Desert sojourn, day 21 - day of storms

I've been getting out later and later for my morning walks, and as a result I do too much of the walk in full sunlight. So this morning I was all set to get out early. Had my alarm set for 5:30 and everything. But the sky had other plans. I was awakened a little after 5:00 by strong breezes coming in the the windows, which I keep open at night. By the time it started to get light, the wind was really blowing and there were lightning flashes. Clearly it was no time to take a walk. We had another colorful sunrise and by the time it got fully light I could see dark clouds here and there and precipitation coming from them. I took the picture above, showing the house I'm staying in under a rainbow, just after sunrise. And I took this video (1 min. 4 sec.) about the same time.

But it wasn't until around 8:30 that a little rain finally fell on me. It lasted for ten minutes or so, not getting anything around here very wet. Though I was glad I had gone outside and closed the windows of the car, which I also keep cracked open.

Now at mid-day it's just kind of cloudy, with clearing in the east. The storm cleared out the haze in the air, and the clouds are making it a little cooler.

Update a little later: While all that weather was going on, searchers found a guy who'd been missing in the national park for almost a week.

Deep springtime

It's a gorgeous spring morning in San Francisco, chilly, clear and breezy; later today it's supposed to be really windy, and already I can see the tops of the clouds being blown diagonally off their bases.

If I haven't been posting here much, it's mainly because I started writing a new novel last week, and I'm devoting as much spare attention to it as possible. I haven't been posting on any of the other blogs I sometimes post on either. I just don't want to sacrifice my momentum with the novel -- which I conceived of twelve years ago, and made several false starts on within the past five years. Having finally figured out a way to go forward, at least to rewrite the opening so that it makes sense, I want to keep going. So there won't be too much ersatz commentary, attempts at journalism, or arch mockery to consume for at last a few weeks.

Today's also my 53rd birthday, and I give thanks for family and friends who have supported me over many years, in the past, today and in the future.

World to end sooner than expected

Slowing of the Atlantic Ocean current and other stuff will drown East Coast U.S. cities twice as fast as other places around the world.

Hey future -- sorry about that!

technorati: global warming, climate change, apocalypse

Today's fake: Recorded classical piece played at Inauguration as musicians sawed

Remember the little scandal at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, when a pretty girl lip-synched while an uglier girl with a prettier voice sang behind the scenes? Something of that fakery was in action during Tuesday's inauguration when Yo Yo Ma, Yitzhak Perlman and two other classical musicians played an adaptation of Aaron Copland. Positioned high above the VIPs, the quartet was actually playing -- but what came out of speakers and was heard on television was a pre-recorded version of the piece, because it was so "wicked cold" -- as Ma put it -- that they didn't want to risk weather-related screeches.

Sigh.

technorati: inauguration

Xmas forecast

It's cold and rainy and intermittently sunny and blustery here at the House of Cats and Rhinos. We're gettin' up slow, having crossed the Bay Bridge after midnight on our way back from Xmas in Walnut Creek. Fortunately there was no backup at the toll plaza, since only about 4 lanes were open and most of the drivers took about a minute and a half each to grok the concepts of "toll" and "four dollars."

For Xmas, I think I'm going to give myself the present of self-publishing my Rat Pack novel. Why not let people read the damn thing. It'll take a while to get that into the pipeline, though, since the formatting has to be right or the resulting book will look like crap.

Looking forward to a week off, too. That's the scene here. Back to regularly scheduled programming soon.

Clusterfuck in the wake of Hurricane Ike

Hurricane Ike happened three weeks ago, making landfall at Galveston on September 13. Today the almost-always-useless local paper went against type and ran an actual news article, reporting about angry residents of a condo complex called The Landing who have been booted out of their buildings because more than two-thirds of the complex is deemed unlivable.

I was struck by the article because I lived in The Landing in 1970, when it was an apartment complex. (It was the first place my family lived in Texas, at a time when my father wasn't sure he was going to be transferred permanently to the Shell refinery there. We lived there about 10 months.) It is located [satellite map] right on the shore of Clear Lake, and even back then the parking lots would flood during a bad storm because it was so close to sea level. At some point in the 1980s, on one of my trips back for Christmas, I drove by and noticed that the ground around the complex had been built up somewhat, raising it a few feet. Not enough in the case of a major hurricane, and in any case there must have been extensive wind damage, as the eye of the hurricane passed just a few miles to the east.

As I've written many times, I've no love for that area, which I consider a mistake and the worst example of suburban sprawl. It isn't a town and never was; it's just a collection of subdivisions plunked down between two towns, Webster and Seabrook, that were barely more than rural hamlets before LBJ got NASA to locate its headquarters there. As I wrote previously, the area has "no center, no landmarks, no history, no culture, and no taste." I have no reason to go back there anymore, as my mother moved out of the state following my father's death.

It's too bad for the people who were tricked into buying as condos these small apartments which were kind of nice in 1970 but were located in a flood-prone area. But if you choose to live in that area, it's hard to feel sorry for you, because it was a disaster before the hurricane, and the hurricane just made it more obvious.

technorati: Ike, Hurricane Ike, Seabrook, The Landing, FEMA, El Lago

Hurricane yike

The hurricane that clobbered the Texas coast this past weekend struck a bulls-eye on the Houston suburb where I went to high school, a purgatorial realm I have written about in stories. Judging from news reports, the destruction was not what I might have hoped. (Sorry if you live there now, but consider this weekend's events as just another big hint that you ought to leave.)

Remnants of the storm dumped copious rain in the Midwest yesterday. I just got email from my friend Marilyn in Ohio saying she just got power back after being dark for 24 hours.

On the way to work

Commuters at 4th and Folsom this morning. The sky, contaminated with smoke from wildfires, is extremely hazy.

Weekend the last

The cool air returned on Saturday night. Sunday was the usual San Francisco summery cool sunny breezy. Now, Monday morning started very foggy, but I already see a patch of blue sky directly overhead.

Hotter than a match head

It's the third day of a heat wave, the day when people start to crack. By this afternoon I expect to be lying on my back on the floor of the house, along with the cats, with a cold washcloth on my forehead.

Yesterday Cris wanted to go to a furniture clearance sale because the advertisement showed some dining room chairs like the ones she's been stalking for years. We drove out to the Bayview district, to a neighborhood of warehouses, and turned onto the street shown in the advertisement. It was choked with u-hauls and pickup trucks. Evidently people in the cheap furniture trade had shown up ready, as Cris said, to acquire mass quantities. We almost immediately got sandwiched in between two large pickup trucks trying to squeeze their way along the choked street. As it was 95 degrees outside, we would have had to park two blocks away, and Cris is using a cane, we simply fled without even getting out of the car. I don't even want to think about what it was like inside the warehouse.

In the evening I went over to Berkeley, which was slightly cooler than the city, and when I came home the house was just as hot as it was during the daytime, judging by the thermometer on the thermostat. It cools off fine when there's a breeze, but there wasn't any breeze. We slept all night with nothing but a sheet, that's how warm it was.

Now at 8:30 it's already 78 inside the house, and it'll be another hot day; I'm not so sure about the forecast fog coming in. In the sky is a strange sight: a clear blue sky with little smog and white fluffy clouds, as if this were Illinois.

technorati: San Francisco, heat wave

Welcome back, Anna

A friend's coming back to the Bay Area from the hot-as-hell East Coast today. This weather report, showing the departure and arrival weather, was on the airline's website, showing the 30 degree difference:

Yee ha

That's not just any tornado, it's a tornado in the desert on Riverside Co. in southern California. It flipped 30 freight cars on a train, among other minor damage.

In the Bay Area, a wildfire burned in the Santa Cruz mountains, and forecasters were, as usual, glum about the coming fire season. Another fire was burning in central California, and even the Everglades was on fire. If you really want to get into the mood, read this excerpt from Joan Didion's famous essay about the Santa Ana winds, a phenomenon of southern California but generally appropriate to the topic.

All too dry for you? You could read about acidified seawater in the Seattle Times.

Spring wind

It was hot last weekend, and the cool air off the ocean came back on Sunday night -- so far, so good. But then it never stopped, and by yesterday the cold wind was positively howling in. We went to Office Max, and there was a little whirligig of garbage in the parking lot -- very unpleasant. The springtime's like that sometime.

Today it's Cris's sister Shirley's birthday. We're hosting chez nous. Cris has been trying to make flan, and after two spoiled flans she thinks she's going to get it right the third time.

technorati: San Francisco weather

The first warm day

Here's what it's like on a warm weekend day in San Francisco -- hundreds of people sprawl on the grass in Dolores Park. I've never understood the appeal of sprawling on the grass in the sun, so I wasn't there. In fact, I consider it a success if I manage to avoid going out in the sun at all.

I was home doing nothing much at all besides listening to the ballgame and cleaning, looking forward to going out in the evening. I had a table reserved at an al fresco restaurant on the city's famous Belden Alley on one of the few warm nights of the year. (There are always only a few.) But it was not to be. Cris wasn't feeling up to going out, and neither was the guest of honor, a friend's mother visiting from France. So I canceled the reservation and will stick around the house, where it is quite warm.

Recently I've been reading Joan Didion -- first a few pieces from Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and then the novel The Last Thing He Wanted. And I've been amazed at how much I don't like the writing, because I used to think Slouching Toward Bethlehem was brilliance incarnate. Now it just looks impossibly mannered and almost precious.

This is from one of the most famous pieces in the book, an essay titled "On Morality":
 

At midnight last night, on the road in from Las Vegas to Death Valley Junction, a car hit a shoulder and turned over. The driver, very young and apparently drunk, was killed instantly. His girl was found alive but bleeding internally, deep in shock.	I actually like the casual reference to "his girl." You could say that in the 1960s. The term encompasses all the possibilities without specifically defining the relationship of the "very young" driver and "his girl," but "his girl" she was.
I talked this afternoon to the nurse who had driven the girl to the nearest doctor, 185 miles across the floor of the Valley and three ranges of lethal mountain road. The nurse explained that her husband, a talc miner, had stayed on the highway with the boy's body until the coroner could get over the mountains from Bishop, at dawn today. "You can't just leave a body on the highway," she said. "It's immoral."	There's an odd mixture of vagueness and specificity here. The location of the hospital is not described, but the base of the coroner is. The hospital, wherever it was, was exactly 185 miles away, not 180 or 200, but the scene of the accident was "three hours" from the town of Bishop.
It was one instance in which I did not distrust the word, because she meant something quite specific.	The writer puts herself in the position of going around trusting or mistrusting others' use of words, implying that she is possessed not only of a magisterial quality of wisdom and taste, but that others' misuse of language consistently disappoints her.
She meant that if a body is left alone for even a few minutes on the desert, the coyotes close in and eat the flesh.	Here she is being specific again, as if it were a virtue, but she's really just trying to shock.
Whether or not a corpse is torn apart by coyotes may seem only a sentimental consideration, but of course it is more: one of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes.	She really likes the word "coyotes," and also the pretentious phrase "of course," which she will use a few sentences later. Then there's the tendentious "the promises we make to one another," which sounds like something out of a John Kerry speech.
If we have been taught to keep our promises -- if, in the simplest terms...	Now she's going to suspend the Ivy League phrasing for a moment, because it's actually not useful when you want to say something plainly.
... our upbringing is good enough -- we stay with the body, or we have bad dreams.	Here's the repeated use of the word "we," which is the height of pretension, more than any exalted phrasing or two-dollar words. She doesn't mean the royal "we," she means "we Americans," or at least, "we Americans whose upbringing is good enough." But the more you read, the more you are convinced that no one's upbringing could possibly be good enough when Didion is listening and passing judgment.
I am talking, of course, about the kind of social code...	Oh for Christ's sake, shut up.
... that is sometimes called, usually pejoratively, "wagon-train morality."	Coming from someone who sounds pejorative almost all the time, that's believable.
In fact that is precisely what it is. For better or worse, we are what we learned as children...	No, really, shut up.

When I was in my 20s I loved this piece. I don't know what was wrong with me.

technorati: San Francisco

Here comes the rain again

It's been raining for a few days. Since I hardly have to be out in it, I find it rather nice. The biggest venture was to a restaurant on Mission St. where my friend Namita had invited people for her birthday. She and I have a bit of history together, which she began referring to and then stopped herself and said confidentially, "I'd better watch what I say, there are people here from different parts of my life and they don't know everything about me." Nor do I, but I do like that we had Stephanie in common.

One thing the rain has done is make me a little bit bleary creatively. I was on such a roll with my just completed book that it's a little hard to walk into my writing room and think about anything else. I'll start the way I started working my self up to writing that book: by reading.

Today: big storm; tomorrow, big storm; Sunday, etc.

I had arranged to work at home today due to the bad weather that was predicted. But I didn't expect the power at home to be out for 11 hours. I blogged the morning on the metroblog, but in the afternoon Cris and I just hung around the house -- in a way. She went into emergency mode and gathered all the candles and made me help her tidy up the place "so we won't trip over stuff in the dark" in case the outage extended into the evening.

Finally at the end of the afternoon, we went out for an early dinner, and when we got back about 6:30 pm, the power was back on. Nevertheless I still came over to my office on Capp St., where I'm writing this. I haven't been over here but a couple of times in the last seven weeks (but still managed to finish my latest novel project).

technorati: California storms

Rainy day

Drizzle all day, more forecast for all night. I've been inside writing all day, but now I have to walk home in it.

Dig the thing about Gorbachev in the Scratchpad. Maybe someday Barry Bonds will do an ad for Viagra.

Foggy, foggy

It's real foggy in the city, has been for a couple of days now. Last night really took the cake. On the way home from church -- where we celebrated Maundy Thursday -- I had to take a freeway detour and swung by the ballpark, where the Giants were playing the Padres. The lights of the ballpark glowed weirdly bright through the fog, like the brilliance of the Mothership at the end of Close Encounters, while all other lights were muted in the murk. Tonight's game, against the Dodgers, should be a classic San Francisco affair, sold out and full of fast-drinking fans who'd rather fight than shiver...

Of the things occupying people's consciousness in the city these days, you've got the Critical Mass kerfuffle that erupted after the local paper's high-profile columnists Matier & Ross publicized an incident that took place last Friday. The first story linked to above is not wrong in saying that a debate is "raging" on internet comment threads and blogs, though it's not exactly unavoidable. To me, the interesting thing is that while Matier & Ross take an anti-Critical Mass stand, leading to pro-cycling people expressing their outrage at this biased approach, without the M&R column the whole incident would have disappeared without a trace. Now the whole subject of Critical Mass and what the monthly event means is all over the internets, and people are talking about it. The result: Matier & Ross can cement their reputation as being take-no-guff moderate-conservatives who freely voice their contempt for the unwashed anarchist masses, and the pro-bike people can scream at how they were victimized over and over, first by the panicky suburban driver in the middle of the flap, next by the police who refused to take the incident seriously, and finally by the MSM.

Sounds like a win-win for everybody, because San Franciscans just aren't happy unless they're staking out a position on some issue, like bicycling or sex toys or Google Ad Words, that is ultimately trivial.

Finally, check out this strange internet-business columnist who customarily uses lots of CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation marks! and strangely placed bold-faced words!!

And finally, a postscript to a classic San Francisco story: the lawyer couple who were involved in the infamous, uber-classic Dog Mauling Case, have been disbarred in California. You gotta wonder what took so long.

technorati: Donna Bogatin, Critical Mass, Matier & Ross

Life's too short to squint

It's amazing how having a highly paid tech job can enable you to clear out a few annoyances. The monitor they gave me was too small after I got used to working on a big one at my old job, so after struggling with it for a couple of weeks, I ordered a new, larger one from Dell, only $310. It arrived today and after I set it up I felt much more productive. Now all I have to do is explain to my co-workers that I haven't received special treatment from the manager. I got it because I have "eye problems." Yeah.

In the past I probably would have felt it was my duty to just work with the smaller monitor. But the heck with it, I'm not going to struggle if I don't have to.

For those of you outside the Bay Area: It was v. warm all over California today -- about 75 in the city. Meanwhile I got email from a friend of mine in a small city in northern Japan: too cold and snowy to work outside today.