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Friday Night Ferry Again

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Due to a variety of strange occurrences during our news day today,I didn’t make it out of KQED until 7:35, 50 minutes before the ferry sailed. I thought about walking to BART and relaxing. Instead, I hoofed it over Potrero Hill and across the south of Market neighborhood and made the boat by about two minutes. One of the crew watched me walk on board, where Thom and Kate awaited, and said, “He’s sweating bullets.” (He was right — I ran the last few blocks, and was well warmed up when I got to the dock.) About 10 days before the summer solstice, it was a beautiful twilight on the bay. Then again, most of them are no matter what time of year.  

[If you’re keeping score of home, that’s downtown San Francisco, with the top of the Transamerica Pyramid, to the left; and in the right distance is Mount Tamalpais. Gorgeous, gorgeous night.]

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Apparition

A week or two ago, I was talking to a couple neighbors about rats. They didn’t get the memo about how genteel Berkeley has become. Just about everyone here encounters them in compost bins or scurrying across backyard fences from one tangle of ivy to another. The guy next door said he thought it would be great if we had owls to take care of the rodents and had considered putting up a nesting box in his yard to attract one. We have seen owls here before, notably a great horned owl that showed up in a neighbors backyard cedar at dusk one day and seemed to be hunting our little cat. I wondered how easy it would be to attract owls, though (the evidence from my reading is mixed: they prefer a rural setting, naturally, but seem have adapted somewhat to the steamroller ways of Homo americanus.)

The other night, walking the dog a couple blocks from home in our un-rural neighborhood, we heard a sound nearby: a loud, pulsing creak. Two, three, four times, like a rusty gate opening and closing. It crossed my mind that it was an owl drawn to our rodent smorgasbord After a block, we heard the sound again, very close by. Then some sort of bird flew up off a telephone line just ahead of us, down the sloping street, then settled again. Close up, the sound had changed from a creak to a short, keening scream, a little unnerving in the dark. I had a bright LED headlight with me, and shone it on the bird from just across the street: a barn owl. So, maybe they’re moving into the area already. Can we encourage them to stay? Here’s one outfit (in Marin County) that seems to say yes.

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Into a Dark Place

From “Cornerman,” a David Remnick profile of Teddy Atlas, a famed boxing trainer, in the August 21, 2000, New Yorker:

“… I flew back to LaGuardia with Atlas, and I asked him why [his] fighter … with decent skills and the willingness to listen, could not follow up on his corner’s repeated instructions.

” ‘It’s the pressure, that dome of pressure that the civilian can’t quite comprehend,’ he said. ‘Nature, everyone’s nature, is to avoid what’s gonna bring you closer to danger and risk. The reason he didn’t throw those extra punches, no matter how much he listened and nodded yes to me, was because he allowed his weaker nature to tell him, “You don’t have to do this.” The basis of nature is to survive. What I’m telling him is against nature. I’m telling him how to be a brute and not just survive. A trainer’s got to lead a fighter into a dark place, and not too many want to go.’ “

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Peoria Story

From Peoria, Illinois—a city that will always be synonymous in our minds with Jack Brickhouse and Mudbone—we have this: Yesterday, a private investigator representing Globe Energy—a U.K. transplant that set up shop in Peoria to make energy-efficient industrial heating systems—paid a visit to a local blogger named Billy Dennis. The local head of Globe, David Jones—described variously as "a nice man" and a "foul-mouthed individual"—got some critical attention back in March when he announced in the Peoria Journal-Star that he was less than enamored with the labor force in the Land of Lincoln: "The work ethic in this state is awful. …r It's difficult to find good people."

The online version of the Journal-Star article drew a comment from a reader who identified himself as a former Globe employee. In essence, he described his ex- boss and other managers at the company as bigoted jerks. That comment was quoted in its entirety on a Peoria blog and thence on a citizen journalism site called the Blog Peoria Project, which Billy Dennis manages. And here's where we get back to the private investigator.

The PI showed up at Dennis's door Saturday morning–nearly three months after article and comment were published–with a letter from an attorney. The missive demanded that Dennis remove the former employee's comment from Blog Peoria because the statements therein breached a Globe confidentiality agreement. If the offending comment was not taken down by Monday, the letter warned, the company would sue. Dennis has not posted the full contents of the threatening letter, and I won't guess under what laws or on what grounds the company believes its demand is enforceable. But in the meantime, the letter has had an effect: The blogger who originally posted the comment has removed it. It has reportedly disappeared, too, from the Peoria Journal-Star site.

Dennis's response was to re-publish the comment on his own blog, Peoria Pundit, while he considered whether to knuckle under to the company's threat. He has until tomorrow to decide, but he says he's already made up his mind: "F*** 'em." Maybe the Peoria Pundit Defense Fund is next.

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Today’s Best …

… Headline: “Human Skill Found In Oakland Construction Site” (a Twitter message linking to this story).

… Sensory experience: 3:32 p.m.: We had an earthquake! Two short, sharp jolts that rattled the house hard and sounded like sonic booms or explosions (Kate just called from a neighborhood up in the hills, where she said people were out in the street, a little spooked by the shake). U.S. Geological Survey link to the temblor: http://bit.ly/10nSP4.

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Cars, Birds

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16th Street at Bryant, San Francisco. This sign (or signs) has been here for years, just behind The Double Play bar. I’ll dig up the story behind them — there’s at least one similar art piece on 6th Street, south of Market — at some later date.

[That later date is now: KQED friend and colleague Molly Samuel advises they’re by a San Francisco artist who goes by the handle Rigo 23 (if Wikipedia is to be believed, his full name is Ricardo Gouveia.) Thanks, Molly!]

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June Rain

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Just after 10 o’clock tonight, the dog and I walked out the front door for a walk. He stopped on the porch and stared out at the street as if asking, “What’s that?” It was rain, an out-of-season occurrence. My tendency, confronted with weather that’s not supposed to happen at whatever time of year it’s happening, is to say, “This never happens.” Then I try to look it up.

So here’s a brief rundown on June rain in Berkeley, thanks to the Climate Summary and Monthly Total Precipitation tables at the Western Regional Climate Center.

–Years of record: 102 (1893 through 2008, with 16 missing).
–Berkeley mean June rainfall: 0.19 inches (annual mean: 23.45 inches).
–June maximum: 1.24 inches (1907). Other Junes with 1 inch or more: 1894, 1929, 1967, 1995, 2005.
–June minimum: 0.00 inches (38 times).

Five highest June rainfall totals:
June 15, 1929: 1.04 inches.
June 2, 1967: 0.88 inches.
June 8, 1964: 0.69 inches.
June 17, 1894: 0.63 inches.
June 11, 1907, and June 24, 1912: 0.61 inches.

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June Rain

junerain.jpg

Just after 10 o’clock tonight, the dog and I walked out the front door for a walk. He stopped on the porch and stared out at the street as if asking, “What’s that?” It was rain, an out-of-season occurrence. My tendency, confronted with weather that’s not supposed to happen at whatever time of year it’s happening, is to say, “This never happens.” Then I try to look it up.

So here’s a brief rundown on June rain in Berkeley, thanks to the Climate Summary and Monthly Total Precipitation tables at the Western Regional Climate Center.

–Years of record: 102 (1893 through 2008, with 16 missing).
–Berkeley mean June rainfall: 0.19 inches (annual mean: 23.45 inches).
–June maximum: 1.24 inches (1907). Other Junes with 1 inch or more: 1894, 1929, 1967, 1995, 2005.
–June minimum: 0.00 inches (38 times).

Five highest June rainfall totals:
June 15, 1929: 1.04 inches.
June 2, 1967: 0.88 inches.
June 8, 1964: 0.69 inches.
June 17, 1894: 0.63 inches.
June 11, 1907, and June 24, 1912: 0.61 inches.

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Rain on the Roof

Who owns the water that falls on your rooftop? In most of the western United States, it’s not you, and if you try to catch and store that water, you may be interfering with someone else’s water rights. NPR aired a story on the issue this morning, “Water Wars Out West: Keep What You Catch,” about a Colorado law that breaks with the usual legal regime. The law allows water collection by residential property owners who need to dig a well or get their supply trucked in (in other words, if you’re served by what city dwellers think of as a regular water system, it’s still illegal for you to catch and save rainwater and snowmelt in Colorado.)

The links:

An Act: Concerning Limited Exemptions for Water Collected from Certain Residential Rooftops

Southwest Colorado Water Information Program: Understanding Water Rights

U.S. Bureau of Land Management: Western States Water Laws

NPR: “Water Wars Out West: Keep What You Catch!“

And also, for generally interesting reading on water rights questions, Aguanomics, a blog from two UC-Berkeley economists.

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Friday Night Ferry

My significant spouse couldn’t make it to the ferry last night for our usual Friday night ride, so I went it alone. Left the office exactly an hour before the 8:25 p.m. sailing time of the day’s last boat, usually plenty of time to make the three-mile hike from the western slope of Potrero Hill to the Ferry Building. But in the interest of trying new routes, I wandered through the UC-San Francisco Mission Bay campus and then along the outside of the right-field stands at Phone Company Park and added about two-thirds of a mile extra to the trip, stopped to take a picture or two, and wound up having to run (or power-shuffle, as a casual observer might have called it) up the Embarcadero to the ferry slip. I made the boat with five minutes to spare.

The usual routine is to buy a glass (plastic, actually) of white wine for my shipmate and a beer for myself and sit under the heaters on the second deck. But the boat bar is cash only, so I climbed to the top deck, stood in the lee of the pilothouse, and watched the trip go by sans beverage. The light was striking, as always, with the low evening cloud cover moving in off the ocean and a much higher layer of clouds catching the last of the sun; the tide was ebbing in the Oakland estuary, moving so fast that it looked like a river current, though not as extreme as the flow you see in New York’s East River.