Category: Current Affairs

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Snow: Profoundly Shocking

I’ve occasionally wondered what would happen out here on the roads if it snowed. Really snowed, I mean, with snow on the streets down by the bayside and not just up on a distant peak where it’s striking but not quite real. Travel? Impossible in an area with hilly terrain and drivers who generally have no experience driving in truly wintry conditions.

So Friday night/early Saturday morning, it was cold here. In the mid-30s, say. Not so cold you’d expect a snowstorm, but cold enough that the forecast brought the possibility of snow down to the 500-foot level. The road that runs near the top of the Berkeley Hills, Grizzly Peak Boulevard, tops out at about 1,700 feet, and sure enough, when our neighbors Piero and Jill drove up there, they saw a little snow-like material along the road. But nothing dramatic. No, the dramatic stuff was over on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge.

If you haven’t been there, the bridge on its north side is built at the foot of a mountain. The highway, U.S. 101, climbs up a grade to go through a tunnel blasted through the ridge. On the north side, the road descends very sharply — from just over 600 feet down to sea level in about a mile and three-quarters — close to a 7 percent grade. Last night, that’s where the snow happened, apparently very suddenly just before 2:30 in the morning. And here, as narrated by the Chronicle, is what occurred when traffic was added to the weather:

“San Francisco cabbie Mort Weinstein had picked up a fare at Fisherman’s Wharf and was headed to Marin City early Saturday when he emerged from the Waldo Tunnel on Highway 101 to find himself in a freak blizzard.

“Slushy snow coated a hillside illuminated by the taillights of panicked drivers careering out of control. Weinstein hit the brakes, but there was nothing he could do.

” ‘There were four to five cars already colliding with each other,’ Weinstein, 51, recalled. ‘My car wheels locked. I started to slide. The front of the car careened off the rear of another car. It was such a profoundly shocking event. Nothing like this has ever happened here.’ ”

Twenty-eight cars piled up. Two people were killed and a dozen injured. The road was closed for 11 hours while the wreckage was cleared.

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The Day So Far

Inquiring minds want to know (a phrase that originated with the National Enquirer, unauthoritatively speaking). And in their quest, sometimes they show up here. Just because I’ve been thinking about it lately, here are the keywords in searches that led people to Infospigot today. Based on these, I’m guessing that Pekin (Illinois) High School is having a good season in basketball.

What I also note is the implied question mark in so many of these searches; I often wish I could answer the queries. For instance, today’s best pseudo inquiry: “info about james k polk Did he win the Nobel Peace Prize.”

No!

Maybe I’ll do the Q and A thing at a later date.

picturegate film

pekin chinks

map of hurricane wilmas movements longitude and latitude

tom hanks oscars angry

does this make my ass look big

info about james k polk Did he win the Nobel Peace Prize

look pedals failure

cubs mug 24

double-ought buck shot

video of lawrence taylor ending joe theisman s career

wrigley field clothespins

theisman broken leg picture

inside St. peter s Basilica

dollars to donuts origins

james mcgreevy hernia

jack bauer and tony almeida layouts

presidents week 2006

the president had chestnut hair and the first lady was radiant in a pink

leslie griffith news anchor

nick berg video kodak

blogsex

whatever it is I m against it

tom hanks cursing at jon stewart

152 anniversary of battle of antietam music feature audio

comet sighting 2006

rhapsody phone number

tom hanks angry at 2006 oscars

southern indiana jeffersonville retreat louisville monastery abbey

joe Theisman broken leg

walter anderson and jail

carlos bernard interview 2006

Pekin Chinks Basketball

joe theisman s broken leg

Pekin Chinks in 1967 state playoffs

24 drinking game

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Flow and Ebb of Freedom

Activist judges shrink our basic freedoms just a little bit more (and the Chronicle strikes a blow for nonsensical headline wordplay). And in a case from my adopted hometown no less:

There is no ‘pee’ in public

State appeals court rules act is illegal

“It’s a crime in California to urinate in a public place, a state appeals court ruled today.

“The case before the court came from Berkeley, where a police officer detained a man urinating in the parking lot of a closed restaurant one Sunday morning in January 2003. …

“…To deal with the question, a Court of Appeal panel in San Francisco turned to a 19th century state law that defines a public nuisance as an act that is ‘injurious to health, or is indecent, or offensive to the senses.’ …

“…The criteria spelled out in the nuisance law might not always apply to urinating in the great outdoors, the judges added. For example, ‘a hiker responding to an irrepressible call of nature in an isolated area in the backwoods cannot reasonably be seen as interfering with any right common to the public.”

Apropos of the subject of public decency in Berkeley, or lack of same, I got a slice of (very healthy vegetarian) pizza yesterday and sat down to watch ESPN’s early coverage of the Barry Bonds crisis. I was the only one in the restaurant, but a few minutes later a guy walked past me toward the bathroom. I ignored him at first, but something made me look over. He was — maybe you should take the kids out of the room now — digging very assiduously in his ass. I mean really going at it. He saw me glance over, looked me in the eye, pulled out the napkin he’d been wiping his crack with, threw it on the floor and walked out. All I could think was, “What was that?” I finished my pizza, though, then got out of there before the next freedom-loving Berkeleyite appeared.

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Counting Traffic

I’ve set up an annoying little traffic counter for this blog. Annoying because if you look at the bottom of the left-hand column, you see a blinking image that signals the counter’s presence. Annoying because the traffic service’s site delivers loads of garbage ads. And annoying because looking at the number of hits my site gets can all too easily become a distraction from more meaningful pursuits.

But the counter does have its interesting side. One thing it does is detect and report the Internet addresses of visitors and from which pages on the Web they’ve arrived. Between 70 and 80 percent of the people who arrive here do so through a search that has delivered one of my pages as a result. The remainder appear to be people — none of them individually identifiable — who come directly to the page through a link or a bookmark or typing the site’s address into their browsers.

If someone arrives on the site through a Google or Yahoo! search, the terms used in the search are also reported. So I can tell, for instance, that there a lot of people have looked at my blog pages looking for information about how Pope John Paul II was embalmed (a subject of interest a year ago) or how to find a gruesome 1985 video clip of a professional football game in which a quarterback had his leg broken.

Occasionally, I’ll see an address that makes me wonder who exactly is perusing the site and why. At least once I’ve had a visitor from the National Security Agency. I figure it was a recreational visit; if anyone there had a professional interest in anything I’ve posted, I’m sure they would have covered their tracks. On numerous occasions, readers have come from armed services domains, usually in search of articles I’ve linked to on U.S. troops killed or wounded in Iraq. A few times, someone has arrived from house.gov, a domain reserved for the U.S. House of Representatives. I’m sure it was a bored staffer looking for information on the Oscars. That happened today, actually, though I don’t have any idea what they read.

Another government visitor today: An unknown someone from tda.gov, the domain of the United States Trade and Development Agency. The TDA’s mission “is to advance economic development and U.S. commercial interests in developing and middle-income countries.” Whoever it was arrived at 4:16 p.m. EST after searching Google for information on drinking games related to the Fox TV show “24,” which airs tonight.

It’s tempting to shift into high dudgeon and scold the anonymous bureaucrat wasting our tax dollars. But actually I’m flattered to get the agency’s attention — and maybe I’m helping advance U.S. commercial interests by giving some bureaucrat in D.C. a chance to unwind.

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Tom Hanks’s Oscar Dos and Don’ts

Item 1: Hanks Hand Out Oscar Speech Tips

“Tom Hanks has been enlisted to give Oscar nominees expert advice on how to deliver the perfect acceptance speech.

“Hanks, who has made the trip to the Academy Awards podium twice, presents a video that has been given to all 150 of this year’s contenders.

“If they win, they should address the audience with ‘wit, flair, creativity – or at least with brevity,’ he says.”

Item 2: Hanks Drops F-Bomb on Oscars

I’ve looked for posts on Technorati and Google News, and other people saw the same thing Kate and I did: Tom Hanks walked on the stage to present the best director award, his face twisted in anger as he looked in the direction of Jon Stewart. Amateur lip readers, including me, think that among other expletetives, he said “f—ing moron.”

Well, he observed the brevity part of his advice. We’ll probably get the story of his discomposure tomorrow. And Stewart will probably have some fun with it on “The Daily Show” tonight.

Later: The Defamer today links to a video of the moment in question.

And still later: The Defamer appears to be the only media entity stepping up and doing its duty in getting to the bottom of the Tom Hanks Cursing Crisis. The latest story/theory is that Hanks was upset that the orchestra was playing the “Forrest Gump” theme when he walked on stage. Meantime, Defamer commenters engage in a spirited give and take about whether Hanks was play-acting or really P.O.’d. From what I saw on my tee-vee set, he was actually angry.

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It’s Who You Know, Not What You Know

Study: Few Americans Know 1st Amendment

The money graph:

“The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just one in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.”

I’ll admit I might be stumped on naming all five freedoms. Some seem to blend in with each other — speech and press, for instance. And assembly and redress of grievances — I might have stumbled on those.

The Simpsons, on the other hand (I do solemnly swear I didn’t cheat): Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie.

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Polling the Troops

Zogby International will get a ton of publicity for its new poll on how members of the U.S. armed forces in Iraq feel about serving there. The headlines so far focus on the poll’s finding that 72 percent of those surveyed — 944 people serving with various branches, a survey size Zogby says gives a 3.5 percent margin of error for the full sample — think the U.S. should withdraw sometime in the next 12 months. Twenty-three percent go along with the commander-in-chief’s suggestion that the forces should stay in Iraq “as long as they are needed.” The Marines are most gung-ho on staying — only three in five think we should be out within a year; four out of five National Guard members and reservists think it’s time to be winding things up.

More interesting numbers, to me: Three in five say they know why they’re in Iraq; two in five say they’re unclear on the reason. Nine out of ten reject the presence of weapons of mass destruction as a reason for invading. So why did we go in? Five out of six say it’s payback for Saddam Hussein’s role in the 9/11 attacks. Three out of four also think we wanted to make sure Saddam didn’t protect al Qaida in Iraq.

It’s another black eye for the reality-based community, which has insisted for years that a) Saddam had no role in 9/11 (even Cheney, the promoter-in-chief of that myth, was eventually forced to concede the point) and b) Saddam had no substantive relationship with al Qaida. At the same time, though, the troops don’t seem to be buying one of the substitute rationales for the war: that it’s all about creating a model democracy for the Arab world. Only one in four respondents named that as a reason for the war.

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I Knew I Knew I Knew I Knew

Our Daily Dead (and many others) have the story:

Billy Cowsill, 58; Lead Singer for 1960s Teen Pop Band the Cowsills

I admit it — I was in junior high when “The Rain, the Park, and Other Things” came out. I liked it. And I associated with a girl who seemed always to wear short floral-printed dresses. I won’t go any further down that particular memory alley.

But back to Billy Cowsill. The money quote from the nicely done Los Angeles Times obit:

“At the time of his death, Billy Cowsill’s Co-Dependents album ‘Live at the Cafe Mecca Vol. 2′ was the top-selling independent album in the Canadian province of Alberta.”



That says it all. On the other hand, Billy was still singing. His brother Barry was living in New Orleans and went missing after Hurricane Katrina hit last August. His body was found four months later — “on a wharf,” the L.A. Times says — just after Christmas (there’s a memorial page on the Cowsills site).

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Today’s Best Idea

The New York Times’s daily wrap-up on Global Cartoon Rage (15 killed today in Nigeria, praise god) includes this summary of a meeting between Egyptian and Danish clerics:

“In Cairo, Bishop Karsten Nissen, of Denmark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, met with Grand Imam Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi of al-Azhar University, the world’s highest Sunni Muslim seat of learning.

“Tantawi said the Danish prime minister must apologize for the drawings and further demanded that the world’s religious leaders, including him and Pope Benedict XVI, should meet to write a law that ‘condemns insulting any religion, including the Holy Scriptures and the prophets.’ He said the United Nations should then impose the law on all countries.”

I nominate Pat Robertson and Jerry “The Hutt” Falwell to represent me at this law-writing confab.

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Posted in Berkeley: Adventure Travel

Visitgitmo

Stenciled on a wall along an outdoor walk on the wall of one of UC Berkeley’s life sciences buildings. Something like this, you’d think if you saw it once on campus you’d see it everywhere. But so far — over the past eight months — it’s shown up in just that one spot.

(Naturally, though, when you start rummaging through Google’s trunk of odds and ends, you find more of the same. For instance, this T-shirt. )