David’s Journal

Today was an eventful day for Susie and me during the Great October Two-Household Experience. We’re literally in the middle of moving from San Anselmo to El Cerrito. Right about now, we have two fairly incomplete houses.

On the plus side, things have improved dramatically from the time we didn’t have electricity in El Cerrito. Think camping, but with carpeting. (We didn’t bother trying).

Now, one house has all our books and kitchen crap (except for the baking ingredients– Lazy Susan*– and the contents of the fridge/freezer, some which I plan to bring back tonight, in a cooler). It also has a plastic, air-filled bed with an electric pump. Firm mattress when we go to bed. Soft and squishy when we wake up.

The other house has all our furniture, artwork, personal records, and garbage. Lots and lots of garbage. So many things that have somehow accumulated over the last three years of San Anselmodom.

We spent last night in El Cerrito, and I took the day off today. This morning, I unpacked and worked on assembling the kitchen, before returning to San Anselmo to collect some things (tools, CFLs, other essentials).

Every time all of one’s earthly possessions move from one abode to another, at least one thing is bound to break. Or so it seems.

Just now, I have suffered the first inevitable casualty of our move. And this one is a tragedy. Susie and I purchased a pair of floor lamps at either Target or Walmart– who remembers such things?– for our very first home together in Milwaukee. I think they must have cost something like 24 bucks, together.

They managed to survive a cross-country journey to the dry (as it would turn out… keep reading…) land of California. One of them, a bit misshapen but shining as bright as ever, still has it’s Bekin’s tracking sticker on it.

The other, having lived in the living room for the last 3 1/2 years, was to journey across the Bay tonight. I was tired of living in a dim apartment with wall switches that don’t do anything. So I unscrewed the lamp pole at it’s center-most linkage to bend the lamp in half, and I picked it up.

A cascade of broken plaster chunks and brittle plastic rained upon our San Anselmo carpet.

Apparently, the weight at the bottom, to keep the lamp from regularly toppling, was made of plaster. And it had dried out. Maybe. Or perhaps my twisting action was too much for it.

Either way, I didn’t want to leave our San Anselmo home in the dark by absconding with the remaining floor lamp. And I do not yet have a suitable table in El Cerrito for a table lamp.

So I am bringing this unweighted, slightly unstable lamp with me for the time being.

Hopefully the TV, it’s inevitable journey still unscheduled, travels a bit safer.

*= lazy susan is where the baking stuff is stored, and it is not meant to describe my wife.

The media (and commenters in the liberal blogosphere) have been set afire by the cover of the July 21 New Yorker, which hasn’t arrived at my house yet (yes, I’ll fully disclose that I subscribe, although their New York / Coastal elitism jars my good Midwestern sensibilities almost every week).

It illustrates just about every single smear which the Informal Right Wing Smearers are using to coat the presumptive Democratic nominee.

I agree with just about every official statement (and one reader comment in particular) on the matter…

The Obama campaign: “The New Yorker may think… that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”

The McCain campaign: “We completely agree with the Obama campaign.”

The New Yorker Editor David Remnick: “It always occurs to you that things will be misinterpreted or taken out of context. But I think that’s the case of all political satire. The fact is, it’s not a satire about Obama– it’s a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama.”

A Huffington Post commenter: “Just the fact that David Remnick has to explain the picture’s message means it has failed as political satire.”

… but the media coverage of this so-called controversy is what’s most offensive (to me); the media, when addressing these so-called “smears,” routinely includes the rumor that Barack Obama is a Muslim as one of these smears.

This false rumor is an untruth, and it’s an untruth that is meant to undermine the Obama candidacy by playing to the fears of some Americans. But to play along with the assertion that “accusing” a man of being a Muslim is “offensive” does nothing constructive– it merely reinforces the ever-dated notion that one’s faith plays a role in one’s ability to govern.

Sadly, it’s clear that we’re decades (at best) away from ever having a Muslim president, let alone a president of a non-Christian faith. In this political culture, it’d be hard to fathom a Mormon or another Catholic president.

The whole B. Obama / H. Clinton thing aside, I figure the Future will show up eventually. But so much for 2008.

The problem seemed especially acute in the San Francisco Bay Area. In Palo Alto, Amy Kawadler said she had been told there was no matzo at the Mollie Stone’s Market, which carries a wide selection of kosher food, but she noticed a lone box making its way down a checkout conveyor.

When she inquired about it, the customer “grabbed it and pressed it against his chest and said, ‘This is my matzo,’ ” Ms. Kawadler said. He directed her to the section where one last box, of onion poppy matzo, remained, resting on the back of a bottom shelf. “I ran with my hands in the air, pumping the box in my hand saying, ‘I got the last box of matzo!’ ” Ms. Kawadler said.

“It was the talk of our seder.”

— Jennifer Steinhauer, “Who’s Hiding the Matzo?”, The New York Times, April 22, 2008

This was not the talk of my seder.

Rather, I showed up rather sheepishly and announced the Great Marin County Matzo Crisis of 2008. My gracious hosts, who proudly eat matzo only one evening out of the year (and in the process add new meaning to the fundamental question: “Why is this night different from all other nights”) offered me their leftover matzo on my way out.

I pointed out that instead of giving me their matzo, they should sell it on Craigslist for $10 a box. Suppy and demand and all that.

But in the Spirit of the Season or something, they collected all the remaining matzos from the table, placed whole wheat and regular side-by-side in a King David matzo box, and bid me adieu.

Later, I found out that my empty-nest parents are matzo hoarders. They bought five boxes back east in the matzo-rich land of Buffalo Grove.

First of all, I finally decided who to vote for in the Democratic Primary back on February 5. It wasn’t easy, but I did vote for one of the two candidates that is going to win the Democratic nomination. Eventually.

Anyhow, I am not publicly endorsing one candidate or the other (partly because no one cares, but mainly because that would be their political death sentence). Besides, I am probably not voting my true instincts, if you believe ABC News.
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We went up to the top of Mount Tamalpais yesterday, and found our house.

Here is that same picture, blown up a bit.

As it turns out, we can’t actually see our house, since it is blocked by a tree, but using the Seminary, an ugly apartment building across the street and down the block a bit, and the bank as guides, I can tell you exactly where it is.

Also, now I know why I can’t see Mount Tamalpais from our kitchen window.

A few months late, I finally removed the graphic that existed over there, to the right. It was meant to follow the November election, but that election is kinda sorta over.

I have replaced it with the badge for the official Chicago 2016 Olympic Bid, under the same headline (”The Race Is On”). I figure I want Chicago to get positive global attention, but I don’t actually live there anymore, so I won’t have to put up with the hassle of the Olympics happening locally.

Besides: Chicago’s domestic competition is Los Angeles?? San Francisco, an early opponent, would have been a worthy competitor.

That is, until Mayor Newsom of San Francisco quite embarrassingly got caught with his city’s pants down. The stadium he was proposing to use for the Olympics was going to double as the 49ers’ new stadium as well.

No one bothered to tell this to the 49ers, who decided to (publicly) announce (to everyone’s surprise) that they were actually going to move the team to Santa Clara. Oops.

As it turns out, nothing is certain. Nothing, except that San Francisco is out of the race.

Go, Chicago, go.

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Here we go. Just the sort of thing to bring me back to my blog.

A celebration!

“Marquette University students and staff celebrated Wednesday after their namesake freeway interchange project reopened a key route to the downtown campus,” writes Larry Sandler of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Yes, it’s true. The Wisconsin Ave. bridge over Interstate 43 in downtown Milwaukee was shut down as part of the Marquette Interchange reconstruction project, a big mess of a project I was lucky to miss out on by strategically moving to California (where they wisely let their roads rot and turn to gravel, before thinking about planning to think about replacing them).

This particular bridge closure was bad news to Marquette students trying to get to the Boston Store, or other Westown institutions like one of several government buildings.

But, fortunately, the bridge is reopened. Sandler writes:

“Students living in nearby Straz Hall have hosted bridge-related events to hail the reopening, [Toby Peters, the university’s associate vice president for administration] said.”

But this story turns tragic. You see, all the festivities that were planned didn’t quite happen as planned.

The celebrating students, continued Sandler, had “to convert a card tournament to a game of euchre when they realized that none of them actually knew how to play bridge.”

D’oh.

“My Very Educated Mother Just Said, ‘Uh-oh, No Pluto.’ ”

So I was minding my own business at 65 mph in the slow lane of Highway 101, moseyin’ my way through the Novato Narrows on the way to work, when all of a sudden, the lane ahead of me comes to a complete stop, and starts lurching over to the left.

Seeing this from a good distance, I gracefully slide over to the left lane, and pass the kerfuffle at a safe 15 mph.

In the right lane is a farm vehicle travelling at a rate of speed which one would expect a cow to travel if she were trying to get the hell out of town.

On the shoulder, I see a man galloping at full speed.

A short distance ahead of the man, I could see that which he was chasing: a trio of allegedly Happy Cows (for we all know that Happy Cows Come From California.)

These particular Happy Cows were high-tailing it to Redwood Country for a lovely and relaxing Holiday, I presume.

Oldenburg, Germany (AP)—A court sentenced a 21-year-old woman and a 24-year-old man Monday to a life in prison for torturing, killing and robbing a 54-year-old man’s wheelchair. Prior to its murder, the wheelchair suffered because its owner had multiple sclerosis.

A 17-year-old youth and a 16-year-old girl who also participated in the murder were sentenced to 8 1/2 and six years in prison because they were juveniles.

The wheelchair was stabbed to death in its apartment in Wilhelmshaven in northern Germany on October 2, 2005, according to judge Dietrich Janssen.

The man in the wheelchair knew one of the group and invited all of them to his apartment. They had been drinking before they attacked and killed his wheelchair and stealing its mobile phones and his wallet.

Man bites dog, anyone? The headline is real. The actual AP story as printed in the San Francisco Chronicle is here.

Furthermore, why is this international news? It’s a tragedy, but I shouldn’t be reading about this in the San Francisco Chronicle. I should be reading about it in the Metro section of the Wilhelmshaven Countryside.

DETROIT — A 16-year-old girl who tricked her parents into getting her a passport and then flew on an airplane to the Mideast to be with a man she met on MySpace.com has returned to Michigan.

U.S. officials in Jordan persuaded Katherine R. Lester to turn around and go home on yet another airplane before she reached the West Bank. Lester arrived at Bishop International Airport on an airplane late Friday and was taken to a private, airplane-free area to be reunited with her family.

She disappeared Monday after talking her parents into getting her a passport by saying she was going to Canada— via automobile, not airplane— with friends.

“This just goes to show how unsafe it is to have airplanes in our society,” said Richard Marks, president of Americans Against Aviation, a leading group dedicated to protecting children from experiencing airplanes, tarmacs, airports, peanuts, and anything else pertaining to commercial or private aviation.

Julianne Denver, a Detroit mother of three, agrees. “To have airplanes, it’s just so tempting.” Denver doesn’t allow her children to see airplanes, and if one appears in the sky, she quickly ushers her children indoors.

Airplanes are a new innovation in travel that makes it much easier for teenagers to travel from the safety of American soil to much stranger lands such as England, Tanzania, or even Jordan, where young Lester found herself.

“It’s 10 o’clock, and where are your children?” asks Marks. “If they travel by foot, or even by car, it’s easy to tell. But with airplanes… God only knows what sort of trouble they can get into.”

“Kids will always be kids,” adds Denver. “But airplanes hardly allows kids to be kids in the first place.

“We must protect our children now.”

What gets me about the story of High School District 214 School Board member Leslie Pinney is not that she is using her position of power to opine about her sense of morality, and to attempt to enforce these right-of-mainstream sensibilities onto the students of this northwest suburban Chicago school district.

Leslie Pinney wants to ban books at the district she helps to oversee. She isn’t the first school board member in the history of school boards to try and do this.

Some of the titles she cites as being “littered with lewd language and graphic sexual references inappropriate for teens” have been cited before. They will be cited again. Reasonable parents, teachers, and school board members will argue that these books are actually quite beneficial, and ultimately the overall mores of the community will prevail.

What is most striking about this story is the second paragraph of the Daily Herald article that brought this story to my attention.

Leslie Pinney, who compares some of these titles to pornography, hasn’t actually read a single book on her list.

Why?

“I don’t know if I would want to,” she told the Daily Herald reporter.

I had Monday morning off, so I drove Susie to her job in Central San Rafael. About six blocks away from her office, I noticed small groups of Latinos walking in the opposite direction.

They were waving American flags, signs, the whole array of rally paraphernalia. Four people in one group, six in another, a pair in a third… no sense of organization, other than the fact they were walking west as I drove east. Unaware of any planned demonstrations in San Rafael, I equated this display to my past experiences of San Rafaelian demonstrations.

Twice now, I have witnessed demonstrations for peace on the streets of Central San Rafael. In a politically monotonous region in which everyone hates Bush et al. with unrepentant reverence, these demonstrations have been exclusively held by a miniscule group of elderly former radicals, confined to the sidewalks while the BMW/Prius-driving, latte-sipping Marinites drive by. They politely honk their horn in solidarity or something, using a rhythm that denotes support. Like “Hooray for you, standing out there in the rain, advocating for the cause I hold so dearly to my heart, but can’t fight for, because I am too busy paying my Marin-sized mortgage.”

It wasn’t rainy this day. It was 75º and sunny, in fact. I dropped off Susie at her office. Then, I had a very specific goal in mind. Go home, do laundry, straighten the house a bit. That was my plan for the day. Eager for something to punctuate that, I decided that it was time for a donut.

The donut shop was a block away, and as I started to walk, I thought to myself how glad I was that this particular business was owned by Asian immigrants, not Latino immigrants (especially as I walked past the Latino-owned businesses in this section of town and saw that they were proudly advertising the fact that they would not be open this day).

I picked up a donut, dropped a tip in the bucket, and started to stroll towards the sirens I began to hear. For now, in addition to the hodgepodge of sign-displaying, flag-waving groups that were populating the streets, I heard sirens and saw the San Rafael police, parking enforcers and Marin County sheriffs begin to head westward as well.

Heading north on Lincoln, I turned west onto Fourth Street. And there, right before me, in the center of Fourth Street, was the beginning of the parade.
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An alleged underpant gnome has finally figured out what phase two of the business plan is.

How it leads to phase three, I have no idea.

(If you’re wondering what the hell I am talking about, just link over here or over here.)

MENOMONIE, Wis. (AP) 4/7/06— A 25-year-old man convicted of stealing hundreds of pairs of underwear was sentenced on Friday to one year in jail

I heard that an angry Frenchman intentionally drove his car into a crowd of wildcat protesters today.

The protesters were angry about a new labor law. The driver was angry that they were standing in the middle of the road. When he tried to drive off after plowing his way through and lightly injuring a few people, the protesters got angry some more. Angry + angry + angry = car gets flipped upside down by mob.

That’s not the interesting part, though.

Because an event in April 2006 and an unrelated event in March 2004 always means a trend, at least according to my neural pathways, I happened to recall this classic story that I wrote up in my blog at the time:

Très désolé
3/17/2004
From the “People” category — posted at around 13:34

In France, a man known simply as “Pierre” thought he found Osama bin Laden.

So he aimed his car at him and accelerated.

Not only did “Pierre” miss, thus wrecking his own car, but it turns out that he was mistaken.

The man he tried to hit with his car was not, in fact, Osama bin Laden.

“Pierre” was ordered to pay $615 and sentenced to a three-month suspended prison term.

Coincidence? Je pense pas.

These people (myself included) are having a Cheesecake Party:

If you haven’t already heard, I am leaving the land of community access for the land of public television (KRCB-TV, to be precise).

I was shocked to discover that many of the people in this picture learned all they know about Final Cut Pro editing, videography, and/or television studio production from me.

Amazing how many minds you can corrupt in such a short amount of time, eh?

It was 6:04. I had to teach a class at 6:30. I hadn’t eaten. And I forgot to bring dinner.

So I rushed out the front door of Petaluma Community Access, aiming for my car, so I could rush off to some fast food restaurant.

Then I stopped. Looked up.

Something wasn’t quite right.

That’s snow (yes, a meager sprinkling by most reasonable standards, but unexpected just the same) on Sonoma Mountain, as seen from the front door of my workplace.

It’s a scorned field, this access world I teach and work in. But someone has to do it.

Asked by Oprah Winfrey if he worried about ruffling feathers [as host of Sunday night’s Oscars telecast], the star of cable TV’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” was self-deprecating— at first.

“If I had a movie career, I might worry about that,” he said. “But what can they do to a guy who’s on basic cable? Can they bump me down to public access?”

The cover (yes, cover— and above the fold, too) of today’s Marin Independent Journal featured this picture:

Rather than sponsor a “Caption This Photo” contest, which might be equally as amusing, I will instead mention that the house in the background is for sale (and the woman in the background is the real estate agent). I looked up the house on the MLS, and saw that has been remodeled with many upgrades, including bamboo floors. It has two jacuzzi tubs, and it is located just a few blocks from the community pool.

This 1,600 square foot three bedroom, three bath ranch on a third of an acre in beautiful Marinwood is listed at only $942,000.

Full disclosure: it is overrun with a flock of wild turkeys that chase away visitors trying to attend the open house.

Perfect for bird lovers.