306.Quick trip to Portland

On the Coast Starlight, again

Wednesday
I think I’ve remembered most of the important things about riding Amtrak. Like dressing warmly and bringing snacks, as the snack offerings are abysmal. It wasn’t until after I boarded that I recalled Amtrak's habit of riding over the worst rails while you should be sleeping. We’ll see if they do this again. (Not particularly.)

This train seems less crowded than I expected. I thought there were only a few seats left when I finally bought tickets. We’re already to Carquinez Strait, my favorite part of the trip on the bay. Or between the bays. So far I haven’t thought of anything I’ve forgotten. I was thinking of bringing my scarf, but that was a contingency thing. I may miss it tonight, actually.

We’re pulling into Martinez. A place I’ve only been to with K_____. I’m not sure how I would even get here aside from on the train unless I rented a car. There is probably an AC transit bus but it probably takes days.

What I didn’t bring is a book. There was one I was thinking of bringing, but it was rather heavy and I do plan on visiting Powell’s. Possibly tomorrow and certainly on Saturday before I depart. 

I don't have WiFi. So of course there’s something I would like to research. Before I left home I determined that the U.S. built about 10,000 Tank Destroyers during WW2 and I’m dying to know how many similar AFVs Germany built. They had tank hunters and an array of assault guns but I suspect the numbers were more modest. The U.S. vehicles were not as good in some important ways, but in other ways they were better. As with destroyers, the IJN had more powerful ships but the USN ships were “good enough” and more numerous. (Ready? It's more complicated than I thought, but the short answer is that I was wrong. The Germans fielded three different classes of armored vehicles besides tanks: 3,535 Panzerjagers; 5,350 Jadpanzers; and about 10,000 StuGs. What makes this confusing is that while all these vehicles had better antitank guns than the USA vehicles, the StuGs in particular were intended for use as assault guns in support of infantry. This is a role the USA tank destroyers also filled, but, aside from the advantages of a turret over pointing the whole vehicle at the target, the USA guns were not as good in this role either. But, the standard M4 Sherman tank, with a 75mm gun, was excellent in the infantry support role, and the version with a 105mm howitzer was even better in the assault role. Only 1,641 of these were manufactured, but the total number of M4 tanks was a staggering 49 thousand and change. )

Also just before I left home I watched a video, a new favorite YouTube historian has produced, about the USS Texas. I’ve written about these antique USN battleships before; they would have been scrapped or used as target ships in the 1940s, as the new battleships joined the fleet, but because there was a war on they were kept in service. The Texas had served with the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet at the end of the Great War and then went on to provide fire support for the Allied landings at Casa Blanca, Normandy, and the South of France. And then she sailed to the Pacific and did the same thing at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. She even made three Magic Carpet trips after the war bringing soldiers home from the Far East.

And unlike the Nevada and West Virginia, she didn’t require much investment during the war. They added lots of AAA and had to replace her gun barrels because she fired so many rounds at enemy targets. These targets would have included the Panzer concentrations around Caen that were devastated by the naval artillery. To the best of my knowledge this role was not something the USN anticipated before the war.

Thursday
Well, I sort of slept. And breakfast was good. Sat with an older (88) man from Vancouver, BC and we’ve been yakking ever since. Sorted out all the world’s problems and gave each other travel and life advice. He used to sing barbershop but doesn’t read music. Meant to ask him why, but he launched into a story about DC and I forgot. I was no prodigy, but reading music isn’t THAT hard. Why, if music is that important to you, wouldn't you take the time to learn? This would apply to Tori Amos as well.

The train crossed over the Oregon border during breakfast. I even saw what I think was Mt Shasta. I swear I recall waking up in my sleeping car bed well into Oregon but that seems to be impossible. Beats me.

Arriving in Portland the train runs next to the tracks for one of the TriMet MAX LRVs, the one that goes past where I stay. I also noticed the stop for where I was planning to have my vegan pizza dinner that day. I love Portland.

Friday
I’m at my now longtime favorite Fehrenbacker Hof in Goose Hollow for breakfast. This is one of my favorite neighborhoods in the world. Mostly because it reminds me of my college days, though I can’t explain why. Last time I was here the Hof was closed so I had dinner at the place just next door. And that was good too. If I lived in Portland I would spend way too much time here. And it would be more expensive than the Bank Cafe where what little I can order is cheap. Here I want almost everything. 

One small complaint/similarity, they are playing music from the ‘60s. A little different music, Credence and Jimi, but still... 

Sweet Jesus, I just noticed my computer automatically logged onto their WiFi. Yes!!! I’m home.

My breakfast just arrived and while I was eating they did play a newer song. And then I realized it was from the ‘90s, so, still the better part of three decades old. I’m just particularly sensitive to five decade old songs.

I’m avoiding going to Powell’s until tomorrow after I check my bag at the train station. One, Powell’s is a good thing to do near the train station. Two, it keeps me from getting stuck in a book while I’m here. That would be a waste of a visit, after all. 

The air quality is getting even worse back in SF due to the fire. I’m starting to wish I had decided to stay longer, but that gets tricky with the trash situation. Still, breathing is something I enjoy doing.

I need to buy nail clippers (the thing I forgot to pack) so just looked to see where the Walgreen's were. In SF you don’t have to go more than a couple blocks to find a Walgreen's. There’s one two blocks from me and five more within six blocks, maybe more. Here there is one in the entire downtown (west of the river) area. Strange. And it’s not like there are many CVS or RiteAid locations. It’s like all the pharmacies decided to leave this market alone.

Had lunch with D___ and G__ at a brew pub with vegan food. I had heard about the Reuben sandwich so two of us ordered that, and we also shared an order of tacos. Everything was good. Was lovely talking to them again. D___ is retiring from teaching next month so it will be interesting to see how she deals with that.

For dinner I went to Bye and Bye, for a third time. Turns out they also have a vegan Reuben, which I wish I had ordered, but I went with the spaghetti and meatballs instead. No complaints, but it would have been fun to have compared the two Reubens.


I would love to have comparative statistics on construction of buildings of greater than four stories in Portland and SF over the past thirty years. I wouldn’t be surprised if more units were built in Portland. And the ratio of residential to commercial in the two markets would also be interesting. My guess is the ratio of residential would be far higher in Portland.


Saturday
It turns out mid November is a great time to visit Portland. It’s a festival of leaves. Enough are still on the trees to give you the beauty part, but more are on the ground. Today was windy and they were blowing in drifts. And the smell was heavenly. 

My pre-train day went pretty well. I had a breakfast snack at Powell’s and lunch at Sizzle Pie. I made a quick trip to the Pearl Hardware Store and bought breathing masks for when I get home, since the smoke has still not cleared. The only down side was that, for the second time, I took the streetcar to the closest stop to Union Station, which is not really the best way to get there. I had to walk blocks out of my way. I think there is a way to do this, but that would require boldly dropping down into streets the destination of which are not obvious. Maybe I should try to do this next time when I’m not actually catching the train.

Powell’s was it’s usual wonderful self. I love that they have these large, formal label/dividers for nearly every philosopher you’ve ever heard of. The selection of Foucault titles was pretty daunting. I couldn’t find anything “about” David Ricardo, but I didn’t look that hard. The area with tables/shelves of featured titles was a little disappointing. I though they would have groupings more to my thinking, but they were mostly groupings convenient to the bookseller. Not that I didn’t find anything I wanted to read. Since size and weight was a primary consideration, I had to pass over some of my first choices, but ended up with Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist. She’s always fun to read.

I had remembered the cafe in Powell’s as being a bit funkier. It was okay, but certainly not as nice as the Hof. Sizzle Pie is great for the pizza but otherwise a pain in the ass. I guess when you stay that busy you don’t have to think about improving things. Not that different than Tartine except that at Tartine I don’t recall my shoes being stuck to the carpet.

Looking out the window at the cafe in Powell’s I noticed a new tall building with four small wind turbines on the roof. I went by and got the name of the company that had worked on that. With luck I can contact them by email and ask some questions. They were spinning like mad today. (No luck.)

Just grabbed a reservation for the last seating at dinner. As I recall, breakfast is awkward as we arrive in Emeryville fairly early. I could be wrong about that but I wouldn't mind having breakfast at home in the morning.

Paragons. Because of C___’s travels in the subcontinent, I’ve been thinking about the Buddha and other paragons. Which got me thinking of Stan Lee: isn’t he a kind of paragon of living a full and productive life? Reaching enlightenment is an achievement, I suppose, but isn’t it also a form of cheating? Penetrating Maya and seeing beyond this reality is like finding the answers to all the quiz questions in the back of the book. What’s more interesting is what people do while playing the game without cheating. This reminds me a bit of that "The Other Side of the Hedge" short story. 

How many of the “homeless” would be good monks under different social circumstances? Some of them are of limited intelligence and have emotional issues, so prime candidates for faith. Would a religious structure like that of the Buddhist monks in South and SE Asia provide structure and meaning to their lives? I should ask C___ about this.

With permaculture, what could you do with 40 acres and a mule?

Perhaps one reason I think of Portland as being Midwestern is that two of the terminuses (termini?) of the MAX system are Cleveland and Milwaukee. But then there’s also Beaverton and, my favorite, Clackamas.

For my sins there are a plethora of little kids on this train, and most of them are in my car. I may be spending the night in the lounge car. Or possibly a bathroom. One is having a screaming fit as I type this. Why would so many kids be traveling in mid November? Thanksgiving! Didn’t think of that.

Another interesting meal in the dining car. A couple that had moved from Seattle to a barge in the Netherlands. She had once lived in Noe Valley and he had once lived in the San Fernando Valley. And a younger guy from Sunnyvale. The Silicon Valley. The Valley table. 

Sunday
The Princess Diarist. Not her best, but good. She says the elephant in the room was his family or the nature of their relationship, but I think the real elephant was her bipolarity (?) You can’t let that out of the bag and then pretend like you haven’t. The problem isn’t just Harrison, though it probably was him too, but, as she says herself, everything going on in her head.


I’m back in SF, North Beach in fact. It’s smoky but I’m not going to shave my beard if the weather is breaking in a couple days. I didn’t sleep well last night, of course, but I napped for a couple hours after getting home. Now I need to get organized again. Just enough of a trip to get me out of my rut, I hope.

305.So much random

Jury Duty 2018

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

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

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

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

Random

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Oracle

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

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

Feynman

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

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

304. La Cocina StreetFood festival

La Cocina StreetFood festival

My greening season is now over. The StreetFood festival was the last of our big events -- there may be a big convention coming up, but I try to avoid those. The La Cocina event was actually disappointing, though I’m not entirely disappointed by that. In its original form, on the streets of the Mission District, this was one of the most compost intensive events we’ve ever worked. The organizers exhausted themselves, stopped doing the event, then re imagined it as a smaller event in a more manageable venue. Even that was pretty overwhelming, but now it’s gotten even smaller on an even smaller site. Instead of having my hands full for eight hours, we were actually over-staffed for what work there was to do. I even volunteered to go home early at one point.

The few food vendors did uphold the reputation of their kind for failure to properly sort their trash. I’ve been trying to start a campaign to compel them to use only bright blue gloves, as these are easy to pick out of the trash. These vendors used white gloves with foods that were mostly white, making them almost impossible to find, while one vendor was using black gloves, which I’ve never seen before, and these were almost as hard to pick out. In part this was because it was after dark and this new venue has no area lighting. The good news was that there were no scavengers. So that was nice.

I did like the venue. It’s the site of an old power-plant just south of Pier 70. There is already a development plan for the old shipyard at Pier 70, and this parcel is projected to be the next phase of that project... though I doubt that this will happen this boom. It will probably sit unused -- and available for events like the StreetFood Festival -- for another decade. This is good as we are running out of venues like this.

Our dumpsters and trucks were positioned off to the side next to a huge old masonry building with no roof. The walls look to be four to five feet thick. If you look at the aerial view in Google Map you will see three huge oil tanks between the old Pier 70 venue and the new Power Plant venue, but those tanks have already been removed. I hope someone comes up with a plan to reuse the building with the massive walls, though I don’t have anything in mind. Well, I do, but it’s just the usual.

As I was working yesterday, I was thinking that I’ve come out of this year pretty well, physically. I have a bunch of things I do for my back, and my back has been fine all greening season. I have things I do for my right wrist, and, aside from a week or two, my wrist has also been problem free. My shoulder is still not right, and I will be addressing that as soon as this week, but it hasn’t prevented me from doing anything. What I occasionally do to my neck is a mystery, but I got through this year without any annoying nerve problems. Not bad.

One of our (much younger) workers started the season by getting hit by a truck while working in a dark parking lot. Then he had to leave HSB because he hurt his knee stepping into a gopher hole. He is still out. I can’t say that would never happen to me, but I’ve taken a number of steps (good boots plus exercises all year long) to help prevent just that sort of injury. I would say that I’m the most prepared of all our workers. This is partly because I’ve been doing this longest -- eleven years; partly because I’m older than all but one of them; and mostly because I’m me. The day after that guy hurt his knee I had cut the toes off a pair of socks and added them to the emergency stuff I carry in my backpack when I work. I discovered you could make an effective and comfortable compression support for your knees with toe less socks back in the ‘80s when I gave running a try. I quickly gave that up though it did serve to remind me that I had injured my knee playing football. That paid off the next decade when I started going to the gym and could tell personal trainers with ideas about hideous squat exercises that they were out of the question for me. I will probably die of a rare aliment that could have been prevented with squats.

One more thing about yesterday. Muni got me one last time and really good. We have a system that displays when the next train/bus is due to arrive. Sometimes it even works. For HSB, going home, I could catch different buses going different directions at the edge of the park. The first day the display for the line I was hoping to take was “Configuring” but never configured and worked. The Next day I decided to go with the other direction, and now that one did the exact same thing. The final day the display said a bus was coming, but it never did. I waited about a half an hour before the bus coming the other direction showed up and I took it. And then, while waiting for the next bus I needed to get home, I noticed that my bus was followed by three more buses on that infrequently serviced route within ten minutes.

So Muni had its hands full topping that. Especially as I was waiting for a streetcar instead of a bus. The display seemed to be working correctly. The next train was minutes away. Then it was Arriving. Then it was Departing. Only it wasn’t visible in this universe. So now we were waiting about fifteen minutes for the next train. Then twelve minutes. Then eleven minutes. Then ten minutes. Then twelve minutes. It continued to bounce around but never got to be less than ten. I walked three blocks inbound to the next station, and it was still the same message. So I gave up and hopped on a bus running perpendicular to where I wanted to go, so I could connect with a different train or bus. Took forever, but I finally got home. 

Wait, Muni got me one more time. When I transferred to the bus heading where I actually wanted to go, I discovered that the bus stop had been moved -- just this month -- and so I had to find where it had been moved to. I can only assume that muggers had complained that the old bus stop was in a too well lit and public location. The new location is far superior for muggings.

Transitioning

People always talk about spring cleaning but I’m in the midst of fall cleaning... and stuff. This is partly things I want to get in order before the rains start but mostly just transition stuff from greening season to non-greening season. Half of this is HOA related and the rest is personal. I’m even attempting to make my annual appointment with my barber. I have to remember to ask her what color my hair is. How’s that for a strange question. But my hair seems to be at least three different colors. Perhaps my drivers license should say, “Neopolitan.” (My barber suggests "salt and pepper.")

One of the errands on my list for today is a trip to the chiropractor to get advice about my shoulder. The tricky part is that I don’t want an adjustment. My back and neck are so unprecedentedly good I don’t want to mess with them. I’m currently on my way there, which is to say that I’m in a crepe restaurant in that neighborhood where I never get to anymore since my favorite cafe in the neighborhood closed at least a year ago, probably longer now. The cafe’s space is still vacant and their sign is still up. This is what my rent tax would prevent. But a block away is a much bigger building that has been vacant even longer because the neighborhood has issues with the new tenant. I can only hope that if the rent tax was stopped while these issues were being “negotiated” the process would run quicker. Though I have a hard time imagining that.

I’ve been working at the newish Peet’s at 10th and Mission lately which reminds me that the ground floor retail spaces in the Uber building are finally filling in. There are still more vacancies in those blocks than there were when the construction process for the big building on the corner started, but at least the trend seems to be heading in the right direction. Which is more than I can say for many neighborhoods of the city.

Riding the train on the way to my event on Saturday, I passed through Mission Bay which has, once again, changed beyond recognition. I really need to make another trip there to look at all the new construction.  I think it should be more evident what the new building flanking the Warrior’s new home will look like. What surprised me even more was the number of cranes rising above Dogpatch. I thought the infill there was about maxed out, but I guess not. And I didn’t see anything happening at Pier 70, though I really didn’t have the best angle.


I’m discovering new levels of random because I don’t have WiFi at this cafe. The other evening I performed my twice yearly test of the security light on the back of our building. This involves going out through the alarmed door and waving an arm around the side of the building to see if the motion sensor turns on the light. It did. But what impressed me was that the dog, belonging to the owners of the unit down there, heard me coming down the front steps in my quiet shoes and sounded the alarm. This is the dog that doesn’t make a sound when her owners are away because she’s off duty. 

Some time ago, when there was a question of rats being in the building (there weren’t) I enlisted her to inspect the little deck outside that lower unit. She sniffed around and didn’t find anything interesting. But I had no idea her hearing was this keen. If the neighbors above ever complain about her barking we will probably have to close the door between the hallway and the stairs, but for now it seems safest to keep it open.

I’m way early for my chiropractic appointment.

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.

302. “The ‘50s never die.”

The Impossible Burger at Mel's

I have read, with mild interest, about the search for a better veggie hamburger substitute. As with most things this trendy, much of this development is taking place locally. While I think the effort (time and money) could probably be better spent. And while I would be more interested if it was the search for a better BBQ ribs replacement. I wouldn’t object to a veggie burger that tasted more like the burgers of my youth. One of the candidates, in this competition is the “Impossible Burger” which I just ate at Mel’s Kitchen.

Mel’s is a famous local diner chain, it was featured in the movie "American Graffiti" -- still the best film George Lucas has made, in my opinion. One of their locations here, on Van Ness, has undergone an upscale transformation at the request of their landlord, a hotel also undergoing an upscale transformation. Instead of being a “diner” it is now a “kitchen.” There are still photos on the walls of "American Graffiti" and of the ‘50s in general, and there are some at-table jukebox controllers scattered about, but the actual music being played is not of the period. This would seem to be the decorative equivalent of façadism. But, then again, ‘50s music is problematic, so I’m not really complaining.

At any rate, I read in the paper that they were offering the Impossible Burger, so I took advantage of the opportunity to try one. It certainly isn’t the worst veggie burger I’ve ever ordered, though it’s close to the most expensive at $16. Without fries! Surprisingly, I would describe it as having the consistency of an uncooked hamburger patty. It tastes fine, but it does make me wonder what exactly they were aiming at. It is served at Mel’s with sliced pickles, a pesto sauce, and the usual lettuce and tomato. The bun was good but didn’t really add much to the experience.

While eating, I was thinking back on the outstanding burgers of my youth, starting in the ‘50s with White Castle. There the thing you recall is the bun, not the patty. My early ‘60s favorite was from Harvey’s on Colfax in Denver. There the primary taste ingredient was the secret sauce. I don’t recall much about either the bun or the patty. My final, late ‘60s favorite was from Whataburger, and I can’t recall anything specific about that one. So, at least for me, the bun and the sauce was more important than the actual burger patty. If I were interested in this search for the perfect veggie burger, I would ignore the patty entirely -- well, I’ve had Garden Burgers that were seasoned and tasted much better, so I would look into that. But I would just play with the bun and sauce and other toppings. A little avocado tends to make everything a little better. And even then, the only reason to even include the patty is to add some protein to the delicious mix. A “patty” of baked or sauteed tofu would work just as well if it had all the rest going for it.

Grease: Sundown Cinema

Last Friday I had to fill in for someone at the last minute. This was for a small event in our other big city park, McLaren Park. This was the first time I've been on foot in that park, but it was quite nice. This was for a public showing of the movie "Grease" -- which I realized I had never seen. There were only a few hundred people in attendance, probably because the weather has been cold and overcast, though it was surprisingly pleasant that evening. There were several food and drink vendors and a large security force, for some reason. The sing-along and dance-along aspect of the event would probably have worked better with a larger crowd.

I only caught a few scenes from the film, not my cup of tea. What I did like was the mostly ‘50s music that preceded the film. The DJ was a young woman with a box of LPs. She did a great job selecting music to play, there was very little I knew, but everything sounded of the period. If I had a tape of what she played, I would listen to it again. Which is a surprise considering my normal aversion to music from that decade.

The event was pretty boring for us as there was hardly any trash to sort. We were all done by 10:30pm though we were scheduled to work longer.

TMM and STC and "enki"

I’m caught up with my TMM blogging, I’ve done what my book club is reading this month (I cleverly specified the end of "Snow," rather than the end of chapter 6, so that we will focus on the philosophical debate and not get sidetracked by poor Joachim. I think they are regretting letting me be the “guide” for this book). I need to go over what I’ve blogged again, but I’m quite happy with it. I’ve linked material from all three of my active blogs. Everything is tying together nicely. And it occurred to me the other day that this will almost certainly be my last reading of TMM. Fortunately, there are one or two other things I still need to read.

On my recent Staycation trip to exotic Emeryville, I picked up yet another stylistically stunning design magazine from the UK, “enki” by name. Since I’m not quite ready to jump back into Genji, I’ve been amusing myself with “enki.” Mostly I love the typefaces and the overall graphic style of the mag. There is at least one instance of a room painted entirely in a dark gray, so popular in UK magazines and so very tempting to me. I’ve pretty much decided to go with the bright white look when I next paint my place, but whenever I see a photo of a room like this I fall in lust again. I just don’t think it would work in such a small space. I don’t actually plan to paint for nine years, so I have time to change my mind a few thousand times.

The most interesting house in this (September 2018) issue of “enki” is a modernist houseboat in Haarlem. It checks all the boxes, sustainable, modernist, climate-change resistant. It looks better on the outside than on the inside, which is nothing special, but I don’t understand why houses like this aren’t everywhere. Or at least everywhere there’s flowing water. Too big for me, of course. And I still have yet to see a multi-family floating project. I hope the Netherlands leads the way with this as the USA almost certainly wont.

There’s been exciting local news about the STC, our new multi-billion dollar bus station. Someone noticed that two of the steel beams, that hold up the part of the structure where I was catching the NL bus to Oakland two weekends ago, are cracked. The entire facility has been shut down and the buses returned to the Temporary Terminal. The beams must have been right above my head as I waited to catch the bus. I can’t wait to see how they shore it up while inspecting and repairing/replacing the beams. Seems like you would need a temporary beam that runs the width of the building and out over the street below, and then three-story posts to hold that beam in place. But how would you maneuver such a beam into place? (Instead they've opened holes in the bus level deck so the support posts run directly down to the street.)

There’s already a huge amount of litigation concerning the nearby residential tower that is sinking and tilting, and now we will get another layer of litigation to determine who is responsible for this SNAFU. And we lose the use of our lovely new park until the structural part of this problem is resolved.

301.Rambling, mostly

Link to Table of Contents

Dentist

Just had my second and last cleaning at the world’s worst run dental office. Originally my appointment was a month ago, but the dentist was ill, or something, so no one was there and no one ever responded to phone calls. A week later I dropped by and found the dentist returned and scheduled an apt for today -- only she says it was for last Thursday -- and since all I have is the note I wrote, we will never know if I simply misunderstood her (she has a strong accent) or if she confused it. In any case, she fitted me in and I’m fine for the next six to eight months. 

My usual dentist, the one who did my expensive crown, has a wonderfully run operation, so she only does exams and actual dental work. She delegates the routine cleanings. My dentist for this year does the cleanings herself in this stunning office on the eleventh floor of SF’s premier medical building -- the one I can see out my kitchen window. None of this makes any sense to me.

Something else that perhaps does make sense to me, is that neither this dentist nor my usual hygienists have much praise for my teeth and gums. Over the years I have improved and improved my dental self-care until my gums and teeth are as problem free as one could wish -- though this dentist did mention I could do something about my tea related yellowing. Fine. I’m adding that to my list. But that’s neither here nor there when it comes to the health of my mouth, or the profits of the dentists. I conclude that they are not actually that pleased to see that I’ve done everything that’s been suggested, so that professional intervention is not required. She didn’t even bring up the usual X-ray topic. Since I think trouble free teeth are not all that common, you would think a grudging, “congratulations, there’s really nothing much here for me to do” wouldn’t kill them. If they ever start giving me pamphlets on the alleged dangers of fluoride use, I will know what to think.

Dream

It’s a huge, multi-floor bookstore. But getting from floor to floor is nearly impossible because there are a variety of options but they are all like rides and take time or are physically challenging.

There are also holographic “characters” that are always roaming the aisles. Authors or characters from books. Animals too. And they can interact with each other -- not sure if you can ask them questions, probably not. I had dream deja vu with this place. But this time it occurred to me to wonder how creepy it must be for the staff when there are no customers, only holograms in the store.

Oddly, this dream started with me at a laundromat that had suddenly decided to not provide dryers anymore. There was a bit in between that I can’t even explain. And the transition to the bookstore is equally inexplicable.

The last time I was in Moe’s bookstore in Berkeley I did have a problem navigating their, not that big but multilevel store, because the floors are not as all accessible from one staircase, as you would expect.

The Bank Cafe 2.0

I learned today [actually some time ago now. I've been sitting on this.] that they are planning a major remodel of my Bank Cafe. The sidewalk outside is already boarded off. Apparently this will happen in sections with the Peet’s remaining open until almost the end, when that part of the space is transformed. According to my informant, behind the Peet’s counter, the mezzanine will be extended -- currently it is only about 30% the size of the ground floor. That will involve heavy steel structural work, so this isn’t just tarting up the decor.

I’m surprised the new bank is willing to invest so much in this odd idea of the previous ownership. These “third space” places are a swell idea but I can’t imagine how they make any economic sense. 

In the past week or two the bean bags -- which used to furnish the stadium seating area -- have disappeared. I assumed this was because “undesirables” were frequenting them, but perhaps it was just in anticipation of the coming construction. There is a semi-permanent indigent in residence here. She mostly just sits in the same spot near the door, with her bags, and looks into space. Occasionally, if I’m sitting close enough, I’m aware of her talking to herself, but mostly people don’t sit that close -- unless they have head colds or there’s nowhere else to sit. There is also full time security here now, which didn’t use to be the case.


Today's addition
I'm deep into blogging The Magic Mountain now, which requires room for book and computer and, if I'm at it long enough, access to an electrical outlet. All things I can find here at the Bank Cafe. 

That last sentence above "Today's addition" is interesting, the "didn't use/used to be" part. Normally I judge these questions by ear, the way I judge when "an" or "a" should preceded a vowel -- the rule is not always a good guide. "Used" sounds a shade better to me, in this case, but I looked it up and saw that "use" is preferred. If I hadn't already written this paragraph, I think I would have probably altered the sentence, before publishing, to "There is also full time security here now, which wasn't always the case."

I'm finding the dialectical nature of the juicy parts of TMM particularly hard to blog. I'm not trying to capture one set of ideas but two, or perhaps three. Our two professors are making their respective points but also trying to score off each other. They say things in the heat of argument that they might not entirely mean. And then I have to keep in mind what kind of game Mann is playing.

This is a wonderful review of Western thought on subjects of the ultimate importance, but Mann is also saying something about Europe in the first decade of the 20th century. But is he also saying something about Europe in the third decade of that century? At times I think he must be. How could you be writing this in Weimar Germany (and not Goethe's Weimar Germany) and not incorporate what you see happening around you? It's all more obvious in Doctor Faustus, when he was safely writing in Pacific Palisades.

Yesterday the official high temperature for SF was 84F. I don't recall the temperature exceeding 80 at any other time this summer, and tomorrow is the equinox. I'm still hoping for, counting on, an Indian Summer, but it looks like yesterday was our regular summer. And I didn't seize that day. I went to the gym in the morning and ran an errand in the afternoon. I was over dressed because I've given up listening to the weather forecasts since all we've gotten this summer has been sweater weather. I should have gone to the park. Or something. I will try to seize the next warm day. 

Planning is well under way for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, coming up in about two weeks now. I'm all signed up for my usual shifts. I've floated a revolutionary new idea for getting all the heavy glass bottles off the fields -- don't really expect anything to come of it for this year, but wanted to get the process started. (Also, that part of our process takes place after i go home for the day, so this won't affect me directly.) 

My boss made the sound decision of passing on greening Fleet Week, which, once again, falls on the same weekend. That means the team we used for Fleet Week last year will cover the night operations while our regular crew will cover the days. If it weren't for the fact we've lost so many of our regular people, this could mean we might really get ahead of things during the event, leaving less to do after -- usually there's a crew sorting what's left over for several days after the end of the concert. But that isn't true of the trash from my area, which is almost all sorted by the time I leave. If we can manage to do the same everywhere, we could be finished at the end of the concert, as with most other events. 

That isn't entirely possible, because some trash will continue to be generated (or collected from the grounds) as the concert facilities are taken down. But that's minimal and manageable. I'm told it was much better on Monday last year than in previous years. It would be easier to build on that if we had the same people working the fields during the day.

Not sure what it says about me that HSB is the high point of my year -- and I don't mean the music. The most frustrating thing (so far) is that the two new acts I was excited to see were going to performing this year are both at stages in the most distant other meadow. I can't even recall the last time I was in Lindley Meadow. Usually the acts I like are at the stage in Marx Meadow -- and I could in theory slip over there to listen for a few minutes (would never actually happen) -- but Lindley is a decent hike. My only hope is that Chris Thile and/or Ani DiFranco will join someone else on the Banjo Stage. And that I will be where I can hear that stage at the time.

More likely I will be behind the food vendors struggling with the urge to kill them.

Speaking of an urge to kill... Last week, when I did my laundry, I noticed the dryer was making a loud, bad belt, sort of noise when it started up. No one reported this to me. I called and it was repaired just short of a week later, when I next needed the dryer. Then, the very next day, I noticed the ceiling light at the top of the stairs was out. Again, no one reported this and I only noticed because I was watering the poor plant on the 2nd floor. I could easily have gone a week or longer without noticing that light was out. How hard is it to leave a note on my door?

I briefly considered replacing that ceiling fixture with an LED alternative (why does "an" sound better there?), since it is actually above the stairs and the hardest fixture to get to. And according to my notes, the fixture is thirteen years old. But replacing the fixture is a two person job -- me to do the work and someone else to record my last words if I fall off the ladder and down the stairs -- and my local (and otherwise well stocked) hardware store still doesn't carry that kind of fixture. I would have had to order it online. 

Okay, this is why writing (rambling aimlessly) is actually useful. It occurs to me as I type this, that while a fixture with an LED "lamp" that can't be replaced, as is the norm in the kind of fixtures I have in mind, will last longer than the florescent ring tube in our current fixture, the fixture itself will not last nearly as long. An LED fixture might last thirteen years -- depending on the number of hours per day it is on -- but our current fixture will probably last much longer. And replacing the tube is not really that hard -- compared with replacing the fixture. I just saved myself a nasty piece of work.

This just in: My boss took the Fleet Week gig, too. So it's going to be the usual shit-show.

Gumps

There must be a name for this, but I don’t know what it is, and maybe I don’t want to hear it. I’ve never purchased anything at Gumps or Shrieve & Company or Britex Fabrics, I’ve never even browsed the jewelry store, but these are some of the few remaining grand San Francisco retail names and I was pleased to see them all clustered, as of this year I believe, at the same end of this block of Post Street as the Bank Cafe. But now Gumps has announced bankruptcy and is having an “everything must go” sale. It’s not even like I’m going to score a bargain at the sale -- there’s nothing there I need or want (or have room for). 

This means another grand old SF name is gone and it will be another vacancy on the block, just when it was close to being fully occupied. “Sad,” as the Orange abomination would say. What I will miss most is the wonderful fragrance that has always blown out their front doors. Not sure if it was something they added to the HVAC or simple the scent of various very expensive things, but it has been something I’ve looked forward to for years now on our increasingly malodorous streets. I do think about it every time Murasaki writes about how great Genji smells. 

300. Dragon Boat Races 2018

Northern California International Dragon Boat Festival

I was trying to remember on Sunday how many of these I’ve worked. Three now at Lake Merritt and at least five at Treasure Island. This year things went pretty smoothly, we were even done a little early both evenings. But let’s start with getting there.

It took me three years to look up the other bus line that runs by Lake Merritt in Oakland, where the event is held now. When I did, I discovered there’s a perfectly lovely AC Transit bus that I can take from the new Transit Center in SF to a block from where we previously had dumpsters and this year parked a very big truck we loaded with sorted trash bags. It only takes twenty minutes as well. Since I usually have breakfast on Geary before work days, and the Geary bus terminates at the Transit Center, I simply jumped on the bus after breakfast, rode up the escalator to the bus deck and caught the bus to Oakland. Easier and almost certainly faster than my previous train then bus method.

I did arrive early to catch the bus, so I spent some time checking out the new bus deck. It occurred to me, also on Sunday, that it was either brave or stupid of them to have a bright white ceiling there given that all the buses are diesel powered. Virtually every surface is bright white. The buses are much cleaner now than they were before the old terminal was terminated, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see the ceiling get darker in time. 

I’ve now taken the trip from SF to the East Bay and back three times and it really does work great. The connection to the Bay Bridge is as smooth as advertised. Normally this only saves a minute or two, but I’m sure there were times when buses got stuck in street traffic going to or from the Temporary Terminal. Back to the Dragon Boat Races. 

I meant to bring my camera on Sunday to photograph the inside of the truck, but forgot. I posted some photos of the event last year. I work the racing crew areas at the far end of the event from our truck, so I only visited at the end of the day, before I walked the short block to catch my bus home. On Saturday night my favorite crew chief had a little sorting station inside of the front right and the entire left side of the truck was a wall of bags stacked a single bag deep. An amazing creation, but he is a genius at trash organization. J___, my favorite event person -- actually he doesn’t work for the event but runs a separate team of haulers so that we sort and they haul -- was also impressed with the truck organization. I was advocating moving the truck closer to the event, but J___ was concerned the bags would fall if the truck moved. Though by the end of the day the back of the truck was mostly filled with bags, so that wouldn’t have been a problem. Maybe next year.

Usually I complain about the food vendors, but the support crew people are worse. Here are the ways you can ruin the sorted order I’ve been maintaining in our eco-stations all day long: 

1. Actually the first option doesn’t ruin it, and this is what we hope people will do, just set their unsorted black bags and boxes next to the station so we can do it properly. Officially, in general and especially at some events, the vendors are supposed to sort it all themselves -- but they can’t, and if they try we are still left with the mess.

2. Toss the unsorted black bags or boxes into a random container. It’s a mystery to me how they pick the stream to ruin. This isn’t so bad if I can get to it and remove the bag before there’s a pile of additional trash on top.

3. The worst, and I happened to be walking to the station and saw the crew guy doing this, is dumping the unsorted bag into a random container. In this case, the bag was primarily compost -- in fact a huge amount of heavy fruit mostly -- but it went into the landfill. That was on Saturday so on Sunday I grabbed their cans periodically and took them out to sort at the station. And I gave them so much shit about the dumping that they were good about placing any black bags, reverently, beside the station like a sort of offering to the trash fairy (me).

When you order a large amount of coffee from someplace like Starbucks, it comes in a plastic bladder inside a cardboard box. There were hundreds of these things since every crew needed coffee apparently (the non-coffee drinker judges them all). As with everything else, they tend to toss these into a random container... though I will admit that they are usually either in recycling or landfill. The bladder is not recyclable, it belongs in landfill, but the box can go in either recycling, if dry, or compost, if wet. Which means you have to take every single one of these beasts apart. Needless to say we get very good at this task, but I enjoy educating (making fools of) the high school students on the support crews by, once a year, forcing one of them to do one of these repetitive and annoying tasks they should be doing all the time. This years victim (student) was a girl who walked up with the coffee abomination and proceeded to empty the contents on the grass. This was unusual enough that it caught my attention, so when she then walked over with that “where do I toss this” look on her face I explained that she had to take it apart and put it in two places. I got to take a short break as she discovered how the box opened,  then how you can pull the bladder out of the box. I only wish we had more time for “education.” 

I’ve already sent in some suggestions for how we can improve this new truck-based system for next year. Why the event couldn’t obtain dumpsters I don’t really understand, but that’s not my responsibility, and this system seems to be working at least as well. Maybe better.


My favorite thing about the crew zone are the camp dogs. Many people bring dogs who hang around the camps all day long. Some are tiny ones who peek out from under chairs and bags, but there are also the decent sized ones who make eye contact with me, mostly, I’ll admit, because I’m usually carrying a bag of compost.