The Future of Newspapers, 1981 Edition

"With a five dollar per hour use charge, the new telepaper won't be much competition for the twenty cent street edition". Um, yeah.

Revolutionary

In one of the more bizarre gifts I've ever received, Hal gave me a hand-painted communist propaganda poster with my face in place of the original character. He took my picture on his iPhone, asking me to look slightly upward, like I was "gazing into the future." The photo above is a photoshopped mockup. The poster arrived this week and is a rather startling likeness that improves on the real me.

Now I have to sort out the political correctness of the poster before I display it in the office. With people from Beijing and all over the world coming in to my office, I'm a bit concerned that what seems like lighthearted fun from an American standpoint might be harder to explain than I want to deal with.

Books, Bookstores, and Culture

There's an interesting article in BusinessWeek called Autopsy of an Indie Bookseller. It's a play-by-play of the demise of the iconic Cody's bookstore. Cody's was to Berkeley what Kepler's is to Menlo Park or Powell's is to Portland. There was also a documentary on PBS about independent bookstores, including Kepler's (where you can buy the DVD!), called Paperback Dreams that I enjoyed a while back. Both are worth checking out.

Last weekend I read an article in the Chronicle about the new Sam Mendes movie, Revolutionary Road. I read and enjoyed the book many years ago. It sounds like Mendes followed the book as closely as possible, so maybe I can go see it without risking a replay of my reaction to There Will Be Blood. What I liked about the article was the insight on the author Richard Yates and the changing culture around reading.

Even as a National Book Award finalist in 1962, with "Revolutionary Road," Yates had the misfortune of going up against Joseph Heller ("Catch-22"), J.D. Salinger ("Franny and Zooey") and the eventual winner, Walker Percy ("The Moviegoer"). Critics loved "Revolutionary Road"; writers canonized it.

The book centers on a time when men defined themselves not only by their salary but also by the books they read and the ideas they burnished. The National Endowment for the Arts recently came out with a study that showed that after college, most men will not read another literary novel before they die.

Was this Yates' largest obstacle, that a book examining the frailties of the American man begged for a male audience, one that has long since disappeared? The notion of striving for some sort of intellectual weight "with which to impress your neighbors is largely gone," Mendes says.

I'm not sure impressing your neighbors on the local cocktail party circuit even exists any more. Certainly not in our neighborhood. Still, you're a lot better off trying to break the ice in a conversation by talking about American Idol than you are by talking about what you've read lately.

Saving Broadway

Thanks to the wonders of our DVR (sadly Comcast, not Tivo these days), we didn't have to stay awake to see this skit about Broadway characters scheming about how to save Broadway in these tough economic times. It's pretty much one long inside joke for fans of musicals. See if you can spot Taylor Swift. Don't know who Taylor Swift is? Just fergeddaboutit.

No Smoking, Anywhere

It seems that Belmont, a few towns up the peninsula from us here in Redwood City, now has the most restrictive no-smoking ordinance in the state, and the enforcement unit to back it up.

It was Friday, Jan. 9, and Kirk Buckman was working the day shift out of Belmont. "I carry a badge," Buckman said. "It's shiny and gold. Pretty neat."

The law is the first of its kind in California, going far beyond the statewide prohibition against lighting up in businesses, restaurants and bars. In Belmont, it is now illegal to smoke inside any multistory, multiunit dwelling. The City Council says enforcement should be "complaint driven," which means neighbors have to rat each other out before officer Buckman can bring evildoers to the nicotine-stained bar of justice.

The story of how an 84 year old who has "trouble maintaining a thought" got the law enacted is actually pretty interesting.

Squirrel Pate

The dachshunds have certainly been busy cutting down the squirrel population in our yard lately. So, as an update to the red-vs-gray battle reported on previously, I learned in the NYTimes now that the new approach to fixing the problem is: if you can't beat 'em, eat 'em.

These days, however, in farmers’ markets, butcher shops, village pubs and elegant restaurants, squirrel is selling as fast as gamekeepers and hunters can bring it in.

“Part of the interest is curiosity and novelty,” said Barry Shaw of Shaw Meats, who sells squirrel meat at the Wirral Farmers Market near Liverpool. “It’s a great conversation starter for dinner parties.”

And the conversation can start over the squirrel and hazelnut pâté.

Embarrassing Ski Moment

I've fallen backwards when getting off the lift, board strapped to my feet, head over heels down the nearby rocks. I've injured Dara. I've knocked Garrett down so many times he refused to go on the same chair as me for years. While trying to keep up with Kyla, I've fallen upside down under a tree near the lift, unable to get upright, while the chairs all passed over me, each person making sarcastic remarks. But, I have to admit, I've never ended up nearly falling off and having my pants ripped off in the process. Looking at the picture, I have to think: what would Garrett be saying to me sitting there in the chair as I hung upside down awaiting rescue?

Last Reading List of 2008

Wrapping up the year...

A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz. Offbeat fiction following a father and son in Australia, and their bizarre journey through life. To call the father eccentric would be doing him a favor, since he's basically nuts, and the son spends his life trying to compensate. Their lives inevitably revolve around bad uncle Terry, as famous a folk-hero criminal as Ned Kelley. The story was unpredictable in a John Irving kind of way. I swung multiple times between stages of being entertained and wanting to throw the book across the room because it was too silly. In the end, worth sticking through, though.

The Indian Clerk, by David Leavitt. I picked this historical fiction up thinking it would focus on the famous out-of-nowhere Indian mathematician, Ramanujan, who came to Cambridge to publish and (literally) perish. Instead it centers more around fellow mathematician G.H. Hardy and his complex relationship with Ramanujan. Altogether an engaging story fleshing out many real-life characters at Cambridge around the time of World War I, including John Maynard Keynes (you might have heard of him in the midst of our global economic meltdown). There are just enough mathematical nuggets to keep the story glued together, since it's hard to appreciate the motivations without understanding why proving Reimann's hypothesis is compelling to someone. Good book.

The Risk Pool, by Richard Russo. I'd read Empire Falls and enjoyed it, but Mom recommended this one. I have to admit, it was better than Empire Falls and will likely end up higher in my list than Bridge of Sighs, which I'm reading now. The book is the story of a loser but loving father (always in the high-risk pool for insurance, thus the title), his likeable son, and an unstable but loving mother. They cope with life in a small town in upstate New York as the son has to rely more on the hapless father to raise him while his mother suffers a breakdown. One wonders what Russo's upbringing was like. He seems like a slightly more upbeat version of Pat Conroy, but from upstate New York.

The Song Before It Is Sung, by Justin Cartwright. This historical fiction revolves around a conspirator in the attempted assassination of Hitler, Axel von Gottberg. The main character is a modern-day grad student of von Gottberg's closest friend, an Oxford professor who dies and leaves his papers to the student. He relentlessly tracks down the details of their relationship, pretty much wrecking his own relationships in the process. As you might expect, the whole thing is a bit ambiguous in its judgements, leaving judgement as an exercise for the reader as you uncover the motivations and conflicts of the characters.

Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier. A timid Swiss teacher has an epiphany when he briefly meets a Portugese woman attempting to commit suicide while he's on his way to work. The encounter leads him to pick up a Portugese book of essays in a used book store, and he connects so strongly with the author's words that it launches him into a voyage of self-discovery in the author's home town of Lisbon. He traces down the friends of the author and their roles in his life and in the Portugese resistance under Salazar. Even he seems mystified by his obsession, but he discovers the limitations he's placed on his own life along the way. A bit too overly introspective for my taste, but overall I enjoyed the book.

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. A fictional biographical story of the journey of a poor Indian boy from lowest servant to cynical entrepreneur. There's no Horatio Alger story here, though, as we walk through every corruption and prejudice in modern day India to discover that the best way to beat 'em is to join 'em. Still, you can't help but root for the main character, whose attitude and sense of humor is engaging as he climbs the ladder and claws his way to the top.

Slam, by Nick Hornby. This is the worst book of Hornby's I've read, and it feels like the later ones are on a downward path. The main character is a teenage Tony Hawk fan who gets his girlfriend pregnant and then has flash-forward type of out-of-body experiences (seemingly powered by his Tony Hawk poster) of the future life that results from it. Sadly, after reading so many good things by him, it will take me a while to recover enough from this book to pick up another one by Nick Hornby.

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin. I think this was the most interesting book of the set I reviewed this time around. It's the fascinating non-fiction inside story of the Supreme Court, primarily concentrated on the Rhenquist court. I was thinking it would have more history in it, but the personal stories and the view into how these nine individuals get their work done and relate to one another while deciding issues that affect all of us was terrific. Highly recommended.

Crashing Through, by Robert Kurson. After the terrific Shadow Divers, how could I resist another non-fiction book by Robert Kurson. This book tells the story of Mike May, who was blinded at age 3 in a backyard chemical explosion, and how he discovered after more than forty years he could recover his sight through surgery. What seems like a no-brainer of a decision was fraught with medical risk, and (although he did not know at the time) a very poor track record when it comes to how a blind person reacts to and deals with sight. It was a very interesting journey and worth reading. As in Shadow Divers, Kurson mixes in some education with the people-story, although I felt I was reading a powerpoint presentation converted to text at times.

How Did I Miss This?

From the Onion.

Wrap your otherwise forgettable gift in an Onion gift box, and watch their faces fall when they realize there is no such thing as a pet feeding/docking station for an overly pampered pet's portable MP3 player—just a crappy bric-a-brac inside you waited until the last moment to buy.

Too late. Only available on backorder now, anyway.

West Coast Xmas

I put a few more pictures on Flickr, but here are the highlights captured before my camera broke :-(.

Dara reacts to getting a brownie pan that is all edges. For 30 years I've wanted the soft gooey brownies, and she's wanted the chewy or crispy edges.

Garrett prepares a chocolate mousse pie for the onslaught of 15 people here on Christmas day.

Kyla manages to get in a little reading between puppies, literally.

Kyla and Dara at the top of the tower at the DeYoung museum, where we went to see a Maya Lin exhibit with Rob.

Enjoying the sun and a hot chocolate on the backside of Kirkwood. They had something like 12 feet of snow in the previous 10 days, so Kyla and I did a marathon day trip up and back before she cleared out back to DC.

Poinsettia Competition

I learned a lot about orchids and breeders when I read the Orchid Thief. One of the main orchid-obsessed people in the book was Robert Fuchs, who apparently descended from Leonhart Fuchs, the guy they named the Fuchsia after. Today I read about the Ecke family that made the Poinsettia the king of Christmas plants.

The plant was brought to the United States in the late 1820s by the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Joel Roberts Poinsett.

Ecke was the first to develop the plant's commercial potential. He grew poinsettias on farmland in Hollywood and sold them from street stands. His son, Paul Ecke Sr., had bigger ideas.

A visionary horticulturist and businessman, Paul Ecke Sr. gave the poinsettia a makeover through a secret breeding technique that turned the delicate and gangly weed into a sturdy and voluptuous potted plant.

The Ecke family had a virtual monopoly on the world's poinsettia market largely because no one could figure out how they produced uniformly perfect plants with multiple branches emanating from a single stem - the "Ecke style."

Unfortunately for Ecke III, in 1992 a "university researcher published an article revealing his family's secret process. It wasn't pollination but rather the grafting of two types of poinsettias that created the desired plant from which cuttings were taken." Sounds like the competition has been fiercer and fiercer ever since.

Festivus Coverage

If you're a Seinfeld fan, you already know about Festivus. It's held on December 23rd. No tree, just an aluminum pole. And what's not to like about a holiday that includes the annual airing of grievances and feats of strength. It seems like Festivus has had a lot of coverage this season.

The Miami Herald covers a local college student's Festivus celebration:

Casuso, along with her friends and co-workers from the Gamestop store she manages, will gather round the pole and air their grievances.

"I plan on telling someone, maybe a certain boyfriend, 'I hate that you pay more attention to your video games than to me,'" she says, laughing. "And to my employees who show up, I plan to say, 'You disappoint me every time I ask you to put away the games and you don't listen.' And I'll tell my stepbrother, 'I hate sharing the bathroom with you'."

and the business of selling Festivus poles:

"That first year we sold about 250 poles, mostly to people who found us on the Web," Leto says. "The following year, orders were up so much that people were ordering them to the tune of 23 an hour online, and paying up to $200 the day before Festivus in order to get overnight delivery so they'd have them in time."

In Chicago, in an apparent attempt to distract people from the all-Blagojevich-all-the-time news coverage, someone installed a Festivus pole in the state Capitol building.

Funny, but nobody's laughing much about the Festivus pole that popped up under the dome of the Illinois Capitol this week.

Not the people who set up the nearby nativity scene.

"I think it's a mockery," said Dan Zanoza, chairman of the Springfield Nativity Scene Committee.

Not the atheists who set up their own Capitol display.

"If the state's going to create a forum for religion at this time of year, which we do not approve of, this is what's going to happen," said Annie Laurie Gaylor of the Madison-based Freedom from Religion Foundation.

Even the 18-year-old who created the pole isn't laughing much. State workers, he gripes, set it up too far out of the way for anyone to see.

"I'm halfway thinking about complaining about the location," Michael Tennenhouse said.

Finally, our nation's capitol is in on the act.

Culturally diverse Adams Morgan is about 2 miles north of the White House. Members of its business group hung a banner, "A Festivus for the Rest of Us," at Columbia Road and 18th Street NW. They included notepads, pushpins and pens Friday and waited to see what would happen, Barden said.

The response was phenomenal.

There are the ones that are just plain funny, Seinfeldian observances about stuff too small to talk about with your friends but big enough to put the nasty in your day:

"A pair of leggings is not pants"

"My office mate snorts"

"I hate it when my husband cuts his toenails in bed! UGH!"

It's a time to rant about those picayune, urban tribulations. On her lunch hour, Mara Veraar, 30, scribbled her way to catharsis.

"I see a dead rat on my way to work every day," she wrote. Then, she said, explaining further: "It's not the same rat. It's a different rat. Every. Single. Day."

There, doesn't that feel better.

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.

Upscale Criminals in Southwest Florida

I didn't want this item to escape our blog master's intense scrutiny of Florida.

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2008/oct/28/breaking-news-bank-robbery-reported-fort-myers-rob/

Old Paint Paints

Now that I have branched out in my interests from fashion into art, I thought I'd point you at this AP article on a horse, Cholla, who paints. That would be interesting enough, but the art critic's response was even more interesting.

John Yimin, an art lover and critic, wrote on his Web site: "The brush stroke Cholla uses to get his vision down on paper ... the watercolor's dance ... and especially the fascinating completion of the works ... Cholla clearly grabs me and holds me as I watch him paint with the fire of Pollock and fixed gaze of Resnick."

Considering someone paid as much as $2200 for Chollo's artwork, training your horse to paint would seem like a more profitable venture than its close cousin, cow plop bingo.