So, another thing about flying: I’m almost always glued to the window to watch the geography below. But I made an impulse newsstand buy before I got on the flight in Oakland that distracted me a good part of the flight: Outside Magazine’s September issue. The cover story is a first-person account by Aron Ralston of how he became trapped while scrambling through a Utah canyon last year when a boulder fell and pinned his right arm to a canyon wall. He freed himself after six days, but only after he managed to amputate his hand. Even sort of knowing how the story comes out, it was a gripping, extraordinarily well told story (just an excerpt from a book due out this month), and I found myself really admiring this guy not for his physical courage, which was considerable, but for his skill and quick-wittedness in assessing his situation and trying to resolve it. And no, he doesn’t shrink from his own responsibility for the event. The boulder falling was bad luck. But he had left no word of his whereabouts and certainly would have died if he hadn’t been able to finally extricate himself.
Our Block from the Air
I’ve always loved looking down from planes and spotting stuff on the ground I recognize, or think I recognize. Taking off out of Oakland yesterday, I brought my little 3 megapixel digital camera. When we made our big loop out over San Francisco Bay, then headed east, we happened to be right over Berkeley. I recognized a school in our neighborhood and snapped a couple of quick pictures through the window without being sure if anything would show up. Looking at them tonight on my computer at my dad’s place in Chicago, I can see I got a nice detailed look at our neighborhood. The dramatically blown-up image is of our block; I can even make out the addition we just built behind our house and our salmon-pink shed (they’re near the right margin of the image, roughly, and a little more than a third of the way up from the bottom edge of the picture). Don’t know why I’m so amazed, but I’m blown away by the detail.
Blog East …
… or maybe Blog Midwest would be more like it. I’m headed back to Chicago this afternoon and then all over what used to be called the Northwest (and beyond) with my dad. That’s the plan, anyway; though we’ll be on the lookout for Alan Keyes trying to throw himself in front of our car to make a point about the sanctity of life. If I can figure out mobile technology, it’s possible that road reports and Keyes sightings will be logged.
Die 4 Less
We go over to the Grand Lake area in Oakland every once in a while to eat at a fun Italian place called Zza’s. It’s not impossible to find a parking place there, but you wind up walking to the restaurant from somewhere in the neighborhood. And while doing that some time ago, we noticed this: Sunset Casket Outlet. The whole idea of a casket outlet is not brand new, and everyone knows that the funeral business is a ridiculously expensive proposition. But this is the only one I’ve seen (in fact, a local weekly once named it the area’s best casket store).
I wish I’d taken a better picture, but inside the window you can just make out one of the odd floor-model caskets. It’s got some painted-on pictures and some graffitied-on slogans relevant is some way to a potential customer. Strange. Tacky (or, in contemporary vernacular, “ghetto”). And just half the price of what most casket stores would charge.
Dollars for Democracy!
A new approach to getting people to vote: Turn the registration process into a sweepstakes. It’s called Vote or Not, and it was launched over the weekend by the two guys who made a bundle from the Hot or Not vanity/dating site a few years back. Register to vote, or prove you’re already registered, and you become eligible for a $100,000 cash prize. Just wrote a piece about it for Wired News (online tomorrow, I think here). They have some interesting things to say about why they did it, and they convinced me they have a kind of nontraditional view of the political system.
Update: A big wrinkle in the plan: The rules of the contest were altered so that voter registration is not required. In other words, any U.S. citizen 18 or over can enter. The reason: a section of the federal Voting Rights Act that, among other things, makes it illegal to offer or accept payment for registering to vote. Neither of the Vote or Not guys, James and Jim, are especially anxious to create new case law on this provision.
Labor Day
Kate teaches in Oakland, and her union is in some tough negotiations with the district over its next contract. Since the district, like nearly all the urban school systems in California, is in serious financial trouble, the teachers agreed to a 4 percent cut in salaries last year. Now the district wants to cap health-care contributions in a move that would cost most teachers something like 250 bucks a month. Doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but 1) that’s $3,000 a year and could cost teachers another 5 percent or 10 percent of their wages; and 2) that $250 a month is just for starters — the cap would limit the district’s cost and make teachers eat the inevitable future health-care costs. A neighbor who lives across the street teaches in Fremont, a city between Oakland and San Jose, and teachers there struck that sort of deal with the district a few years ago; he says he’s paying $10,000 a year now to insure himself, his wife, and their two daughters. (Gee, where is this issue in the presidential campaign?)
Anyway, the Oakland teachers are gearing up for a big labor fight, and today they held a rally and march from Lake Merritt to downtown. It was probably the first labor event I’ve ever attended on Labor Day.
Das Arnie Fanklub
Now that I’ve brought myself to watch a few seconds of Arnold’s speech at the recent Republican group grope, and taking a look at this cover story in Wired magazine, I figure I’m missing something. From what I saw of his convention speech, his delivery was, as usual, loud and tone deaf; his text was as rhetorically graceful as a tank driving through a wall. His physical appearance is becoming kind of scary: When he works his muscular mandibles to extrude his odd English stylings and retread “Saturday Night Live” punchlines, he resembles the Jaws character in James Bond, like he’d like to pump you up, then chomp you up. And if human flesh isn’t available, you could probably start feeding him tree stumps. The governor who chips and mulches.
Meantime, Wired dips its toe into the murky waters of mainstream politics and declares Arnold “The New American Idol.” That declaration is based on an embarrassing inch-deep analysis of Schwarzenegger’s 10 months in office summed up thus:
“Schwarzenegger has turned out to be a surprisingly effective governor. He’s eased (though not broken) the political logjam in Sacramento, navigated ably through the biggest state deficit ever, and established himself as a potent force on the national political stage. His popularity rating among California voters hovered through summer in the 60s, near the all-time highs for a Golden State governor and more than 40 points above the end-of-term numbers for the man he replaced, Gray Davis.”
He’s surprisingly effective — like our semi-elected president, he gets high marks based on near-zero expectations. He’s “eased the logjam” in the state capital, though the nature of the jam is never explored or explained. Navigated ably through the deficit. Not hardly: the genius solution he’s pushed on the state is to turn the deficit into future debt, and not even that “let the grandchildren pay” solution has come close to clearing up the deficit. He’s established himself as a potent force on the national political stage. Yeah, he’s a star, no denying that. Potent force? We’ll see. And he’s more popular by far than Gray Davis was. Guess what? So are Saddam Hussein and the Son of Sam.
Arnold’s big-time revolutionary moves so far, Wired says, include naming a Democrat to be the state environment secretary (Bush has a liberal Democrat in his cabinet, so he too must be a revolutionary) and that he’s working on a way to eliminate gerrymandering through an amendment to the state Constitution. OK — that’s worth a try, though Wired, apparently innocent to the ways of the world and U.S. history, doesn’t raise the obvious suspicion that Arnold is really working on a way to break the Democratic majority in the Legislature and in California’s House delegation.
One glaring omission in its report on this miraculous new revolutionary politician — he rules from “the radical center,” the magazine says — is his fundraising. Just like his big hungry maws, this is kind of scary: the guy is reportedly raising something like $2 million a month, more money, faster, than any California politican ever. The money’s not coming from the little people, either: The secretary of state’s campaign finance reports show that The Austrian’s biggest contributors are all the insurance and energy and other big companies that just want to make life better for all of us.
X Prize Status Report
Today’s story on Wired News: A roundup of the handful of teams that are still saying they have a chance to launch this year for the $10 million prize. John Carmack, the guy who pretty much invented the first-person-shooter videogame, had some strong words about the da Vinci Project’s promised balloon-and-rocket space shot, set for Oct. 2:
“… The chance of (da Vinci) taking a rocket that’s never been tested — they started before we did and they have flown nothing, not a subscale vehicle, not a model, haven’t even put a balloon in the air, absolutely nothing — the idea they’re going to go from nothing to a full suborbital space vehicle, it’s just silly.”
That Russian School
The New York Times is running a Reuters picture with its coverage of the slaughter in the Russian school (200 or more killed?) earlier today: a woman caressing the head of a bandaged child on a stretcher who appears to be dead. The scene brought Walt Whitman’s “The Wound-Dresser” to mind:
“… Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,
Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground,
Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital,
To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again. …”
Happy Birthday, Pop
Hey, it’s my dad’s birthday.
He was born up in Marshall County, Minnesota, the same year that Warren Harding became president of the United States. Who’d ever have thought we’d get a president who’d make Harding look so harmless? But enough of the politics. Although Dad was born in Warren, the county seat and where the closest hospital is, Dad’s parents (Sjur Ingebretsson Brekke and Otilia Sieversen Brekke) lived in Alvarado, where my grandfather was pastor of the Lutheran parish from about 1917 through 1925 (he had at least one other congregation he served, too, at a rural church called Kongsvinger).
The area had a certain ethnic flavor: Alvarado was half Swedish, half Norwegian back then, and started out in the late 19th century with two different congregations. Services at Kongsvinger were said in Norwegian exclusively up through the 1930s. From Alvarado, the family moved to Chicago, where Sjur had attended seminary (on the site of Wrigley Field) after arriving in the United States in 1893, age 17, and where my grandmother’s very large family lived (she was the first child in her family born in the States, in October 1884). In Chicago, my dad became fluent in English (very useful), became a Cubs fan (not so useful), met my mom (indispensable development, from my point of view), played for the Chicago Bears (tuba, in the marching band they used to have perform; I’ve been working that line for decades), worked at Spiegel’s when it really was Spiegel’s, raised a big, challenging family of his own, and has generally been a remarkable, interesting, fun guy to be around.
OK, that’s it. Happy birthday, Dad!