It struck me when I wrote the other day about Berkeley’s off-street pathways that there’s a group here dedicated to their restoration and preservation. It’s the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association. The picture on the group’s homepage, by a local artist named Karen Kemp, features the same sort of jumbled steps that I was trying to photograph. It’s not actually the same path — plenty of Berkeley’s paths and stairways look this way.
Debates
Interesting historical footnote from The Writer’s Almanac, which notes that Sept. 26 is the anniversary of the first televised presidential debate, Kennedy vs. Nixon, 1960. I vaguely remember Mom and Dad watching the debates on TV, though I have a clearer memory of other parts of the ’60 campaign, such as the Democratic Convention on TV from Los Angeles, Mom being a Democratic precinct captain, the giant Kennedy poster in our front windown, and Mom and Dad taking us to shake Kennedy signs at a Nixon rally in Park Forest the weekend before the election (though here’s another reason to love the Web: here’s a transcript of his prepared remarks, delivered Oct. 29 — or 10 days before the election instead of the weekend preceding the vote. More on that memory later, I suppose).
Anyway, after 1960, debates weren’t held again until 1976. It’s not terribly surprising if you think about it: Nixon was running in two of the following three elections; in ’68, he probably didn’t want any part of an exchange that had proved so disastrous in his previous run; in ’72, he simply didn’t need to debate. Interesting that an event that has become a fixture — though obviously flawed and less and less useful as it devolves into a piece of spin theater — took so long to catch on after the 1960 experiment.
Happy Birthday, JB
Hey, it’s John Brekke’s birthday. He’s 98 percent of the way done with his first half-century of excellence.
Happy Birthday, John!
Berkeley Walks
Berkeley is filled with scores of walkways laid out in the middle of its regular blocks. Most are in the hills neighborhoods where the street pattern is curved and irregular to follow the contour of the land. One afternoon earlier in the week, I was following a wandering course home from some unnecessary errand or other and wound up on a section of the Tamalpais Steps. I took the first picture trying to capture how the sections of stairs slant at different angles. I didn’t get that so well and will have to go back when the lighting isn’t so challenging for my little digital camera.
But there’s still a little bit of a find in the picture. If you look at the large version of the image, there’s a piece of paper tacked up on a fence to the left of the walkway. I didn’t notice it when I took the picture. But as I continued up the walk, I saw it. It turned out to be an impromptu poetry posting. A few people around town do this. It’s as unexpected and pleasing as the walks themselves.
Why Not Jeb?
To dabble for a moment in dark speculations: I just got done watching Jeb Bush doing his “OK, everyone, another hurricane is coming” thing on TV. Every time I hear him, I wonder: Between the two brothers, why is he not the Chosen One? He sounds smarter and more thoughtful than his brother; Jeb, logical thought, and the English language do not appear to be irreconcilable entities. After giving his statement in English, he flipped over into Spanish; though he was speaking from a statement, it appeared he was making some extemporaneous remarks, too. That’s always impressive to an English-only type like me.
Anyway, I’m sure not hoping that we have to contend with a third Bush in the White House. But given what the ordinary person like myself can see (and maybe I have to start reading the Bush family histories out there), it seems rather extraordinary that the seemingly more limited of the siblings made it to the top. Or made it to the top first, at least.
X Prize Update: da Vinci Delay
Monday I plan to go down to Southern California to cover Burt Rutan’s first X Prize flight for Wired News. I had been debating going up to Saskatchewan at the end of the week for the planned rocket launch by da Vinci Project. The launch was supposed to happen next Saturday, Oct. 2, and I had gotten a motel reservation in Kindersley, the launch site. But Wired News wasn’t too keen on paying for me to go up there, so it was going to be a matter of going on my own dime or trying to report it over the phone or something (the latter being a rather lame excuse for covering this kind of story). But the da Vinci Project, whose plans have drawn lots of skepticism (as I noted in a post in early August), made the decision easier for me, announcing last night that they’re postponing their flight. Wired News posted my story on the delay about an hour ago.
CSI: The Dark, Moody One
Yes, we here at the Infospigot headquarters and residence in Berkeley, California, indulge ourselves in all sorts of low-brow entertainments. For instance: Over the past couple of years, Thursday night has meant “Survivor” and “CSI,” viewed as we eat burritos in front of our flickering Sony. (Actually, this is kind of a high-brow evening, given that for a brief time our Thursday night habit was WWF’s “Smackdown.” That turned out to be time well spent, though, because we got to see The Rock in the day of “the People’s Elbow — the most electrifying move in sports entertainment.” But I digress.)
Now, we never cottoned to the Miami version of “CSI,” and quit watching after six episodes or so. Even though the same creative team is behind both shows, the Miami production just doesn’t feel like it’s up to the same level as the original, set in Las Vegas. The Miami lead actor, David Caruso, is one obvious difference. Sure, his Las Vegas counterpart, William Petersen, can be arch, but I can actually buy him as an inquisitive, creative investigator, and one who has some interesting character quirks. His acting has some range. Caruso’s work, by contrast, has all the subtlety and nuance of someone banging iron bars together outside your window. It’s relentless. Not particularly pleasant to watch or hear. One wonders how he’s gotten so far with this act.
The differences between the shows go further than that. Both shows share a sort of MTV/music video visual style, especially when they go into their crime-scene/crime-lab montages with the investigators and technicians doing their thing. But the style, which has a slick but natural feel in the Las Vegas show, feels pasted-on and artificial in the Miami version. I think that’s because the ensemble cast, one of the original show’s strong points, is weaker in Miami, or at least hasn’t developed the chemistry the Las Vegas show thrives on: The folks surrounding Caruso look like they’ve been hired because they’re beautiful people, period.
Now comes the third entry in the “CSI” franchise, a show set in New York City. The creators have come up with something much different in tone and maybe in substance from the Las Vegas and Miami series. Whereas the earlier shows use a lot of flash and attitude and humor and try to capitalize on the exotic nature of their locations, the New York show was dark and somber; in fact, the “CSI” characters seemed subdued and preoccupied to the point of depression. A key conversation involved the lead investigator, played by Gary Sinise, and a paralyzed, gravely injured victim who could communicate only by blinking. The exotic locations included brief forays into a garbage scow and a wasteland on the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge.The preview of next week’s show seemed to promise the same, tone-wise; and the little we found out about the characters suggests they’re in a justifiable funk and that it’s going to be some time before they emerge from it.
As far as the episode itself: The producers tried to jam too much into it. Partly that’s the burden imposed by having to introduce characters, suggest some history, and get them rolling on a complex case. That burden will get lighter as the series develops. It’ll be interesting to see whether the tone of the show gets lighter, too.
Willfully Blind
By way of my brother John, a good online piece from Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey refuting complaints that critics of the Iraqi war are guilty of Monday-morning quarterbacking.
“To be sure, the State Department did its homework in 2002 with the ‘Future of Iraq Project‘ (my link, not Dickey’s) and came up with some answers. But the Pentagon threw away the studies and effectively banned anyone who had worked on them (meaning just about anyone who knew anything about Iraq) from participating in the ‘transition.’
“This was the real intelligence failure in Iraq—the willful blindness of an administration that did not want to discuss the risks ahead. Didn’t even want to know them. To have talked too much about such things might have made the American public and the American Congress as cautious about this war as the warriors were. It might have given some inkling why most Europeans and our Arab allies and Asians and Africans and Latin Americas were skeptical about the whole venture. Did they hate democracy? No. They hated occupation. They knew its humiliations and its risks.”
We’re Winning the War …
… against Cat Stevens. Or Yusuf Islam. Or whatever he wants to be called. Allah be praised that our terrorist trackers realized the singer was on a Washington-bound airliner and diverted it to Maine before he could run amok in our capital. Terrorist trackers up there in the woods questioned Stevens/Islam, and now they’re deporting him, Allah be praised.
Why? Praise Allah, now that’s a story.
I just love the way the Associated Press describes the grounds for sending the guy’s plane elsewhere, detaining him, then ordering him out of the country:
“… [A] government official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said Islam was placed on a watch list after multiple intelligence sources in recent weeks indicated the peace activist may have associations with potential terrorists.”
Got that? He may be linked to potential terrorists. Making allowances for a possibly clumsy rendition of what the anonymous government official said, it’d be nice to get the specifics out into broad daylight, because just about anyone may be linked to potential terrorists.
The anonymous official also indicates that this information was reported recently. But the AP story goes on to cite suggestions and whispers dating back to 1988 that Stevens/Islam donated money that wound up in the hands of Hamas and a sheikh convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Stevens/Islam denies ever knowingly giving money to terrorist groups, the AP story notes, adding that he’s been donating royalties from one recent CD release to a 9/11 victims fund.
Again: It’d be nice for the government, which saw fit to disrupt the liberty of an entire planeload of passengers, to put its cards on the table: Exactly who is saying what about this guy, and what’s the evidence they’ve got against him? Of course, asking for such elementary respect for civil liberties these days — from a bunch of people who proved impotent to spot or stop a squad of real killers three years ago and who ultimately responded to that attack by fabricating a case for an irrelevant but ruinous war — is probably a bit much.
An Old Impulse
I’ve mentioned Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Writer’s Almanac” before. Kate started getting it a while ago and started reading me some of the poetry and literary notes that are part of the daily email. Then she signed me up, and then I signed my dad up. It’s the best day-to-day email “newsletter” I’ve ever gotten and usually superbly written and edited.
A recent example: While I was back in Chicago, I missed the almanac for Sept. 11 (the archiving isn’t ideal; you’ll have to scroll down to find the day’s entry). The poem offered that day was “To a Terrorist,” by Stephen Dunn (from his book “Between Angels“):
“For the historical ache, the ache passed down
which finds its circumstance and becomes
the present ache, I offer this poemwithout hope, knowing there’s nothing,
not even revenge, which alleviates
a life like yours. I offer it as onemight offer his father’s ashes
to the wind, a gesture
when there’s nothing else to do.Still, I must say to you:
I hate your good reasons.
I hate the hatefulness that makes you fallin love with death, your own included.
Perhaps you’re hating me now,
I who own my own houseand live in a country so muscular,
so smug, it thinks its terror is meant
only to mean well, and to protect.Christ turned his singular cheek,
one man’s holiness another’s absurdity.
Like you, the rest of us obey the sting,the surge. I’m just speaking out loud
to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse,
doomed to become mere words.The first poet probably spoke to thunder
and, for a while, believed
thunder had an ear and a choice.”