Night by Night

Let's be honest: it was one crappy week for me.

A job I'd tried very hard to get went to somebody else.

A class I was preparing to teach was canceled, when not enough students signed up.

Plus I was sick. And my kids were away on a trip with their Mom.

Even the first baseball game of the season was disappointing; the Giants appear to be on the verge of a terrible season.

My driving student's confidence was shaken when I got her into too demanding of a traffic situation, and we both felt bad afterward.

Plus, I was stressed all week that my daughter's hamster, Charlie Russell, who was staying here while she was away, would suddenly fall ill and die.

The two previous hamsters who've lived here, Little Flame and Sparkie, both died on my watch.

I hate burying hamsters.



But, the children returned, and somehow, I started feeling better. Charlie Russell survived, my illness subsided a bit today, and we pulled off an early 12th-birthday party for my youngest son.

Eight 12ish-year-olds in one flat in the Mission could drive a stronger soul than me to the brink of insanity.

But my little guy planned the whole thing, and went to Safeway with me to select the drinks and snacks. Not normally very talkative, he talked all the way.



As a parent, you always strive to help your kid be happy. It's natural. Mine finished his model truck today; his friend helped.

You see, my life is a very simple affair. Happiness can supplant sadness from some very simple developments. Today was such a day. My soccer players both had great games. The outcomes were 0-0 and 2-0.

Up top on this post, the apple tree is budding -- pink and white and green. The mystery of how fruit emerge captivates me as I stroll through my backyard.

Other beauties become visible: Along the side of the freeway, driving south into the valley tonight, a great white egret landed and posed for me. The light at dusk was indescribable. Every house and tree stood out, as if outlined by the sun.

Meyer lemons hung heavily like dripping kisses from the trees on the street where we parked and walked to the 60th birthday party of a friend, a man who was a leader of the Asian-American progressive movement that developed here in the '70s.

Remember the I-Hotel?

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Awaiting the Eco-Sport Era

We are living in one of those strange interludes in human history where only a small percentage of those alive perceive how seriously our species' survival is threatened, and how urgently the structural causes of this impending calamity need to be addressed.

From the snippets of conversations I pick up on the streets, in the markets, or in the ballpark (more on that venue in a minute), most Americans are still more concerned about the cost of the gasoline they pump into their cars than they are about their own personal over-sized carbon footprint on our common planet.

(Less I sound self-righteous here, I should admit that I am conducting an inventory of my own wasteful habits, like driving my car, eating meat, leaving the lights turned on, etc., in order to assess where I fit in the human ecology of wastefulness. So far, my initial grade for myself is a C-...and that is nowhere good enough.)

On to baseball, an intellectual refuge from the depressing "facts of (real) life."

Tonight was the first home baseball game of this season (albeit an exhibition contest) between the Giants and the Mariners.

The latter team's star is the great Japanese player who is known by only one name -- Ichiro -- and my Japanese companion was so excited at seeing him from lower box seats just off home plate that her lovely smile lit up any otherwise gloomy game's night.

Baseball as a sport has an enormous carbon footprint, and wouldn't you know that it is the frugal Japanese who are trying to do something about it.

They've announced a campaign to reduce the length per game this season by 6% (12 minutes), which will have a significant impact on the overall energy consumption necessary to keep all of those bright night and scoreboards lit, among other luxuries.

Of course, this is not only a good idea, it is a harbinger of things to come.

The Giants, who looked utterly pathetic on the field tonight, badly need a marketing theme if they hope to attract fans to their games this season.

Why not be the first "green" MLB team?

This is a great idea, and San Francisco is the right place for it to happen, but alas, the current management seems clueless about the urgency of the moment.

Baseball is as close to an American experience of timelessness, unless you include fishing, imaginable.

But time will not wait for us. The time to go green in our "field of dreams" is now, not when it turns out to be too late.

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Race and Sexism in America

I have been watching the poll numbers lately as the controversy over race has, finally and inevitably, entered the Presidential primary race. So the pastor at the Chicago church where Obama worshiped shouted out some things that offend conservative white Americans.

Tell me again exactly why I should care about that?

I have spent a lifetime among white people who felt quite comfortable calling young black men "bucks" and single black mothers "welfare cheats."

I was an activist, and my only arrest came at a demonstration on behalf of the latter group, when I was a college student in Ann Arbor in 1969.

More times than I can remember, white friends and relatives have referred to "niggers" or warned me (during the civil rights movement) that "Communists" were behind the effort by African-Americans to attain a decent measure of equality in this sorry society. I shuddered every time somebody I cared about uttered these hateful and ignorant words.

One of my first memories is my cousins telling me that they had touched the hair of a black boy in Royal Oak and that he "felt different" and "smelled different." The very first black boy I met was named Perkins, and as much as I hate to admit it, he did seem to smell different to me.

I never touched his hair, but it was pretty obvious even to a clueless white boy that the texture of his tightly curly hair differed a great deal from mine.

Not so many years later, during my first years traveling through the south, I saw water fountains, restaurant entrances, and other public places marked for "whites only" and for "colored only."

I visited communities where the schools were segregated, the churches were segregated, and every single neighborhood in town was segregated. In the black end of town, in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, I saw shacks on dirt roads where the black folks lived.

This is not sometime lost in history. This is the late Sixties.

Excuse me, but there are still many older folks, like the preacher in Chicago that Obama listened to, who lived through these indignities. If they use language that whites find offensive, maybe it is time for these white Christians to live in the shoes worn by another person, as their religion dictates, if even for a day.

Do this, and your complaints with the newly notorious Rev. Wright will evaporate with the sweet love of compassion, replacing the dark hatred of prejudice.

None of this, BTW, should be misinterpreted as a criticism of Hillary Clinton, who today chose to attack Obama about the comments his pastor made, apparently in the belief that this might save her failing bid to win the Democratic nomination. I am not unsympathetic to Hillary. Everything written here could easily be rewritten to highlight the unfairnesses applied to her effort to become the first woman President.

Americans seem to expect women to step aside, and put their own hopes and desires on hold in favor of their husbands, boyfriends, graduate advisers, bosses -- or some other man who thinks his career matters more than hers.

I do not advocate this. I do not think Hillary should quit the race because a woman should concede a close race before it is over in favor of a man. I would never do that.

Nope. I think she should prepare herself to be the VP on the ticket Obama will lead to victory in November.

That, my friends, is the bottom line of this political cycle. We have a candidate who can win it all, and that is all that matters, in these troubled times.

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D.B. Cooper's Parachute Found?

Breaking News:

By GENE JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer

The FBI is analyzing a torn, tangled parachute found buried by children in southwest Washington to determine whether it might have been used by famed plane hijacker D.B. Cooper, the agency said Tuesday.

Children playing outside their home near Amboy found the chute's fabric sticking up from the ground in an area where their father had been grading a road, agent Larry Carr said. They pulled it out as far as they could, then cut the parachute's ropes with scissors...

...A man identifying himself as Dan Cooper — later mistakenly but enduringly identified as D.B. Cooper — hijacked a Northwest Orient flight from Portland, Ore., to Seattle in November 1971, claiming he had a bomb.


When the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, he released the passengers in exchange for $200,000 and asked to be flown to Mexico. He apparently parachuted from the plane's back stairs somewhere near the Oregon border...

...when Carr overlaid the family's address onto a map investigators made in the early days of the investigation, he learned another encouraging fact: They lived right in Cooper's most probable landing zone, between Green and Bald mountains...

...In 1980, a family on a picnic found $5,880 of Cooper's money in a bag on a Columbia River beach, near Vancouver...

"If this is D.B. Cooper's parachute, the money could not have arrived at its discovery location by natural means," Carr said.



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(Please click on the headline of this post to read the entire story.)

She's Back!

Obama Girl strikes again...even Bill Clinton makes a cameo this time.

If we can ever arrange for Obama, Japan, to host a concert by Obama Girl, this world just might turn out to be a better place...

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Deviled Eggs.2

I've always found ask.com to be far and away the best place to find recipes. Today, I used it to make deviled eggs.

How's that for a domestic post?

Long away and far ago, the world made some sense. Now, it's just like this absurd building, frying in the mid-day sun, much like an egg in the pan.

This building actually has a purpose. It's the San Francisco Fire Department's training facility. Sadly, there seems no way to get a decent photo of it (I've been trying for months.)

There's all sorts of things I didn't know about eggs. You should hard-boil older eggs (nearer their expiration date); otherwise, the shell is exceedingly hard to peel. Also, if you want to avoid that unappetizing green-gray tinge, rinse them in very cold water after you boil them, and then refrigerate them.*

I'm considering a career change.

Since journalism seems to have, for all intents and purposes, joined the endangered species list, I need a new way to support myself and my family.

Maybe I could be a food specialist?

Did you know that extremely tiny green onion shoots make an excellent salad garnish?

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* The goal here, of course, is to achieve that nice yellow yoke color in your deviled eggs.

Without Title or Prospect.3

"Black Monday"



"Heart Leaking"







Everything looks different. How we see is always mediated by mood, of course. Yesterday's beauty is today's ugliness. Yesterday's hope is tomorrow's despair. There is nothing continuous left any more, just the next jolt of change. All that ever happens, it seems, is our next opportunity to be electrocuted...

-30-

Little Cars for Little People

A photo documentary. Sometimes words are unnecessary.

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