Category: Berkeley

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Yellow Friendly Merry Cab

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Once upon a time, the cab business here in the East Bay was pretty much like it was in other large-ish urban areas. There were a few large taxi companies whose owners leased cabs to drivers. Most drivers paid "gates and gas" — they bought their own fuel and paid a daily (or nightly) rental fee (hereabouts called the "gate"), and they got to keep whatever they earned in fares and tips above those expenses. Some had a simpler arrangement, splitting both the fares and the fuel expenses with the cab owner. That’s the deal I had when I worked for the late, forgotten St. Francis Taxicab Company, which plied the streets of East Oakland in the early 1980s. That arrangement worked out better for the driver on a bad night and better for the owner on a good night.

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Over in San Francisco, always viewed as cabbie Shangri La by often-idle East Bay drivers, big companies or co-ops are still the rule. The East Bay business has evolved, or degenerated, into a sort of free-for-all, with a bunch of independent operators scrambling for an individual share of the crumbs. One result is a proliferation of taxis with similar-sounding names, many involving the word "yellow." (Like all the best ideas, the original Yellow Cab appears to have been one of Chicago’s gifts to the world.) The Berkeley telephone book has nearly three pages of agate-type listings, many undoubtedly redundant, for various permutations of "Yellow Cab."

I loved the version spotted above, parked in a long queue at the North Berkeley BART station. It’s not just Yellow. It’s Friendly. And Merry.

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One Thousand and One Vacuum Nights

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The vacuum’s still there.

Kate and I walked past its corner this evening, this time as empty-nesters-in-training going out to get a sandwich (Tom was out rowing with the Sea Scouts). I was kind of surprised that the kids from the nearby middle school hadn’t taken matters into their own hands, but maybe they’re trying to fit the vacuum cleaner into their own little universes, too.

Tonight’s appliance-centric reverie — this time mine — revolved around rewriting "The Velveteen Rabbit" (I recommend the Meryl Streep-George Winston version) with the vacuum cleaner standing in for the story’s title hare. It almost works:

Much-loved and overused object of attention falls by the wayside as newer appliances appear on the domestic scene. The owner is taken ill — instead of scarlet fever, I see him going off his meds and getting involuntarily committed as bipolar. His hard-hearted landlord puts his belongings out on the street. Everything is snatched up but the forlorn vacuum cleaner, which has learned from a Miele HEPA-vac, a NordicTrac home treadmill, and a KitchenAid mixer that it’s of no use to anyone. Alone on the street and coming apart at the seams, the little vacuum hopes one of the kindly passing pedestrians will put it out in the middle of the intersection, or throw it in a Dumpster, anything to put it out of its ownerless misery. Instead, a magic fairy appears, restores it to like-new condition, and whisks it to a local flea market. There, its former owner, on a day pass from the ward, sees the little vacuum and is struck with an overwhelming sense of fondness for it. He assumes it’s a sign that he still has issues to deal with, and walks quickly away, leaving the little vacuum with all the other refurbished appliances. 

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Lonely Vacuum

Vacuum

Kate and I went for a walk after dark. A few blocks from home, we passed an abandoned upright vacuum cleaner, standing forlorn on the corner. Cord unraveled, bag flaccid, partially detached and flopped on the sidewalk. You could almost read its life history: from youthful vigor as a partner in the war on household grit, leaving behind no donut crumb or sinsemilla seed; through wheezing middle age that saw it sometimes leave flecks of granola embedded in the living room carpet, even after half a dozen passes; to tired, inefficient old age in which even wayward Cheetos and carelessly sprinkled Baco-Bits scoffed at its feeble sucking powers.

I saw the discarded appliance and my first impulse was to take it and stand it up in the middle of the intersection. It’s not a busy corner, and I don’t think it would be a significant safety hazard. But I just liked the idea of drivers encountering this thing in the middle of the street. The one flaw I could see in my idea was that I’d have to hang around for a while to watch the fun begin. I didn’t have the patience to wait around for my brainstorm’s possibly Letterman-esque consequences. Also, Kate didn’t wholly approve of the concept.

Her response was to imagine posing the vacuum cleaner on different corners in town; sort of an instant interactive “found art” piece. She thought about hanging a sign on it, asking passersby to pick it up and take it someplace interesting, take a picture of it, and send it to us; then we could publish the pictures online. She spun the whole idea out in about half a block, to the point we were imagining the vacuum cleaner riding BART for the day, appearing in a grocery line, getting set up at a public phone.

We didn’t do it, though. Later, I did manage to go back to the corner and snap the vacuum’s picture.

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Double Zero, Double Ought

The topic was ear gauging. The Resident Teen was telling me he intends to gauge his ears. What that means, in brief, is stretching out an ear piercing so that you can fit a piece of jewelry into the enlarged hole; one piece of jewelry inserted into a gauged ear is a colored plug. It’s a modest piece of body modification, really, and one that the Teen’s mom and dad can live with a little more easily at this point than a tattoo, say, or rings or spikes of various descriptions inserted into various vicariously painful body locales.

In talking about the size of earlobe hole that he desired to produce through gauging, the Teen described the largest diameter typically done as “double zero” and held up his fingers to indicate about a quarter-inch. Hearing “double zero,” I immediately thought of “double ought,” one of the largest sizes of buck shot (it turns out there is a larger size — “triple ought”). I wondered if the double-zero gauge for ear piercing was the same diameter as double-ought shot.

Not to keep anyone in suspense, I still don’t know. But I started looking for information on the size of double-ought shot. The non-precise answers I came up with suggested a range equivalent to .30-caliber to .38-caliber bullets — that is, .3 to .38 inches.

I didn’t hunt long, because one of the first references I consulted, with a page title of “Firearms Tutorial,” was a discourse on wound ballistics — the study of damage caused to human tissue by different types of gunshots. I was slow to realize the subject, because I was focusing on finding the diameter of buckshot. The Google entry for the page suggested I’d find the information there. When I hit the link, I searched forward to “double-ought,” and found the statement, “A 00 or ‘double ought’ pellet is essentially equivalent to a low velocity .38 handgun projectile.”

Then I considered the context. In the next paragraph, I encountered this:

“At close range, the pellets essentially act as one mass, and a typical shell would give the mass of pellets a muzzle velocity of 1300 fps (feet per second) and KE (kinetic energy) of 2100 ft/lb. At close range (less than 4 feet) an entrance wound would be about 1 inch diameter, and the wound cavity would contain wadding. At intermediate range (4 to 12 feet) the entrance wound is up to 2 inches diameter, but the borders may show individual pellet markings. Wadding may be found near the surface of the wound. Beyond 12 feet, choke, barrel length, and pellet size determine the wounding.”

It turns out the “Firearms Tutorial” is a resource for forensic pathologists, giving an introduction to the world of guns and everything they can do to the body, with special attention, it seems, on close-range effects. Living in a place where the number of people who die each year of gunshot wounds rivals the total of deaths during the entire Iraq war*, it’s good to have such a resource at the ready.

(*On the statistics: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control report, “Deaths: Final Data for 2002,” (PDF file) puts the total number of U.S. firearms deaths for the year — the most recent the CDC has covered — at 30,242. (I was surprised to see that more than half of those deaths — 17,108 — were suicides.) It’s hard to know the real toll in Iraq since our war began in March 2003, but the Iraq Body Count site, which bases its estimates on an analysis of press accounts, puts the number of Iraqi dead so far at a maximum of about 20,000. The Iraq Coalition Casualties site puts the number of U.S. and allied troops killed so far at 1,726, and notes that at least 210 foreign contract workers have died, too). The big unknown in the total Iraq numbers is how many Iraqi troops and insurgent fighters have died since the fighting started. Ten thousand? Twenty thousand?)

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Opening Night

The Infospigot household, plus special guest (and friend of Thom) Jane, took in the Oakland Athletics home opener tonight. The final score found the hometown nine at a steep deficit to the visiting Toronto Blue Jays, a result that left the 44,000 witnesses chilled and uncharmed. (Just a second and I’ll be done with what I believe is a bad Roger Angell impression.) But the team has 80 more home games to play, so hope abounds.

I’ll say this, though: Everything was close to OK before the umpire went and wrecked things by saying “play ball.”

The A’s stadium, which now goes by the name of McAfee Coliseum or something like that, is impersonally massive since its reconstruction a few years ago to accommodate the East Bay’s professional football team. The main charm the big concrete bowl had before the remodeling was a view over the top of the outfield bleachers to the Oakland Hills. There’s still just a sliver of that vista visible from the cheap third-deck seats (ours came with an unadvertised obstructed view), and the evening sunlight on the ridge — even with a hillside stripped by a gravel quarry — is always striking. Just before the anthems were played — Canadian first, then ours — I noticed a couple of big birds soaring just over the rim of the stadium to our left. I thought they were turkey vultures at first silhouetted glance — an addition to the pigeons, California gulls, and barn swallows that claim the Coliseum as home roost — but as we kept looking, we realized they were red-tailed hawks. Both swayed and wheeled around a light tower on the third-base side of the stadium, and both eventually settled onto the white-painted grating of a workers’ platform at the base of the lights.

Then the anthems. Even though a Canadian guy I met in Ireland in 1973 pointed out that “O Canada” is a militarist hymn (“Listen to what they’re saying — ‘O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.’ On guard!”), I’ve always liked it, and Kate and I sang the few words we knew. Then a singer started into “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a performance punctuated by loud fireworks. We sang along to that, too, despite my dislike of the current manifestation of our flag and patriotism cult.

But while we sang, both Kate and I kept scanning the sky around the stadium. Roy Steele, the public address announcer, alerted the crowd to expect a flyover from a pair of FA-18 jets from Lemoore Naval Air Station in the Central Valley (here’s a question: How much do those flyovers cost, and who pays?) when the anthem was done. Somewhere in the song’s last few bars, Kate said, “There they are.” And off to the southeast, a couple of tiny shapes trailing smoke headed for the rim of the stadium opposite us — heading straight for us, in other words. I said, “Stay way up there, you two.” There was just a dull roar till they climbed into the west behind us, then we were engulfed in a prolonged peal of thunder. I love seeing the big, fast planes. Too bad we can’t put them on permanent amusement duty.

Then the game started, and things went downhill from there. At least until the postgame scrambled eggs back here in Berkeley.

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The Things I Think About

Here’s a pointless exercise I spend time on nearly every morning. The Chronicle has a weather page. Not up to the standard of the Chicago Tribune’s page, which is the best I’ve seen; its overseer, Tom Skilling of WGN, has apparently worked with people at the paper to give the page real dimension and depth; they actually make an effort to tell readers something meaningful about the science of weather, they pore over the record books to put the current weather in some sort of meaningful context, and they highlight interesting weather happenings outside the Chicago metro area.

But back to the Chronicle’s weather page. It’s full of numbers, and it features a giant Bay Area map. But it’s really narrow and dull when you get down to it. One feature it has presented presented since I started reading the paper regularly, back in 1976, is a list of a dozen California cities and their current seasonal rainfall. From Crescent City in the north to San Diego in the south, the list reports precipitation in the last 24 hours, how much rain has fallen since the start of the current season (which runs from July 1 through June 30), how much fell in the same period last year, the “normal” seasonal rainfall to date (an average taken over the last 30 years), and the “normal” total for the entire season. Doesn’t that all sound interesting?

I have a daily habit of checking the precipitation numbers if it’s been raining. I have a minor, ongoing fixation about one particular fact: how Oakland’s rainfall stacks up against San Francisco’s. As a resident of the East Bay, it’s a source of pride that humble Oakland has been, on average, a little more rainy than its vainglorious cousin across the Bay Bridge — Oakland’s season normal is 22.94 inches versus San Francisco’s 22.28. But a worrying trend has developed: In several recent years, San Francisco has wound up ahead in the rain race; this year, Oakland is nearly two full inches behind, 25.22 to 27.21.

It makes you wonder whether the fix is in — maybe West Bay meteorologists are doctoring the results to claim Bay Area Rain Capital honors. It makes you wonder what the penalty is for tampering with an Official Government Rain-Measuring Instrument.

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On the Bike

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I’ve been out cycling more this month and last than I have for a while, and a new thought about riding — new for me, I mean — bubbled up while I was going through my usual bout of bike procrastination this morning. Just this: There’s a certain story that forms in your head during every ride about the ride. Everything you see and hear and feel, all the conditions, builds into a narrative about the experience. Maybe this is true to some extent of everything we do. But I realized when I started thinking about it that the story is especially focused and intense during a ride.

Today’s story: Tired legs after two short-ish but hilly and fairly intense rides Friday and Saturday. I started out with no fixed destination or route or purpose, except to get back home ahead of the storm that was just off the coast. I wound up heading up onto the main road through the Berkeley Hills (Grizzly Peak Boulevard), trying not to push too hard while keeping my pedaling smooth and (for me) reasonably fast. As I chugged along, another cyclist blew by, standing on the long gradual ascent, moving away so fast that it seemed like he was out of sight in about 30 seconds. Over the top of Grizzly Peak –about a 1,500-foot climb from home in about six and a half miles — the winds were picking up. There are big eucalyptus groves up there; you think about them in a high wind — about a branch getting dropped on you, or in the road in front of you, as you ride by. Big banks of dark clouds were blowing in over the Bay; but the Golden Gate Bridge and all of Marin County were still visible, so no rain was falling over there yet.

As long as the storm still had a way to come, I kept on south, onto Skyline Boulevard in Oakland, which rolls up and down a series of little ridges before making a long fast descent — the same place I knocked out my front teeth in 1991 — to a junction with a street that plummets back down to the city. I turned around there and headed back up; cresting the first climb and rounding a curve, I could see that the storm was finally near — a big curtain of rain was sliding across the Mount Tamalpais in Marin.

So now I had a race — could I get back across the hills and down before things got wet? I decided to stay on the top of the ridge as long as I could because turning that earlier six-and-a-half mile climb into a descent is a local riding highlight for me. Every time I came to a road where I could bail out and head down from the hills, I decided I could still make it. So I wound up riding north to Kensington, taking the narrow and precipitous streets that drop down to another major hills boulevard called The Arlington (yes, "the). The Berkeley portion has just been repaved; the downhill stretch from Kensignton is like a raceway; a Subaru Outback passed me, even though I was going faster than the speed limit, and I managed to draft behind it most of the way down; possibly foolish, but definitely fun. The first rain started to fall when I was about four blocks from home.

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Jerry Brown, Blogger

My friend Ted Shelton did something pretty cool a couple months back: He got in touch with Jerry Brown — mayor of Oakland, former California governor and presidential candidate, aspiring state attorney general — and talked to him about how to use the Net to speak to the people. The result is that Brown started his own blog. It exhibits everything I like and dislike about Brown, who is well into his fourth decade as an elected official. The part I like: The guy’s smart and quick and communicates ideas beautifully. The part I dislike? Well, I said it in a response (below) to a recent post he wrote on all he’s done for the Oakland schools: Brown’s got a razor-sharp sense for telling the story that casts him in the most glowing light. As to the unhappy scene that may lie just outside the frame of his self-portrait — that’s someone else’s problem. But that’s another thing I like about the blog — I can tell him just that, and there’s some evidence he’s actually reading what his audience has to say.


My comments to Mayor Brown:

Jerry, any public education success story is to be applauded, and the Oakland School for the Arts is no exception. It’s also refreshing to hear someone in a position of responsibility say the schools need both innovation AND money; cash isn’t a panacea for our public schools’ problems, but used wisely it’s a crucial part of the solution. You also mentioned "freedom" as a necessary ingredient for success; I’ll get to that in a minute.

But I have to say that your post is full of the kind of attitude and omission that long ago led me to conclude that while your intellect is a couple cuts above the average pol’s and you occasionally seem to be moved by the most noble motives, you’re at bottom a self-promoter and opportunist. …

Continue reading “Jerry Brown, Blogger”

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The Habit

Dad and I talked on the phone earlier. The first thing he said was, “Are you all right?”

“Sure. Why?”

“There’s been nothing new on the blog since Thursday!”

How’s that for drama in real life? He was kidding, but he was right. And the remarkable thing is that I was conscious of it and trying to organize my poor thoughts into some kind of post earlier in the evening. This has gotten to be, for better mostly but on occasion worse, a daily habit. I told Dad I knew I had missed some days recently — partly because I’ve been out doing other stuff or partly because I needed to give the blog a rest — but that I was pretty sure I hadn’t missed two days in a row (and still haven’t) for several months. Saying that meant that I had to go back and check. And the last time I went two days without posting something — we’re not talking quality here, just regularity — was August 28-29.