Happy Birthday

This year marks a half century since the New York Giants abandoned the old Polo Field and relocated here in San Francisco, at first to a tiny, inner-city field just a few blocks from here in the Mission District.

Later they moved to a windy stadium at Candlestick Point.

Then, they got a new home in China Basin in one of the most beautiful baseball parks imaginable.

This year, the franchise celebrates 50 years in the city by the Bay. In all of that time, however, the San Francisco Giants have never won a "world" championship. They came closest in 2002, but fell short.

No one in baseball thinks they can even finish better than last place in their division in 2008, exactly where they ended up last year.

Two words: Barry Bonds.

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Parallel Universes

At certain moments, almost without warning, your sensory perception suddenly improves.

You see differently, hear sounds that normally might be white noise. You can smell a faraway scent, or, as you run your fingers over a smooth table, or a soft arm, you feel a sensual rush that normally eludes you.

Taste is enhanced. You savor a piece of food with new appreciation.



In the summer of 1970, in Taloqan, Afghanistan, it was hot and dry. So hot (over 100 degrees F) and so dry that my body was apparently ready to accept tastes that never before had pleased me.



Someone served a "salad" consisting of two foods the younger version of me always thought he hated -- sliced tomatoes and sliced raw onions. They were chilled, and as I tentatively allowed them to enter my parched lips and perch on my dry tongue, an amazing thing happened.

They tasted delicious!

I've had variations of this experience many times in many places. Maybe it's nothing more than learning to appreciate new sensations under new circumstances.

When in Japan, I often encounter foods that, back home, I wouldn't ever choose to eat. But somehow in Japan, these items bring me an entirely new form of joy. The same in India (vegetable samosas), France (foie gras), Finland (reindeer), Pakistan (blood oranges), Germany (creamed herring, pickles, and beer for breakfast -- hmmm), and on and on.

The sharp afternoon sunlight in Paris, the late-night ambiance of a London pub, the grinding sounds of music in the bars in the tropical islands of the South Pacific. Taipei's couples walking at midnight; Amsterdam on a harbor cruise, Sydney on a harbor cruise, Puerto Limon with its giant sloths in giant trees.

Southern India's wild elephants in herds in a nature preserve; Brussels with its Grand'Place at wintertime. The list goes on and on -- places, times, feelings. Each reference yields a new wave of memories.

Even in my modest backyard, every day is a new one, with the birds and butterflies and cats and humans, trees and plants that share this place repeating daily rituals only to suddenly achieve new ones.

I, the observer, can only watch in wonder.

If you wish, please visit my new blog at BNET! Or, just click on the headline of this post...

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Life Before/After Color

It may be hard for those of you too young to remember, but some of us grew up without any photos other than black and whites.



When TV arrived, it too was only available in black and white.



Lately, for reasons I don't understand, my normally trustworthy camera has chosen to revert to these earlier times whenever I try to capture an image.

Perhaps this is only appropriate. As we approach the end of our lives, in many ways we revert to our beginnings.

On the other hand, it's also possible that I just pressed one of the wrong buttons on this contraption, and this revisionist view of the world around me is nothing more than another technologically-challenged interlude, an illusion that can be altered by pressing yet another button.

I must confess, however, that I feel like I'm living in that movie, Pleasantville these days.

I'm just hoping somebody brings the colors back soon!

p.s. If you think you can help me, please do.

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Not so fast...

In politics, like sports, it ain't over 'til it's over, and when it comes to the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination, it clearly is not over yet.

Clinton won by a landslide in Ohio and by a fairly thick whisker in Texas. Obama still leads in delegates but by a smaller margin than 24 hours ago.

All of which has to be good news to McCain, who clinched the GOP nomination, causing my guy, the charming Huckabee, to finally drop out.

(Ron Paul is a brother from another planet, and seems oblivious that he attracts no one but hard-core Libertarians. But hey, I love his rap on the war.)

I guess the Democrats haven't had enough yet, like sports fans who cheer a game that goes into overtime. But as Clinton and Obama continue to beat each other up, McCain can sit back and smile.

What Democrats have to worry about is whether their chances in November will fade as this process continues.

As for the other, recent candidate who announced he's in the race (again) -- Ralph Nader -- I doubt he will be much of a factor this time around. But, thinking over the long term, it is good Nader keeps running. How else can we ever find our way to a multi-party system?

Greens, Independents, Conservatives -- they all should field viable candidates. Our system would be the stronger for it.

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Could This Be The Night?

Certainly, if we've learned one thing, it's to not trust the exit polls this year. Nevertheless, many giddy bloggers are reporting the early waves of exit polls as follows:

Ohio Obama 51 Clinton 49
Texas Obama 50 Clinton 49
Vermont Obama 67 Clinton 33
Rhode Is. Obama 49 Clinton 49

Except for Vermont, where Obama clearly will prevail, the others are all within the margin of error and therefore tossups.

As many have noted, if the two big states, Texas and Ohio, turn out to be close races, Obama will in fact be the winner, due to proportional delegation allocation. Given Clinton's large leads in both states right up until the past few days, if Obama makes them close, this race will be effectively over.

Why?

Because there is no plausible scenario for Clinton to catch Obama in delegate count -- unless she wins those two state big tonight.

I'm not about to make predictions based on exit polls. But, once real vote totals start rolling in, we should be able to analyze whether the final tallies are likely to be close or not. If they prove to be as close as the exit polls purport them to be, this will be a decisive night for Obama indeed, and probably the last night of Clinton's campaign.

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Congratulations, You're a Winner!

Next time you're feeling poor, check out the Global Rich List for a little perspective.

If you are squeaking by on US$25,000/year, you're among the top 10.8% of humanity in wealth. If you're making $36,000, you're in the top 4.33%; $75,000, you're in the top one percent worldwide!

If you've made it to $100k, you're among the 0.66%; and should you be earning $150,000, you're in the top 0.33%, which is occupied by just 20 million people on the globe.

There isn't much point in keeping going but I decided to run the numbers on $175,000, which is the best editorial-related job I've been offered over my career. That would have placed me in the top 0.17% worldwide and made me the ten millionth richest person alive.

Hmmm.

None of this may make sense when one is unemployed, and earning virtually nothing, except that the table scraps one picks up in this culture easily projects out into the top five percent of people on the planet.

One of the best things about having spent a couple years in a very poor country, Afghanistan, teaching English in the Peace Corps, is that I learned how privileged my life was even when I had a bank account of zero.

The freedom we have to earn money in any number of ways, plus our access to credit, and our valuable citizenship rights in the wealthiest land in history are birthrights too many Americans take for granted.

Annual salary may be the easiest way to assess your relative wealth, but for an even more comprehensive portrait try adding up your assets (and liabilities). The resulting pyramid reveals that within our own country, the distribution of wealth is as skewed as it is when we compare ourselves to the rest of the world.

The latest figures I could locate indicated that the national median net worth (half of us have more than this, half have less) is $86,000.

But the top ten percent of Americans have a median net worth of $830,000 while the bottom twenty percent have under $8,000. In fact, the top one percent of the U.S. population -- roughly 3 million people -- has as much wealth as the 100 million poorest Americans combined!

So much for the myth of equality. Numbers like these do not lie.

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How's Your "Way Back Machine" Working?

In case you've never visited the Way Back Machine, you may wish to do so, if only for nostalgic reasons, as long as we define nostalgia as a feeling that exists about only about things since the advent of the world wide web.

This is a non-profit effort to provide snapshots of the web as it existed in the recent past, before all the iterations and redesigns and erasures that are constantly remaking the electronic text and images at url after url.

So, occasionally, you can find the equivalent of an old online friend -- a page that you liked that has since disappeared.

That is a rather unsettling reminder about just how much our world has sped up, almost to the point that we can no longer be sure whether what we thought we saw -- or heard or read -- really existed, because it has since been deleted from the "place" we used to "go."

Besides this dilemma, my question is this: As we transition to the entirely digital future that so obviously awaits us, what about all that came before? Will history have essentially stopped somewhere around 1994, and started anew online?

Is this, possibly, a B.C./A.D. moment for humankind?

I believe it is.

When I watch my young children doing their homework, their research is usually confined to whatever can be found online. Yes, they also consult books, those endangered species that cover my walls, but 90% of what they need to find out to complete their assignments exists online, and that percentage is only going to grow.

At some point in the not too distant future, I suspect that non-digital information will be accessible only in libraries maintained by private universities and wealthy governments.

It is almost as if we are going way back in time to when books and manuscripts were a luxury reserved for the elite...while, at the same time, we are entering an age where anybody can find out just about anything about any subject by the simple act of keystroking an entry on Google.

To the credit of Google and other Internet companies, efforts are under way to scan books and other artifacts so they can be searched and located online. Some of my own books are available via Google Books, and I certainly do not mind.

It would be nice, of course, to get a little compensation, for the intellectual property rights that I apparently no longer possess.

But, since I wrote those books not so much to make money as to make a point, it's really okay.

Way back. Way back now only means 14 years, give or take, less than a quarter of my lifetime to date, but more than the entire lifetimes to date of my young children (aged 13, 11, and 9.)

I wonder if in the future they, and their peers, will begin to become curious about all that came before this marvelous, frightening, powerful moment we find ourselves in, a moment when technology fundamentally transforms reality, wiping away past barriers, and opening up unimaginable futures?

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In the Heat of a Night

Bay Bridge from the top of Yerba Buena Island (photo by Junko)



The winds stopped, the sky was cloudless and blue as it only can be in places like San Francisco and Perth.

A lone purple flower pushed up and bloomed among the bright yellow sourgrass and clover that coats our backyard.



I was mesmerized by a single orange butterfly as it visited the rich white blossoms that now coat our plum tree. So much of Nature's beauty is utterly silent.

("Paint the gesture, not the hand." -- Van Gogh)

I love the art and architecture that humans create, but none of it exceeds the silent loveliness of a butterfly or hummingbird or bumblebee at work extracting sweetness and pollinating our productive plants.

How can anyone pretend that global climate change is not the most fearsome challenge we face as a species?



It was so warm tonight that we decided to barbecue our chicken and eat it outside.



The sun was still high enough to be blinding if you looked to the west. There wasn't a breath of air, but the freshness of our coastal air kept the early evening comfortable.



Even as the sun set, we needed nothing more than T-shirts to be comfortable here.



I love this weather. San Francisco is not naturally a warm place; we are chilly much more often than hot. But even now, after 9:30 pm, this city is warm tonight. Just like the classic song by the Animals: "San Francisco Nights."

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