Author: Dan Brekke

Posted on

Big O

Bigo1

This morning, from Chavez Park on the Berkeley waterfront, via my phone camera. I was down there with The Dog after dropping Kate off to catch the train to Sacramento. After the sun rose, this big smoke-ring-like thing was visible over the city, drifting south with all the other mornng clouds. Yes, those are steam plumes rising from west Berkeley, but they didn’t appear to have anything to do with the cloud overhead. Between this apparition and the Eugene contrails the other day, I’m getting ready for the next part of the message.

Technorati Tags: ,

Posted on

Today’s Highlight

Unicorns030407

It’s everyone’s favorite fantasy creatures: Commie and Freedom, the dueling Cold War unicorns. The concept is sublime on many levels, not least of which is the fond and uncomplicated memories of that late era of imminent global annihilation. I’ll trade you a bin Laden and Bush for a Ford and Brezhnev. Please?

A friend (or friends) of Thom tracked down the unicorns for Thom’s birthday (available at Archie McPhee, among many other places online; they’re from McPhee’s parent, an outfit in Seattle called Accoutrements, “Outfitters of Popular Culture”; among the company’s other offerings is a Librarian Action Figure). Before we move on to the serious business of life, I commend your attention to the artwork on the box. The “Freedom” side is pretty straightforward, though it features a pretty gnarly Uncle Sam. It looks like whoever did this project spent more time working out the “Commie” iconography: I especially like the Lenin figure, which appears with a factory in the background and above a bunch of Bolshie soldiers (headed out to do battle with the Whites or to dispossess the bourgeoisie). The other figure–the long-coated commissar-type–is pretty cool, too; then at the top you’ve got an 1812-era cannon, the czarist double-headed eagle, and to the left of that some tiny cartoonish man. Odd. Fascinating.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Posted on

Big V

Eugene030307A

From atop Skinner’s Butte in the middle of Eugene, looking south across downtown. Kate and I drove up Friday to spend today with Thom–his 20th birthday. Amazingly, I don’t think we once went into dramatic retelling of “the night you were born” stories. Instead, we spent most of the daylight hours outside. It’s been rainy up here lately. We heard a woman at one of the drive-up coffee stands on Franklin Boulevard say she woke up, saw the sun, and thought it was a UFO. The sunshine and warmth lasted all day, and besides Skinner’s Butte (named after the city’s founder, Eugene Skinner), we walked along the Willamette, saw a bald eagle hunting the river, and took a short hike up a high ridge south of town. A great day for us. Too bad we don’t have more time up here–we need to head back south tomorrow. It’s always a fun trip, though.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Posted on

Steam

Steam022807

Drama in real life: The other morning, after four or five days of off-and-on rain, the sun came out bright and early. The posts to the pergola on our back patio steamed–is that the right word? sounds better than “gave off water vapor”–in the sunlight.

Technorati Tags:

Posted on

McCain

John McCain was on Letterman Wednesday night and announced (or pre-announced) that he’s running for president. There was a moment a few years back when I felt pretty good about McCain. You know: stand-up guy, moderate, rational, independent thinker, as demonstrated by his willingness to go against Bush, Cheney and company on the issue of the United States employing torture against detainees enemy combatants. McCain managed to rally veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress for his anti-torture bill and got Bush to publicly acquiesce and sign the thing. Here’s what’s strange about that story, though, and a hint about what’s wrong with McCain’s quest for the presidency: He uttered not a whisper of public protest when news reports disclosed that Bush had appended a signing statement to the new law that said, essentially, the executive branch would enforce it as it saw fit.

Why would McCain not raise a fuss about that? It’s as if, having made his principled stand, having won his public relations victory, he couldn’t be bothered with confronting Bush’s designs to thwart his work. It’s as if the only way he can imagine becoming president is to be part of the team that’s running things now.

And then, of course, there’s Iraq. McCain not only supports the “surge,” a piece of window dressing designed to buy time, but he has long called for the United States to send a far larger force into Iraq. That’s his answer to the Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney “mismanagement” of the war–an American army big enough to bang heads together and “create the conditions” for peace. I’ll give Letterman credit: He left off fawning long enough to ask McCain a hypothetical question that was at least as probing as what he’d get from the likes of Tim Russert or Katie Couric:

“The country of Iraq is stabilized, the government is now, as you described, stabilized, the violence is now significantly reduced; the net benefit to the United States, beyond Americans have stopped losing their lives there, is what?”

To which McCain responded:

“Probably that we have a functioning democracy or a government that will become a democracy, that there will be oil revenues which will then be used by the Iraqis to build up there own country. And maybe it will spread in the region. You know, there are really only two democracies in the region, Israel and the other is Turkey, in the whole region, and obviously we would like to see that.

“I think I know what you’re getting at, and that is should we have gone in in the first place. There was massive intelligence failures and books have been written about the mismanagement of the war, and I would recommend ‘Fiasco’ and ‘Cobra Two’ or one of these other books. But we are where we are now–we are where we are now–and rather than reviewing all the problems we have, if we withdraw early, every expert I know says it will descend into chaos, sectarian violence and even genocide, so that’s why when I say this may be our last chance to succeed, because Americans are very frustrated and they have every right to be. We’ve wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives, over there.”

So, part one of the answer is the same old fairy tale: If we try hard enough, we’ll turn Iraq into a functioning democracy or start the evolutionary process toward democracy in motion (hey, a Republican who believes in evolution!). And maybe it will spread to the other benighted corners of the Middle East, like those governed by our closest Arab allies.

Part two is also getting to be an old saw: If we withdraw, there will be unimaginable violence (senator, check your morning paper). In short, this is the same answer we’d get from Bush, complete with occasional signs of the same fractured syntax (though I note that McCain slipped and said American lives have been wasted in Iraq, which is a heresy among the true believers; if some Democrat had said that, Fox News and the whole right-wing opinion mob would be flaying them alive, the mainstream media would be picking up on it, and a mealy-mouthed clarification/apology would be in the works).

The bottom line is nuts: We’re gonna fight our way out of this, only smarter this time. Don’t ask what it costs, because we can’t afford to fail.

Technorati Tags: ,

Posted on

‘Nemesis’

NPR’s "Talk of the Nation" had Chalmers Johnson on Wednesday talking about his new book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic." Johnson is a harsh critic of the way our military has come to dominate at least the foreign policy agenda of our government, and he offers no comfort for those (like me most of the time, to be honest) who believe we’ll just find a way to muddle through:

"One of the oddest features of political life in the United States in
the years since the terrorist attacks is how few people have thought or
acted like Barbara Lee. The public expresses itself in opinion polls,
which some students of politics scrutinize intently, but there is
little passion in the society, certainly none proportionate to the
threats facing our democratic republic. The United States today is like
a cruise ship on the Niagara River upstream of the most spectacular
falls in North America. A few people on board have begun to pick up a
slight hiss in the background, to observe a faint haze of mist in the
air or on their glasses, to note that the river current seems to be
running slightly faster. But no one yet seems to have realized that it
is almost too late to head for shore.

"Like
the Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, imperial German, Nazi, imperial
Japanese, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Soviet empires in the
last century, we are approaching the edge of a huge waterfall and are
about to plunge over it."

                        

And he also points out what’s obvious now that we’ve gotten to watch Congress’s first impotent response to Bush’s Iraq policy:

"I believe that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have led the country into
a perilous cul-de-sac, but they did not do it alone and removing them
from office will not necessarily solve the problem. The crisis of
government in the United States has been building at least since World
War II. The emergence of the imperial presidency and the atrophying of
the legislative and judicial branches have deep roots in the postwar
military-industrial complex, in the way broad sectors of the public
have accepted the military as our most effective public institution,
and in aberrations in our electoral system. The interesting issue is
not the damage done by Bush, Cheney, and their followers but how they
were able to get away with it, given the barriers that exist in the
Constitution to prevent just the sorts of misuses of power for which
they have become notorious."

Posted on

On the Bike: Lousy Cycling Weather List

Just to put it on the record before the beautiful memories start to fade:

The weather people were right: Saturday turned out rainy and windy, eventually. We rode into some light rain about 20 miles from the start of the 188-mile ride, but that was done with pretty quickly; if that was all we’d had to contend with, no one would have even remembered it. The northbound leg was pretty painless because we had a nice tailwind through the first mandatory stop (“control” in the language of brevets) at mile 46 or so in Petaluma. The breeze was a big help as we continued on, too. But off to the west, the hills were shrouded in falling rain, and it was raining by the time I got to Santa Rosa. It rained moderately for the next hour or so, just about all the way to our turnaround control in Healdsburg. By then, with more than 100 miles to go to get back to the start, everyone looked pretty wet. I was soaked, and couldn’t stand around much before I started to shiver. Luckily, I met a couple friends, Bruce and Rob, who were just finishing lunch and ready to leave; I had downed an orange juice and a protein shake–my stomach had felt too upset earlier to eat anything, and the liquid fuel was working just fine–and I rode with my two East Bay compadres along the edge of the vineyards down to the Russian River, then out to the coast. There, the principal weather factor turned to wind: A strong breeze was rising along Highway 1, and it was mostly right in our faces. About 20 miles after reaching the ocean, and about 57 miles from the end of the ride, it started to rain again; the wind had grown strong enough that, along with our forward motion on the bikes, the drops seemed to blow horizontally and stung my face. It rained with increasing intensity all the way back to the finishing control at the Golden Gate Bridge. It was so windy up on the span that we all had to dismount to walk around the north tower, and even then we had to lean into every step to make any progress at all; with the rain, it felt like we were getting sandblasted.

But it wasn’t all one big gray blur. Every once in a while I’d catch a piece of the scene–the glistening green slope of a mountainside before the storm really hit, the nearly-obscured hills or beaches as the rain rolled in, the rain blowing through the light cast by streetlamps–and the beauty of it all was striking. Or maybe that was just an attempt to justify subjecting myself to an experience that at points seemed crazy.

At one point, Rob and I got flat tires just below one of the last summits of the ride. The road was completely dark except for bike and car lights. We were in the middle of the storm in a dark, dripping forest, and we made our repairs with cold, wet hands. I, at least, didn’t have perfect confidence that my tire would stay inflated, but within 20 minutes or so we were riding again. One thing I like about this climb, from Nicasio up and over to San Geronimo, is that when you approach the summit, there’s always a pronounced breeze–a wind moving through the notch in the hills, a signal that you’re just about at the top. Last night, you could hear the wind roaring above us as we went up the slope. Instead of the usual breeze, a gale was blowing so hard that I wondered at first whether I could keep my bike upright. Instead of the usual fast, effortless descent, we had to keep pedaling to make progress into the wind. It was a relief to get down. We heard the same roar going up the other hills we had to cross in Marin County and faced the same wind-blown descents each time.

My hardest day ever on a bicycle? The way memory works–smoothing over the most unpleasant parts–it’s tough to say. But it would definitely be up there. I got soaked early and knew I was beyond hope of drying out (if this had been a multi-day ride, I would have found a laundromat and thrown my stuff in a dryer). It rained hard and for a long time, and it was on the chilly side–low to mid 50s all day. The wind was a special factor. As I said to Rob and Bruce after descending into San Geronimo, “That was wild.” I suppose I felt exhilarated, but a lot of that had to do with knowing that I’d be done riding in an hour or two with any luck.

The headline up there promises a list. So here they are, a quick review of the harshest weather rides I remember (one might be struck by how many of these are in the last four years; that’s when I started randonneuring and bought into the notion, perhaps to be explored later, that a little rain or heat or cold shouldn’t keep you from going out and riding all day and night).

1. February 24, 2007: San Francisco 300 brevet. 120 miles of rain and wind. Finished.

2. May 3-5, 2003. Davis 600 brevet. Rained for six or seven hours in middle of event (and for me, in the middle of the night). Cold pouring rain at the turnaround point, situated in a redwood grove in a state park. The hardship wasn’t so much the storm, but the distance still left to cover after I got a good soaking. I finished and qualified for PBP.

3. March 18, 2006: San Francisco 400 brevet. 55 miles into a 20-35 mph headwind on the western edge of the Central Valley. It took 11 and a half hours to finish the first 200 kilometers; the wind-aided return south took eight and a half hours.

4. July 22, 2006. Bay in a Day Double Century. High temperature on the road: 118 degrees. Started early, finished late, and got cooked in between.

5. January 28, 2006: San Francisco 200 brevet. Rain for 100 of the 125 miles on the road. But wind wasn’t much of a factor until near the very end. Finished.

6. September 14-15, 2006: Days two and three of the Last Chance 1,200 in Colorado and Kansas. We had a good 36 hours of 20-30 mile an hour winds; the breeze was from the south, meaning it was mostly a crosswind, but it made bike handling very tough and tiring. I finished the 1,000 portion of my ride, but did not finish the planned 200 afterward due to an Achilles tendon injury.

7. June 24-25, 2005: Great Lakes Randonneurs 600 brevet. Thunderstorms struck at the 300-kilometer mark; after two-and-a-half-hour delay, rode most of the night in the storm with bolts of lightning for extra illumination. I quit at the 400-kilometer mark.

8. April 12, 2003: Visiting Chicago for my parents’ 50th anniversary, I decide to take my brother-in-law Dan’s bike out for a ride. Temperature was about 40, and the bonus factor was a stiff breeze off Lake Michigan. I rode across the Wisconsin state line, called my sister’s house to announce my accomplishment, then enjoyed a wonderful tailwind all the way back to the North Side.

9. July 13, 1969: I take it into my 15-year-old head to ride from our place in Crete, Illinois, to Kankakee River State Park, about 35 miles away, on my red three-speed Schwinn. The temperature reached the mid-90s on a mostly unshaded route. I had a map. I did not have anything to eat or drink, though I did bring money and bought stuff along the way and I wasn’t shy about stopping to ask people for water. Finished the ride and then repeated it two days later with two friends; we tied sleeping bags and other camping gear to our bikes and hit the road. Even though I was really tired and sore and probably dehydrated and sunstruck and got a ride home from my dad, I had sort of a good time. Maybe this ride explains all the others.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Posted on

On the Bike: Weather Edition

Tomorrow’s event, part two of the qualifying series for this August’s Paris-Brest-Paris exercise in transatlantic self-punishment, is a 300-kilometer ride. That’s 188 miles in universally recognized American distance units. We’ll start at the Golden Gate Bridge at 6 a.m., ride up through the interior valleys of Sonoma County to the town of Healdsburg, head out along the Russian River to the townlet of Jenner, then ride down the coast highway to Point Reyes Station, where we’ll swing inland to go back to the bridge (the foregoing provided for those who want to keep score at home). Based on past experience, this will be something I’ll be doing well into the evening.

The hard part is: rain. The sky is clear out there now. But for the past two or three days, the forecast has predicted rain and, for the return trip on the coast, headwinds. I’ve been meaning to write a little something on the blessing and curse of modern weather forecasting for the modern bicycle rider. By which I mean: The blessing is that the sort of forecasting that’s possible today, along with tools like Doppler radar and satellite water-vapor imagery, can give you a pretty clear idea of what you’re riding into and when; the curse is that you become the prisoner of a prospective and freely revised reality.

Weather forecasting is highly model driven, meaning that a bunch of unimaginably fast and powerful computers are applying sophisticated mathematical models to the wealth of weather data pouring in from all over the globe; when the machines finish their model-assisted number crunching, they spit out a picture of the way the world will look in 12 and 24 and 48 hours and so on. Then forecasters take these visions of the world as the models predict it and try to turn them into forecasts. Except: Sometimes the forecasters are confronted with two or three or six conflicting, or at least significantly varying, takes on what tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, ad infinitum, will look like. Then the humans have to do something that is a cross between highly educated guesswork and astrology: often, based on observations about which models have “verified” recently, they’ll make a prediction based on a compromise reading of models or just lean on the model that seems the most trustworthy in a given set of circumstances.

The curse, more specifically, is that we can all look at the developing forecasts, read the forecasters’ reasoning, even consult the raw data if we think we can handle that. Which means, in the end, we don’t get a minute’s rest thinking about whether it will rain, how much it will rain, how awful the headwinds will be out on the road. On balance, it seems like it would be simpler, and much more peaceful for the soul, to just look out the window before you get on your bike. But that would be much too simple and would fail to make the best use of our high-speed Net connections.

Time for bed now, right after I check the forecast and the radar again.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Posted on

The Softball Team

Pete Dexter, the former great newspaper columnist and author of one of my favorite novels (“Deadwood”) was on KQED’s “Forum” Wednesday morning, part of a tour promoting a new book, “Paper Trails.” At the prompting of host Michael Krasny, he told this story (the MP3 show audio is here):

“It started with a column about some drug activity in a real bad part of, well wasn’t that bad a part of Philadelphia, it was the Tasker neighborhood, and this kid had gotten himself killed in a drug deal. And I wrote about it, they had a meeting that I wasn’t supposed to go to but I knew a lot of guys in Tasker, so I went to the meeting and wrote about it. It was really too bad, because this was a kid who woulda–he wasn’t a bad kid. So you’re against drugs, big deal. So I write the column and I get a call; the column came out weeks after the incident and right after the meeting. And I got a call from the kid’s mother and she was hysterical saying I’d brought it all back and stuff and I felt real bad and apologized and she wanted a retraction. I didn’t know what she was gonna retract, I mean the kid got hit in the back of the head so hard with a baseball bat that one of his eyeballs had come out and they found him dead in a stream.

“I was very nice to her, but she wasn’t having it, and then her older son called and we go through the same song and dance. And at some point in this conversation the guy started talking about how he was going to come find me and he was gonna break my legs and break my hands and all this stuff. At that point in my life, you said something like that to me I wasn’t going to come looking for you to hurt you but I was going to make myself available. I was in the gym every day then, I could take care of myself.

“I said where are you and he told me he worked in a neighborhood called Devil’s Pocket; it’s a real well-named place in Philadelphia, it’s about the worst neighborhood in that city. I went over there at 8 o’clock at night and he was sitting in there with four or five guys … we talked a little bit and I thought everything was settled and I turned away and somebody hit me, then I got hit with a beer bottle. I wasn’t hurt–my teeth were sheared and my lips were busted up–but I wasn’t hurt. And that night, it was December and I was going over to a birthday party at my friend Randall Cobb, who at the time was a–you know Randall didn’t have the talent to beat Larry Holmes, probably, but he had a fight with Mike Weaver who was the WBA champion at that time and he probably would have beaten Weaver because Cobb you could hit him with a pipe and he just could hardly be hurt. He was a pretty good fundamental boxer, wasn’t fast, didn’t have much talent or a whole lot of punch but he had beaten Ernie Shavers and he probably would have beaten this guy Weaver. Which means when he fought Larry Holmes and lost, which wound up happening, he would have come in as a white heavyweight champion of his own fighting the other guy and it would have been a huge money match. We’re just talking dollars and cents here–he would have gotten five or ten million dollars for that fight.

“I went to Cobb’s birthday party, I think it was his 28th birthday, and he saw me and asked what happened and I told him and he said, well, do you want to go talk to them about it? And it’s one of the many moments of my life where I wasn’t thinking in everybody’s best interest; I said all right and so we went back over and talked to these people a little bit. And Cobb kept saying to me, well what do you want to do? Well one of the guys sitting in there, this little fat guy, ran out the back door. The last thing I really wanted to do–I wasn’t there to get even, we just walked in there, there’s four or five guys, I don’t know, maybe six sitting there. Cobb and I–we had nothing to take care of that but all of a sudden this guy–in two minutes that place just filled up with people with softball bats and reinforced steel with little tape markings on the handles where they would use them to hit people, and crowbars. And I remember Cobb looking at the–it was snowing outside by now, and Cobb looking at these people pouring into the bar and saying to me, ‘Don’t you hope that’s the softball team?’ I was so scared I really could hardly laugh. And one thing led to another. …”

You guys got worked over pretty bad.

“I ended up–my back was broken.Yeah, giving the guy credit, he said he’d break my legs, and he did break a leg. I had bleeding on the brain. To this day things don’t work right.

“But the more expensive damage was probably done to Cobb, because he broke a little bone in his left forearm which is for a right-handed fighter, for Cobb anyway, that was all his offense anyway, he was a jabber. So he didn’t get the fight with Weaver, the fight fell through, so when he fought Holmes he got half a million dollars for it. “