"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
The picture (me, with a camera phone, at Andronico’s) says it all. A dollar-off special on marinara sauce — $9.99 a jar.. The sign is not a mistake. An online search confirms that someone is intentionally selling pasta sauce for 10 bucks (and up) a quart. Our dilemma here at the Infospigot household is that we do not have pasta fine enough to exalt with this product.
I went out for a ride yesterday in the Berkeley Hills. A short, slow ride due to the fact I haven’t really ridden for weeks. Near the top of Spruce Street, one of the main routes into the hills from the north side of town, a guy passed me and said, “Nice bike.” I looked over and he, like me, was riding a Bridgestone RB-1, which is kind of a cult classic steel production bike. “You, too,” I said. I’m given to talking to other cyclists when I’m out riding, so I sped up just enough to keep up with him. In just a few minutes, after we had hit the top of Spruce and turned on to Grizzly Peak Boulevard, I had learned that his wife had given him a dirty look when he left the house (“full of screaming kids,” he said) for his short ride and that “many moons ago” he had ridden for Harvard’s cycling team.
“It was a club sport, and we were part of something called the Eastern Collegiate Cycling Association. Twelve schools. As far south as Virginia and as far north as New Hampshire. In the winter we did lots of indoor workouts. Our coach would put on rollers. New Hampshire was tough — the mountains up there, and I think they all did cross-country skiing, too. One time we had a three-way meet — New Hampshire, us, and Columbia. All the New Hampshire guys finished together in front. Five minutes later, we all finished together. Then we went in and got something to eat and took showers, then wandered back out to see the wreckage of the Columbia team coming in. They just didn’t have any chance to train outdoors before the race.”
And so on. The whole time I had been conscious of riding fast enough to keep up with him. I was just trying to keep up a nice quick spin on the very gradual incline of Grizzly Peak. After about five or six minutes of this pleasant cycling talk, another cyclist, a non-Bridgestone rider, passed us. My companion’s response was dramatic: Without a word, he accelerated from our conversational pace to not just catch up with the new rider, but pass him, too. Not that he was in great shape to do it — he’d been complaining about his conditioning. But apparently, he found something a little intolerable about getting passed, even on a pretty Sunday afternoon on which there was nothing to do but enjoy the ride and sunshine. The funny thing was, he continued leading the second rider for all of about a quarter mile, then turned off onto a side street, apparently to head downhill and home.
I thought, see ya, bud; nice talking to you, too.
That’s sunset today in Berkeley. This afternoon, I tried to take advantage of our little stretch of dry weather (the last rain was on Tuesday) to clean up some of the weediness in the front yard. As the sun went down, a layer of high, broken clouds caught the light. After taking the picture, I went back to the garden cleanup and, even though it was getting dark, decided to cut down a big blue potato bush that was growing so hardily it was obscuring the front of the house. Tom came home while I was still sawing off some of the bigger branches. He turned on the front-yard spotlight, then went inside. A couple minutes later I heard an R.E.M. song, "Gardening at Night," start to play inside the house. Tom opened one of the front windows so I could hear the song better.
We had a dry day today, so I walked up to the top of the hills. Early in the afternoon, when I was headed back down, I heard some rustling up a driveway I was passing. I looked up and saw these guys (well, I think, from the way it behaved, that only the one in the center is a guy; the other two are does). Broad daylight. Not fazed in the slightest to see an unarmed barbarian strolling past. In fact, when I stopped, the deer in the center here actually advanced toward me a few feet (that’s why I think he’s a guy). A couple minutes after I took the pictures, a man came walking up the road with two small-ish dogs on leashes. The deer picked up on the dogs right away and took off.
At the convenient local observatory, located just outside the back door, I just spotted a comet I read about on an email list a couple days ago. It’s Comet Machholz, discovered by an amateur astronomer of that name in the Sierra Nevada last August. If you’ve got very sharp eyes or a very dark sky, you can see it (a little bit to the south and west of the Pleiades tonight and moving toward the north night by night) unaided. The sky is just a little too bright here and my eyes too fuzzy to make it a naked-eye event for me, though Tom managed to pick it out once he’d seen it through the binoculars.
I think it’s the fifth comet I’ve seen: West (1973), Halley (1986), Hyakutake (1996), Hale-Bopp (1997), and Machholz. Get out there. Be prepared to say “wow!” Or “what is that thing?” Or “I think I see something.”
It’s another rainy day in Infospigot’s neighborhood. What better way to pass the time than with the Sunday papers, an occasional glance at TV football, and a plate full of pancakes (Kate was inspired by watching Alton Brown explain the history and science of flapjacks on the Food Network; you think I’m kidding, but the picture above is included to show I’m not). I struggled through The New York Times crossword. I read the obits in the Chronicle. And I happened across an awful opinion piece in the Chronicle’s Sunday “Insight” section.
The column, by former Wall Street Journal reporter G. Pascal (Greg) Zachary, is titled “India, Indonesia didn’t prepare for the worst.” It ventures to lecture India for spending money on developing nuclear weapons and Indonesia for diverting profits from its oil industry away from one of the provinces stricken by the December tsunami. That’s all fine. I guess governments everywhere could have more enlightened priorities. But gee, Mr. Zachary, where do you or any other American get off giving someone else a hard time for their weapons obsessions or economic greed or for ignoring their people’s vital needs? Naturally we’re the smartest, best (and best-looking!) people on Earth. But I’d think the Iraq fiasco, the national missile defense folly, the Enron scandal, health-care and pension crises and the incipient collapse of public education for the poor would lend us a sense of humility.
I was bugged enough that I wound up writing a letter to the section’s editors:
Editor:
G. Pascal Zachary’s piece (“India, Indonesia didn’t prepare for worst,” Jan. 2, 2005) almost fooled me. What I took at first to be hypocritical carping about the irresponsibility of Asian nations hit by the December tsunami turns out to be satire almost too subtle to contemplate. Zachary scolds India for, among other things, diverting precious resources into an arms race. He wags his finger at Indonesia for its greed in dividing the spoils from its oil industry. He indicts both governments for failing to adequately care for their citizens. Wow. Really hard-hitting stuff. For good measure, he throws in a swipe about India stealing U.S. jobs. As a contrast to such short-sighted selfishness, he offers us Americans, who “naturally … can see past their narrow self-interest.”
Of course, you have to look past a literal interpretation of Zachary’s words to glimpse their Swiftian brilliance. What Zachary’s really getting at is how India and Indonesia are merely aping the example of the United States (and other powers of South and Southeast Asia’s glorious imperial past) when they waste treasure on weaponry, put profits for the wealthy ahead of citizens’ welfare and pursue policies that say to their own people and the rest of the world “we couldn’t care less what you think.”
Congratulations on a masterpiece.
We’ll see if it runs. I’m sure my note is just one among many.
It’s taken me 23 hours and 49 minutes (and counting) to take official notice of the seemingly inevitable development that unfolded time zone to time zone across the world in the last x number of hours: 2005 has arrived. I spent a good deal of the first day of the year outside, walking along the Emeryville shoreline (that’s Emeryville, California, if you’re not a San Francisco Bay Area local) with Kate and our neighbors Piero and Jill and Marie. Later, Kate enticed me to go to a New Year’s party that some friends were throwing up in the hills by offering to walk there. It was a great hike, under clearing early evening skies, but the surprising feature of the foray was seeing several acquaintances from my earliest days in Berkeley whom I hadn’t seen or talked to in 20 years or more. How is that possible?
That’s it really. Maybe I’ll talk resolutions for 2005 and reflections on 2004 later. Maybe.
Meantime, it’s started raining again as the clock ticks toward January 2. More later.
It’s really winter here now. You can tell by the daily rain (it began last Sunday and has been going ever since). We’ve had about 10 inches in December, and half of that or more in the last six days. The creeks that run down from the hills and cross the Berkeley flatlands to the bay are rushing full and loud (sometimes in the open, like Codornices Creek, above, just below Live Oak Park; mostly in culverts, so most people don’t suspect they have a small river running right through the middle of their block in the rainy season).
But this isn’t a winter without respite. We always see breaks between storms, hours when the weather clears. This morning, for instance. The clouds blew off to the east, and suddenly it was sunny and warm. Everything started to dry out. The air was washed and clear. I walked past a spot where Kate and I sometimes go to sit and talk and drink coffee on Saturday mornings, the yard behind the big middle school up the street, and you could see clear across playground, the town, and the water to the Golden Gate.
The clouds closed in again late in the afternoon, and it started to rain just before dark. The forecast for tonight, tomorrow, and the next several days is the same: Rain. More rain. And then some more after that. I’ll be looking for the breaks.
Christmas morning: The usual post-luminaria routine is to wake up, do the presents, then go out on the street to pick everything up: gather the luminaria remove the candles, dump the sand, and fold up the bags so they can be reused next year. But there was a heavy frost last night and the bags were all pretty much soaked this morning, so Piero decided we’d just recycle them and use new ones in 2005. He’s the boss.
Our neighbor Kay Schwartz, above, was the first one out this morning, and she pretty much picked up all the bags from the upper block of Holly Street. Then we hauled everything down to the Martinuccis to pull it all apart. Most of the usual suspects were there (below). It probably takes a total of two hours to set the whole thing up on our street — more if you have to get the 600-plus bags ready first — and about the same to take it all down again.
11:17 p.m.: The lights are still lit on Holly Street. But the people who came out to walk through the neighborhood, and we had dozens who stopped by our little driveway table to have hot mulled cider, had all gone home. We stopped by the Martinuccis’ place, where all the set up stuff was piled on their front lawn, to hang out a little bit before we went home for our traditional middle-of-the-night gift-wrapping extravaganza.