Month: March 2009

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Guest Observation: E.B. White

From a collection we have, “E.B. White: Writings from The New Yorker, 1927-1976”:

Crossing the Street

July 16. 1932

Possibly you have noticed this about New Yorkers: instinctively, crossing a one-way street, they glance in the proper direction to detect approaching cars. They always know, without thinking, which way the traffic flows. They glance in the right direction as naturally as a deer sniffs upwind. Yet after that one glance in the direction from which the cars are coming, they always, just before stepping out into the street, also cast one small, quick, furtive look in the opposite direction–from which no cars could possibly come. That tiny glance (which we have noticed over and over again) is the last sacrifice on the altar of human fallibility; it is an indication that people can never quite trust the self-inflicted cosmos, and that they dimly suspect that some day, in the maze of well-regulated vehicles and strong, straight buildings, something will go completely crazy–something big and red and awful will come tearing through town going the wrong way on the one-ways, mowing down all the faithful and the meek. Even if it’s only a fire engine.

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‘The Wire’

In a rare show of endurance and stick-to-itiveness, I have concluded my 10-week program of watching all five seasons of "The Wire." It wasn't easy. I ventured late into the night, consuming piles of burritos and pizza slices, quaffing unpretentious but still premium brews and humbler vintages of red wine as the gritty life of "Ballmer" played out before my slack jaw and uncomprehending stare. But finally, red is black, and the last disc is ready to go back to the video store.

The project was occasioned by wanting to watch Season 5–the one in which The Baltimore Sun is a major player–for the first time. But I wanted to put the season into perspective by seeing everything leading up to it. As the series aired, I saw only Season 4 as it aired. I had already seen the first season on DVD and maybe parts of the third year, too.

Treading where millions have before, I offer a few takeaways:

–If you could see just one season, watch the first. You can chase your tail arguing about which season was the best conceived, best written, best acted, etc., and I'm not certainly above that (see below). But what the first season has that the rest never equal is surprise: A world and characters are revealed with depth and detail and tension rarely equaled on the tube. The best of the subsequent seasons build on the first, the worst of them mimic them in a tired sequel kind of way.

–Best seasons: the first and fourth. The first for reasons already elucidated. The fourth because of the combination of wonderfully tight story lines and the group of kids the season follows.

–Worst season: the second. It seems forced and formulaic; reminiscent of the SCTV parody of "Ocean's 11."

–Best take on the theme song, "Way Down in the Hole": Season 1 (The Blind Boys of Alabama) and Season 4 (DoMaJe, said to be a group of Baltimore kids). Tom Waits wrote the song and his version is used in Season Two; I found it grating to the point of fast-forwarding through it.

–Favorite characters: Bunk, Omar, Freamon, McNulty. Not in any particular order. And oh, special mention to Snoop, one of the oddest and scariest characters ever; and to Bubbles, who alone among all the characters is redeemed at the end.

–Favorite arcane newsroom moment: From Season 5. An editor at the Baltimore Sun asks a rewrite man to do something. The rewrite man, Bill Zorzi (actually a former Sun reporter), retorts: "Why don't you stick a broom up my ass and ask me to sweep the place?" If you spent any time around The San Francisco Examiner in the 1980s, this was a moment of pure deja vu. There was a copy editor there named Tony Stelmok, an old-timer whom a colleague describes as looking like Colonel Sanders. One night, the slotman directed him to trim a story or write a whip (a "reefer" line, for instance, one referring readers to a story on another page), to which Stelmok responded: "Whip, whip, whip. Trim, trim, trim. Why don't I just stick a broom up my ass and sweep the place, too?") As it happens, there is an Ex-Sun connection: Jim Houck, a news editor at the Examiner, became managing editor at the Sun. Given the relative rarity of the formulation "why don't I stick a broom up my ass," I'm betting that Houck carried the Stelmok tirade to the Baltimore newsroom, and eventually, through oral tradition, onto TV.

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Modern Marketing Notes

A weekend morning ritual has evolved since The Dog’s arrival in 2006: On Saturdays, we walk up to Fatapple’s, a restaurant with a take-out shop, and pick up coffee and a pastry, walk over to the local school garden for the four-legged family member to scope out the chicken coop and the squirrels, then sit in the little amphitheater next to the playground (it’s got a view out to the bay) and eat. Sunday, we’ve started walking the other direction, to a place called Fellini, on University Avenue, that has a take-out window. We buy coffee and skip the pastries, then walk down to the old Santa Fe right -of-way and circle back home. All of the above is habit-forming. ledgers030809.jpg

Across the street from Fellini is Ledger’s Liquor, one of the few remaining liquor stores on University. In olden times, city ordinances forbade alcohol sales within a mile of the Berkeley campus. You know the reason: the pernicious effect of drink on youth and so forth. Those laws were scrapped long ago, but their legacy — a dearth of taverns and liquor outlets and a subdued night life — remains. The big liquor market on the street, Jay-Vee, closed about a decade ago and is now a synagogue. Another place a few blocks away, B&W, which was attached to a bar and seemed to have a corner on the down-and-outer crowd, has been a vacant lot for two or three years. The stores have gone out of business mostly because surrounding neighborhoods, and the city, have become unfriendly: University Avenue liquor stores are seen as magnets for crime and trash.

Ledger’s had been around awhile when I got here in the ’70s. It was known for stocking exotic beers, which back then only meant brews free of the taint of St. Louis, Milwaukee, or Golden, Colorado. I can’t remember the last time I was in there; I’ll bet it was in the ’80s. But it’s still kicking along, though what draws my attention now is the assortment of goods advertised and the slick way they’re presented.

The message on the marquee is semi-permanent and perhaps immortal. Anyone know a source for that?

ledgers030809a.jpg

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A Modest Proposal – Bikers, Take the High Road

An excellent read from the Times: A Modest Proposal – Bikers, Take the High Road

It includes four suggestions for New York cyclists — but applicable in most other cities — that are sure to provoke indignation and derision (or maybe not: the comments on the article are for the most parrt well reasoned):

NO. 1: How about we stop at major intersections? Especially where there are school crossing guards, or disabled people crossing, or a lot of people during the morning or evening rush. (I have the law with me on this one.) At minor intersections, on far-from-traffic intersections, let’s at least stop and go.

NO. 2: How about we ride with traffic as opposed to the wrong way on a one-way street? I know the idea of being told which way to go drives many bikers bonkers. That stuff is for cars, they say. I consider one-way streets anathema — they make for faster car traffic and more difficult crossings. But whenever I see something bad happen to a biker, it’s when the biker is riding the wrong way on a one-way street.

There will be caveats. Perhaps your wife is about to go into labor and you take her to the hospital on your bike; then, yes, sure, go the wrong way in the one-way bike lane. We can handle caveats. We are bikers.

NO. 3: How about we stay off the sidewalks? Why are bikers so incensed when the police hand out tickets for this? I’m only guessing, but each sidewalk biker must believe that he or she, out of all New York bikers, is the exception, the one careful biker, which is a very car way of thinking.

NO. 4: How about we signal? Again, I hear the laughter, but the bike gods gave us hands to ring bells and to signal turns. Think of the possible complications: Many of the bikers behind you are wearing headphones, and the family in the minivan has a Disney DVD playing so loudly that it’s rattling your 30-pound Kryptonite chain. Let them know what you are thinking so that you can go on breathing as well as thinking.
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Svein Tuft Watch: Fan Club Flakeout

I think I blew my chance to be president of the Svein Tuft fan club. I lost him after a stage or two of the Tour of California and am only now checking back in. But wait: Maybe that flakiness qualifies me to be president. In any case, the update.

Tuft was in 20th place in the overall when he crashed on the seventh, and next to last stage, and suffered a concussion. That put him out of the race. According to the Denver Post, his next race begins this Wednesday: Tirreno-Adriatico.

Two more Tuft-related readings:

Denver Post, February 26, 2009: An Example of Tuft Love (kudos for the truly dumb headline)

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 6, 2009: Four teams commit early to Tour of Missouri (Tuft finished third there last year; this year Garmin-Chipotle teammate Christian Vande Velde will be defending his 2008 title).

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Big Bathtub I: The Acre Foot

An acre foot is the amount of water it would take to flood an acre to a depth of one foot. An acre is, ballpark number only, a patch of land 100 feet by 400 feet. If you were standing on that patch of land with water about halfway up to your knees — well, you’d be having a direct experience of the acre foot.

An acre foot is 325,000 gallons. If you pay a water bill that shows how much you use, you can figure how long that much water would last you. The rule of thumb, that we journalists borrowed from “water experts” here in California was that an acre foot was enough to supply two average households for a year. That’s for use inside and outside the home for three or four people say, and it comes out to about 460 gallons a day for each household. Of course, there’s a lot of variation. An inner city apartment dweller uses a lot less than someone whose lawn looks like a fairway at Augusta National. Someone in a cool coastal area — Berkeley, for instance — uses less than someone in a much hotter area on the other side of the hills, lawn or no lawn.

The acre foot is a basic unit of life in California. Yes, weather people and water management officials count inches of rain and snow in the winter. But those units are incidental in a place that needs to capture and store an immense amount of water to irrigate roughly 15,000 square miles of crops and to supply 36 million people. The acre foot is the fundamental currency of reservoir storage and water delivery.

Up and down California, the federal government, the state government, electric utilities, county and city water companies, and irrigation districts have built reservoirs. They’re big bathtubs that together hold something like 42 million acre feet; that would be enough to submerge the entire state of Wisconsin under a foot of water. They reservoirs are expected to fill up in the winter and spring with runoff from the rains and melting snow running down from the Sierra Nevada. Then the water is pumped out during the dry season to help the fields and orchards thrive and to keep the showers and garden hoses flowing. Some water is even set aside for the fish that swim in dwindling numbers through the maze of waterways between reservoir, farm, and town.

A wet winter here–what people like to think of as normal, with nature’s tap switched on when we get into the middle of autumn–keeps our big bathtubs full and the water running where it’s needed. But there are other kinds of winters, too. Very wet ones, where the system simply can’t hold all the water coming down the rivers. And dry and very dry ones, where the water level in the reservoirs falls and keeps falling if two dry years come back to back.

We’re in what appears to be our third dry–or drier than “normal”–year in a row. Three of the biggest federal reservoirs in Northern California– Shasta, Oroville, and Folsom–all fell to critically low levels in December and January. Together, the three reservoirs can hold about 9 million acre feet; that’s about enough to supply a year’s worth of household water for New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. That’s every U.S. resident east of the Great Lakes and north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Remember,: that’s the capacity of just three reservoirs. There are dozens of others. During the last five weeks, copious rains have fallen and the water has started to rise in some of those big bathtubs. More about that later.

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North Berkeley Rainbow

rainbow030409.jpgEarly this morning, just after the sun was up, it started to rain. That meant there was a rainbow somewhere in the west. And yes, somewhere up there beyond all those wires, a rainbow appeared — actually a double, but the second, outer arc is pretty faint.