Brother's Keeper

My father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light.
He married a mermaid one fine night.

If you can sing the rest, and you have a commercial boat operator's license and a taste for innkeeping 4 nights a week and solitude the rest, you should apply for the lighthouse operator's position on East Brother Island out here.

A Richmond nonprofit is looking for a couple to serve as lighthouse keepers on East Brother Island, a 1-acre rock in San Pablo Bay. The winning applicants will keep tabs on the flashing Fresnel light and a pair of foghorns, and will run the inn housed in the 1874 lighthouse, which still has a functioning Coast Guard light.

Income from the bed-and-breakfast pays for the island maintenance and supports the lighthouse keepers, who earn between $70,000 and $100,000, plus room and board.

I have a feeling this might be one of those jobs that sounds better when reading about it on a blog than it would in real life.

Modern Wise Men

Thanks to a pointer from Josh. Also worth a look in the Telegraph, weirdly appealing food art.

Peeling the Onion

It's kind of amazing how good The Onion has remained after all these years. It can still make me laugh and spend time poking around absurd articles and spoof videos. So, it was interesting to read this article in the Washington Post Magazine a while back about how they make it all come together. They pretty much invert a normal publication, by choosing the headlines first and then writing the story.

For a headline to have made the first cut, at least two of the six writers in attendance had to okay it, generally an occasion of little fanfare in which a couple of people threw up their hands and murmured with a defeated sigh, "Sure, why the hell not?" Among the survivors were "Sudanese Man Best In Village At Stacking Bodies"; "Really Loud Whistle Guy Takes Every Opportunity To Whistle Loudly"; [and] "Steven Tyler Laid Off From Aerosmith As Band Jobless Rate Hits 20%".

And the Onion is still making money and expanding while real newspapers are struggling for survival.

The rise of the parodic industry poses new riddles for media observers: In years to come, will America's faux news prove a more enduring enterprise than the news itself? What might it mean for our nation that joke news could outlast the institutions it ridicules? "Speaking as a citizen of America, it's a little terrifying that real news is crashing while fake news is growing," said Chet Clem, the Onion's editorial manager. "It's scary. You wonder where people are going to get their facts."

I say: Facts? Facts!?! We don't need no stinkin' facts!!!

Kyla might appreciate the most popular Onion story currently: 26-Year-Old To See Every Asshole He Ever Went To High School With On Night Before Thanksgiving.

The trip back home, scheduled for later this week, will reportedly bring McCabe face-to-face with an endless string of pricks from his past, each of whom he will have to engage in awkward conversation, and generally pretend to be happy about seeing again.

Good thing she's staying on the East coast this year.

Missy and Mom Conquer Madeira

Little did I know that the trails would all be straight up and down. It's all mountainous with terraced hillsides and flowers blooming everywhere except in this photo. Some of the trails were narrow with terrifying dropoffs but we lived to tell the tale. We hiked every other day, from eight to ten challenging miles with a picnic stop for lunch. Missy backpacked a lot of gear in spite of having all our bags transported from one hotel to another. The weather was lovely, in the 60s, and the hotels ranged from adequate to 5-star, all with stunning views. We started on the northwest coast and ended up at the southern port of Funchal. Missy rented a car (stick shift) on two of our days off so we got to explore other places, too. A big bonus was making friends with a couple from Scotland who were part of our tour and traveling the same route. They were faster but stopped to be sure I made it over the rough spots and helped when needed. The trip took 14 hours from Missy's house to our first hotel, and about the same on the way home. It's a long way to go, but it was totally different from anything I'd ever done before and it turned out even better than we had hoped. Missy has many more photos which she will share when she gets past the rush of preparing Thanksgiving for eighteen people.

Room with a View

Birthday sunset from the Claremont.

The morning after.

I took a few days off for Dara's birthday, and we spent them in Berkeley mostly. We had lunch at Chez Panisse, dinner with Rob, and spent the night at the Claremont overlooking Golden Gate and San Francisco. The weather was gorgeous and warm. It wasn't until we got back that we read about the wildfires down south. We don't get those Santa Ana winds up here, and we also had several inches of rainfall a few weeks back. (The Claremont Hotel just missed being burnt to the ground during the Oakland hills fire in 91.) The grass is starting to grow here now and is turning the golden hills light green. Time to shift irises around in the garden and start to fret about mowing again. Hmm, must be time to start thinking about snowboarding.

Post Election Roundup

Here is activist Dara and a neighbor waving signs to oppose Prop 8 (Anti Gay Marriage Prop). Unfortunately, they lost.

In other news, the Harris swing staters managed to pull all their states in for Obama! Congratulations!!! Okay, Kyla, now you can move back home to California. Your job is done. AJ, Ursula: it's okay to get on back to Hawaii now. Keith, you may have to extend your influence out to West Virginia.

As usual, the Onion gets it right. I'm not sure which headline I liked more: Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are or Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job.