341. Photography San Francisco

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Photographs

It's been a while since I last did a photo post. Let's see what I've accumulated,

Here's an interesting new building gate I photographed just today (why this occurred to me).

Here's a building in my neighborhood that has long had a problem with people camping on their front "stoop." I noticed they had taken care of this by storing a bunch of stools out there, but it was only last week that I finally noticed that the stools are bolted to the paving.

It does work.
This next may be hard to explain.

They are currently in the process of upgrading Camino del Mar in Lincoln Park. In particular, they are reducing the storm runoff into our sewer system. There are several of these structures that are designed to capture water from the street, let the water flow from one deep basin to the next (Note the the little gates at the low point in the little walls) giving the water time to be absorbed into the ground. Eventually, if necessary, any water beyond what the system can absorb will flow out the opening at the end and go to either the next structure or to the storm sewer.

This is my favorite Wee Free library, also near Lincoln Park.

Okay. I know this is strange, but I have always had a thing for outdoor lighting -- street, parking lots, even the side of buildings. This is a classic 1960s street light fixture but the only time I've ever seen it with four lights. Someone when BART's MacArthur Station was being planned noticed this rarely (if ever) used option in some catalog. It's only a matter of time before it gets replaced by an LED fixture, so I wanted to capture it.

Architects are having more fun with parking structures these days. This one is in downtown Berkeley.

340. How It All Began

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How It All Began

by Penelope Lively - Viking 2011

P13 End of chapter 1.  Oh, I do like Lively. Already we’ve got three strong point-of-view characters. First there’s Charlotte the elderly woman we start with who’s been mugged; then her daughter Rose, another strong female character, and finally Marian who shares my habit of redecorating spaces when bored. Though Marian is a decorator, so knows what she’s talking about. Rose and Marian are both middle aged. 

And we also got just a bit of Rose’s employer His Lordship or Henry. 

P22 Chapter 2. Henry is rather more important here. His forgetting his notes and making a mess of his lecture -- in particular forgetting names -- is clearly Lively making something out of the inability to remember names she spoke of in her other book. The thing is, forgetting the name Pitt is not something that only comes up in a lecture. Surely he would have realized this problem before and had some experience with dealing with it -- I know I have. It’s a bloody nuisance but you can make light of it and either use others to help prompt you or failing that, kill time until the name comes to you. What’s even worse is when you completely lose your train of thought. But again, this is not that unusual. Of course Lively is making the most of this because it is so annoying for academics in particular. 

P24 And we get just a dash of Thomas Hobbs.

I am attempting to apply both Stoicism and Roombaism to the crises in this novel. It’s an interesting exercise. So far the crises have been: Charlotte getting injured in a mugging -- you move on and deal with the PT; Stella learning her husband is having an affair -- for him, you can make an argument for moving on to a less difficult relationship, for her there doesn’t seem to be either a Stoic or Roombic option; Henry’s disastrous lecture should lead to either a new approach to doing these things or an avoidance of the situation. I kind of think Roombaism wins this comparison.

p30 “...Henry is in fact out of touch with the eighteenth century. He stopped thinking much about it a number of years ago, he has not kept up with new publications. The eighteenth century has moved on, leaving him behind. History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion. Henry is well aware of this, and aware that the eighteenth century has disappeared over the horizon so far as he is concerned, reconstructed, reinterpreted.”

It is interesting to see how Lively pulls things from her own life into her novel. The bit about traveling on London buses (I didn’t quote) is from her own experience, this bit about history is thanks to her late husband. But I take issue with Henry’s being so removed from his subject. Lively was around 78 when she wrote this interesting observation about the 18th century “moving on.” She continues to process her reality. As much as I dis-esteem academics, I have a hard time believing they don’t continue to think about their subjects -- just as I occasionally come upon a novel thought while rehashing either philosophy or history. (Just confirmed that Lord Peters is 76.)

P86 Chapter Six - As with Martha Grimes, I’m wondering if Lively starts with a plan or just lets the characters lead her forward. I assume Anton’s having been an accountant will come to something. I assume things will go in surprising directions, rather than calming down, since the point of this novel is how a random event can lead to changes. It’s the old butterfly effect again. Unless I’m wrong about that, Butterfly Effect might have been a better title. (I had forgotten that she mentions the Butterfly Effect at the very beginning.)

Lively has much more experience with the nobility than I do, but one of the things I actually like about them is that they tend not to care what others think, since they are born to their status. Lord Peters’s discomfort here seems middle class to me. I’m probably wrong.

P99 Chapter Seven - I’m never in Starbucks because I hate their process for serving iced tea, but I was there today when I read this chapter, which is largely set in a Starbucks. This is an interesting Starbucks simply because it faces a busy bus stop -- just off Market and across the street from the Bank Cafe (always closed on weekends, but now doubly closed for remodeling of Peet’s.) Here you see waves of FOB-looking Chinese and tourists. Three or four busy bus lines stop here. Sitting where I am in the window, it’s hard to notice what the people are doing in the Starbucks. Currently there’s a guy standing in the middle of the sidewalk right in front of the doors who seems to have misplaced his last brain cell. 

A nearly spherical man just climbed slowly off a bus and paused mid-sidewalk to light up a cigarette. Probably he juggles machetes as a hobby.

P101 Chapter Eight - I love where she’s going with Lord Peters. “A certain awful appeal. The voice, the manner, everything. You’d be sticking your neck out a mile, putting him on. People would love him or hate him. A provocation. Risky -- oh, yes. But just might be a winner.” Delia, a very minor character is considering put him on TV. Without wanting to insult Lord Peters, this could also have been said about Trump at the beginning. And I love Marian’s disbelief that Delia is agreeing to even the one show. (I’m sorry he didn’t have a little success in TV.)

P105 Now this is interesting, here is Lord Peters working up the script for his pilot, “ ‘I myself have a soft spot for what is known as the Cleopatra’s nose theory of history -- the proposal that had the nose of Cleopatra been an inch longer the fortunes of Rome would have been different. A reductio ad absurdum, perhaps, but a reference to random causality that makes a lot of sense when we think about the erratic sequence of events that we call history. And we find that we home in on the catalysts -- the intervention of those seminal figures who will direct events. Caesar himself. Charlemagne. Napoleon. Hitler. If... this person or that... had not existed, how differently could things have turned out?’...”

This is the historical twist on the butterfly effect. So another alternate title, Cleopatra’s Nose. 

And this passage continues, “... ‘A decision is made in one place, and far away a thousand will die. There’s an analogy, I understand, with a process that interests the physicists -- chaos theory. The proposition that apparently random phenomena have underlying order -- a very small perturbation can make things happen differently from the way they would have happened if the small disturbance had not been there. A butterfly in the Amazon forest flaps its wings and provokes a tornado in Texas.’ ”

P142 Chapter Eleven - Jeremy is interesting about the way he likes to lead life flying by the seat of his pants. I had to do something vaguely similar during my freelancing days, but I was never comfortable with it. I’ve always preferred something more routine and dependable. And I agree with Lively that this seems consistent with a man also being unfaithful to his wife. Though I also agree with Marion that Stella should know him well enough to be able to deal with this by now. 

I’m reading this at the Peet’s near Uber and they are playing hits from the ‘60s that are not the usual hits from the ‘60s. Songs that I know from the first bar or two though I haven’t heard them for decades. Some maybe since the ‘60s. And this reminds me that, as I noticed before with Lively, there’s little to nothing about music in this novel. Curious.

P154 “...Story, yes, indeed, but the fascination of story is what it can do. Henry James can tell it through the eyes of a child, and make you, the reader, observe the adult chicanery and betrayals of which the child is unaware. Charlotte needed to remind herself of the sleight of hand whereby this is done...” I haven’t read James but this makes me think of a favorite part of The Diary of Adrian Mole, when his mother is having an affair and he is oblivious.

My Bank Cafe is still under-construction -- taking longer than expected -- so I’m at the neighboring Starbucks again with hot tea, having given up on their idiotic iced tea, and have discovered an advantage to this location. Here one may enjoy, like a cat, the afternoon sun coming in the front window. If the sun ever hits the Bank Cafe windows it would be in the morning. Glare not so good for using the computer, but great light for reading and, after the gym this morning, it’s nice to absorb some UV rays.

P174 Chapter Fourteen - This is quite wonderful really, Jeremy and Stella’s secret romance. I don’t exactly like Jeremy but you have to admire him a bit. 

P202 Chapter Sixteen - How does one forget one has a million pounds in equity? This comes into the story like a Victorian bequest, but really! Are things so different in England that... Oh! Never-mind. Just realized that without income a bank would be unlikely to give her any sort of loan even with all that equity. 

Finished. Marion came out the best here. Jeremy and Stella did fine. Henry and Mark did well. Charlotte came out a bit worse for the wear. Rose and Anton had the best story though without the dramatic, romantic ending. Gerry dodged a bullet without ever knowing.

339. Warriors 2019 playoffs round 2

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Warriors!

Once again one of our local sports teams has done something exceptional. And I don’t just mean they won, but they won in the context of a phenomenal story. It’s always the story that pulls me in. The next paragraph is background on the Warriors for the tiny group of people who aren’t familiar with their story, but might be interested in getting a quick review so they can appreciate the “story” I want to talk about.

The Warriors team was built around two amazing shooters, guards Steph Curry and Klay Thompson who are known as the Splash Brothers for their ability to hit 3 point shots. With the back court in place, the organization -- which is a model of what a basketball team should be -- started building up a supporting front court with Dramon Green and Andre Iguodala (a veteran starter and one of the most outstanding 6th men in the game). They won a championship but the next season they came up short against the same team they had beaten the season before -- there were some good reasons for this. The organization responded by going after Kevin Durant, either the best or second best individual player in basketball, depending on who you ask. With KD, Curry, Thompson, Green, and Iguodala they constituted what is popularly known as either the Hampton’s 5 or the Death Lineup. This group led the team to back to back championships and was leading the team through the second round of this year’s playoffs when KD went down with an injury late in game 5 against Houston. This has been a very close series with, through game 4, each team winning their home games. The Warriors were home for game 5, so this gave Houston a shot at “breaking serve” as it were. Last year, the Warriors/Houston series was the REAL championship as, after just barely beating Houston the Warriors easily defeated the champion in the east. The basketball world had been eagerly anticipating Houston getting another shot at the Warriors now that one of their players, Chris Paul, was healthy. Now, late in the 5th game, Chris Paul was healthy and they were playing the Warriors even in the series, winning their two home games while the Warriors won their two home games. That's when the Warriors lost KD to injury. That’s the setup for this story. A frustrated team, eager for revenge after feeling they were cheated the previous season finally given an advantage against the champions. This is when it gets interesting.

The Warriors managed to pull out that game 5, putting them up 3 games to 2. The next game would be in Houston and then a game 7 would be played in Oakland. As I’ve said, so far the home team had won every game and now the Warriors would be going to Houston short arguably their best player. Steve Kerr, their coach, was forced to play his bench -- the non-starters who had seen very little playing time because this was, to date, a close run battle between the starters -- and they responded brilliantly. But basketball is impossible to predict and Steph Curry, quite possibly the best shooter of all time, ended the first half of game 6 with zero points and three fouls -- so that he had to be pulled off the floor. So now the Warriors were missing KD and Curry was shooting blanks or sitting on the bench. Sounds like they’re doomed, right? No.

Klay Thompson and the bench managed to play Houston to a draw in the first half. Fate gave Houston two huge handicaps and they couldn’t take advantage. Then came the second half.

If KD isn’t the best player in basketball, then that honor goes to LeBron James. The Warriors sought out KD mostly so they could use him to balance the advantage James gave the Cavalliers the year they didn’t win the championship. And that strategy worked for two years. After game 6 LeBron James Tweeted the following, “NEVER underestimate the heart of a champion!! !!” 

After scoring zero points in the first half, Steph Curry scored 33 points in the second half. Especially in the crucial fourth quarter, he took over the game sinking long threes while also attacking the basket for easy twos. The dagger to Houston’s heart was a perfect Warriors play that started with Curry, passed though the hands of almost the entire team before it went to Klay Thompson who buried yet another three. It was a master class in team basketball.

The Warriors still have another series to get through before they make it to the championship round, and the longer they play the better the chance of their getting KD back, along with two of their centers who were injured earlier. They could get even better by the end. But what people will remember is what they did while short handed against a very dangerous opponent. 

Bringing the story up to date

That series against Houston seems so long ago now. The next series, against Portland, was also entertaining, but in the end the Warriors won. They then faced off against Toronto in the finals. Toronto won in 6 games but the Warriors team they defeated was without two of its three best players. Both KD and Klay Thompson started game 6 but left with new, more serious injuries. The Warriors did well with the players they had left, but that wasn't good enough.

Since then the Warriors team, and indeed many of the teams in the NBA have been blown-up and re-imagined. Last I heard, the Warriors will start the 2019-2020 season with only four players from their "dynasty." A fifth player, Klay Thompson, will return later from his injury. Most of the new team will be new faces and I'm actually eager to see how they do. I suspect that the "dynasty" is over, however. 

What's a little awkward about this is that they are also leaving Oakland and moving to a new facility in San Francisco. Instead of showing off a championship team in their new house, they will start with a team that is still learning how to play with each other.

338. Autumn Light

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New book - Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer - Knopf 2019

Tale of Genji referenced on page 14. God help me.

P22 I didn’t pay much attention to the description of the failed new development of Nara in the ‘80s, but this is a perfect example of top down planning that doesn’t understand how cities and business work. It was like Skywalker Ranch on a much larger scale -- a lovely idea but not really practical. He references Mountain View, but even Mountain View and the original Silicon Valley only made sense because of Stanford and the existence of San Jose and San Francisco nearby. That and the fact that the first generation of tech engineers were mostly from the Midwest. Suburbia appealed to them, especially California suburbia.

P30 “...I can hardly recall the bright-eyed kid who made such a pius point of telling himself that purity and kindness and mystery lay inside the temple walls and that everything outside them was profane; the beauty of Japan is to cut through all such divisions, and to remind you that any true grace or compassion is as evident in the convenience store -- or at the ping-pong table -- as in the bar where two monks are getting heartily drunk over another Hanshin Tigers game.”

This is pretty damn close to my response to Buddhism -- though he left his pal the Dalai Lama and people like him off the hook with that ending. The point I think he is making here is that Japan encourages a mindfully sacred way of looking at life while not rejecting life as most religious traditions do. His teachers are not the Dalai Lama and his local equivalent, but Hiroko and the routine of life in Japan. This does make me curious about how different his life is in California. 

P32 “...I can hear kids chanting... the forty-seven syllables of the hiragana alphabet, in the ceremonial song that features every syllable once and once only.
...

“This song, though, might be the scripture of Japan. ‘Bright though they are in color, blossoms fall,’ I hear the children shouting out. ‘Which of us escapes the world of change? We cross the farthest limits of our destiny, and let foolish dreams and illusions all be gone.’ ”

Well that’s pretty profound for a school song. I tried to find the rest of it through a Google search and could only find a link to this book. 

Among the things that Iyer doesn’t cover, but I wish he did, are more about his relationships with his own family -- another book, perhaps. His feelings about SoCal. And, since there’s a fair amount, thanks to Hiroko’s father about wartime Japan, a little about how things like education changed after the war. Most of what I know about pre-war Japan and the education system has to do with the indoctrination program.

P33 “The season is a kind of religion, I think, to which we offer poems and petitions, but it’s not one you believe in so much as simply inhabit.”

P34 “It took me a while, after I settled down here, to realize that every detail -- the apples, the boxes they sit in, the table on which we place them -- counts, because none of these things is inanimate in Japan. Only yesterday, Hiroko remembered, ‘I small time, I kicking table -- sometimes little angry -- every time, my father say, “You must apologize! To table. That table has heart. It never hit you. Why you must hit it?” ‘ “

I bet her father could have explained why the Japanese military didn’t repair damaged planes during the war. Something I’ve read about but never understood. I think it’s related to this idea of animation.

P37 ...”What makes the air feel thronged [in Japan] is the presence of household deities and ghosts, the spirits that for my neighbors inhabit every last desk or box of chocolates. Nothing essential ever seems to die in Japan, so the land is saturated with dead ancestors, river gods...”

This reminds me of the Ryuko Lady in Genji who, even after her death, possessed Murasaki. There was no further mention of Genji after that first one, but I do wonder what Hiroko would make of this aspect of The Tale. Would she find it exaggerated or very familiar?

P41-42 So I guess the Japanese Buddhist notions of death and after death are quite different than the Tibetan notions. Since you are supposed to be reincarnated after a year, it wouldn’t make any sense to honor the dead past that period in Tibet. I’m not sure about the other Buddhist traditions in India and SE Asia.

P46 The mother in law refusing to eat (but secretly eating) is so like the prince’s daughter at the end of Genji. I’m doomed.

P50 I love Hiroko’s baseball analogy. Sometimes it seems like the true purpose of American foreign policy is to spread baseball around the globe. It has only taken root in places where we have profoundly messed with the local culture. I wonder if they see this as reasonable compensation?

P54 The point of this introduction into being Japanese is so opposed to our being ourselves. While he is using ping pong to show this, I can see how ballroom dancing would work even better.

Pico reminds me a bit of Bill Bryson in how he ends up in Japan. So far, and I know this is his intention, Masahiro is the most interesting thing in the book. How is he possible? What is his story? It is a great way to preserve your status since you can’t do anything wrong if you are never there. He’s like a god you choose to imagine in the best possible light and no one can argue since he’s invisible. 

Pico has just mentioned that his own father was not happy with his own life choices -- why Hiroko never met him -- but we aren’t learning much about his family so far. Settling in Britain or Japan is a little like ignoring your own family, though not as decisive. More passive aggressive than outright rude.

P88 "Tokyo Story" and Yasujiro Ozu are a call back to The Elegance of the Hedgehog, unsurprisingly.

P94 Of course the brother is the absent heart of this book. Such an interesting story and perhaps a plot less predictable than the story of aging and death. You expect some kind of resolution or else why is he writing this? (And why is he giving so much information for a potential stalker? Have they moved now?) From my perspective, I see that siblings have options that only children don’t have. Or they do but it would be even more egregious. 

Here’s a question, Are Hiroko’s charming lines her English or his translation of her Japanese? What language do they usually speak? 

P112 The battleship Hiei that sank at First Guadalcanal was named after Mount Hiei. That was the battle in which the USS Barton was sunk (family connection to our book club. A better way of putting this is that First Guadalcanal was the battle in which both the Hiei and the USS Barton were sunk.) 

Just hit the part where everyone is reminiscing about the past and in particular their work past. There are different ways to count this, but I’d say I’ve had around fifteen different jobs, all of which I liked to some extent. My twelve years of greening work is the longest period I’ve done the same thing. I worked in tech for a similar time but as a writer, tester, and coder. And for many different employers. Though it is also seasonal, so I imagine I worked more hours as a bookstore clerk. Hard to know for sure.

P139 Being sent to Manchuria was probably the best way to survive the war. You were very fortunate if you were sent east and survived.

P143 Transient global amnesia -- oh, great, something new I’ve never heard of to worry about. I did think it didn’t seem like a stroke, but this would be very confusing. Of course if you were alone you would probably just go to sleep and wake up fine. So maybe not so bad.

P158 Interesting about forgetting your own observations. I know this is true for me as well thanks to blogging, especially with books. Hard to know when you’re plagiarizing yourself. 

P191 He mentions Thoreau translating the Lotus Sutra but not that he was reading the Bhagavad Gita at Walden. Like Iyer, he was a mix of Western, Indian, and Japanese influences. I didn’t say anything about the passage with the Dalai Lama but he captured what I had a problem with on my friend’s chanting tour of South Asia -- the places are of no real importance. I was thinking -- with some pride -- that there are no particular sites associated with philosophy. The Academy in Athens is an exception, but it isn’t regarded as sacred or anything. Walden Pond, come to think of it, probably has as much status as the Academy does. And that makes sense as it is the nature experienced there that is important. Unlike with a religious “sacred place” the connection with nature Thoreau experienced there is available to anyone willing to look for it. Of course Thoreau would say this patch of nature is not so different from others so you shouldn’t have to travel there to see what ought to be visible everywhere. 

I guess I was naive to expect any kind of resolution in this book. I am surprised that he has taken the liberty he has with the brother’s story. Not exactly kind, but a reasonable guess, I guess. And I’m still surprised he gives so much personal information. Unless he’s fictionalized it.

P227 I love the way he shows us Hiroko, 
“ ‘You writing autumn story?’...

“ ‘Not so much story,’ I say. If autumn is a religion, it’s something you recite -- or see with your eyes closed -- more than put into words.

“ ‘Like Ozu movie?’ she asks in apprehension. My attempts to inflict the seasonal explorations of mood and dissolving families on her have not been a success...

“ ‘You know me,’ I say. ‘I’m so greedy for sunlight, I need to be pushed into the dark.’

“ ‘Your book, nothing happening?’

“ ‘Well, not exactly nothing. But what happens is not so visible. It’s hard to see which parts are important until years later. Or maybe never.’

“I see her watch me skeptically, and gird myself.

“ ‘When I came here, I was so taken by everything that was different, full of drama, so distinctly Japanese. Like you when you go to America. Now I see it’s the spaces where nothing is happening where one has to make a life.’

“ ‘Little no-action movie,’ she says, visibly unpersuaded, and closing the pages of this book without needing to open them. ‘Rain come down window. Car stuck in traffic jam. Quiet music playing. Autumn light.’ 

“Exactly.”

I would love to hear her synopsis of The Tale of Genji. Perfumed men raping every women they see then musing about becoming monks but never getting round to it.

It's curious to me that he briefly references his family's connection to Theosophy without any suggestion of the Hindu influences. I wonder if this was part of his awkward relationship with his father?

337. Nimitz

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Random

It is probably a good indication of how bored I am that I was kind of excited when our street sign started to fall off and I needed to repair it. It is, of course, an awkward job. The screw that has failed is at the full extension point of our extension ladder. So working on this means balancing a little higher than I’m entirely comfortable with. Thus, I am not repairing the stripped out screw hole the way I would if it were more accessible. I just bought a replacement screw -- the old one was so rusty it is obvious it hasn’t been in contact with the wood for decades. And I bought some plastic screw inserts that you screw in to fill the hole before screwing the new screw into the plastic. This should be reasonably easy to do at the top of our ladder. I even have my drill/driver charging at home to make this even easier. I'm hoping this paragraph will also serve as a “not-suicide” note in the event things go south.

We are now in the June lull of event greening season (I'm still way behind with my publishing) so I had breakfast at the Pork Store and learned that one of my favorite waitresses is moving to Dallas in July. At this point I can’t blame anyone for leaving SF, but it is unfortunate.


Someone on the Chronicle wrote something this week pointing out that the city -- and this means both the politicians and the people -- are willing to do anything to address the housing shortage so long as it doesn’t mean building new housing. That just about sums it up. And this goes nicely with our eagerness to solve the global warming problem so long as it doesn’t mean any change in lifestyle. The obesity situation also suggests itself here.


There’s also a political/sociological aspect to this. To change the world you have to have an unreasonable expectation that change is possible. I don’t believe people are currently willing to make things better. Perhaps it is better to be young and naive (or ignorant) than to see how bad the situation really is. 


If I knew more about Berthier, I would not be surprised to learn that at the beginning, before Napoleon first crossed the Alps into Italy, Berthier was pessimistic based on the very real difficulties of conducting a war on the far side of the Alps while the Royal Navy controlled the Med. I suspect Berthier both understood the difficulties and had reasonable ideas for how to overcome them. But you need a Napoleon who thinks unreasonable things are possible before anyone will attempt the thing. And yes, I’ve been thinking about the Waterloo campaign again and I’m even more convinced that Napoleon could have pulled it off if his army had moved the way it always had when Berthier was his Chief of Staff. Hypotheticals in history are never a sure thing, but this one is relatively easy when you consider how close run the real history was. 

Biography of Nimitz

This is a book I read a long time ago and own a copy of. I’ve been thinking that it was a great introduction to the USN both leading up to and during the Pacific War. Like a one book guide to the USN in the Pacific War. But, as I said, it had been a long time since I’d read it, so I thought I should give it another read to confirm this. There’s a lot I had remembered but some details I had forgotten. I just ran into one which inspired me to write this.

P164 “In June 1936 Chet [Chester Nimitz’s only son] was graduated from the Naval Academy and, after a period of leave, went to sea in the cruiser Indianapolis...” There’s nothing unusual about this except that the Indianapolis was Spruance’s flagship for much of the time he commanded 5th Fleet and the ship was sunk in particularly unfortunate circumstances at the very end of the war.

I had remembered that it was Nimitz who built the submarine base at Pearl Harbor, and that he had been an advocate of the circular sailing formation that became standard during the war. I had forgotten that he had the idea for underway oil replenishment and was serving as an officer on the first oiler to make it work while sending USN destroyers to Britain after the USA entered the Great War. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of both the circular formation and underway replenishment in the conduct of the Pacific War.

P167 And here’s my favorite Nimitz story -- and this one I have remembered, though I thought it was in San Diego, not Long Beach. Doesn’t matter.

I mis-remembered the story about who transported Roosevelt on a destroyer back in the 20s? It was Halsey, not Nimitz. And it was apparently someone other than Spruance who came up with the “platoon” system for the Big Blue Fleet. And speaking of both of these matters, it occurs to me that Halsey is a perfect example of the Peter Principle. Right up until he took command of 3rd Fleet, everything went perfectly for him and the USN. He just was not up to that last step. If they had only given him 7th Fleet instead, and Kinkaid 3rd Fleet. Only he would not have been happy, though maybe MacArthur could have made him see reason. That’s an odd thing to say.

336. B2B Expo +

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Medium

Was on Medium just now and I’m still amazed by how much interesting content they have. An interesting piece on Seneca -- one of many? -- and another on existentialism and nihilism. Medium is almost always a handy way to start down a philosophical path. 

Seneca is always a mixed bag for me, Stoicism makes wonderful sense if you are a Stoic, the same is true with Buddhism. But this piece focused on Seneca’s ideas on how best to spend your time, or how best to not waste it. And this is problematic for the same reason Buddhism is problematic -- deciding what constitutes “wasted time” is not easy. Much of what Seneca -- or Cicero, for that matter -- would consider well spent time I would consider questionable at best. I can’t recall the name of the Roman poet I love to quote (Horace) who is so well spoken on enjoying life while you’re young, but I like his ideas too. Seneca was keen on spending time doing things that, in the end, ironically, probably had very little value. In his death tub I wonder if he had any second thoughts. Interesting that Seneca and Marat are both famous for dying in a tub.

Here's Horace:
"Tomorrow and her works defy;
Lay hold upon the present hour,
And snatch the pleasures passing by,
To put them out of Fortune's power.
Nor love nor love's delights disdain;
Whate'er thou gettist today is gain."

B2B 2019

My goal every year at this time is to avoid working Bay2Breakers. B2B is a charming SF tradition, a combination of a footrace across the peninsula and a party. There are clever costumes. There are always nude men. There’s still a lot of drinking. Working it is a pain. For years I dodged it by working Maker Faire and then last year, when we stopped doing Maker Faire, I switched to Himalayan Fair in Berkeley. This year I was unable to get a shift for that -- I’m not the only one trying to avoid B2B -- so I signed up for a Saturday shift at the B2B Expo instead. 

I wasn’t really happy about that move, but it worked out perfectly. For starters, we’ve been getting a series of winter storms in a month that should be the start of our dry season. Saturday was wet in a major way, so much so that they canceled the Himalayan Fair. And the B2B Expo turns out to be held inside one of the enclosed piers on our waterfront. Aside from some leaks, I got to work inside out of the rain on a day of serious precipitation. 

The only bad part was that I had to work my complete shift because we couldn’t finish before everything from the Expo had been hauled away, revealing all the signs and bundles of newspapers and random trash that the vendors left behind. It was a lot like the early days of volunteering for GreenFestival. Except that I was being paid and, being a much smaller event, it wrapped up hours earlier. 


The Bank Cafe

I’m currently sitting in the just opened remodeled section of the Bank Cafe. Now the center of the space is blocked off including the stairs. This is a huge improvement over before. And by that I mean over the previous blocked off state -- but also the remodel is quite nice, with more seating in the windows, for example and a much better sound system with better music to go with it. The most noticeable change, besides the new wood floor, is that everything overhead is now bright white except for the fire sprinkler pipes and the three oversize pendant shades over the central table, all of which are dark red. The new furniture is an improvement. Both better looking and just not as worn out. There are two small “rooms” on the Kearny side, I’m sitting in one now, and it appears that they are intended to have doors for increased privacy, though the doors are not installed as yet.

The biggest improvement is that we now have windows again for the first time in months. It was pretty oppressive. The trade-off being that not as many people have been working here so the WiFi has been better.

335. CBF 2019

Link to Table of Contents

Cherry Blossom Festival 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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