Month: December 2004

Posted on

Morning-After Disassembly Line

Loho

Christmas morning: The usual post-luminaria routine is to wake up, do the presents, then go out on the street to pick everything up: gather the luminaria remove the candles, dump the sand, and fold up the bags so they can be reused next year. But there was a heavy frost last night and the bags were all pretty much soaked this morning, so Piero decided we’d just recycle them and use new ones in 2005. He’s the boss.

Pickup

Our neighbor Kay Schwartz, above, was the first one out this morning, and she pretty much picked up all the bags from the upper block of Holly Street. Then we hauled everything down to the Martinuccis to pull it all apart. Most of the usual suspects were there (below). It probably takes a total of two hours to set the whole thing up on our street — more if you have to get the 600-plus bags ready first — and about the same to take it all down again.

Disassembly

Posted on

The Aftermath

Aftermath

11:17 p.m.: The lights are still lit on Holly Street. But the people who came out to walk through the neighborhood, and we had dozens who stopped by our little driveway table to have hot mulled cider, had all gone home. We stopped by the Martinuccis’ place, where all the set up stuff was piled on their front lawn, to hang out a little bit before we went home for our traditional middle-of-the-night gift-wrapping extravaganza.

Posted on

Lit Up

Holly

8 p.m.: Between about 6:45 and 8, all the bags and candles were distributed and lit along the length of Holly Street. This kind of forgettable shot is from in front of our place, looking south to Cedar Street. Dozens of people have showed up to walk the streets this year. All the familiar faces from around the neighborhood, and lots of people we haven’t met before. Even the beat cops are coming by to check out what’s going on.

Posted on

Blogging the Luminaria

Earlyluminaria

6:54 p.m. PST: The first luminaria in the neighborhood are lit. These are actually a block away from us, on Buena Street, looking east from California. All of these were in place by dark. And not only here. For nearly a half mile along California to the south and on many adjoining blocks, the luminaria were all set out and ready to go by nightfall, too. Amazing to think this has all spread from our little celebration on Holly Street, which started 13 years ago tonight. Ironically, folks on our street are just out now putting out the bags. More later.

Posted on

Berkeley Braces for Xmas

Arlingtonlights

Even in Berkeley, overrun as it is by irreligious leftists (like me) and know-it-alls (like me) who will tell you (are you listening?) without you ever thinking of asking that you’d be better off (you would) to just skip this whole December holiday deal with its materialistic and reactionary churchish trappings, we have Christmas light displays. This one’s on a street called The Arlington, one of two streets in the north end of town that carry a definite article in their name but stand unadorned by designation as street or avenue or way. The Arlington has been in such bad repair for so long (it’s getting fixed now) that one refers to each of the multitude of pavement issues along the street as "a pothole." Indefinite article. Or maybe "other-abled asphalt." I’m sure a city commission has ruled on the matter.

In any case, a walk this evening took me from an automatic teller to a bookstore up some long flights of neighborhood steps to The Arlington, where the above-depicted scene held pedestrians and motorists in thrall. I walked back by way of the open-till-midnight drug store and several more quietly lighted streets.

More on Christmas lights tomorrow.

Posted on

‘Let’s Stay in Iraq … for a Month’

A remarkable human-in-the-street story in The New York Times on Wednesday about how the American public feels about the war. The story cites another poll that illustrates doubts about what the whole thing is about: This time, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll that shows 47 percent of respondents feel the war is going worse than it was a year ago, 32 percent think it’s about the same, and 20 percent think it’s going better than it was then. Those 20 percent must be on antidepressants.

The article is full of quotes from people who mostly sound resigned to the thing just dragging on the way it is now. One guy, identified as a cotton farmer in Texas, opines that opinion polls and public debate about the war are aiding and abetting the enemy. Not a single person comes out and says that they thought the war was a good idea to begin with. Most striking to me was one woman, a U.S. Army civilian employee in Virginia, who is quoted as saying she supports the troops’ presence in Iraq now and backs Bush’s plan. But look at the way she qualifies her support:

” ‘I think we should stay through the elections. I support the president’s plan up to there. But if we’re going to focus on Iraq without support of other nations, I see the violence increasing. I can’t see a democratic Iraq. So what are we doing there?’ ”

This is another way of saying, “I can stand for this for another five weeks.” How many people like this are out there, both conflicted and just about at the end of their rope?

Posted on

It Was 9/11, Stupid

I just got around to reading a New Yorker piece from the December 6 issue; which is pretty good for me, actually; I usually don’t open New Yorker issues for a month or so after they arrive. There’s a post-mortem piece on election polling by Louis Menand called “Permanent Fatal Errors: Did the voters send a message?” (unfortunately, it’s not posted on The New Yorker site; a Google search turns up a doubtless unauthorized copy of it here). Menand sat in on a meeting of “political scientists and polling experts” at Stanford a week after the election.

The piece talks briefly about how far the exit polls were off in a bunch of key states (not just Ohio and Florida), but doesn’t get into anyone’s thinking about why that happened.

Two interesting take-aways from the article, though. Even a Bush pollster concluded that voters’ concern about “moral issues,” supposedly such a driving force for so many Bush voters, was way overblown in post-election reporting. More important was one pollster’s conclusions about the issue that really locked things up for Bush:

“Why did President Bush win this election?” Gary Langer, the director of polling at ABC News, said at the Stanford conference. “I would suggest that the answer can be expressed in a single phrase: 9/11.” No one there disagreed. “Fifty-four per cent of voters on Election Day said that the country was safer now than it was before September 11, 2001,” Langer pointed out. “And perhaps, I would suggest, more important, forty-nine per cent of voters said they trusted only President Bush to handle terrorism, eighteen points more than said they trusted only John Kerry.” He went on, “Among those who trust only Bush to handle terrorism, ninety-seven per cent, quite logically, voted for him. Now, right there, if forty-nine per cent of Americans trust only Bush to handle terrorism and ninety-seven per cent of them voted for him, those are forty-eight of his total fifty-one percentage points in this election. Throw in a few more votes on ancillary issues and that’s all she wrote.” Langer thinks that a key statistic is the change in the votes of married women. Gore won the women’s vote by eleven per cent; Kerry won by only three per cent, and he lost most of those votes among married women. Bush got forty-nine per cent of the votes of married women in 2000; he got fifty-five per cent this year. And when you ask married women whom they trust to keep the country safe from terrorists fifty-three per cent say “only Bush.” (The really salient demographic statistic from the election is one that most Democrats probably don’t even want to think about: If white men could not vote, Kerry would have defeated Bush by seven million votes.

I know this isn’t news so much anymore. I’m just trying to keep track of how we got where we’ve gotten.