I went for a walk yesterday

Here are some random pictures from a rainy day in my neighborhood.



The Eugenia Steps.

When raccoons attack (the winter lettuce).

Oh, brother. The raccoon visited my roof deck last night.



Where there was once a thriving pot of winter lettuce there is now this:



Too funny.

What's for dinner.

This recipe in the November Sunset looks tasty. (I love Sunset.) It's a chorizo cornbread stuffing with butternut squash.

My honey's a vegetarian, so I'm substituting Boca vegetarian sausage for chorizo:



Here's the cornbread, a-baking:



Here's the butternut squash (cooked in hot water w/ brown sugar):



Cilantro and sage:



And my favorite part--mushrooms, red bell pepper, onion, and fennel head cooked together with butter:



And here is everything but the cornbread all mixed together:



When the cornbread finished, I broke it in to cubes and dropped them into a mixture of vegetable broth and two beaten eggs. Then I combined everything and put it in the oven to bake.

"They've met the transvestites and transsexuals, sat with them on bright drapes and cushions, and heard about sex work. They've inspected the lifesaving beauty salon, where the transvestites get reminders about condoms while flowers are woven into their hair. Now they're on their way to call on female sex workers, who will greet them with heart-breaking personal stories and an ear-breaking drum troupe. But just for the moment they are stuck in traffic. So Bill and Melinda Gates are talking about their favorite subject: the world's biggest challenge and what can be done."

Link.

I already knew this.

Best strategies for finding a "good" parking spot:

The researchers considered three performance measures of what constitutes a "good" parking spot: the total walking distance between the space and the mall's front door (including distance walked to the door, back to the car after the shopping trip, and to return a shopping cart), driving time in search of a space, and the amount of time to reach the front door after entering the lot.

Their comparison showed that, in their model, the "park and walk" approach takes an average of 61 seconds, from entering the lot to reaching the mall entrance, whereas the "cycling" strategy requires an average of 71 seconds. The first approach usually involves more walking, but you tend to get to your shopping faster.

So, to save time at the mall, "park and walk" works best—most of the time.

Link.

San Francisco photo click-trance

Try lackadaisical. Lots of street shots and house parties.

Ditto Gwen Harlow.

the Christmas tree comes home

I have a small appetite for Christmas tree ornaments, but this is just pathetic.



UPDATE: Commentor "Me" at NinaCamic wrote this:

my mother wrote an article for the washington post one year about how she loved christmas trees lit by candles

a german woman looked up my mom and told her that her tree was lit by candles

we drove pretty far on a cold night

the drapes were drawn because lighting your tree with candles must be a crime of some sort

kinda felt like we were part of the underground railroad or smuggling jews in poland during world war ii

the tree was more gentle than stunning

the candles sat on little candle holders

and dimly lit the tree

That bolded part reminded me about the time I visited a friend in Anchorage, AK for Christmas. We drove out of town in the middle of the night to get a Christmas tree, pulled off the road, sawed one down, hauled it back to the car, and got locked out by the puppies who, happy to see us, jumped up and down against the door and (presumably) inadvertantly locked us out.

We had to break a window to get back in the car. After driving home in the freezing December Alaska cold, we decorated the tree and Diana insisted we use candles. It was beautiful but really not something I'd do in my own home.

Hewlett and Packard's garage set for public opening.

The story begins like this: 1938, Hewlett and Packard, former Stanford University classmates, decided to start a company. The two-story shingle at 367 Addison Avenue had everything they needed: a bottom flat for Packard and his new bride Lucile, a shed in back for Hewlett and a garage they could convert to their workshop and laboratory.

While here, the company created the Model 200A audio oscillator, the company's first product line. An advertisement for the oscillator says to ``write Dept. A for complete information about this and other materials.'' Mancini wonders whether Dept. A was Packard's tiny apartment or Hewlett's 8-by-18 shed.

Hewlett and Packard's time at Addison Avenue was brief -- they outgrew the garage in 1940 after hiring two employees. But their stay was long enough to create, as the plaque outside reads, ``the birthplace of Silicon Valley.''

...

California has declared it a historic landmark (No. 976), and HP is now gunning for a federal designation.

Link.

I enjoy Sudoku.

An ancient Asian temple defaced with urban graffiti?



An ancient wooden Asian temple?



Exquisite craftsmanship!



More public art.



It was too dark and rainy to look around for artist information...Please post it in the comments if you know!

Watching Hitchcock

"One of the defining moments for Hitchcock supposedly was when he was five years old and his father wanted to teach him a lesson so he sent [young Hitchcock] with a note to the Chief of Police who was a friend of [Hitchcock's father]. The note said to put [young Hitchcock] in jail for five minutes. So there was this five-year-old child who was in jail for five minutes. Well, five minutes can be an awfully long time if you're terrified. And that fear of jail, and particularly police, haunted Hitchcock and haunts Hitchcock's films."--Peter Bogdanavich, speaking in Hitchcock's The Wrong Man DVD special features.

Burning Man sculpture comes to San Francisco Civic Center

Flock, by Michael Christian

In case you can't read that sign because my hands were cold and shaking when I took the picture:

Black Rock Arts Foundation in Partnership with Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office and the San Francisco Arts Commission is pleased to present Michael Christian’s Flock.

This sculpture is part of a series of works being brought to the City of San Francisco for temporary installation to help engender conversation, foster community involvement, and engage people with their public spaces.

For more information, visit www.blackrockarts.org

Not really art, but quite sculptural: pollarded trees just next to Flock.

December 1, 2005 was a rainy day in San Francisco.

The view from the bedroom:



The plants like the rain.



So do the succulents on the front porch.



I'm looking forward to the day the city undergrounds those cables.



More plants here.

"Coyotes, which weigh between 25 and 45 pounds, will prey on small animals, Fox said, but they usually avoid humans. There has only been one documented case of a coyote killing a human in history, she said, while family dogs kill an average of 20 people a year."

Link.

Memory of an earthquake.

"A dream might have taken root in San Francisco's Tenderloin on Saturday when city work crews and neighborhood volunteers planted 77 trees along some of the grittiest streets in the city."

Link.

Ah, the 'Loin...

I had a studio (with a Murphy Bed) in the Tenderloin at 415 Jones Street (#505) when I first moved to San Francisco in 1989. I was nineteen years old. My friend K helped me paint Van Gogh's Starry Night on ceiling and DeChirico's Melancholy and Mystery of a Street on the foyer wall. I lived next door to a hunky art student w/ bleach blond hair who who rode a BMW motorcycle and painted his whole apartment black.

I was there when the Loma Prieta Earthquake struck just after I poured myself a glass of milk to go with a peanut butter & jelly sandwich. It was the day before my birthday and also the day before my neurology mid-term. I never took that mid-term because the earthquake shut down school for a week. I sipped my milk as the building rocked, and thought to myself, "This is a bad one. Or maybe it's just this old building." After all, I was on the fifth floor. When the shaking stopped, I resumed reading about Lynn Margulis in a Smithsonian Magazine I picked up at the recycling center where I worked.

Then the power went out.

I couldn't very well study without power so I thought about going to a movie. (That tells you what kind of student I was!) The Castro Theater was showing Kubrick that night. I'd missed the 4 p.m. screening of 2001, but I could hustle to make it to the 7 p.m. screening of Dr. Strangelove, which I'd never seen. I invited my other neighbor, a tall, teutonic beauty named Diana to go with me. She informed me the Bay Bridge had fallen down, the city was on fire, looters were looting, etc., etc. "So, that's a no?"

My dad got me on the phone at 3 a.m., worried sick. He reminded me it wasn't the first quake that killed all those people in Mexico City, it was the aftershocks. The first one just loosened all the bricks. The aftershocks brought all the buildings down.

Thanks, Dad.

Gardening at night.

That's what I'm reduced to with it being dark at 5 p.m. when I get home from work. I could garden in the morning before I go to work, but then what would I have to look forward to all day?

Tonight's observations:

The star flower bulbs I planted a month ago have sprouted. I didn't expect to see that for several months.



The tiarella seems to be going dormant. I wonder how long tiarella lives... I want mine to spread and form a carpet.



The mimulus I planted in October looks better than it did when I bought it at the nursery. I expect a big show next spring.



(Note to self: Re-stack that stone wall)

The Meyer lemons are finally ripening. It's been little green balls all year long. I see Lemon Drops dancing in my head.





My last garden post here.

I lived in the Mission for several years before I moved to Bernal Heights in 2003. Since then, I've rarely visited my old neighborhood. How nice the New York Times is keeping me up to date about the new restaurants.

This one sounds like fun to me:

Café Gratitude, 2400 Harrison Street at 20th, (415) 824-4652. Vegan dishes like I Am Worthy and I Am Wonderful may be cheap back-door tickets to knowing oneself, but some are top-notch examples of raw cuisine. Dinner for two with a large bottle of organic beer, $45.

The raw foods trend caught on big a few years ago, and then seemed to fizzle when its avatar local restaruants, Rawesome and Roxanne's Raw Foods, abruptly closed. Maybe that episode of Sex and the City did them in. I never had the chance to eat at Rawesome or Roxanne's. Now I have a second chance.

UPDATE: Looks like there might be two Cafés Gratitude. Hmmm... And a MetroBlogging commentor points out another place called Alive in a part of down I really never go to.

Work in progress...

That circle of rocks at 11 o'clock rings a manzanita (Howard McMinn). Moving clockwise, next to the birdbath, I planted two mimulus cream (sticky monkey flower) and some pink primrose.

That mulch will sit for the winter. I sowed grass and California poppy seeds. I'll landscape that area in the spring if I don't get around to it this winter. At 4 o'clock, the Princess Plant remains in shade, but she'll get lots of sun this spring.



Down at the bottom of the frame: sea pink (two of them), a climbing hydrangea, some dark-green waxy leaf shrub whose name I forgot and some pinkhead smartweed (which is Hawai'ian I believe & hopefully invasive). I planted several bulbs and some ground covers in the middle of the terrace too.

At 9 o'clock next to the pond, there are three grasses--Mexican feather grass, Deschampsia cespitosa (Northern Lights) and Libertia peregrinans (you can't see that one very well because it's dark, but it's next to the birdbath and it's starting to spread). Also a red flowering currant (ribes sanguineum glutinosum) and Zauschneria (epilobium). The bright green spreader growing over the rocks is a licorice that loves my yard. I have another one under the stairs and they're both spreading madly.



I need to re-work some of the rock walls and hire an electrician to run an electrical line out into the yard so I can nix the extension cord that powers the pump in the pond. (Among many, many other things.)

I love the splatter on the flagstone from the birds using the birdbath!

Natives in this shot: manzanita, mimulus, one of the sea pinks, ribes, epilobium. I have more in another part of the yard.

I didn't plan to get hyped about native plants when I started landscaping my backyard. In fact, I resisted the idea at first because native plant enthusiasts tend to be so...dogmatic. Dogma turns me off like a light switch.

But the idea took root (heh, heh) and now when I see an exotic plant at the nursery, I think it looks wrong somehow.

I can't wait to see everything grow in.

Zauschneria on the left, Ribes on the right. Zaucsch will make white flowers, and Ribes red.

Jared Sandberg wrote an excellent column in today's Wall Street Journal on the subject of indecision in the work place. Some excerpts:

For people who work for indecision-makers, even the most irresponsible snap judments would be better than no decision at all--what General Patton called the "ready-aim-aim-aim-aim syndrome."

Indecision, alongside other obstacles such as bureaucracy and blame deflection, are "driving employees absolutely crazy," says Jeffrey Saltzan, chief executive of Sirota [Survey Intelligence]. The trouble is, indecision often fails to get rectified because it's a lot harder to spot than bad decisions. "It's like proving a negative," says Mr. Saltzman.

Indecisive managers may not accomplish much. But on the long list of things they don't do is this: get fired. The not-so-little secret is that indecisions are often more frequently rewarded at the workplace than decisions, joining the litany of office-sanctioned bad behaviors that include toadyism, hissy-fits and frat-house machismo.

I thought about checking to see whether the article is available online, and decided not to.

"[Copernicus'] famous book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), in which he first proposed that the Earth revolves around the Sun, was published after his death. And astronomy was little more than a spare-time occupation for the clerical man whose name now stands as one of the most significant in the history of science." Link.

Polish archaeologists believe they've located Copernicus' remains.

Get a massage at the airport

Officials plan to nearly triple the amount of space allotted to spa facilities [at San Francisco Int'l Airport] in the coming year, putting the airport at the forefront of a national trend toward hosting services that appeal to domestic and international travelers weary with stress and fatigue.

Five years after the concept for a multisite spa at the airport first emerged, SFO is advertising a four-location lease involving 3,693 square feet of commercial space to prospective developers, according to airport property manager Sharon Perez. At least 50 companies have already expressed interest in the opportunity, which will require a $461,700 minimum initial investment.

“It’s a new trend coming up with the airports,” Perez said. “It’s really just geared for the passenger between his flights.”

Link.

Very sad.

The ghost city of Varosha. Look at those beautiful beaches!

Recent work on sleep.

"The implication of these findings is that the sleeping brain can either generate its own perceptions or it can think about them. It cannot do both at the same time. Dreaming is therefore as hallucinatory and thoughtless (or delusional) as so-called mental illness.

In the second study we tested this hypothesis. When psychotic schizophrenic patients were given the thematic apperception test (TAT), in which verbal descriptions of simple but ambiguous pictures are recorded and scored, when they were awake and asked to report their dreams, they had equally high scores on a bizarreness scale (designed to pick up cognitive discontinuity and incongruity) for both. [N]ormal control subjects have the same amount of dream bizarreness as the patients but are much less bizarre in their wake-state projective test responses.

These findings support the hypothesis that REM sleep is a physiological brain state that produces a distinctive and psychosis-like mental content, whereas during normal waking such properties are suppressed. Put another way: when awake, the brain is normally free of the formal aspects of dream activity. Conversely, normal dreaming is justifiably considered to be an entirely normal model of highly abnormal conditions of the human brain and mind. It is now clear that the kind of consciousness that a person experiences is a function of the state of the brain."

So maybe the brains of psychotic people are dreaming, and simply can't wake up.

I performed some minor edits on the quote above. You can see the original here, and check out the TOC for the whole sleep supplement here.

This interested me too: "Major disasters such as Three Mile Island, Exxon Valdez, Bhopal, and Challenger were all officially attributed to sleepiness-related impaired judgment in the workplace."

It's Halloween...

and it's also the third anniversary of the day our mortgage closed. Kinda crazy to remember the day of something like that, but when it falls on a recognizable date like Halloween, you don't forget it.

We popped a bottle fo Veuve Clicquot to celebrate. And I'm working a great buzz!

As for the Jack O'Lantern, we were too late to get the big ones, so we got the acne-scarred runts.

What's growing in that planter? Purple lantana, a native Ceanothus ("Diamond Heights"), and a very young climbing hydrangea (hydrangea petiolaris).

UPDATE: They're starting to stream in.



This one really testifies to my complete inability to get the camera ready on time. Like they're going to wait for me. As if!



Awww!!! (We gave him two pieces!)

UPDATE: It's 7:25 p.m. and we're almost cleared out of 14 pounds of candy! And I thought we bought too much.



Harry Potter!!! My night is complete!

I walked up to the Bernal Hill Soapbox Derby today, but didn't bring my camera.

Here's a slideshow on Flickr.

This larger-life-size reproduction of MouseTrap looks v. cool.

I was down at Hunters Point yesterday for Open Studios but didn't see it. Of course I didn't know about it until just now, so I wasn't looking for it either.


As for the rest of Open Studios, here are three of the artists I liked the best this year: Lynn Rubenzer, Alberto Ybarra, and Carol Aust.

Here's Ybarra:



and here's Aust.


That's a book she painted in.

Rubenzer has a Flash-based site I couldn't copy pictures from, but you should definitely check her out w/ the link above.

Princess Plant

A lot of people come here after googling "Princess Plant" because of this post about my then-new Tibouchina urvilleana.

Update: She continues to do well in the shady spot where I planted her. I know they like full sun, but I don't have a lot of full sun in my backyard. She has bigger leaves than most other princesses; I imagine that's an artifact of growing in a shady spot.

Except for removing some crossed branches, I've done little pruning, but pruning is definitely in her future--especially when the sun moves back across the sky next spring and she can expect several hours of full sun every morning. She will have an open, airy canopy, not the dense, shrubby habit of other princesses. She's there to arch over the pond and stream (still in progress).

I planted her in a sawed-off oak wine barrel I bought at a local nursery. I tipped a nursery worker $30 to saw out the bottom too, for better drainage and future root growth. The barrel also serves as a structural element holding up half of a terrace that's retained by a rock wall along the rest of its perimeter.

Knowing she'd be in shade, I was reluctant to put her in the native, poorly-draining California clay soil. Most people, I believe, put their princesses in native soil, but I wanted to be more careful about drainage since she's growing in the shade. According to the wiki, princess plants come from Latin and South America.

I haven't noticed many butterflies flocking to her, but late summer and fall may not be the time for butterflies in San Francisco--I don't know. The blossoms have been large and abundant, but short-lived--usually just 2-3 days. Generally, 10 blossoms are open at any time, and she's still pretty small--no more than 3-4 feet in any dimension.

More news later. With pictures. Here's one.

"The tipping point between life and death"

For a personality in crisis, the accessibility of the Golden Gate Bridge can be the tipping point between life and death. "It's like leaving a row of bottles of poison in front of a baby," says Meyer of San Francisco Suicide Prevention. "And they're all pretty and have bows on them."

The majority of bridge suicides are preventable, she says, because so many are impulsive. Strangely, the greatest stumbling block in the building of a suicide barrier is the attitude of a population that prides itself on open-mindedness.

"I had someone come up to me as I was walking to some hearings and he said, 'They should put up a diving board so those people can jump off it.' I said, 'Now say to me, "They should put up a diving board so my son could jump off of it."'"

Link.

Here's the interesting part:

"In his original plans, chief engineer Joseph Strauss considered the bridge's potential as a suicide site and designed railings 5 1/2 feet high. On May 7, 1936, a year before the opening of the bridge, Strauss boasted to the San Francisco Call-Bulletin that the bridge was "practically suicide-proof."

"The guard rails," he was quoted as saying, "are five feet and six inches high and are so constructed that any persons on the pedestrian walk could not get a handhold to climb over them. The intricate telephone and patrol systems will operate so efficiently that anyone acting suspiciously would be immediately surrounded. Suicide from the bridge is neither possible nor probable."

By the time the bridge opened a year later, Strauss' promise had evaporated. It's unclear when the plans were modified, but at some point architect Irving Morrow, originally hired to design the entryways and bridge plazas, went to work on the guardrails. Morrow reduced them to 4 feet, and in doing so created a stage for decades of self-slaughter."

So, for San Francisco & Marin County audiences, the way to phrase the winning argument in favor of erecting suicide barriers on the bridge would be to say "we're restoring the bridge to its original plans."

I wonder what happened to those original plans...


UPDATE: Interesting account of plaigirism found in the GG Bridge series. Link.

The Nano Car

"To show that the nanocars actually roll around on their fullerene wheels, rather than slipping and sliding like a car on ice, the Rice team introduced the nanocars onto a flat gold surface. They found the nanocars were quite stable on the surface—remaining parked until the surface was heated above 170 °C—presumably because of strong adhesion between the fullerene wheels and the underlying gold.

Between 170 °C and 225 °C, the researchers observed that the nanocars moved around by translational motion and pivoting. The translational motion was always in a direction perpendicular to the nanocar’s axle, indicating that it moves by rolling rather than sliding."

Link.

"Megan Mullally's daytime syndicated talk-variety show has been sold in four top markets for a fall 2006 launch." Link.

I loved her album, especially the Brecht song.

"Printers have a special place in the history of liberty. It is very disturbing, therefore, to learn that documents printed on color printers from Xerox, HP and other manufacturers contain secret government codes identifying the time, date and serial number of the printer." Link.

The Home Depot drama comes to a head...

The B.A.R. runs down the Home Depot issue.

Okay, I'll give up an pretend like I give a flying fuck about Home Depot. Living on Bernal, I should be grateful the neighbors haven't torched my house since I don't have a Home Depot circle slash sign in my front window.

Random thoughts on the matter:

Home Depot is a terrible place to shop. All the big hardware stores are--Lowes, OSH, whatever. They all suck. Trying to get actual help in any of them is a joke. Or a nightmare. Or both. The workers hate you for interrupting their shelf-stocking duties with your dumb questions. There's nothing in it for them. I should please go fuck myself.

How sorry should I feel that people in the Bayview "desperately" need jobs? Does their joblessness have anything to do with them, I wonder? I guess I better not say so, or the neighbors will definitely torch the house. Whatever. I don't expect to see much shopping improvement in a Home Depot staffing with Bayviewers.

And is Home Depot really what they need anyway? What a depressing thought.

On the other hand, Bayshore Boulevard is a dump. Aside from Floorcraft Nursery and BevMo, it's a wasteland.

Why doesn't Cole Hardware grow some balls and open their own superstore? No vision thing?

And back to why I don't care....The traffic. Sorry, I don't envision a lot of people clogging Cortland Street to get to Home Depot. They'll take Alemany or Potrero. Ergo, not my problem.

In the final analysis, I will never use the Home Deopt on Bayshore.. When I need hardware, I go to Cole. I don't mind paying more because I know the shopping experience won't piss me off. And that's it.

Cool.

“'I think the discovery of the ‘half-animal, half-plant’ microbe shows part of the process of single-cell marine microbes evolving into plants,' Prof. Isao Inoue, a member of the research team, said." Link.

"I meditate a lot, but I am constantly in pain."

Monday marks the anniversary of the tiger attack that nearly killed [Roy] Horn two years ago. It's also his 61st birthday.

Horn has made considerable progress. He can walk unaided for short distances. The grip of his right hand is noticeably firm.

Signs, however, remain of the attack.

A thin white scar cuts across the right side of his neck. His left side is partially paralyzed. His walk is still a slow shuffle.

Link.

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (excerpt):

One is tempted to believe that a stupid man will only do harm to himself but this is confusing stupidity with helplessness. On occasion one is tempted to associate oneself with a stupid individual in order to use him for one's own schemes. Such a manoeuvre cannot but have disastrous effects because a) it is based on a complete misunderstanding of the essential nature of stupidity and b) it gives the stupid person added scope for the exercise of his gifts. One may hope to outmanoeuvre the stupid and, up to a point, one may actually do so. But because of the erratic behaviour of the stupid, one cannot foresee all the stupid's actions and reactions and before long one will be pulverized by the unpredictable moves of the stupid partner.

This is clearly summarized in the Fourth Basic Law which states that:

Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

Link.