Category: Berkeley

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Dustbin

Listening to the A’s game tonight (they lost, and having lost three out of four they’re close to officially cooled off from their long, long run). Sammy Sosa was up for the Orioles, and announcer Ken Korach observed that with the Cubs last year, he was 2 for 9 against the A’s. Then he said to Bill King, who’s been doing the A’s games since 1981 (before that, he did Oakland Raiders and Golden State Warriors games, and was the best play-by-play announcer I’ve ever heard in both football and basketball; he started as a broadcaster in Pekin, Illinois, in the late ’40s, one-time home of the Chinks (the nickname of the Pekin High teams) and late Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen. …)

How easily I digress.

Then Korach said to King, speaking of the A’s interleague series against the Cubs last year, “But you wouldn’t remember that, Bill.” King hates interleague play, period. He said something like, “No, no I wouldn’t. They play those games and then they go into the dustbin of history.” Korach: “Dustbin of history — I like that.” I was thinking, how many baseball announcers out there are quoting — who? Marx? no, Trotsky — and how many people are making the connection? I’ll bet, but do nothing to back up my wager, which will involve neither doughnuts nor dollars that King knows just where the phrase comes from.

And that concludes this broadcasting day.

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Anatomy of a Toot

As promised, photographic documentation of what’s called locally “a toot.”

But having spent two hours posting 11 pictures in that little photo album, I’m reminded why I don’t do it more often. I mean, it takes two hours. Part of the problem is the seeming inflexibility of the TypePad photo albums: The pictures appear on your working site in the reverse order you chose them; when you post them, they appear in reverse order again — or, to look at it another way, in the same order you orginally picked them. That always confuses me and I wind up writing absurdly prolix captions (also time consuming) that are supposed to have some sort of narrative order but come out rather jumbled. The current effort’s a case in point. Could be that later I’ll go back in and try to fix my fractured storytelling. But for now: Bed.

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Brief Road Blog

In Chico (just west of Paradise) after a quick un-air-conditioned ride up Interstate 5 in a red ’93 Honda Civic hatchback (aka “The Machine Messiah) to visit a Sacramento Valley monastery celebrating its 50th anniversary. Temperature: 106. Relative humidity: 9 percent. The backstory: The monastery figures in a long tale involving Leland Stanford (in a cameo), William Randolph Hearst, and a 12th century Spanish abbey. I’ll relate all — as many others have done — later. With dramatic photographic evidence.

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August 6

At the tail end of the day — actually, tale end would work just as well — a moment’s pause to acknowledge the Hiroshima anniversary.

On one of the bike club email lists I subscribe to, one mostly for Berkeley folks and our ilk, one member sent out a mildly worded note that he planned a ride out to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory today to reflect on “human intelligence and human stupidity.” Good for him. Then, to underline his feelings, I guess, he appended a simplistic screed copied and pasted from someplace on the Web that declared that the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the “two worst terror acts in human history.”

That set off a chain reaction of responses that fell into two familiar camps:

–It was essential to use the bomb to avoid the slaughter that would have attended a U.S. invasion of Japan’s home islands. And besides, war is hell. And here were similar or worse atrocities and mass deaths during the war, some due to Allied bombing.

–Japan was about to collapse. The argument about preventing mass casualties is a myth. The bombings were entirely avoidable and amount to mass murder, plain and simple.

At one point, I would have veered toward the second camp. And I still can’t accept there was no acceptable alternative to dropping the bomb on a virtually defenseless civilian target. That being said, it’s disappointing that the discussion is reduced to such absurd oversimplifications and dominated by the need for an uncomplicated answer.

Easy for us, most of whom have no direct experience of the magnitude of violence unleashed in modern warfare to try to justify or condemn the bombing. The reality was terrible, and terribly complex. Just one example: The immediate backdrop to the bombing was the battle of Okinawa. Three months. Two hundred fifty thousand killed; 100,000 civilians killed. There was good reason to dread the next step in an invasion of Japan.

As I said, I can’t buy that dropping the bomb was the only option. But what did the decision really come down to? Callous disregard for life? Desire to avoid sacrificing U.S. troops in a bloody invasion? Reckless use of a lethal and perhaps imperfectly understood technology? Lasting animosity for a nation that hit us with a sneak attack? Underlying racial and cultural hatred? Desire to show the Soviets what would be in store for them if they got out of hand? Impulse to do something, anything to finish off a fierce and much-feared enemy?

I choose all of the above.

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TV News Love Affair

Mcqueary

Let’s see: There’s a guy named Charles McQueary (Dr. Charles E. McQueary to you, thanks very much) who is undersecretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security. So, given 5 or 10 minutes with those facts and a computer keyboard, how wrong could you get that if someone asked you to type his name and affiliation? Whatever your answer is, someone just topped you.

“Homeless Defense Undersecretary.” It’s about time.

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Birth of a Trend

Bissell

Another orphan vacuum cleaner has appeared on a local street corner. Kate and I were walking over to the Berkeley Jazzschool last night to hear Tom’s friend Sam play when we encountered this well-care-for Bissell upright at the corner of Holly and Cedar. Of course, our minds went back immediately to the lonely Spanish-speaking vacuum cleaner abandoned a few months ago a few blocks away. One more of these, and we have a trend on our hands.

Sam’s concert was great, by the way.

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A Cyclist, 1884

“In appearance, he was anything but a holiday wheelman. Brown as a nut, and mud-bespattered, all surplus fat had been worn off by his severe and protracted work. His blue flannel shirt was a deal too large for him and much weather-stained. His knickerbockers had given way to a pair of blue overalls, gathered at the knees within a pair of duck hunting leggings, once brown, but now completely disguised as to texture and color by heavy alkali mud.”

Description of Thomas Stevens in Cheyenne, Wyoming, during his transcontinental bicycle “ride” (he pushed his cycle nearly as much as he pedaled it) in 1884. I wanted to read about Stevens because his trip began in Oakland. An account of his journey appears in an 1887 book called “Ten Thousand Miles on a Bicycle,” by Karl Kron; Kate got me a facsimile reprint a few years ago.

Naturally, I did a little search for more information on Stevens. The very first Google listing brings up an account from Harper’s Weekly with an illustration of someone considerably less weather-beaten than the character described above. Kron’s account mentions that Stevens took his bicycle across the Atlantic the following spring and set out across Europe and western Asia, getting as far as Tehran, Iran, before winter weather stopped him. The Wikipedia account discloses the next chapter (and what happened to Stevens’s bike much, much later): He made it to Japan and sailed back to San Francisco in 1886, the first person, apparently, to have cycled around the world.

And finally, Stevens’s own story of his journey is online, thanks to Project Gutenberg. Here’s how the ride starts:

“With the hearty well-wishing of a small group of Oakland and ‘Frisco

cyclers who have come, out of curiosity, to see the start, I mount and

ride away to the east, down San Pablo Avenue, toward the village of the

same Spanish name, some sixteen miles distant. The first seven miles are

a sort of half-macadamized road, and I bowl briskly along.

“The past winter has been the rainiest since 1857, and the continuous

pelting rains had not beaten down upon the last half of this imperfect

macadam in vain; for it has left it a surface of wave-like undulations,

from out of which the frequent bowlder protrudes its unwelcome head, as

if ambitiously striving to soar above its lowly surroundings. But this

one don’t mind, and I am perfectly willing to put up with the bowlders

for the sake of the undulations. The sensation of riding a small boat

over “the gently-heaving waves of the murmuring sea” is, I think, one

of the pleasures of life; and the next thing to it is riding a bicycle

over the last three miles of the San Pablo Avenue macadam as I found it

on that April morning. …”

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The Boalt Tour: Part IV

Law schools and business schools attract very bright people, many or perhaps most of whom have their eyes on careers that will pay handsomely. To compete for new generations of very bright people, professional schools need continual investment in the faculty and facilities that make them attractive places of study. To invest, the schools need constant infusions of cash. For a publicly supported professional school like Boalt Hall. most of the cash comes from the state’s taxpayers, student fees, and private donors. Not suprisingly, the biggest group of donors are alumni, the past generations of very bright students who have gone on to their brilliant and rewarding careers. Once the alums have coughed up their money — and the schools remind them often that it would be greatly appreciated if they could scan their forgotten T-bill accounts for a few thousand stray bucks to help out the alma mater — the school has a way of giving back: Hanging the donor’s name in a place of honor. The more decimal places on the check, the grander the placement.

At Boalt, the former law dorm cafeteria (now a cafe) is named for Melvin Belli, a fabulously successful San Francisco ambulance chaser of the old breed and old century; the registrar’s office bears the name of Larry Sonsini, perhaps the most successful and best-known technology lawyer in Silicon Valley. The names are everywhere. A dogleg lobby between the law library and the registrar has two names — one for each section of the passageway. One section of Boalt’s main courtyard memorializes a family that produced a half-dozen Boalt grads between 1930 and 1970 (and lots of gifts, too).

Even individual offices have donor nameplates — though I’m not sure whether it’s the office or the fancy modern brushed aluminum address sign (with coordinating mini-corkboard) the donors’ gift paid for. I was curious about the name attached to my shared office, number 205. Howard B. Crittenden Jr. was a pre-Web man and left only a modest store of Google-able facts — just four hits, in fact. They’re all lawsuits, and the first one is a beauty: A case that arose in the early ’60s when Howard and his two brothers fell to squabbling about an inheritance and wound up in court.