their mission.


Overall, it’s been a good event greening season. No injuries. All the parts still in working order. Several small improvements to my work gear -- new clear backpack, protective sleeves to replace my badly stained old protective shirt, shorter picker, and on Saturday I finally realized that it was my aluminum water bottle that was making my lips appear blue or black at times. I’ve gone back to plastic for my water bottle needs.

303.Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

HSB 2018

The weather was perfect. The music was great (at the stage or two I could hear). And, best of all, the plan I came up with, the day after the 2017 event, to handle load-out at Arrow worked perfectly. 

Friday and Saturday went smoothly, aside from our losing one worker to a gopher hole, and several others to reasons. One new person was supposed to work with me to be trained but, before we could even start, decided this wasn’t for her and quit. 

Sunday was just the perfect greening day. I went through three rolls of compost bags (30 bags I think) plus a number of heavier clear plastic bags for really heavy food vendor compost loads. Besides keeping the vendors in order, I also was able, with one assistant, to keep the entire west end of Hellman Hollow in order all day. We were even able to take down the two busy mega-stations (four compost, four recycling, two landfill cans each) directly in front of vendor row. This means that virtually all the waste from the field was properly sorted and bagged.

Last year I was surprised by the vendors loading-out immediately after the concert ended, instead of the following day. All our eco-stations were surrounded by vendor gear ready to be loaded into trucks so that no one could get to them. I finally just left because there was nothing more I could do. But my clever plan for this year was to move all our stations across the cart path at 6pm, before they started disassembling their tents. By the time we returned from shutting down the mega-stations, after 7pm, the vendor trash was beginning to come in. They didn’t like having to carry bags or cans a little further, but the new station locations stayed clear and usable. By the time the trucks came in to load up all the gear we had sorted and bagged virtually everything. We were gone by 9pm, though the loading-out was still in progress. The only real problem we experienced was because I wasn’t given gear I had requested. 

Which is not to suggest that the vendors were at all helpful. They sorted almost nothing themselves. Working with food vendors is like working with that guy in the movie “Memento,” no matter how often you tell them where something goes, a few minutes later they’ve “forgotten.” This is really only a problem for me on the rare occasions when they contribute waste to our stations -- usually they use the cans inside their tents. It becomes a problem for me when I can’t grab and sort their cans before they decide to dump them randomly in our stations.

I thought I had seen it all, in terms of bad vendor behavior, but this year I saw something new. In our “lingo” a “vendor bag” is a garbage bag, usually black, filled with a near perfect blend of compost, recycling, and compost. The compost, while mixed throughout, often is mostly at the bottom of the bag because it’s heavy and slippery. One of my vendors was producing perfect vendor bags only they were, for a reason I couldn’t determine, in green compost bags instead of the usual black bags. Compost bags are both more expensive and more likely to tear (or compost) so this makes no sense.

The sheer volume of food that gets thrown away at an event like this would be shocking if I weren’t so used to it. We ended up with a stack of unopened boxes of pizza crust. Both this Friday (the first day with the smallest attendance) and Friday 2017 we had to deal with an entire garbage can full of excess paella. (This is where the small toters I had requested would have been invaluable.)

I think this is the first year that I have no plans for improving things next year. Everything (under my control) went as well as it could have. Okay, I thought of one thing. If I had thought to bring enough cash, I would have taken a taxi home Sunday night instead of letting Muni dump on me. Earlier in the Summer, this occurred to me and I planed to do it, but forgot and didn’t remember until I was waiting for the bus that never came. I should write that down now before I forget.

Random

I’m having lunch at my second favorite neighborhood pizzeria -- owned by a former unit owner in my condo and staffed by mostly East Asian students from Academy of Art University -- and I just got a waitress “dear” from a new hire. Charmed.

Random 2

Today I received a postcard offering to pay cash to buy my condo. I don’t want to sell, and they couldn’t buy it even if I wanted to sell it to them, but what interested me was the cursive typeface used on the postcard. It is really convincing. There are multiple versions of the same letter, like “i,” depending on what character comes before. So it has to use code to translate text into what looks like cursive handwriting. I can imagine how it works, but I’ve never seen anything so convincing before. I can also imagine how I would write the code to do an even more convincing version where you would “randomly” pick from several options for each letter in every context. I put “randomly” in quotes because “true” randomness is hard, or impossible, to manage on a computer. But this is actually a meaninglessly fine distinction that only annoying people pay attention to. Still, I would include some debugging code to show what “random” was generating to make sure it wasn’t obviously failing. Says the person who hasn’t written a line of code since the ‘90s.

212. The power of pain

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2017

In previous years I've literally limped out of the park at the end of my Sunday shift at HSB, totally spent, but not this year. In sports, this would be called "peaking at the right time." My back, wrist, and all my various body-parts were perfect at the crucial moment and I could have worked longer if I hadn't run out of bags and if idiots weren't taking apart the area where I was trying to work. I can't even explain how my feet were so much better than normal at the end of 27 hours of working hard on uneven ground.

Take that being-a-senior-citizen!

As I expected, things did not go according to plan -- always a safe bet. The new Arrow vendor row -- on the opposite side of Hellman Hollow (Speedway Meadow) where the Arrow Stage was in previous years -- was both smaller and more contained. Aside from a lack of shade, it was easier to work than the old location... until the end. 

The only act I always catch is Emmylou Harris's final set on the Banjo Stage. I take care of as many stations at the back of that crowd as I can handle -- this time just one as I couldn't see any others in the crowd. By the time I returned to my vendors, they had filled my well-ordered compost cans with way more compost than anyone could deal with and, to make things really interesting, they were in the process of taking the whole area apart -- something that previously didn't happen until the following day. 

I had to create order in trashed stations and sort the usual black vendor bags, while the stations themselves were either blocked or being shifted around. If I hadn't run out of bags, I would have stayed even longer than I did, but between the lack of bags and being unable to get to some of our cans, I finally just gave up and went home. Still, I think I got all the vendor bags -- though there may have been some in areas I couldn't get to -- and I did the best I could with the huge volume of heavy, high quality compost the vendors left behind as they shut down.

If it had gone any better, I would have been suspicious, so I can't complain -- despite the complaining and suggestions-for-next-year emails I've already sent out.

But where, you ask, does "the power of pain" come in? As I said, I felt great last night after I arrived home and, was a little stiff, but otherwise still surprisingly good when I got up this morning. None-the-less, I got my ass up and went to the gym this morning for an abbreviated session. The year old memory of my double hamstring cramp from the Monday after HSB last year was sufficiently motivating to get me to the gym even though I felt fine and was taking a bunch of other steps to avoid cramps. 

And here's the show and tell:

Our HQ between my food vendor area and Banjo Stage with a smaller eco-station in the foreground and my boss, the Mary in Green Mary, in the background:

"My" compost dumpster Before:

Same dumpster at 4pm on Sunday, with three hours of concert and more hours of dumping still to come:

The before of the recycling dumpster: 

Again, the After at 4pm on Sunday. Note the comparatively empty landfill in the background. This is why we do what we do:

(This is one of our two smaller dumpster locations. I pestered Mary until she finally went along and got the event to go along as well. Previously, all this waste would have been hauled much further away in golf carts and truck to our main dumpster/sorting location at the stables. This saves a huge amount of time and some gas.)

Emmylou Harris on stage at the end of the festival. The face in the center of the backdrop is Warren Hellman who started and funded the festival:

My view from the back of the crowd with some of our compost cans in the foreground:

I wanted to get the last of the sun at the top of the trees, but my station got busy and I missed it. This was the last shot I took:

HSB related...

The Arming Scene

I've written before about the scene in action films (like Predator 2) and possibly originating in The Odyssey, where the hero puts on his armor and gathers his weapons. (There are similar scenes in The Iliad, but I like the one with Odysseus the best.) It occurred to me as I dressed for day one of HSB that I have my own little arming scene. Here's how it goes.

The evening before I lay out my cargo pants and fill the pockets with the personal items and gear I will need for my work. Now that I'm carrying a backpack, most things go there, including spare rolls of bags, marking pens, energy bars, 1st aid supplies, my headlamp, and camera. I still put my work gloves and water bottle in my cargo pockets. 

I also assemble my hat, picker-stick, lifting belt, and the Green Mary t-shirt I wear over my long-sleeved undershirt. And I write out any notes I need for the event -- who's the crew chief, where we are to meet, any transit notes including a time schedule for when I have to leave to arrive on time.

The next morning I apply sunscreen (magical ointment as protection against Apollo, the Sun god) then put on my UPF 50 Apollo resistant undershirt (I only have two of these so I went with a thicker cotton shirt on what was supposed to be the coolest day of HSB), my thin under-socks and heavy outer socks, and then put on my cargo pants, one leg at a time. Then I put on my heavy work boots -- because I knew I would be working on uneven ground, for this event I laced them all the way up for extra support -- before putting on the lifting-belt and then the Green Mary t-shirt on top.

Finally I put on my UPF 50, wide-brimmed hat and firmly grab my tool... I mean my picker-stick. Thus equipped I go forth to sort and haul and dump.


Not for the first time, I'm almost certain, on Saturday -- the busiest day on the Speedway Meadow portion of HSB -- I noticed a similarity between managing our Greening operation and fighting a battle. It is so satisfying when you are busy doing something else and you suddenly get this visceral understanding of military strategy, relevant to most any era and region. I'm going to start with the military version and return to the Greening.

Napoleon lived and died by this strategy and usually it worked for him -- this is one of the things Tolstoy found incomprehensible in War and Peace. But I'm going to take the instance I know best (this one didn't work either, but it almost did) Gettysburg in the American Civil War. First you attack on a flank, in this instance the Union right flank. The enemy is forced to reinforce that flank to prevent a breakthrough. Next you attack on the left flank forcing the enemy to throw in even more reserves and even shift units over from the center. Finally, you launch your main assault at the center where the enemy is weakened, and after most of his reserves are committed elsewhere.

At HSB, besides Speedway Meadow, where I always work, there are additional stages in Marx Meadow and in Lindley Meadow. Mid-afternoon on Saturday we started getting calls for help from Lindley and sent some people over to help. Mary would be an awful general as she over-reacts to any situation like this, but in this case she was already off and it was other people who left us with very few people on hand when the crowd surged back in our direction at the end of the day. I had to leave my vendors unattended (like leaving toddlers alone with balloons filled with gasoline and a bunch of lighters) and go out on the field to keep the stations near the food from overflowing. My constant whining about how great the large, blue recycling toters lined with heavy bags were for dealing with situations just like this, payed off this year as we had these all over the field. 

It takes a great deal to fill one of these toters, and even when that happens one person (me) can dump out about half the contents into one of these spare bags to keep the station functioning. (You can even sort out the compost and landfill at the same time so you end up with a fairly clean bag of recycling next to a fairly clean toter, or two toters since they are usually paired and I can dump twice into the same bag.) This method worked perfectly on Saturday. But back to my analogy...

In our case we are not opposing an enemy general but, in the HSB case, the person who scheduled the events on the various stages. It is very easy to end up playing whack-a-mole with crowds that shift from stage to stage, meadow to meadow. And anyway, the worst that can happen is that some eco-stations over-flow for a period of time until someone can get to them. We would rather this didn't happen, but it's also inevitable when the crowd gets to a certain density, regardless of staffing.

But as I watched (listened) to this developing on Saturday, I could completely understand the over reaction of a general being attacked by Napoleon. In the heat of the moment you are trying to be strong everywhere and end up being weak at the critical point. 

Meade, at Gettysburg, had the advantage of a numerically larger army that was still arriving at the battlefield so he could keep sending new units in to fill in the gaps in his line. 


My favorite sight of the festival
In that crowd watching Emmylou Harris, a man walked past me carrying, or rather embracing, a dog. The dog was a Beagle and they were chest to chest, face to face. The Beagle and I locked eyes as they went past and seemed to communicate "Don't judge us" -- instead of the "I wouldn't mind eating whatever you have in that bag" I usually get from dogs when I'm working.

207. Dragon Boat Races

International Dragon Boat Races

The Lake Merritt venue for DBR is growing on me. It doesn’t seem to be as popular with dragon boat teams though, there were fewer teams this year than last year. For the first time I had time on my hands mid-day on Sunday. In the past this event has run me ragged all day, both days.

In part this was because I’ve gotten better and the other crew we work with has gotten better (they know to stay our of my way), but I think there were just fewer teams. Poor Oakland.

I do still miss the Treasure Island site. It was always fun getting there and just being out there in the middle of the bay. But Lake Merritt is at least as beautiful in its own way. It’s also fun for me because it just feels so foreign (in a Midwestern sort of way) compared with SF. I’ve learned the local bus situation now so I’m not making the long hike from BART. And just waiting for my bus on Grand at the end of the day is interesting. That stretch of Grand could not be mistaken for any area of SF. 

Of course the weather plays a part in this. We managed to dodge the worst of the heat this year (it’s been getting hotter each day since Saturday but isn’t going to peak until Wednesday). It was warm but comfortable both days this year, whereas last year it was scorching.

Here are the few photos I took on my Saturday lunch break:

This is the view from the building where they fed volunteers and staff. From left (south) to right (north):

Below there's a spectator area on the left and one of the two crew areas (with all the tents) to the right, with the modest skyline of Oakland behind.

This year I was the only one on the crew who had worked the event before -- this is one Mary, the boss, has never worked -- so I made several suggestions for how best to handle it. There were really just two issues for me: More than the usual landfill dumpster space, because most of the waste here comes from food vendors and crew teams, neither of which have any understanding of what is and isn’t allowed (lots of Styrofoam). And time at the end (and possibly assistance) sorting and taking down the stations at the end of the day. I have a nice paper-trail of emails in which Mary and I are on the same page about all this. And then comes reality.

Not only did the event not increase the landfill dumpster space, they reduced it across the board. Officially, we didn’t have a compost dumpster. Ja___, the manager for the other, hauling crew, (we also work together at Art & Soul) and I decided to ignore this and make one of the too small dumpsters compost and the other recycling. The bigger (but not big enough) dumpster was for landfill. Jo___ (the actual crew chief, who had never worked this event before so was following our lead) went along. 

End of day Saturday I was starting to fear we would get Jo___ in trouble if we ended up with a partly full compost dumpster while we ran out of room for recycling. I don’t think I’ve made it clear that in all likelihood, our compost dumpster is going to be dumped into landfill -- for reasons unclear to any of us. 

Fortunately for Jo___, when we left Sunday night the landfill dumpster was full to overflowing; (this is a problem when you’re hauling it away on a freeway. But not our problem) the recycling dumpster was also full to overflowing; and the compost/landfill dumpster was equally full to overflowing. 

There was no way we could have allocated the dumpsters provided that would have held all the waste the event generated. We at least had the satisfaction of doing our part as well as we could (see also Tibetan sand paintings) while the event was left with three messes on their hands, thanks to trying to save a few bucks on dumpster rentals. And if Waste Management (the company that owns the dumpsters) really do dump our compost into landfill, we will at least have the satisfaction of knowing they had to also deal with the nasty overflows. It couldn’t have worked out better, given the circumstances.


And then there was that other matter of my being left to sort and take down the stations at the end. Ja___, is one of my favorite people in this event greening world. We’ve worked together for years and know each other well. His crew is, at best, well-meaning but limited, but through repetition and practice we’ve learned to work well together. Closing down on Saturday went really smoothly. The dreaded black vendor/team bags came to conveniently located eco-stations where I sorted them into clear, labeled bags to go straight into the proper dumpster. We left an hour early with nothing left but a cluster of black bags a food vendor (not in my area) put out at the last moment. And Sunday was going just as smoothly... until the end. 

As I said, it was actually slow mid-afternoon. I started taking down some peripheral stations in preparation for the late rush in the center of the two crew areas. Ja___ reminded his crew to let me take the stations down. And then, out of nowhere, our third crew member, who had never worked the event before, came through and -- I think because all the crews were away at the awards ceremony -- thought everything was over and took down my key sorting stations. I was left with a couple poorly situated places to sort the black bags as they slowly appeared after the crews returned from the ceremony. 

The one thing I could never have anticipated.

In the end it worked out fine. In fact, it has occurred to me that this kind of worked to my advantage in one small way. Which leads me to a new term I’ve just coined, Greening PTSD.

When I was advocating for more landfill and some assistance at the end of this event, I had a vague sense of how nasty it had been last year closing down, but I seem to have blocked out the very worst experience. One team, I don’t know which one and I don’t want to know, used the worst trash containers I’ve ever seen in their little camp (I really don’t understand how I’ve never seen them in action, only at the end when we have to deal with them). 

I’m guessing normal people don’t have a “favorite” trash bag, but I do. Maybe three years ago now, at HSB, there was some screw up and we couldn’t get the usual trash cans, so we fell back on medium sized toters for all three waste streams. And we had these huge, heavy duty plastic liners that fit these toters. (I’m told we still have boxes of them in storage.) These bags are so strong they can stand on their own, so one person (well, me) can dump a partial load of landfill or even glass-heavy recycling from a toter into the bag without needing the usual assistance. I adore these bags and still rave about them if given half a chance.

Anyway, the team bags are just like this only instead of tough plastic they are made of opaque paper. So you can’t see what’s in them and the bottom is almost certainly pulp. And the contents are whatever anyone has tossed in over two days. They are an order of magnitude worse than the dreaded, black plastic vendor bags.

Because my co-worker had unaccountably closed down my sorting station, when these bags showed up -- mere feet from where my station had been! -- I said screw it, and had Ja___’s crew haul it all back to our dumpsters unsorted. It was only last night, while thinking over the events of the day, that it came back to me what it had been like sorting those bags last year, and how the experience had cruelly touched me in my special place. (I’m pushing the Sexual Trauma angle of PTSD here.) 

If my station had been up, I would have sorted the damn things. And while I have to admit I hope they came back to the guy who took down my stations so that he had to sort them, I really hope Jo___ just tossed them in the landfill. 

And that’s all you were eagerly waiting to learn about this year’s dragon boat races... except to report that once again this year, there was a winner in every race. 

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

I like to think my campaign to promote HSB machochism in our little greening community is having some success. Jo___ seems to be looking forward to the upcoming work-fest as much as I am. Though it’s worth recalling that this could in part be because two years ago he was in a drug induced coma in the local burn unit at this time, so working really hard in Golden Gate Park is something of a lark in comparison.

Mary is desperate for more bodies this year as HSB and Fleet Week are overlapping -- I will be sorry to miss my usual greening of Marina Green with the airshow roaring above, but that doesn’t compare with HSB. Several of Ja___’s crew are signing on, and Jo___ was trying to tempt Ja___, which would be great, but he wasn’t buying it. 

The Class of '70

Your high school graduating class is one of those things that is only important (if it's important at all) while you are still in high school. As we were closing down our base by the dumpsters last night, and talking about greening related things, it came up that our third crew member (the one who blindsided me) and I are both class of '70. It came up because 1970 was also the year of the first Earth Day, and the year I sold my car (stopped consuming gasoline) and became a vegetarian (stopped consuming meat). 

I had deflated a rant against the environment destroying ways of capitalism by pointing out that capitalism didn't force people (me) to do the things that are harming the environment. It's a little like the elderly woman in Mesa who would complain about my working on the Sabbath while I drove her to church in my taxi. 

Let's blame capitalism for giving us the things we choose to buy. The world is full of failed capitalists (or at least failed entrepreneurs, their fellow travelers, I suppose) whose dreams were dashed when people refused to buy what they wanted to sell.

At any rate, I now know the two of us are the same age. I'm as bad guessing ages as I am remembering names, so I had never wondered how old he was, so I can't say I'm surprised that we are both class of '70. (And why does it seem like that should appear on a banner whenever you say it, even to yourself?) It does make me wish we were better friends -- he lives way north of SF so mostly works up there, where I never venture. If we were better friends I could now make senior citizen jokes at his expense.

195. Summer to end of summer

Not exactly the Rocky training montage

At the gym yesterday I was thinking that we're down to the last month and a half of Greening season -- only a month until International Dragon Boat Races, which is my warm up for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. The good news is that I'm on the mend. My mysterious ulnar nerve problem seems to be resolving itself, and the rest has helped my wrist. My back is slowly improving. I will not be back to full strength by the first week of October, but I should be fully functional. Given the year I've been having, that's a win. At this point I'll be happy if I end the season with all my limbs connected and my faculties intact.

I would love to start a more intensive training period for September -- I'm not happy about the strength I've lost since I've been nursing my back and nerve -- but that would be risky at this critical time. Better to take it slow now and possibly crank it up a bit after HSB.

Summertime

Today the inland (hotter) areas of the Bay Area are supposed to hit the mid-100s F; tomorrow the mid-110s -- Phoenix heat. Meanwhile I'm still sleeping under double comforters. Aside from a number of Sundays (always Sundays, so far) when the SF temp has slipped into the 80s, it has been consistently cold this summer. That will probably change soon, maybe as soon as tomorrow, but SF has been almost too cold for me this year. (Let's see what I have to say at the end of October.)

TV

I've been catching up with my TV the last several weeks. I bought (and then resold) seasons 12 and 13 of "NCIS," so I'm only two seasons behind now. The show (the show runner, I'm guessing) is very good at using its bully pulpit. At least a couple times a season they highlight some good cause related to Navy and Marine service people or veterans. Not only is it a good thing to do, but the show's audience is not going to complain, even if it does take time away from the "entertainment." It's a win-win, but you probably still have to have a show this successful to get away with it.

This week I'm wrapping up "Castle," the 8th and final season. The show has a lot going for it, but I think it's been limping along ever since Castle and Beckett got together. (I wonder if part of NCIS's success is how Gibbs has never really changed?)

The writing this season has been sloppy. There have been two episodes inspired in part or in whole by psychology experiments (including the Stanford prison experiment) but one of them makes no sense by the end of the episode when you finally know all. Aside from my trick of picking the villain by the casting, I'm usually not that concerned with figuring out Who Done It, but if you had been attempting that with the experiment episode you would have been mislead and confused.

Still, when they just let Castle be Castle, the show is as good as ever. 

Hobart Building

Something has bugged me ever since I moved to SF...

See that blank wall in the center of the photo? That's the side of the, otherwise attractive, Hobart building, that was never intended to be seen. 

Some closer views of the tower.

Before the International Style hit SF, the intersection where Montgomery ("The Wall Street of the West") hits Market was a place of beauty. 

All that remains of these three buildings is the base of the one in the middle.

First Wells Fargo took down the building next to the Hobart and replaced it with a much smaller building next to their new tower (briefly the tallest in town). 

Then Crocker Bank sacrificed the top of the building across Montgomery so they could build their own office tower at the other end of the block. 

New Crocker tower at left with Galleria in between.

Combined, these changes meant that the blank side of the Hobart was revealed and that it was also visible for blocks.

There is now a plan to rebuild atop the base of the old Crocker building -- now a Wells Fargo, housing my safe deposit box -- and this may (or may not) help by blocking the view a bit. But, short of building something more fitting abutting the Hobart, I think something could be done with that blank wall. Something matching the granularity of the Hobart tower. Maybe. Anyway, some kind of mural.

Later that same day...

Just went out for a late lunch and to take some of the photos of the Hobart building above. Stepping out of the air conditioned Bank Cafe, I got a nose full of ozone. It's already warmer -- though not at all hot -- but the change in the air chemistry tells me that the wind has shifted and we are now swimming in air from the east and north rather than the usual air off the Pacific. Besides given me a Proustian flash of past time (the San Fernando Valley in the 1960s), this means we might indeed hit the 90s in the next several days. The horror! It will be a novelty to no longer sleep under blankets until the fog returns. And speaking of weather...

Hurricane Harvey

I've gotten sucked into a Facebook discussion of Harvey (the storm, not the rabbit) and to what extent this is a sign of climate change. (Now, I'm wishing that giant imaginary rabbits might become a sign of climate change.)

Of all the obvious indications and consequences of man-made climate change, I think this is one of the worst examples to point to. Hurricanes are just too unpredictable and it would not be unrealistic for someone to point to the 1900 storm that devastated Galveston as an example of previous storms that were on the same scale. And I continue to hold my position until someone can craft a convincing argument that the other weather pattern that boxed in Harvey, and sent it meandering around Houston and then back into the Gulf, was a consequence of higher air or water temperatures. That other weather pattern is what seems to set this incident in a new category.

But someone posted a link to a counter position HERE that I think is very interesting, without changing my view. Actually I'm kind of shocked I didn't make this connection to the Houston/Beaumont area as the Mecca of the petroleum economy/society. And he doesn't even mention Spindletop, which I would have done. It really is almost too perfect.

We humans are not very good at reason, but a storm is a kind of logic even a fool understands. Some percentage of the people flooded out this time will come to the conclusion that living on this coast is not worth it. (There are supposedly about 100,000 Katrina evacuees still in the Houston area. I would love to know what kind of decisions they make now.) Even the people who decide to stay this time will be less likely to stay next time, especially as funding for repeated inundations is reduced. And companies -- even energy companies -- may be less sentimental in their decisions than the average person. 

How many more storms will it take to convince a significant percentage of the population? I don't know. And how to make the transition from making better decisions about residence placement to making lifestyle changes that reduce the likelihood for even more destruction in the future? I have no idea. I still think that's more likely to be driven by economic factors relating to electric vehicles becoming cheaper than gas powered vehicles. We are much better at making that kind of comparative decision. (Though that's the sort of decision process that led to the off-shoring of so many jobs and the Wallmart-ization, and now the Amazon-ization of the retail economy.) 

And I fully expect a large percentage of the people who flee to higher ground will continue to deny climate change. Because stupid monkeys.

151. CBF and Sisters

Previous - 150. Original sin

Link to Table of Contents

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

53. More HSB + Ethics

Previous - 52. My dogs are barking

HSB, the day after

I didn't mention the music last night, did I. Well, I was tired. Where Mary Chapin Carpenter performed all her hits, just like on my iPod, Tracy Nelson, early morning on the Arrow stage, sang great but didn't perform her best song (Down So Low) from back in the day -- a song I don't have but may have to look for. It's from a vinyl album I wore out but wish I still had.

I was so involved with work that I almost forgot Jerry Douglas was going to play, until I heard his dobro. He was far from the only dobro player on the Banjo stage on Sunday, but no one else sounds like that. So, time for a quick station sweep at the back edge of the Banjo crowd.

Finally there was Emmylou, of course. I was down at Arrow when she started but worked my way from Arrow to Banjo sorting the stations in between as I went. This time I stayed on the field for the whole set -- the vendors had been fine a half an hour before and I knew all hell was about to break loose back there when they started breaking down, so I would just be in the way. 

Normally it is too crowded near banjo stage to move around easily, but the crowd yesterday was so sparse I was able to sort about four large stations much deeper in to the crowd than I usually can get during the event (just to give myself something to do while listening to the music and watching the sun set. This is when I took the last three photos I posted yesterday). 

I didn't think it was one of her better sets. (Maybe they should let me produce the music as well as sort the trash.) But there is just something about her voice in that setting. Every year I swear I will try to get out to the park early Sunday morning for her sound check -- which is even better than the concert -- but I'm barely ambulatory the morning after and there's no way I'm getting out there that early. 

Flu shots and ethics

I'll start with Kant's Categorical Imperative ("Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law,") and maybe you will be able to guess where I'm going with this.

For the past two years the American Flu Shot has been a poor match for the varieties of flu people actually got. The first year I didn't get the shot, though my doctor really pressed me, because it was already late in the season and I knew it was a poor match (he didn't know that). Last year I got it just so he knew I wasn't being completely unreasonable.

We are months away from knowing if this year's shot will be a good match, but I usually don't get it unless there's a particularly good reason I should -- when I was spending time in my mother's Independent Living complex, or the year when there was a strain that was killing people in my age cohort. But I know my doctor will press me on this again, and I understand why. The Flu Shot business is dependent on people consuming the product. If the public stops consuming, the producers will stop producing and there will be no supply when a nasty virus comes along.

From Kant's perspective, getting your flu shot is the right thing to do even if it isn't going to do you any good. However, without wanting to sound like a vaxxer, there is a certain amount of risk in injecting anything into your body. So not only is a flu shot not doing you any good, it is a small risk to your personal health. So how do you balance your personal interest with your social responsibility?

I'm thinking about taking an every other year approach, unless I think of something better.

Next - 54. Kevin Durant + Fleet Week +

52. My dogs are barking

Previous - 51. Even better

Sunday

I've always hated that phrase (from Death of a Salesman, I think), but it comes to me every time I walk out of Golden Gate Park the final night of HSB. Until then, my feet hadn't been bothering me, but once I stopped working I was ready to be home and sitting down -- unfortunately Muni had other ideas and it was a slow three bus rides home.

For the first time ever I took pictures! Here's a view of Arrow stage from the platform between the compost and recycling dumpsters,



 And here is the compost dumpster mid-day,

And here is the recycling dumpster at the same time,

Two photos of the Banjo stage during Emmylou Harris's set with the sun starting to go down,

This second shot shows part of the trash station I'm "monitoring",

And a final shot looking back toward Arrow stage,

This is the smallest crowd I've ever seen at Banjo for the final set on Sunday. Normally it's packed. There was a forecast of rain which turned out to be a light sprinkling that lasted about 30 seconds before Noon. The afternoon was as beautiful as the two previous days, but the people didn't come out. 

Another possible reason is that the park had been shut down (I heard) at one point on Saturday when the crowd was believed to reach 300,000 people. Maybe people were avoiding the mob -- though it has been more crowded numerous times. 

The work

All day our work was much lighter than expected. I managed to get an assistant for the final vendor cleanup after the concert. Ryan was a big help but we still didn't quite finish as the vendors were still breaking down at 9:30 when we ran out of bags and energy. Still, it's amazing how much we sorted and bagged and marked for the haulers. I achieved pretty much everything I hoped for -- though Saturday was more satisfying than Sunday. Now, technically speaking, it is Monday, and I really need to get some sleep. 

Next - 53. More HSB + Ethics