Infospigot: The Chronicles

News of Note

That paper from yesterday? It's done. It beat me up, too. If you like surprises and want to know what it's about, just send a self-addressed stamped envelope.

Now just have to finish my take-home final for cognitive linguistics. Due tomorrow. It's like one of those long, long multiday bike rides I've done: at a certain point, it's just about managing to ride the thing in any old way you can. By the way, that's the sound of me in a buoyant mood.

Tomorrow, not that anyone asked, is the 25th anniversary of my first date with someone I'm still going out with. That worked out well, I think.

More later.

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Paper

It's finals time, sort of, at UC-Berkeley. I'm in the midst of trying to wrestle a history research paper to the ground. That struggle is signified by the mess around me chair. And after that's done, I have a take-home final to finish for my cognitive linguistics class.

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Still Life, with Rolodex

The dining room table as the sun went down this evening. Kate got the sunflowers earlier this week--or was it just yesterday?

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Vignettes 1 & 2

On BART, going from North Berkeley to downtown Berkeley on my way to class. I got on the last car of a three-car train and since I was going just one stop, I didn't sit down. I stood next to a woman in a motorized wheelchair; she was facing away from me and toward a vacant seat. It's about a two- or three-minute trip from one station to the next, and I was preoccupied. But gradually it dawned on me that the woman in the wheelchair was reading a newspaper that she had place on the vacant seat. She was turning the pages with one of her feet. A couple of days ago I was reading about Christy Brown, the Irish artist (subject of the movie "My Left Foot") who taught himself to paint and write though he had control over just one of his feet. Watching the woman in front of me, I was reminded of that and I thought about the determination it would take to learn to do what she was doing and take it into the world--to be as "normal" as she can be, "normal" defined as what the rest of us are doing. Even in the short time I was watching, I became absorbed in what she was doing. If she had turned and looked at me, I would have said something vague like, "Hey, how's it going?"

Across the aisle from the wheelchair woman sat an African-American woman with a striking straw hat and stylish sunglasses. She was nicely turned out. The straw-hat woman was looking at the wheelchair woman. She looked like she was going to say something. As we approached the Berkeley station, she spoke up. "Excuse me. ... Excuse me," she said, looking at the woman in the wheelchair. "It's amazing ... it's amazing what you're able to do. I really admire you." I couldn't see the wheelchair woman's face. But I heard her say, "Well, that's my life." She sounded matter of fact--no impatience or crossness in her voice. "I admire that," the straw-hat woman said, "the way you've learned to get along with what you have. ...""

The train had stopped at the platform and the doors had opened. I got off and didn't hear any more of the conversation. The straw-hat woman's frankness was as striking to me as the wheelchair woman's physical performance.

* * *

In Ohlone Park with the dog. As usual, he had spotted a squirrel and went into stalking and observation mode. I didn't hurry him along, and we wound up under the canopy of an 80- or 100-foot tall redwood. There was a commotion overhead, a bird fluttering. I looked up and saw that it was a little hawk--a sharp-shinned or a Cooper's. You see them around here; they hunt other birds. The one overhead was pretty well obscured by redwood boughs, but it moved twice into higher branches. It was only when it settled down that I saw it worrying something with its beak--a freshly killed bird, it turned out. A steady fall of downy feathers came down from the tree, and I caught a few. While looking for feathers around the base of the tree, I discovered a used syringe. More feathers fell, maybe from a mockingbird, which, per Harper Lee, would be a shame. Finally the hawk had worked its way to the main course, I guess, because the feathers stopped. I look at the birds around here and often think of the calories they need to survive; how many mockingbirds does a Cooper's hawk need to kill and lunch on to enjoy a healthy, rewarding lifestyle (and raise a family)?

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Tonight's Fund-Raising Call

The Democratic National Committee called tonight. After all the sterling work the party has done since the 2006 election, helped of course by my hefty donations (five figures if you go to the right of the decimal point), a very cheerful and polite and hopeful-sounding young woman wanted to ask me for another couple hundred bucks.

You know, I was on the verge earlier today of writing down the litany of the woes I read about and hear about and witness and the sense I have that we'll be good and tangled up in these things for a good long while: The people blown to pieces day after day after day in Iraq and Afghanistan, the people losing their homes or walking away from them, the four-buck-a-gallon gasoline, and the president who says everything will be fine if we just do things his way. Then there's the stuff we apparently just accept as part of the landscape now--our shambles of an education system (tell me, when's the last time you heard the candidates slug it out over that?), our excellent but increasingly unaffordable system of health care, and the fact we've apparently decided that as a country we can't or prefer not to pay our own way anymore.

Did I mention that domestic ferry passengers in Washington State are being accosted by border agents demanding proof of citizenship? Or the sudden and calamitous decline of the last big salmon runs in California over the last year? Declining dollar, anyone? The estimate of my state's budget deficit for the next year increased from $8 billion to $10 billion to $20 billion in just the last four days (or maybe it didn't).

And then I look at the parties and the trio from whom we'll select our next president. While all of the above is transpiring, one of the Democrats has been reduced to talking about his minister's loony views and apologizing for speaking frankly about the fear and frustration that drives the electorate. His principal opponent is capitalizing on the fear and frustration to sabotage him (and probably herself, too, in the fullness of time). The guy from the other party appears to be promising more of his predecessor's worst policies along with a few gems of his own.

Plenty of tunnel. No light. I know this is not the glass-half-full view. I know I am not being "part of the solution." I am not being the change I've been waiting for or that you've been waiting for either.

You know, tonight's not a good night to ask for that two hundred bucks.

Advice from the Neighbors

One thing about living in Berkeley: You can count on encountering advice from all quarters on how to conduct yourself in public; sometimes the advice is very detailed. Here are a couple examples dealing with the plague of dog waste, Now, the town does have a law on the books about this: If your dog bestows a precious leaving on lawn or sidewalk or village green, you, the dog's best buddy, need to pick it up. And the evidence is that most people do. Given the number of dogs around, it's uncommon to find evidence of their alimentary workings underfoot, and the public garbage cans all over town are brimming with those little plastic newspaper delivery bags, all filled with crap of the non-editorial variety.

I guess I wonder who the signs speak to. If you are the kind of person who thinks nothing of having your dog take a dump on someone else's lawn, and there are plenty of that kind, do these signs stir your conscience and make you think, "Gee--I should really think about other people sometimes!" And if you are the kind of person who does your best not to leave fecal surprises for your fellow townsfolk to step in, do these signs do anything more than irritate you a little? I suppose there's a middle population of people who walk around not knowing what they'll do when their dog unloads. These signs might make them say, "Jeepers! That's a good point!" But since you actually have to prepare yourself to deal with the eventuality that your dog is going to be leaving day-old Alpo around the 'hood--you need to carry bags, etc.--there really isn't a middle group. If you're not prepared, by definition you're in the Dump and Run Club.

As far as the dog urine sign below: What it says may very well be true. Though the sign says in small type at the bottom that it is the work of "people who love dogs and flowers," I question whether the authors have actually observed one of these lovely dogs. Because, even with the most fastidious owners in the world, most dogs are gonna go where they're gonna go (and mostly that means where another dog went).

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This American Gripe

One thing I've made myself get used to is that there's nothing I can do about the way my fellow humans drive. For years and years and years, I've gotten steamed about people blowing through stop signs or speeding up and down residential streets and generally acting like idiots behind the wheel. (No doubt I've given people to get steamed, too).

I had a moment of enlightenment last fall when I was walking the dog and a car came screaming up the street behind us and went through a stop sign. For some reason, it hit me that it was just a coincidence I happened to be there to see it happen, and it would have happened whether I had witnessed it or not. And if I hadn't been there--if I had been at a movie or sitting at home reading a book--the guy would have raced through the stop sign and I would have been none the wiser. I would not have gotten upset or started thinking about what an idiot the guy way or gone through any of the usual mental and emotional gymnastics. What the guy did had nothing to do with me, and getting exercised is a waste of energy and attention.

That insight, if that's what it was, has helped me to stay unengaged on the street. I'm less upset more of the time, and that's a good thing.

Since last fall, three people have been run down and killed in North Berkeley crosswalks. Two of the deaths occurred at the same corner, the third a block away. It's not clear to me that anyone was ever charged in the incidents. Unless a driver is drunk or drug-addled or exhibiting some recklessly outrageous behavior, killing someone with your car seems to be regarded as just one of those things that happens.

We live on a street that has two relatively busy thoroughfares at either end. Both of those bigger streets have stop signs close to our street. And over the 20 years we've lived here, we've become used to the fact that most of the drivers who do slow to what passes for a stop here in Berkeley do so only grudgingly. The implicit impatience--for instance, the cars that continue rolling through the intersection as you cross, the cars that avoid stopping at all so as to get through the intersection before you can step off the curb--is obvious and constant. And I'm not one to stroll ostentatiously across the street, either--since I'm a driver in my other life, I know driver-kind is anxious to get a move on.

So right there is one time that my little mental trick--hey, that guy swerving across the double-yellow line and ignoring the oncoming traffic: as far as I'm concerned, he's not really there--doesn't work so well. When you're actually in the crosswalk and have to interact, however indirectly, with the driver who is worried about not making the next traffic light a block away, that driver really is there.

Late this afternoon: It was a beautiful day here in Berkeley. We were crossing the street over to the school where we sometimes let the dog run. A couple weeks ago, an acquaintance was crossing at this same corner--there's a stop sign and a crosswalk, all installed to make it safer to get to the school. A driver rolled through the stop sign and hit her dog, who somehow was not seriously injured.

So there we were. We started to cross. There was a car to our left. The driver didn't stop; instead, he steered around us as he continued on. There was a car to our right. That driver didn't stop, either. He continued to roll.

I won't go into detail about what objects or epithets may have flown through the air during this intersection encounter. It's not an episode that reflects well on me. I can repeat that one of the drivers explained, somewhere amid a bouquet of f-words, that "I didn't come anywhere close to you" as he rolled through the stop sign into the crosswalk. In other words: Buddy, you're not under my car. What are you complaining about?

Eventually, I calmed down and though about all this. It's true there's nothing I can do to change driver behavior, and nothing is less effective than getting angry with them. Still, what gets to me is what I think I see in these incidents: the basic lack of awareness or care when drivers get behind the wheel that other people are out there in the world and that yes, it's necessary to grant them a shred of attention every once in a while. What a way to live.

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Today's Best Expression

"As mad as a hatter." That's a tried and true formulation, though maybe a little archaic. One of Kate's colleague's has supercharged it and and updated it a little. In reference to someone who might be a little off-center, she's fond of saying, "He's as crazy as a f---ing mad hatter."

So there, Charles Dodgson.

Hey, Where'd Everybody Go?

I would be embarrassed to admit the attention I pay to how many people land on this site. For the last three years or so, the number has been in the low hundreds every day; it has spiked briefly several tiimes, but I don't think it has once hit 1,000. I've also found that in the past couple of years, more and more people arrive on the sprawling Infospigot web property not to partake of the brilliant bons mot but in search of pictures of Mount Shasta or the Haymarket memorials in Chicago. That's fine--glad to be of service.

But in the last ten days, something odd has happened. That steady volume of visitors has shrunk suddenly and rather sharply, to just a few dozen a day. I can't think of any reason this might have happened so quickly. Maybe Google has weeded out a lot of the redundant references to the site. Maybe something else has happened. Hope it wasn't something I said.

This American Gripe

The world is, per custom, full of more serious issues and worthier subjects in my life and others, but sometimes you just have to put all that aside and complain. Listening to one of my several daily fulminations on diverse subjects, Kate said, "You should have your own show--'This American Gripe.' " I like the idea well enough, but so far it hasn't gone further than that (although I will note that as of this writing the exact phrase "this American gripe" appears exactly once in Google's database and that thisamericangripe.com is still available).

So, This American Gripe. Here's one:

I mentioned recently that I got a call from someone in Oregon who wanted to use a picture that I took last year. Kate and I, with dog in tow, drove up to Eugene over Memorial Day weekend, picked up Thom and drove over to Florence, on the coast. A beautiful arched lift bridge carries U.S. 101 over the Siuslaw River there, and I took some pictures of it.

OK, then. I got a phone call about 10 days ago from a woman named Nancy who works for the Harley-Davidson dealership in Coos Bay, well down the coast from Florence. The town has a rhododendron festival, and the Harley place is making up a special T-shirt for the occasion. Nancy said they liked one of the pictured I took and wanted to use it as part of the T-shirt design. I was flattered. Naturally, I said they were welcome to do so; I just asked for a couple of the T-shirts in return for sending them the highest resolution version of the picture I had.

Since I had taken several bridge pictures that I put online, I asked Nancy to describe the one she wanted: It was an image that was obviously taken in the middle of the roadway with one of the bridge arches in the foreground and a car visible far down the road. From the group of shots I had taken, only one fit that description and I emailed the original to Nancy. I remarked that it looked a little darker than the online version of the shot; she agreed and asked whether I had a brighter version; I adjusted the brightness and contrast and color qualities of the picture and sent two more versions for Nancy to compare.

Then she said that the shot I sent her seemed to have been cropped--that the one she was looking at appeared to have been taken a little farther out from the bridge structure than the version I'd sent. I checked to see whether I had cropped the original. Nope. But at this point I suspected that we were not talking about the same picture at all and asked her to send me a copy. She did, and here it is (left--hers) side by side with the original (right--mine).

Well, they are pictures of the same bridge. But if you asked for a copy of the one on the right, and someone sent you the other one, would you think for even a moment that they were the same picture? No, you wouldn't. For her part, Nancy seemed reluctant to believe that the picture she had wasn't my work, even after I told her it wasn't.

Next time, I suppose the smart thing to do would be to ask for a copy of the picture in question before I start trying to hunt for something I don't have.

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