Month: March 2008

Posted on

Undergraduate Notes

A couple of things I see in class that I didn’t see the last time I was in school (I think our president then was a cardigan-wearing Georgian):

Students who spend entire lecture hours on Facebook: Not to be anachronistic. There was no such thing as Facebook when I was at Cal in 1980. There was no such thing as a laptop. There was no such thing as a wireless network. But all that stuff is here today, and I frequently find myself seated behind students who sit through lecture checking on Facebook, or maybe toggling back and forth between some online entertainment and the notes they are taking. I’ve seen one student repeatedly spend an entire 90-minute session designing some sort of graphics. One young woman spent an entire class period texting on her cellphone; in fact, I wish I could have shot video of her because she was so fast. At least I think she was texting; she might have been playing a game.

Back in the olden days, you could be in class without being there, too: you brought a book or magazine or newspaper to read, or you wrote or doodled or daydreamed or snoozed (I’ve also been impressed by how ostentatiously some of my fellow students are about sleeping in class. Maybe all the instructors understand they are overworked).

Classroom meals: One of my classes has an hourlong discussion section at 1 p.m. every Thursday afternoon. There are about 15 of us in there. One student usually brings in a big takeout meal to tuck into while we ponder the subject of the day. The graduate student instructor who leads the section has never said anything, so I guess it’s an accepted part of the culture.

Classroom swilling: In another class, there’s a very fit-looking guy who sits in the front of the room. He will punctuate the professors lectures by bringing out a plastic gallon jug of water and taking a few good long pulls on it. I’m impressed at his commitment to slake his personal drought; a gallon of water weights 8 pounds, and that’s on top of whatever else he’s bringing to class. He’s obviously serious about his thirst.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Posted on

‘Over the Top’

If you’re a dedicated, long-time Northern California bicyclist, you might remember the name Henry Kingman. In fact, in days of yore he wrote for a monthly called Northern California Bicyclist. He is a good writer, is interested in everything, it seems, and is a hell of an imaginative and tough rider. I emailed him once and asked him to have lunch with me so I could ask advice about Paris-Brest-Paris–Henry rode it one year, unsupported, in 49-plus hours. Before we met, I found an account he had written of a ride he had done once from Chico, on the edge of the northern Sacramento Valley, across the mountains to Nevada. In the winter. On back roads. I haven’t read it in a long time; but with the tragic news yesterday of two cyclists dying down near San Jose when they were struck by a car, I think I was looking for something to lift my spirits a little. So I hunted down the piece, which wasn’t completely easy to find.

Excerpt:

“…Down to Crescent Mills, and stocked up at the store there: big jar of peanut butter, 4-pack of Premium crackers, chunk o’ cheese, cookies, pies, big can of corned beef, a couple of ramen noodles, etc, etc. Then headed up to Taylorsville, asking about the various dirt roads over the Sierras there, whether any would be passable. ‘Not a chance you’ll make it in the world,’ was the general reply, ‘but maybe you could get over the paved road to Antelope Lake if someone has taken a plow up there.’

“Meanwhile, though, a tremendous cold snap was on, with highs below freezing, so I had other ideas.

“Monte the stone mason could tell I was going to go for it. He was full of drama. ‘People get into trouble up there,” and so forth. I must have looked at him like he was completely naive. And he was, in a kind of wonderful way. To think for a second that the dangers of being out-witted by nature could come anywhere close to the danger of being fucked over by other people. Only someone living in a place so idyllic as Genessee, doing something as wholesome as stone masonry, only someone like that would worry about you heading off into the woods. The rest of the world knows its when you come out of the woods that the trouble starts.

I’d ridden about five miles up towards Genessee when Monte’s Bronco hauling a trailer scattered with stones leapfrogged me and came to a stop on the shoulder. ‘You okay?’ I asked, thinking maybe he’d broken down. ‘Here’s my card, it has an 800 number on it, call me when you get through. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll send help. I’ll be your backup.’

The link: ‘Impossible Birthday.’

Posted on

Stand Up Woman

Just wondering: The New York Times turned up quite a story on the governor out there. It was solid enough that the governor, a former lawman who prosecuted his way into high office, came out and all but confirmed it in a meeting with reporters. That’s all swell, and if one were to bet on the outcome, the governor will resign, and soon.

But there’s one thing I don’t get. When he went before the cameras, his wife went with him. She looked sad and somber but not shattered, which meant she was putting on a good show. But still: How does a guy who’s admitting to hiring a call girl persuade his wife to stand up with him for the rite of public exposure?

Maybe she’s demonstrating a love and commitment that is ready to endure the worst as well as the best of her marriage. That’s what we who have married all vow in some form; though a vow of facing up to a theoretical future trial is one thing and dealing with an ugly fact in the here and now is another. Maybe something else is at work: the wife having the responsibility to fulfill the public role to the end.

Either way, standing up with someone who had wounded me so deeply is more than I think I could do. I’d be tempted to say, hey, you didn’t need me when you were setting up your dates; you’re going to have to deal with this one by yourself.

(I will add, though, that the governor in question does score a point by not subjecting the electorate to an “I did not have sex with that woman” drama.)

Posted on

Ben Stein, on the Money

Ben Stein and I go way back. Yeah. There was “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” And once I won some (but not all) of his money. On the studio lot where that happened, I saw his car. It was a pearl-finish Cadillac with the vanity license plate CLER EYZ (or some variation); the plate referred to the fact Stein was a spokesman for Clear Eyes and had made a bundle from the gig.

Anyway. Ben’s quite the conservative Republican. Much more conservative Republican than anyone else in my little circle of acquaintances. But having said that, he is not of the stripe of Republican conservatism that hands you a cow pie and tries to sell it to you as filet mignon. He seems oddly reality-based. Today, he wrote a great column in The New York Times: “What McCain Could Do About Taxes.”

His message to the nominee presumptive of the GOP is that Republicans have “for the last 30 years or so been operating under a demonstrably false and misleading premise: that tax cuts pay for themselves by generating so much economic growth that they replace the sums lost by tax cutting.” In an open letter to McCain, he argues that that course is ruinous. The Bush tax cuts, and the Reagan cuts before them, have shifted the tax burden “from us to our progeny and add immense amounts of interest expense to the federal budget. At this point, taxpayers shell out about $1 billion a day just for that item.” He continues:

“Moreover, immense federal deficits in modern life are financed largely by foreign buyers of our debt. This means that the American taxpayer must work a good chunk of the year to send money to China, Japan, the petro-states and other buyers of United States debt. In effect, we become their peons.

“By flooding the world with debt, we in effect beg foreigners to take our dollars, and this leads to a lower value of the dollar and a higher cost of imports, including oil. If you feel pain filling up the tank, you can partly thank those tax cuts. If you feel the sting of inflation, you can partly thank the supply siders. Deficits matter.”

What’s to be done? Stein urges a decisive tax increase for the wealthy. His reasoning? “The government — which is us — needs the money to keep old people alive, to pay for their dialysis, to build fighter jets and to pay our troops and pay interest on the debt. We can get it by indenturing our children, selling ourselves into peonage to foreigners, making ourselves a colony again, generating inflation — or we can have some integrity and levy taxes equal to what we spend.”

Note that he says taxes ought to be equal to what we spend. That could be a veiled call for draconian budget cutting, but Stein does seem to have his feet on the ground: He concedes what a lot of the Republicans deny: That the people want a lot from the government, and that what they want costs money.

I hope McCain or maybe even some Democrat is listening to this.

Technorati Tags:

Posted on

Ipto s: Two Views

Iptos022908A

Cedar Market, the little corner store near us, has been closed for the last few months. Until two or three years ago, it was run by a Chinese couple who seemed to do all right but clearly had modest ambitions for the business. There was nothing fancy in the place, though they always stocked a few bins of tired looking produce and even had a meat counter. But the store was mostly dark and a little bare, and the only thing I’d buy there with any regularity was an It’s It, a local product that is a species of the ice cream novelty genus of dessert items. It consists of vanilla, chocolate, mint or coffee ice cream pressed between two round graham crackers and the whole thing covered with a thin layer of chocolate. I could go for one right now.

Then the Chinese couple sold. The new owners were Indian or Pakistani — a guess based on reading the names in the liquor license record. In the first year they were in business, they put a lot of money into the place. New freezers and refrigerators, new racks, and a much upgraded product line including a full if haphazard wine and beer selection. They started selling lottery tickets, and they hung a sign out front announcing they were selling fresh sushi daily. I think it’s when I saw the Newman’s Own cookies in the store that it hit me they were really trying to cater to the fancy, upscale, organic tastes of some in the neighborhood. It was mid-October, within a couple of weeks of spotting, but not buying, the Newman’s Own cookies, that I walked over one weekday around noon and the place was closed. The next day, too. And the day after that.

They put a sign up announcing that they were remodeling and would reopen on Halloween. But unless they intended to knock the building down and start over, it looked like they had already done all the remodeling the store could take. There was never any sign of any work going on, though all the racks had been removed and the refrigerators were empty.

Halloween came and went. No remodeling, and no reopening. Soon, whoever ran the store posted a big notice from the state alcohol control agency saying their liquor license had been suspended for two weeks; checking around, I found the store had been caught in a Berkeley police sting and was busted for selling alcohol to a minor last April. Another sign appeared in the window: Reopening November 25. I looked at that, calculated that the 25th was a Sunday, and figured the store would stay closed. It did. Then in December, someone moved some racks back in, and they were filled with candy and chips. But the store stayed closed.

Two weeks ago, a new notice was hung in the window: new owners are applying to take over the store’s liquor license. On odd nights, the lights have been on inside; when someone’s there, they tape a sign on the door saying, “Sorry, closed for remodeling”; when they’re gone, they take that sign with them. Peering in the front door, it looks like there might be beer in the refrigerators. The floor racks are still filled with candy and chips, and it looks like the same stuff that showed up last fall (when’s the last time you checked the “best if consumed by” date on your M&Ms or Doritos, though?).

So our minor neighborhood institution remains on hiatus. For me, the most profound change since the owners took a powder is the disappearance of another letter on the old Lipton’s Tea sign on the window. It may have been 50 or 60 years since that sign was put up; I can’t precisely identify the era in which Lipton’s was a major magnet for corner-store shoppers. Ten years or so ago, the sign lost its “N.” Sometime later, the apostrophe absconded. Now the “L.”

I can’t say I care that much about whether the store ever opens again. But that sign; I’d like to know the Lipton’s sign is still up there, marking time.

Iptos022908

Technorati Tags:

Posted on

Hail to the Chiefs

There was a time — starting the moment George Washington left office — that being a military heavyweight wasn’t seen as one of the big qualifications for being president. The Civil War (six) and World War II (six) produced the highest number of president veterans–most who served as generals. If there’s a pattern here — military service or expertise turning into excellence as commander-in-chief in wartime or in peacetime — it escapes me.

George Washington: Trenton was one of his greatest hits.

John Adams: Learned to be commander in chief on the job.

Thomas Jefferson: Learned on the job.

James Madison: Learned on the job–fought actual war.

James Monroe: Learned on the job.

John Quincy Adams: Learned on the job.

Andrew Jackson: Knew his way around a battlefield. (References.)

Martin Van Buren: Learned on the job.

William Henry Harrison: Did someone say ‘Tippecanoe’?

John Tyler: Learned on the job.

James K. Polk: Learned on the job. Enthusiastically.

Zachary Taylor: Soldier.

Millard Fillmore: Learned nothing on the job.

Franklin Pierce: Mexican War combat veteran.

James Buchanan: Learned on the job.

Abraham Lincoln: Learned on the job (served in Illinois militia during Blackhawk’s War).

Andrew Johnson: Learned on the job.

U.S. Grant: The Civil War brought out the best in him and the blood out of everyone else.

Rutherford B. Hayes: Civil War combat veteran.

James A. Garfield: Civil War combat veteran

Chester A. Arthur: Civil War quartermaster.

Grover Cleveland: Avoided Civil War draft by paying a substitute. Learned on the job. Twice.

Benjamin Harrison: Civil War combat veteran.

William McKinley: Civil War combat veteran.

Theodore Roosevelt: Noted equestrian with enthusiasm for Cuba.

William Howard Taft: Learned on the job.

Woodrow Wilson: Learned on the job.

Warren Harding: Learned on the job.

Calvin Coolidge: Learned on the job.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: Former assistant secretary of the Navy.

Harry S Truman: World War I combat veteran.

Dwight D. Eisenhower: Ike. Mentioned something about a “military-industrial complex.”

John F. Kennedy: PT-109.

Lyndon B. Johnson: World War II combat veteran (Army).

Richard M. Nixon: World War II, Navy; played mean game of poker.

Gerald Ford: World War II combat veteran (Navy).

Jimmy Carter: Navy nucular engineer.

Ronald Reagan: Learned on the job (warmed up dispatching National Guard to Berkeley).

G.H.W. Bush: World War II combat veteran (Navy).

Bill Clinton: Otherwise engaged during Vietnam draft. Learned on the job.

G.W. Bush: Air National Guard (1970s); carrier landing (2003).

Technorati Tags:

Posted on

Commander in Chief

About a year ago, Garry Wills had some thoughtful things to say about the notion of the president as commander-in-chief and about what that role has evolved and is evolving into. He talked about the militarization of our politics, the way “wartime discipline” has become the norm rather than the exception, and about the glorification of the president as a military leader.

I can’t improve on what Wills said. But I can register alarm at the sudden, crazy veering of Hillary Clinton to inform the world that she and John McCain are commander-in-chief material, while Barack Obama is not.

My friend Pete sent me this quote, which I find in a Baltimore Sun blog:

“I think that since we now know Sen. (John) McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Sure. As Wills points out, everyone and his sister has to strike the military pose now (even when the effect is comic rather that martial). That part’s unfortunate, but no shock. What seems like lunacy, though, is the embrace of McCain. Yeah, that may help her in her contest with Obama. But apparently she cares nothing about what happens when she or Obama will actually be running against McCain. She’s endorsing him, for crying out loud.

But that’s not the only way in which she’s taking leave of her senses. She’s decided that she has to play act at the job of commander-in-chief. First with the “red phone” ad, and now — as the Sun’s blog describes — by holding what was described as a “cabinet style” press conference in the company of a bunch of military officers who support her. What she’s doing is working to reduce the primary campaign to the president’s military role. Again, this must be aimed solely at Obama, because no one can honestly believe she’ll compare favorably to McCain if that’s the way the campaign is framed.

It’s possible she’s given Obama an opening, though. The president’s military conduct during the last eight years was repudiated in the 2006 election. McCain’s rhetoric about war has become so extreme that, as my brother John pointed out, people are calling him McBush. Clinton is recklessly aligning herself with McCain (an act that, among other things, makes you wonder what, if anything, she really believes about Iraq). After the decade we’ve just gone through, and the prospect that continuing on the same path will not only cost trillions but cripple the armed forces the Bushes, Cheneys, McCains (and now Clintons) profess to love so much, wisdom, restraint and an open mind will look pretty good in the Oval Office. That’s Obama’s argument to make.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Posted on

Air Lines and A. Lincoln

The Library of Congress site–a dangerous place to explore. I actually started out with a purpose when I began searching the its collection of broadsides last night. Among knowledge nuggets gleamed: American railroads of yesteryear often called themselves “air lines.” Why? Were they towing zeppelins ‘cross the prairie? No. “Air line” (or “air-line”) described the shortest route between two points

I also happened across the item below: apparently a clever piece of Democratic campaign ephemera from 1864 that purports to be an Abraham Lincoln business card. March 4 refers to the date in 1865 that Lincoln would have left office had he lost the election. (Click the image for a larger, legible version of it. The library’s page on the item is here.

And the text says:

“To Whom It May Concern:

“My old customers, and others, are no doubt aware of the terrible time I have had in crossing the stream, and will be glad to know that I will be back, on the same side from which I started, on or before the Fourth of March next, when I will be ready to swap horses, dispense law, make jokes, split rails, and perform other matters in a small way.”)

Alincoln

Technorati Tags: ,

Posted on

21

It’s Thom’s 21st birthday. Boy, did that come fast. I was under the impression we just brought him home from the hospital. (Of course, my time sense is getting severely telescoped these days. Seems like I can still see the dust rising from the ’69 Cubs team falling on its face.)

Anyway, he’s up in Eugene, where birthday weather will be overcast but maybe not rainy. TB, have a great one, and I’ll wait till you’re back down here to toast the day.