September 17 Notebook

–Happy Constitution Day. Senator Robert Byrd inserted a provision into a spending bill last year — later approved by Congress and signed by the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — that directs schools that get federal money to conduct some sort of educational program every year on or around September 17th. That’s the date in 1787 the Constitution was signed. The requirement is actually a pretty loose one. The University of California set up a Constitution Day website, and doing that little bit would have complied with Byrd’s law. (At UC Berkeley, the occasion will be marked with a panel discussion at the law school, open to anyone).

–Happy 143rd anniversary of Antietam. Well, yes, happy might not be the word. After the battle that consumed a beautiful summer day in the woods and cornfields around Sharpsburg, Maryland, “nearly 6,000 men lay dead or dying, and another 17,000 wounded. … The casualties at Antietam numbered four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944.” (From “Battle Cry of Freedom,” by James McPherson).

Beyond the carnage, the North’s strategic victory gave Lincoln political breathing space to promulgate the Emancipation Proclamation.

–Happy Harvest Moon. It’s tonight.

–Happy birthday to Dominic Hickey, born in Berkeley on this date in 1983, while I played with his older brother Dylan and my son Eamon in a park down the street from his folks’ place. He’s a senior this year at UC Irvine. Hey, it seems like yesterday,

Stairs

Stairs

Just me and my semi-broken tiny digital camera: Walking home the long way from work Friday. La Loma meets Virginia in a series of twisting streets and stairways The skies open up from their monthlong fog, the late warmth and autumn-slanted sunlight a surprise. Everything’s color and shadow.

Phone Message

Sent today at 7:58 a.m. by an Oakland public school teacher to her husband:

“Hey, Dan, this is Kate … I came into work this morning and on all of the portable [classroom] doors including mine someone has smeared dog shit all over the doors and the handles and everything and the custodian’s outside cleaning it up. This is awful.”

That’s how Kate’s school week began. She talked to her kids about it during their daily morning meeting. The solution one of the second-graders came up with to deal with the mindless idiots vandalizing the school: Install cameras.

We’ll see.

Flying Home

Heading back, watching the night unfold, watching the towns approach, slide past,

right-angle layouts, the bright stitching of main streets against invisible landscape.

I can guess the names of the bigger towns: Rockford. DeKalb. Galesburg. Iowa City. Cedar Rapids. All maybes. Nothing big enough to suggest Des Moines or Omaha. Then the smaller towns. Some I’ve passed through, others are just names I’ve picked up along the way. Dyersville. Grinnell. Ottumwa. Story City. Stanhope. Storm Lake. Then across the invisible Missouri: Grand Island. McCook. Hastings. Ogallala.

But most without any names that I know, though I’d love to learn them. All down there somewhere in that thinning web of settlements as we move west, each town throwing its main-drag strands of light into the dark. Island universes in uncounted numbers.

[Translation: United Flight 385, Chicago to Oakland. Took off 8:45 p.m. CDT, landed 10:45 p.m. PDT.]

Campus

So, I’m nearing the three-month mark in this law school job (every day a new record for longevity). It’s interesting getting to know the campus again, walking it every day. Interesting to see the students; last time I was up there on an every day basis, I was one of them — a little older than most, actually, but still, within a few years of most of the people in my classes. Now — well, I can hardly ignore the fact pretty much all the students are bracketed by my kids’ ages — 18 and going on 26. I don’t feel a full lifetime away from who I was the last time I was in class (something to do with a senior thesis, I think; never got finished). But in simple age terms, that’s what I am.

That’s not what I started out to say, though. What I started out to say was this overheard snippet, a guy to a couple friends walking down Bancroft Way: “Ted had a press conference the other day. He said Longshore‘s the man.” Translation took a couple of seconds: Football season’s here, and the fans are talking about it.

P.S. And, a lifetime away or not, Nate Longshore is about as fine a sports name as you’ll find occurring in nature.

P.P.S. Pending gridiron excitement: Illinois vs. California in beautiful Memorial Stadium. The last time these squads tilted, the Fighting Illini (caution: politically incorrect) hunted, killed, and skinned the Golden Bears (government notice: extinct hereabouts).

More Fun with Chemtrails

Today’s installment: An Idaho weathercaster, Scott Stevens, who has started a site dedicated to recording all the chemtrail activity he sees and that the many chemtrail investigators everywhere send him pictures of.

This is a guy who has studied the weather and makes a living standing up acting like he’s forecasting the highs and lows and storms and fair weather for the next few days. And he’s come up with his own interesting theory about the supposedly odd behavior and increasing incidence of jet condensation trails: At least some of the contrails are just contrails. But the planes that are leaving them behind are doing atmospheric research in conjunction with the development of some type of energy weapons that will be used, among other things, to manipulate the weather.

Of course, there’s more to the story than that. Stevens links to a site that contains a long Q and A with a chemtrail expert that tells all, or mostly all, about what’s going on: The trails are part of a global effort to disperse a variety of materials that will create The Shield — a barrier meant to combat meant to combat the effects of global warming. The reason we don’t know about any of this is it’s secret; and it’s secret because … well, let the experts tell you:

“Due to the severity of the situation it is mandatory to maintain public calm for as long as possible. The Earth is dying. Humanity is on the road to extinction – without the Shield mankind will die off with in 20 to 50 years. Most people alive today could live to see this extinction take place.”

Twenty to 50 years? Why are we bothering with Social Security? Or Iraq? Of course, the government is probably undertaking those projects for show — just to keep our minds off the really important stuff that’s happening “in plane sight,” as Scott Stevens says. He also urges his readers to “demand an accounting from your government, now. I know that they can’t believe they have been able to keep this secret for this long.”

OK — besides the principle of Occam’s Razor, here’s my problem with this as with so many other conspiracy theories: It all goes back to the government. Not that the government’s not capable of some secret double-dealing. But the historic examples of “the government” — any government — pulling off the kind of massive undertaking without alerting the world in general that something big is going on are rare. People blab. Even the Manhattan Project was infiltrated by Soviet spies. And once an atomic bomb was actually detonated in New Mexico, it was just a matter of time before word of what was happening down there got to the outside world (in practice, the secret only needed to be kept for about three weeks before the whole world knew we had the bomb).

But I’m digressing again.

The point is, the same government that — just a couple exhibits here — can’t figure out how to put armor on Humvees, that has blown up two spaceship crews in the last two decades and can’t seem to fly the shuttle anymore without getting in trouble — the same government most people don’t think competent to fill a pothole — is somehow credited with unerring use of its vast omnipotence to carry out its secret ends. Of course, there’s no paradox at all: the the Humvees and the Columbia blowing up are just part of the sleight of hand.

[Actually, I’m late, very late to the chemtrail picnic. USA Today was on the case in March 2001. Now they’re just part of the conspiracy, too.]

Memorial

The weekend’s major activity was a trip up to the Sierra foothillls, near Grass Valley, to go to a memorial for our former neighbor Bret Tilson, who died of cancer at age 68 earlier this month. I think the main reason we went was to see his wife, Christine, who went through a rough couple of years with Bret sick. Although they lived next door for 13 years — they moved in about six months after we did — I never felt I got to know Bret very well. He avoided crowds, partly because he was sort of shy and partly because he had suffered profound hearing loss and just couldn’t understand what people were saying when they all started talking at once.

His work — he was involved in advanced mathematics research most of his adult life — also might have made him something of a recluse. Christine’s sister said that once, in a show of interest in Bret’s work, she asked him if he could explain the work he was doing. “He looked at me, and didn’t say anything. He looked at me and looked at me and looked at me, and finally he said, ‘I don’t think so.’ ” He wasn’t putting her on. The dissertation for his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley was titled, “Group-Complexity and p-Length of Finite Semigroups.” With another mathematician, he’d been working on another paper that had been published and presented over the past several years, “Categories as Algebras, II.” An advanced math illiterate, the very first sentence in the abstract throws me: “A theory of the semidirect product of categories and the derived category of a category morphism is presented.”

So, yes, he was kind of a stranger to us, though extremely friendly whenever we had a talk over the back fence or commiserated about computer problems. But really, we got to know him better yesterday than we had in all the years he was next door. Just one thing that astonished me: His parents were killed in a plane crash when he was 18 and had just finished his first year at MIT. He had three much younger brothers — age 4, 6 and 8, I think — and he somehow managed to keep them all together and more or less raise them by himself with help from various relatives. Maybe people always rise to the occasion — but hey, no they don’t; a pretty amazing feat for an 18-year-old.

An Important Thing You Must Know

Chemtrails

A special message to the tiny sliver of humanity that reaches this dust-bunny-ridden corner of the World Wide Web: condensation trails aren’t what you think they are. For months, I’ve seen the mysterious stickers up all over town referring to "chemtrails." Probably some sort of conspiracy crap, right? But it wasn’t until I heard people talking about them at last week’s peace vigil and subdued hootenanny that I did what one of the stickers suggested and Googled "chemtrails." You should be glad I did — if it’s not too late.

You think condensation trails are … condensation trails. Caused by the near instantaneous freezing of water vapor in aircraft exhaust at high altitude. You might call them contrails for short.

But whatever nifty terminology you use, if you believe that they are just the product of some sort of garden-variety jet exhaust and cold air, then you’re just a patsy for a huge government conspiracy.

Open your eyes! "Contrails," my … you know … bum! They’re really chemtrails. An evil, or at least unwholesome, rain unleashed by whoever unleashes things like that. The United States government, for sure. Could be the United Nations. And United Airlines is probably getting a piece of the action — getting secret payments to use their harmless-looking though increasingly unpleasant-to-ride-in airliners as long-distance crop dusters. We can only guess who else. (Can I get odds on Satan?)

And what’s the crop. We are? Capacity for independent thought immobilized by the vapors wafting down from on high. Or maybe the effect is physical. No one seems to know. Yet.

 

GoogleCrime

Another incarnation of Google Maps: IncidentLog.com. The site takes preliminary police reports from several dozen participating jurisdictions and maps their locations and details. Here’s the report for Berkeley (Google defeats my feeble efforts to make a screenshot of one of their maps — hey, sounds like a weekend project). Anyway, it’s a useful display if your thinking about what the ne’er-do-wells are doing in your town (we recently had a couple of daylight stickups within a block of our place). The limitation right now is that so few localities are listed, maybe because relatively few offer readily usable data.

OK, so poking around, I see a reference to ChicagoCrime.org, which does essentially the same thing as the IncidentLog does elsewhere. ChicagoCrime has a new Google Maps gadget that essentially combines the routemaking feature on Gmaps Pedometer and the site’s crime database. The resulting tool lets you plot a route anywhere in the city, set the parameters for time and type of crime, then get a Google map showing all the bad stuff that happens along the path of your evening constitutional. When you reach a danger spot, you can break into a run, resulting in fitness and personal safety benefits, or at least a good sweat.

Berkeley Vigil

Vigil

About 8:30 tonight, corner of Solano and The Alameda. (Yes, auslanders, The Alameda.) The MoveOn site said 500 people had signed up to join the vigil at this location. We got there about an hour after it started, and there might have been a total of 250 or 300 on the four corners of the intersection, though I’m a big crowd overestimator from way back. It was a social occasion for lots of people. I ran into an old colleague from The Examiner, and Kate met up with a group of her Oakland teacher buddies.