jackkansas

Donald Duck on Ludes

2009-12-13T05:48:26Z

Prologue:
I moved to from Somerville, Mass., to Berkeley, Calif., in 1978. A major factor in my decision to relocate was the desire for a slower, less frenetic lifestyle than that enjoyed inside the Route 128 beltway. It astonished me that an area so picturesque, so beautiful as the San Francisco Bay Area was so seemingly underpopulated and underdeveloped.

In partcular, I found driving in Berkeley to be a joy. After nearly ten years of Boston's laissez-faire traffic, where the strong get home and the weak get nowhere ... where the right of way belongs to whoever has the balls to take it ... where you make your own lanes ... where some of the most hair-raising driving takes place at less than thirty m.p.h. ... and in whose quasi-legal demolition derby the tie-breaker is often "oldest car wins" ... I was without peer — but I was ready for a change. Driving in Berkeley was like being in an alternate universe. Traffic was light ... parking places were abundant throughout the city, even downtown ... drivers for the most part obeyed the rules of the road and extended various courtesies to each other and to pedestrians — signaling ... ceding the right of way ... and in general behaving like civilized adults.

None of this could last, of course. Over the decades, under pressure to expand the tax base and to make more housing available for University of California students, the Berkeley City Council abandoned the anti-development regulations that had kept Berkeley small and personal and working class, and although the new massive developments were well-camouflaged and whose EISs theoretically minimized the impact on local traffic and parking, the fact is that traffic skyrocketed and parking evaporated. Add to the mix an exponential increase in bicycles and a new breed of fanatical kamikaze pedestrians, and everything is much more stressful than it used to be. The new breed, arrogant, bursting with attitude, and suffused with sanctimonious entitlement, made for a much choppier sea than earlier days. You have the drivers — new students at Cal, learning their way through a town whose one-way streets and unexpected traffic barriers are often non-obvious, in search of increasing difficult-to-find parking places ... old-time residents of Berkeley, moving at a snail's pace, oblivious to everyone and everything around them ... smart boys from Oakland in old, battered cars, two to five guys in hooded sweatshirts, scowling at everyone and everything ... wealthier grads and business folk in their Mercedes and BMWs and Jaguars, driving like they own the road. You have bicyclists — who feel that the karmic credit they've earned by eschewing motor vehicles entitles them to ignore any and all traffic regulations or safety guidelines. And you have pedestrians — imbued with a sense of immortality because they have a guaranteed right-of-way card and whose sense of immortality leads them to step into moving traffic without looking, even though their bluejeans and dark sweatshirts render them invisible in night traffic. And then there's me — and you should pray to God that I see you before you pull your goofball stunts.

It was in this environment, after I started driving LCB to work on a regular basis, that The Educator was born. I suppose he had always been there in nascent form, left over from the days in Boston. where the words "Hey! ASSHOLE!" in the rich Boston Irish-Italian patois often cleared the road. I decided that much of the stupidity and arrogance exhibited by those with whom I shared the road was due to insufficient socialization, insufficient feedback between them and their fellow travellers ... an insulation from the consequences of poor decision-making. Without respect for the law, society falls into anarchy. As a former teacher, I decided to do my small part to remedy the situation. I would engage my fellow travellers in dialogue, however brief. I would endeavor to enlighten them, to transform them, to gently show them the error of their ways and to inspire them to correct their behavior, to go and sin no more. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it.

Stripped of profanity and various speculations about the sexual and ethnic characteristics of my students, the dialogue was mostly reduced to helpful suggestions like — "We don't do that in this country" ... "In America, we drive on the right" ... "Turning left from the right-hand lane is ill advised" ... "Signals too complicated for you?" ... "You might want to put a light on that bike" (addressed to a compadre passing on the right, with only the click of his derailleurs to alert me to his speeding presence) ... "Stupid shit like that will get you killed!" (said to pedestrians blithely striding across moving traffic against the WALK signal). After the first few lessons, when she saw my hands move toward the electronic window controls to lower the window for a conversation, LCB would say, "Just what to you think you're doing?" "Teaching," I would reply, a reference to one of her favorite scenes in the Harry Potter oeuvre. "You're going to get us shot," LCB grimaced, but you can't live your life like a victim, and if I'm shot bringing Traffic Truth to the heathen, I welcome my martyr's death. A few weeks ago, LCB and I had parked in the Andronico's lot on Solano Ave., and I was crossing Solano to pick up a pizza at Zachary's — traffic is always slow on that part of Solano, and drivers get impatient with pedestrians in the crosswalk, even though many signs indicate that pedestrians have the right of way. I was in the middle of the street when some smart monkey decides he's had enough, pulls out into the opposite lane, speeds past the cars ahead of him, then pulls back in to blast through the crosswalk just inches from me, completely ignoring the "State Law Says Stop for Pedestrians in the Crosswalk" sign that bends in the breeze of his prop wash. "STOP FOR PEDESTRIANS IN THE CROSSWALK, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!" I scream at him, wishing that I had a three-pound fishing weight in a pair of panty hose to express myself better. One of the oldsters lounging on the bench in front of Peet's Coffee grinned at me. "Like they can't see you," he chuckled, and we exchanged high fives.

A Few Days Ago:
The fact that I've been ill for over a week doesn't mean that I don't drive LCB to work, especially in this cold, inclement weather. One of my back routes between the Claremont exit from eastbound Hwy 24 to the Press involves taking Ellsworth Street from Channing to Bancroft, then over to Oxford Street and Berkeley Way. I was heading up Ellsworth (which is one-way at that point) when a driver of a different sexuality and ethnicity than myself illegally turned her brand new Mercedes (ever notice how the Mercedes hood ornament looks like the pucker in a chicken's asshole?) into Ellsworth. I flashed my brights, leaned on the horn, and jammed on the brakes, and got lucky as the [young woman] turned into a convenient driveway. I lowered the window, prepared to deliver an object sermon to the extent that this was a one-way street, young lady, when I realized that the only thing coming out of my mouth was a dull croaking. I had lost my voice. I sounded ... well, I sounded just like ... sure, you got it, I tipped my hand ... Donald Duck on ludes.

Tales of the Kitties — Wonder of Wonders!

2009-12-09T19:27:35Z

Not once during the past years that Gogo has lived with LCB and I has she allowed me to hold her over my left shoulder. She allows (yay, invites) endless cuddling in an astonishing variety of positions — but the minute I try to move her to my left shoulder, she makes a snarky little mrowr! of distaste ("No means no! Don't touch me there!") and moves away. This is all the more galling since this is precisely the position in which LCB holds her all the time. Jealous doesn't begin to cover it.

Until this morning, when she hopped up onto the table and crawled up over my left shoulder — not once, but twice! We had two long comfortable cuddles. I blame the cold, but I'll take what I can get.

Six Days of Flu

2009-12-09T19:19:58Z

... dreams ... not "the house" this time ... more like a river of India ink, flowing with junk like Dorothy's tornado heading for Oz ... thoughts wriggling like pink lamprays in search of prey ... or bony, phosphorescent fishes from great depths ... Prince's "Purple Rain" on a tape loop ... endless yammering from Crazy Cherry at the top of her voice about things she doesn't understand ... headache ... fever ... joints ache ... sore throat ... eyes too big for their sockets ... Harry Potter marathon on cable (God, I hate Harry Potter, except for some completely inappropriate fantasies about Emma Watson) ... kitties curling close for extra warmth ... racking cough ... revisiting mother's diminishing options for care ... listening to my thirteen-year-old grand-neice in Finland talk to me in Finnish, wondering what kind of lifeline would help this child of two generations of broken marriages (her American grandfather and Finnish grandmother, and her Finnish-American father and Finnish mother) ... time warp overlaps of other times I've had flu in December ... Boston, 1969 ... Somerville, 1976 ... Santa Clara, 1993 ... wonder if having CFS means feeling like this all the time? ... no end in sight ... strange craving for oatmeal ...

Happy Birthday, baronlaw!

2009-12-09T18:55:04Z

May someone grant you a wish!

Snow This Morning

2009-12-07T19:33:05Z

LCB was quite enchanted with the frosted hilltops this morning.

The first of December was covered with snow,
And so was the Turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston,
Though the Berkshires seemed dreamlike
On account of that frostin'
With ten miles behind me
And ten thousand more to go.
There's a song that they sing
When they take to the highway,
A song that they sing
When they take to the sea,
A song that they sing
Of their home in the sky,
Maybe you can believe it
If it helps you to sleep
But singing works just fine for me.

Goodnight, you moonlight ladies,
Rockabye sweet baby James,
Deep greens and blues
Are the colors I choose,
Won't you let me go down in my dreams?
And rockabye, sweet baby James.
— James Taylor, "Sweet Baby James" (1968)

Follow-Up to Thanksgiving Death Watch

2009-12-05T19:30:07Z

My brother The Gunsmith wrote me on Thursday that my mother is awake, alert, and talkative, with no sign of brain damage. The consensus seems to be that after a period of convalescence, she'll be able to return home. My emotions at this point are fairly complex, but I don't think I'll feel celebratory until the possibility of her resuming her independent life are confirmed.

My brother's first wife was a girl from Finland that he met in high school when she was an exchange student. They had one son together before she divorced my brother and returned to Finland with the child. Over the years, the boy has had various problems with the law, and I was under the impression that my brother had disowned him. So I was surprised to learn that my brother has three grandchildren, and that he's recently signed up on FaceBook to stay in touch with them. Hmmm. That makes me ... a great uncle! How time flies!

Also I seem to have the flu — headache, aches and pains, and a cough ... all aggravated by the fact that when I get sick, I go cold turkey on caffeine, which adds withdrawal symptoms to the mix. I hate being sick.

Is There a Hyphen in Anal Compulsive?

2009-11-22T06:06:44Z

This week's issue of the New Yorker is the "food issue," which I knew would appeal to LCB. She insisted that I read the first few paragraphs of an article on rice, and I quickly realized why. The author was discussing his father's compulsive approach to cooking — the father counted the number of raisins he put into his morning oatmeal (fifteen) ... and (here's the kicker) he always measures the water he uses to cook his basmati rice.

I drink a lot of tea, sometimes brewing a single cup, but more often brewing an entire pot. If I'm just making a single cup (heating the water either in a saucepan or a microwave), I'll fill the cup and heat that amount. But if I'm making a pot, I'll measure the water I put into the tea kettle — one 8-oz. cup per intended cup of tea. That's a bit more than the National Bureau of Standards 6-oz. teacup, so I add more tea or teabags to compensate. On weekdays, I usually make a pint of tea at the condo, using three tea bags. On weekend mornings, I make a quart, using five tea bags. I'll also make a quart of tea upon arrival at Sunnyvale as needed, using five teaspoons of loose leaves.

For some reason, the fact that I measure the water into the tea kettle cracks LCB up — she takes this as irrefutable proof that I'm incurably obsessive-compulsive. And even Angel (who readily acknowledged her own obsessive-compulsive nature) thought I was being hysterically silly. I just don't get it. To me it makes perfect sense — why boil more water than you need? Not only is it wasteful of energy, but it takes longer. It makes even more sense after my switch to drinking distilled water twenty-some years ago, since distilled water costs about ten cents per 8-oz. cup. (Ok, I also know that my tea bags cost about twenty cents apiece, sue me.) I suppose one could leave the unused water in the tea kettle in readiness for the next brewing, but you're still wasting time and energy, and using twice-boiled water to make tea is just disgusting. I patiently try to explain this to LCB, but I just get the big razzoo. It is especially galling since LCB is obsessive-compulsive in the extreme about just about everything.

What we need is a fresh perspective. Help me out, LJ-Land — just take this simple poll:

View Poll: Just How Obsessive-Compulsive Are You, Bud?

UNIX Tool & Die — Have root, Will Travel

2009-11-18T22:01:53Z

Crazy Cherry is a luddite. With her philosophical roots in the eighteenth century and her emotional equilibrium controlled from Alpha Centauri, she is imbued with the mundane humanist's disdain and contempt of computers. She often has very perceptive historical and political insights. She also has aspirations of being a novelist, but her fictional efforts are puerile even by today's relaxed standards.

In the late 1980s, through a peculiar sequence of events, I gave her an early model Compaq computer running DOS that I had inherited from a defunct startup so that she could try using MultiMate (a clone of the popular Wang word processors) to write her books. (The first one's free, baby....) She was quick to see the advantages of electronic word processing over a traditional typewriter, and has reached an accommodation of sorts with computers used for writing, although she still sneers at the encroachment of machines into modern life. If it were up the Crazy Cherry, we would go return to the Jeffersonian ideal of a nation of small farmers.

A number of years ago, the Compaq died, and the husband of one of Crazy Cherry's childhood friends purchased and configured a replacement machine for her (paid for by Crazy Cherry's mother, for whose estate I am the trustee). The husband, who I'll call Bill, got her a low-end Dell running Windows XP and connecting to the Internet with a dial-up modem through some IBM/Dell site. Crazy Cherry wrote her books in WordPerfect and used whatever email was native to the Dell site. This worked well enough over the years, although she failed to renew the McAfee service after the first year, which meant the gradually the machine became a haven for assorted malware. When I examined the machine a few months ago, it exhibited quite bizarre behavior, although Crazy Cherry has managed to evolve some extraordinarily complex workarounds.

The upshot came a while back when Microsoft insisted that everyone upgrade to the latest release of Internet Explorer. The download time over a dial-up line was prohibitive, and Crazy Cherry became anxious about losing her email access. I suggested that she request an upgrade CD from Microsoft, which she did. But by then various aspects of her unique psyche had been triggered, and System Control at Alpha Centauri instructed her not to yield to the bullying of the corporate giant whose tentacles were strangling our free society. Upgrade be damned! No bullying conglomerate was going to push her around! Proud and defiant, Joan of Arc foreswore the upgrade! And as she had feared and I had predicted, her email ceased to function with the obsolescent version of IE. When I came down to evaluate her setup, I created a Yahoo! email account for her, which worked for awhile, but eventually failed as the servile lackeys at Yahoo! caved in to the Microsoft juggernaut. "I hate Microsoft!" she shouted, "You work with computers — can't you do anything?" Ah, the magic words — there must be a better way to do it!

My position of trustee of her mother's estate grants me wide discretionary powers, and since her mother had purchased the original computer, I felt that her mother would have been willing to replace the outmoded equipment. I suggested to Crazy Cherry that I could replace the Dell with a MacBook and a laser printer, which would be infinitely cheaper than continuing to use her color inkjet printer for printing manuscript drafts. After some consultation, we decided to get her a 15" MacBook Pro and a HP LaserJet P2055dn printer. Our adventure commences....

Thursday (11/12)
I took the Central Expressway from Sunnyvale to Palo Alto to visit the Apple Store in the Stanford Mall. I was in the store for fifteen minutes without anyone acknowledging my presence, not so much as an "I'll be with you in a moment, sir," and I became sulky and went home.

Friday (11/13)
Fridays I often spend in Walnut Creek. I drove LCB to work in Berkeley, then returned to the condo and did the laundry. I then drove downtown, parked in the defunct Andronico's parking structure, and walked to the Apple Store. I keep thinking that the Walnut Creek Apple Store is hard to get to, but it's certainly easier to reach than the one in Stanford Mall. I had had a previous (and very positive) experience at this store — LCB had purchased a late model Nano (she finds purple irresistable), but discovered it was DOA. I had returned it, expecting all kinds of evasions and delaying tactics, and had been pleasanty surprised when, after a quick automated diagnosis, I was handed a replacement Nano with no backchat. LCB was thrilled.

I walked into the store and was greeted by a pleasant young man. "I'd like to buy a 15-inch MacBook Pro," I said. "Which model?" he asked, and I specified the low end model. "Extended warranty?" he asked, and I said yes. "Free all-in-one printer?" he asked, and I shuddered no — been there, done that, not happy. While a runner was bringing my purchase from inventory, I asked the young man if they sold cross-over Ethernet cables — he was not familiar with the term, but checked Google and Wickipedia from a nearby demonstration machine to see if Apple had a different term for it (they didn't). My purchase arrived, and he swiped my credit card through a small device hanging from his neck that looked like a jogger's lap meter. I was out of the store in less than fifteen minutes. I had forgotten that it was Friday the Thirteenth, but I would remember later.

Saturday (11/14)
LCB and drove down to Sunnyvale so that she could play on the Internet with my big Comcast pipe, and I would do the configuration of the MacBook. Since I plugged the MacBook into the wall socket, it took me awhile to realize that the battery was nonfunctional — although the various lights on the power cord and the battery test lights indicated a full charge, the menulet and the power menus indicated that the battery was DOA. Bother. I had hoped to deliver a working setup to Crazy Cherry in South San Jose on Monday, but this threw my timetable off. I put the MacBook away and amused myself with other things. LCB and I returned to Walnut Creek a few hours after midnight — can't leave the cats unattended for too long or they create mischief.

Sunday (11/15)
I went back to the Apple Store in the morning. There was a smart-looking woman in her late twenties who looked like she might be the manager. "How can I help you?" she asked. "I bought this Friday," I said, "The battery's DOA." She asked for my receipt and poked around the MacBook, then said she'd have one of their "geniuses" (this always cracks me up) look at it. She started the return process. The genius confirmed that the battery was dead, and she sent another runner off to inventory for a replacement machine. She was terribly apologetic about the DOA. The runner returned with a new MacBook, and I was out the door, again in less than fifteen minutes.

Monday (11/16)
I drove LCB to work, then went to the Staples on Shattuck Ave. I have become tired of shopping at Fry's and like to avoid their monolithic stores and endless lines whenever I can. I was hoping to pick up the printer at Staples, and though they had a demonstration model, they were completely out of stock. However, the salesman, a thin older man with a short beard, speaking good English with some kind of faint Slavic accent, was so helpful that I purchased my other gear there, specifically a USB cable, an inexpensive flash drive, and a ream of printer paper. Drove down to Sunnyvale, hoping to find a nearby Staples that had the printer. It turns out that the nearest Staples is on El Camino Real in Menlo Park, near where by Chili's used to be — they had one printer left and agreed to hold it for me. I raced up 101 to Willow, made my way through sluggish lunchtime traffic in downtown Menlo Park, and was on my way home in no time. I spent the rest of the afternoon configuring the MacBook, downloading software updates using the wireless networking with my iMac, and installing OpenOffice from an installation CD that I had thoughtfully prepared earlier.

Tuesday (11/17)
Show time! Drove LCB to work, drove down to Sunnyvale to pick up the gear, then drove down to South San Jose to where Crazy Cherry lives in her mother's house. Crazy Cherry's abusive father had been an interior decorator, and she has done wonders in imposing a Japanese motif on the house and grounds. There were a number of things I needed to accomplish —

• Introduce Crazy Cherry to the MacBook, and specifically to OpenOffice Writer, the word processor
• Transfer her WordPerfect files to the MacBook and make sure she could edit them with Writer
• Install and configure the printer and print sample pages of her files
• Show her how to burn backup CDs of her files

The most challenging task would be transferring the WordPerfect files. The Dell was incapable of burning CDs, and we had been surprised to learn that it also lacked an Ethernet card (I had suggested an upgrade to cable modem, but Comcast had been unable to complete the installation because of the lack of an Ethernet card), making a direct box-to-box connection impossible. My first thought had been to use a flash drive, but LCB, who does lots of work with a mixed Mac-PC environment, had led me to believe that this was not feasible. I had instructed Crazy Cherry to make RTF versions of her files to minimize application incompatibilities. I had bought the inexpensive flash drive on a hunch — if it worked, it was a big win; if it didn't work, not much loss. I had a backup plan that involved FTP'ing the RTF files to one of my shell accounts, then downloading the files to my iMac and burning them to a CD, which I would then mail (USPS) to Crazy Cherry from Sunnyvale — but this was time consuming, and obviously inferior to being able to have her work on her files immediately.

The flash drive, as it turned out, worked flawlessly, but I did encounter an unexpected glitch. My plan had been to copy the RTF files to the flash drive on the Dell, but much to my annoyance, Windows for some obscure reason would not allow me to cd to the subdirectory containing the RTF files. Hidden security bit? Baroque registry setting? Double secret probation? I hate Windows, and the lack of any real tools for dealing with problems is frustrating in the extreme. I finally finessed the issue and used xcopy to copy all of Crazy Cherry's home directory to the flash drive, which I then plugged into the MacBook and used find(1) to locate the RTF files and copy them to their destination directory. They came up fine in Writer.

I won't pretend that everything else went without a hitch, but I got the printer installed and working, burned a backup CD, and by the time it was time to leave to pick up LCB in Berkeley, I had a fully-functional installation.

And on the sixth day, he rested. B^)}

Good Joke Feeds? (Use the Net, Luke!)

2009-11-09T04:50:03Z

For reasons too complicated to explain right now, I need a source of good jokes — you know, the kind that admins used to FAX to each other before the invention of the Internet ... the kind of stuff that circulated as a kind of non-profit spam after the invention of email. I suppose some kind of RSS feed would be fine, but I'm hoping to find one that comes recommended rather than just picking one at random. I need to cheer up an old friend who finds these jokes amusing — she's hip, but easily bored, and would rather receive a filtered selection from me (the filtering is synonymous with caring) rather than just strike out onto the Net herself. Naughty, off-color, salacious are all fine — beneath her professional exterior is a savvy girl who's forgotten more about "naughty" than most people ever know — but witty is preferable to crude. She's a doctor and a shrink, and while not a computer geek, her kids are in the trade. All suggestions appreciated!

Grumpy Old Man

2009-11-06T02:54:56Z

That's not how we invented the wheel when I was your age.

Writer's Block: War and peace

2009-10-22T17:45:47Z

Many countries require all citizens to fulfill a mandatory period of service in the armed forces. Do you agree or disagree with this policy? Do you think the current recruitment system creates or sustains socioeconomic inequality?

Submitted By jeepgirl77

View 607 Answers

As a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, I would absolutely oppose this policy and would support anyone refusing to comply on the basis on conscience. The current recruitment system certainly exploits the appalling socioeconomic inequalities that exist in our society — and the solution to that is to correct the socioeconomic inequalities. Mandatory military service is a form of slavery.

Happy Birthday, aknitwit!

2009-10-20T18:57:21Z

Looks like you have a lovely day for celebration! If I haven't said this before, I'm awfully glad you and your guy are local!

Life with LCB

2009-10-13T20:45:27Z

Cast Study 1 — Aliens. Driving from Berkeley to Walnut Creek on Hwy 24 around 9 p.m. last night, LCB noticed two very bright lights in the sky — probably aircraft, but the lights were very bright and appeared to be moving in tandem. "What are those, Jack?" LCB asked. "Aliens," I replied, then added, "And I'm not going with them." "For which I'm sure they'll be profoundly grateful," LCB muttered. I would have pushed her out of the car, but I was laughing too hard.

Case Study 2 — The Cable Guy. For the past few months, the cable performance at LCB's condo has become more and more flakey. The problems were intermittent, usually occurring late in the evening and on weekends — some channels were pixelated to some degree, and other channels would display no video at all, although feature metadata was present. Channels at the ends of the spectrum were rarely impacted, but channels in the 60–90 range were frequently affected. LCB's cable TV belongs in a museum — it consists of a small General Electric color television of unknown vintage ... a Mitsubishi VCR that is at least ten years old (I know because I bought it to replace LCB's original VCR when it died) ... and an Astound Broadband cable box that is probably five years old. Pulling the power plug on the cable box forces it to reacquire the channels and would temporarily correct the problem, but not for long.

Last night we were watching Return of the Jedi (1983) on channel 69 when the pixelating started. I rotated the stack of electronics in preparation for pulling the power cord on the cable box, then paused to study the configuration. Speculating quietly, I wondered if the antique Mitsubishi VCR, which was positioned between the cable box and the television, might be degrading the cable signal received by the television. We never use the VCR now that LCB gets DVDs from Netflix and watches them on her MacBook, and studying the maze of wires connecting the machines, it seemed like it might be easy to wire around the VCR. I voiced this thought to LCB, who was in the bathroom. "I thought we needed the VCR so that the cable box could talk to my antique television," she said. LCB wrangles computer hardware as part of her job, so I'm inclined to take her word on hardware issues — but I had installed both the VCR and the cable box, and I had no recollection of the VCR being a necessary component to make the configuration function. But I'm no guru in these matters. I expressed my skepticism to LCB and indicated my intention to proceed with my plan — it couldn't hurt. "There'll be no living with her after this," LCB called, a veiled reference to Pirates of the Caribbean (2003). I unplugged the VCR from the television, unplugged the cable box from the VCR, and plugged the cable box directly into the television. Voila! Problem solved. LCB was suitably impressed. "The picture's better than it's ever been!" she exclaimed, "Look at those reds!" And all the small [Imaginary Creatures] were agog....

Case Study 3 — Rainy Day Imaginary Creatures. The [small Imaginary Creatures] have been blissful during the cool weather, and the prospect of actual rain has them ecstatic. This morning they were rummaging around in The Pockets(tm), digging out their little raincoats and festive umbrellas. Each [small Imaginary Creature] has her own umbrella with its own design, and there is often a bit of struggling and confusion when they take a fancy to someone else's rain gear. The [big Imaginary Creature] is often forced to step in and arbitrate. Driving from Walnut Creek to Berkeley on Hwy 24 this morning was slow, but the rain was wonderful.

Rick Nelson's Last Performance in Milwaukee . . .

2009-10-11T06:00:00Z

Q: What was the date and venue of Rick Nelson's last performance in Milwaukee?

I lived in Milwaukee from the summer of 1983 to early spring of 1986 while Ava attended the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW). One snowy winter evening during that period, we attended a Rick Nelson concert with a few of Ava's classmates. Nelson died on December 30, 1985, when the DC-3 carrying him and members of the Stone Canyon Band crashed near DeKalb, Texas. Initial speculation that the cabin fire that caused the crash was caused by the band freebasing cocaine, but subsequent investigation showed that the faulty gasoline cabin heater was the more probable cause. Over the intervening decades, I came to believe that I had seen one of Nelson's last performances before his death. I intended to exploit this fact in a proposed sequence of LJ postings, but before I bet the farm on this fact, I thought I'd take a moment to confirm the exact date and venue of the performance I had seen.

I thought specifying "rick nelson" + "milwaukee" to Google would make short work of this inquiry, but I got over six thousand hits — apparently FaceBook.com and ClassMates.com have things to offer. Adding "music" to the search string cut the hits down to thirty-seven hundred, and adding "performance" reduced the hits to about six hundred — but none of them seemed particularly relevant. Adding "1985" reduced the hits to a little over three hundred, but nothing seemed like a list of performance dates. Lots of noise in the search — apparently there was a Milwaukee enlisted man named Rick Nelson who had died in Iran or somewhere, and the benefit concerts for his family kept showing up. Lots of death notices and accounts of Nelson's demise showed up, including accounts of the investigation of the DC-3 crash and an analysis of the cabin heater malfunction. Nelson's twin sons, Gunnar and Matthew, had formed a rock duo named "Nelson," and accounts of their career and performances inevitably included the name of their father. The Rick Nelson home page did not provide a list of performances. Further complications were introduced by the fact that someone associated with Nelson had recorded the old Jerry Lee Lewis hit "What Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made A Loser Out Of Me)".

This wasn't working, and I thought I'd attack from another angle. The City of Milwaukee home page has a list of performance venues in the city, and I reviewed the home pages for each one, hoping for some kind of history of performers. Nada, although the description of the Eagles Club rang a bell (I remembered a distinctive logo on one of the club's walls, although at the time I thought it was a Masonic or VFW insignia). Unfortunately, incorporating "Eagles" into the search string generated additional noise, although I did turn up the interesting factoid that bassist Randy Meisner, one of the founders of Poco and the Eagles, had also played in the Stone Canyon Band, Nelson's backup band. All this was a lot of fun, in a fucked-up kind of way, but after more than three hours (more like two hundred minutes) of digging through the Internet midden, I really was no nearer to the answer I needed than when I started.

The time between when I pick LCB up in Berkeley and the time we arrive in Walnut Creek is our "Grumpy Time," usually time for LCB to unload about the idiots she works with and the rudness and inconsiderateness of those she tries to assist, and the insanity of working for the State of California in these troubled times. Since her day had been relatively benign, I grouched a bit about my experience searching for the concert date. LCB is by no means unsophisticated in this arena, having honed her shopping skills even before there was an Internet. "Why don't you try calling the library?" she suggested. Why don't you try calling the library!

The next morning, I got the URL for the City of Milwaukee home page from Wikipedia. The city page had a listing of city departments, which included a URL for the Milwaukee Public Library home page. And on the library home page was listed a service called "Ask a Librarian", along with a phone number. A phone number! I dialed the number, and the phone was answered on the third ring by an intelligent elderly woman. I was halfway through formulating my question when she said, "Would you mind awfully holding while I transfer you to our cultural specialist?" Five seconds passed, and an intelligent young man asked what I wanted to know. I explained about the Rick Nelson concert, adding that I thought the date was 1985. He asked me to hold, was gone for perhaps thirty seconds, and returned to tell me that Rick Nelson had last performed in Milwaukee in 1981, 1982, and "on January 19, 1984, at the Eagles Club." (Note that he found the information despite the fact that I had specified an incorrect year.) He asked if I wanted pointers to any reviews of the concert, but I thanked him and said that he'd told me exactly what I needed to know. Elapsed time: less than four minutes.

A: January 19, 1984, at the Eagles Club.

Happy Birthday, deirdremoon!

2009-10-04T09:14:50Z

Great party! Have a wonderful day!

Amory Lovins on KQED This Morning

2009-09-30T19:44:00Z

Amory Lovins, environmentalist and energy consultant, was interviewed on KQED's "Forum" program this morning. The program will be available by podcast and is well worth listening to. Lovins will be speaking Friday (10/02) at the "Reinventing Fire" conference sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Institute at the Westin Hotel (Market Street) in San Francisco. Lovins is non-partisan, non-ideological, and non-dogmatic. He works from the radical notion that revolutionary changes in the way we create and use energy can be accomplished through free market mechanisms, and that controlling climate change can be good business. Check out his house in Colorado!

Audio Separated at Birth?

2009-09-28T20:21:33Z

Driving home from some errands, I heard for the first time Blue Öyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" on KFOX (98.5). Until I paid closer attention to the lyrics, I could have sworn I was listening to the Moody Blues . . .

Tales of the Kitties — Gogo's New Game

2009-09-28T02:41:47Z

Not a new game, really, more of a variation on a theme, an extension of the escape-to-the-hall game. She escapes out the door (usually when you're coming in with arms laden with grocery bags), races down the hall, and hides in the four-step stairwell between the dwelling floor and the lower floor of the entrance area. Fortunately, there is a fire door between the hall and the foyer (which has the elevators and mail boxes for the unit, as well as a small visiting area for realtors and their clients), and there is the main entrance door between the foyer and the Outside World, so her chances of total escape are minimal — but I'm definitely motivated to chase her when she gets out, on the chance that one of the bozos that lives in LCB's secured condo has propped open one or more doors again so that their visiting friends or clients won't have to go to the trouble to buzz them on the intercom. @#$%&*!

Of course, being chased just adds to her fun, but it's not the main object of the game. Once she reaches the stairs, she crouches down, waiting for me to appear, quivering with anticipation. When I show my face, she rolls over on her side and sinks her claws into the carpet on the vertical ascender to the next step up. She wants to be petted and patted, but she also wants me to tug on her, stretching her out while she works her claws deeper into the carpet, a little mock battle. Usually by this point I'm convulsed with laughter, but I'll tug on her for awhile, while she purrs like an Evenrude on low throttle. I realize I'm just reinforcing her naughtiness, but the kitties have very little entertainment in their lives. Eventually I scoop her up into Carrying Position 1 (my right hand on her chest, under her front legs, with her butt on my shoulder), and we return to the condo.

You can train cats after a fashion — you can't really stop them from doing anything, but you can increase the likelihood of them doing something that they want to do. I've taught Gogo that she's entitled to a "legitimate trip to the hall" when I take the garbage or cat litter to the trash chute in the hall. Although she seems like a little goofball most of time, she's usually by the front door within seconds of me starting to make knots in the garbage bag, the signal that I'm getting ready to go out. This doesn't, of course, decrease her efforts to escape, but it adds another dimension to her life. I can't help it, I just adore her.

Pixar and WALL-E

2009-09-27T00:35:03Z

The current issue (Oct. 8, 2009) of the New York Review of Books contains an article titled "Pixar Genius" by Christian Caryl that reviews WALL-E (Pixar Animation Studios), The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company (David A. Price), To Infinity and Beyond: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios (Karen Paik), and The Art of Pixar Short Films (Amid Amidi).

Happy Birthday, tronpublic!

2009-09-25T18:40:36Z

Hope your celebration is harmonious!

Google Books and Engineering Hubris

2009-09-17T04:47:20Z

A friend on another mailing list forwarded an interesting URL to a discussion of the problems with the metadata in the Google Books project:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1701

I have long maintained that the mechanisms of search engines (all based on the old KWIC strategy whose theoretical inadequacies were well-analyzed in the 1960s) were inferior to the more powerful (but more expensive to implement) cataloguing approach used by librarians. The incorporation of human intelligence into a project is always expensive. Read the article and the comments — it's very educational, not just about books, but about the whole approach to problem solving we've embraced.

Michael Moore on Jay Leno

2009-09-15T22:26:38Z

Michael Moore will be on Jay Leno's new prime-time show tonight, promoting his latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, which recently won two awards at the Venice Film Festival.

The Bodhisattva Always Looks Back

2009-08-27T00:50:39Z

The letter I sent to my ex-wife last week was returned unopened marked "Return to Sender." This was not unexpected, and, in fact, if I were a betting man, this is the outcome on which I would have put my money.

One of my failings is a propensity for folding my cards too soon. There are many other explanations of why the baton might have been dropped. I have not tried every possible USPS or email address, and I gave up trying to deal with AT&T's Information Center for telephone numbers, defeated by people for whom English is not even a language. I found her daughter's Gmail address, and for a while contemplated a message that started off, "Hi, K———, you don't know me, I was married to your mother forty years ago, I've got some things of hers but she doesn't want to talk to me, blah, blah, blah," another intricate dance with a neutral intermediary to avoid arousing hurtful memories and antagonisms.

Stop. No.

We are constantly admonished not to look back, and the word on the spiritual street is rife with cautionary tales about those who flout this stricture, tales of Lot's Wife and Orpheus, a western orientation suited to mindlessly moving forward without reflection or compassion, leaving lost selves behind like a baby abandoned in a dumpster. Puritan, really — the saved move on, the damned are lost. But the Bodhisattva always looks back. No stragglers on the Road to Englightenment. Everybody goes home.

We cannot change the Past, the irrevocable events cast in concrete as we pass through the infinitely-thin membrane that divides the Present from the Past — but we can change our perception of the Past, and we can use our enhanced understanding to make better decisions as we go forward. Nothing is written until we write it.

Looking back, I thought I had destroyed a woman, turning her from a leftist activist into guru fodder, dressed in a sari with a candle burning before the picture of her Master. But today I remember her rigidity, her inflexibility, and her utter conviction that only she knew the answers. She loved me when I was crippled, but my growing health threatened her and the basis of our marriage. In retrospect, I'm not surprised that I sought out a different woman, perhaps less intellectual, but more understanding that a relationship involves compromise and the importance of treating each other as equals.

What am I doing here? I needed to iron out some wrinkles in my karma — to give thanks for a long-ago kindness ... to apologize for wrongs unintentionally inflicted ... and to perform actions required by common courtesy and responsibility. I had hoped to do this diplomatically and eloquently, reflecting what I hope marks a milestone in my own spiritual growth, and perhaps opening a door to new spiritual opportunities for us both. B.B. King says, "Fellas! Don't be too proud to beg!" But I've never been very good at begging.

Thank you. I'm sorry. Call me when you want your things back. My work here is done.

Just Too Happy for Words!

2009-08-24T19:04:27Z

Arrived in Sunnyvale this morning and found email from someone who has been very much on my mind of late (I'm currently transcribing the journal that I kept when we were together). She was very young when we were friends, and though my intentions were honorable and I don't think I did any harm, in hindsight I sometimes have second thoughts about it all. I wasn't sure how she would feel about me surfacing after all these years (thank you, Internet!), but she was delighted to hear from me. She has a husband and a lovely daughter, lives south of Eureka, and continues her work as an artist. I don't know how often we will communicate, but it is nice to know where she is and that she is well — I was always sorry that our paths diverged ... and perhaps will converge again.

It is a good day to smile.

On Rereading Old Journals

2009-08-11T20:36:27Z

For most of my life, I've thought of myself as Lawful Good. So it comes as something of a shock while rereading journals from almost forty years ago to realize that I'm actually Chaotic Good. So odd when your self-image and reality collide to generate a hologram.