dannyman.toldme.com

Brita Hummel left a job at Meta.

A temp-worker’s view of the usefulness of Dilbert cartoons as a gauge for dysfunction.

“The land, still cold and wintery, was alive with creatures that trusted in the coming of spring.” –William Least Heat-Moon

A blog is the cultural equivalent of a yard sale.

Elon Musk turned a lot of people off by giving Nazi salutes, but the media never mentions this when reporting Tesla’s falling sales. “Elon Musk spent several chaotic months crudely slashing government programs,” reports The New Yorker.

During our Happy Birthday Phone Call, my Uncle mentioned that I was a Bicentennial Baby. “Yeah, I’m sorry our 250th is under such Circumstances.” “That’s okay, just stick around for 300.” “Uh … yeah, I’ll take some vitamins.”

“You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you’ve been feeling bad.” –William Least Heat-Moon

“I don’t trust pride, but when you realize that we are all one, you can be proud of being part of that gigantic entity that we all are.” –Bob Weir

I had a dream that my bicycle got stolen and I was annoyed about having to replace it because can you even buy an affordable awesome new bike with a front fork suspension and rim brakes anymore?

My wife is going for an evening walk.
She asked if I would like to join her.
The cat sitting on my lap looked up at her and meowed “no.”
The older son is going in my stead.

“A city of men is also a city of horses–balding horses, horses beautiful as Brooke Shields. Cars kill more people, but relieve us of the sight of beings whipped on our streets.” –Sparrow

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I heard that with the Super Bowl coming to Santa Clara, we could expect a rush of federal Law Enforcement, so I signed up for Santa Clara County Rapid Response Training. That was my Saturday morning. A room full of volunteers and a word at the start that an observer had been murdered in Minnesota the same morning. We learned a bit about how ICE has been functioning locally, and how Rapid Response works. We signed up.

Back to the house and switch to the minivan to schlep the Pinewood Derby track over to the Pinewood Derby. “Have you seen the video?” “No, and that’s just as well.” I helped set up the track, then excused myself. “I am crashing. I need to eat.”

I ate and then climbed into bed. I rested but couldn’t nap. I missed most of the Pinewood Derby. I had just run out of energy. Not a physical thing so much as a state change. National despair. I can’t explain it but there’s a good chance you understand.

I caught the tail end of the Pinewood Derby, helped pack up the track. I stopped at Trader Joe’s for some non-alcohol Hazy IPA. The Family had eaten at The Derby. I dined on candy and fake IPAs for dinner. I don’t recommend that. But that’s a Sometimes Saturday Night. We watched Saturday Night Live. No mention of Minnesota and I understand why.

Come morning I couldn’t sleep. I really like to sleep in when I can. That’s what Sunday is for, right? I got up and went to the computer. The letter E in 700 point font. Two of them. And N, D, I, and C. I taped up the old sign: END ICE. I dressed warm and headed out.

Around the corner a guy walking his dog encouraged me to be a dumbass and go get shot by federal agents. He seemed good natured about it. I walked down to the crossroads where other protests have been held. A few cars tapped horns quietly in the residential neighborhoods but as I got to crossing the streets of the main intersection over and over, many enthusiastic honks. Kind words out of windows. Hand gestures of solidarity. A ride share driver pulled over and handed me a can of Red Bull. Another man, who looked a little like a priest, beckoned me over. He had an orange juice, a Kind Bar, “a chocolate milk, for later” and a $10 gift card for the coffee shop. He thanked me for what I was doing. As a son of immigrants. Rene nearly brought the tears to my eyes.

I did my thing for about two and a half hours. My first solo protest. I think organization is generally a better thing, but when people start coming out spontaneously, the mood has shifted. I didn’t mind being alone. I wasn’t. Most folks saw past me but plenty knew that I was there for them. We don’t want to live in a country that is ruled by Fear. I don’t want that for my boys. I really want my country to be that special place where people come to escape Fear, and for opportunity. Death in the streets is nothing new, but blessing Federal Police with power to murder people at their own discretion? I can not live with that.

Walked downtown for brunch. On the way home a lady asked if there was a protest. “It was one guy,” I said. She pointed me out to the kid as an example of a good person. What made me good, in my book, was heading home to plan out and run a Den Meeting for the Cub Scouts. We talked about pets, but mainly we enjoyed being kids together.

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When this post is published, I am fifty years old.

Go me!

Thanks, Mom!

This website is about thirty years old.

Go World Wide Web!

Thanks, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!

I have spent just over half my years in California versus Illinois. It is where we raise our kids, and where we own our home. Chicago and the Midwest will always hold a special place in my heart, but I have become one of those sunshine people who are just an earthquake away from sliding into the ocean.

Go Bears!

Thanks, California!

Our marriage, like our older kid and our mortgage, not to mention our cats, and my current job tenure, are all just over a decade old. (And the younger kid is closing in!)

I recently heard it said that your first decade is the happiest. But my forties have been really great as well. What makes a good childhood — being surrounded by loving people who support your growth — can really come back to you when you work to be a good spouse, a good parent, a good friend and a good citizen.

I am a very fortunate person.

Go Family!

Thanks, My Sweetheart!

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Along the Leestown Road, near an old whitewashed springhouse made useless by a water-district pipeline, I stopped to eat lunch. Downstream from the spring where butter once got cooled, under peeling sycamores, the clear rill washed around clumps of new watercress. I pulled makings for a sandwich from my haversack: Muenster cheese, a collop of hard salami, sourdough bread, horseradish. I cut a sprig of watercress and laid it on, then ate slowly, letting the gurgle in the water and the guttural trilling of red-winged blackbirds do the talking. A noisy, whizzing gnat that couldn’t decide whether to eat on my sandwich or my ear joined me.

Had I gone looking for some particular place rather than any place, I’d never have found this spring under the sycamores. Since leaving home, I felt for the first time at rest. Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention. It’s a contention of Heat Moon’s — believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he’s going to get — that a man becomes his attentions. His observations and his curiosity, they make and remake him.

William Least Heat-Moon
Blue Highways

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Previously: Movies I Have Watched Recently

Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away

Buddy Guy started Down South, picking cotton, as his ancestors had done for too long. He loved playing guitar and made his way up to Chicago. Worked a long time to get The Industry to dig his sound. Got some help from the English, who were more directly inspired by and keen on promoting Guy’s rawer, more energetic style of Blues.

About twenty years ago my father came to town to re-wire the recording studio he had wired up decades previous, and they put him on the guest list at Buddy Guy’s. I joined him and his wife and we listened all through the night, moving from standing around the perimeter, as is common in Chicago blues clubs, to sitting at a table once the crowd thinned. There was a blind organist that Dad’s wife had grown up listening to. It was a long loud night. Afterward we piled into Dad’s car. The wife wanted popcorn shrimps, so we cruised through the night to a stand that sold popcorn shrimp in paper bags.

I had heard Buddy Guy’s had closed down, but I looked it up and not only is the place still open, but Buddy himself is listed as playing more nights than not.

Die Hard

They had the original Charlie Brown Christmas on Apple TV, which is a sweet little thing I re-watched with the family. But you know what is a Christmas Movie we had never seen before? Die Hard! You know? That is an amazingly great movie. Another perfect action movie. If you haven’t seen Die Hard, go for it. You needn’t wait for Christmas.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Because it was referenced in “Americana” and because I remember enjoying it decades ago … once upon a time, a mafioso saved the life of this weird kid who was into Japanese culture. In the present day, that kid, now a grown man, lives alone on a roof with pigeons, working hits for the mafioso, His Retainer, in the spirit of the Samurai.

A gimmick in the film is when he chats with the Ice Cream Truck man, who only speaks French. They each speak in their respective languages, arriving at the same conclusion. This probably illustrates something relevant about perceiving the world beyond the limits of language. It is a fun movie and I’m glad I watched it again.

The Samurai is a way that is no longer followed, and the mafia in this movie also understands that it has lost its spirit and is also on the way out. Ghost Dog came out in 1999, when the world was changing quickly into the Brave New Digital World of today. It feels like every day, I see a bit more value in bringing back some Older Ways.

Le Samouraï

A loner hitman lives upstairs with a bird. He is very careful about his work and covering his tracks. He steals cars with ease. License plates are swapped. When a female witnesses his work, he takes no action against her. His client turns violently against him. Ghost Dog clearly drew some influence from this 1967 film, where everyone speaks French.

The Cops feature more in this film. Dogged Big City Cops. The boss detective is trying to pin the protagonist down: his alibis are too perfect. But the beautiful piano player lady swears absolutely, this is not the guy.

There’s a lot of hide and seek on the Paris Metro. And vintage French cars with headlights so dull that every not-young person would swear “aha! they have gotten so much brighter!” The plot is engaging, but the movie tends to drag a bit, in my esteem. Yeah, you’re doing a Noir crime chase but a lot of the scenes loiter too long in the dark.

I also learned that the 1967 Paris Cop term for a surveillance bug is “walkie talkie.”

The Apartment

This was playing at Alamo, but the online seat selector said there were no good seats to be had and the weather was crap so I pulled this up on Fandango at Home. 1960s Manhattan. A guy works on the 19th floor of an insurance company: a vast open sea of desks crammed together beneath a ceiling of fluorescent lights. But he has a scheme to advance his career: he makes his apartment available to executives who need a place to bring their mistresses for an hour or two.

This, of course, is a logistical hassle and often a great inconvenience. I like his apartment. Pre-war. Cozy. Nice architectural details. An air conditioner and a pathetic kitchen. Anyway, he has a crush on the Elevator Girl and as his prospects improve so to does his confidence in courting her. Of course, she’s working through her past(?) fling with The Big Boss … long story short, the protagonist comes home to find the Elevator Girl in his bed overdosing on pills. The neighbor, a Doctor, helps save her life and counsels that he needs to closely monitor her recovery.

It was a wonderful movie. Suspenseful and humane. One scene that caught in my attention is earlier when he’s trying to impress her by explaining “I know everything about you. Where you live, your family …” and he explains that he pulled her policy card to learn more about her. She takes this creeper news in stride. Either folks thought somewhat differently about privacy and ethics back then or we’re being told that her standards for decency in men have been lowered below the horizon. Point being that it can be really hard in New York to sort through all the ambitious young men and distinguish the ethical lapses of the over-eager from the bald lies of the truly rotten.

The Hospital

After “The Apartment” Fandango suggested “The Hospital.” Another hectic Manhattan workplace in 1971: a busy teaching hospital. The protagonist runs the place. The hospital is a giant complicated mechanism of endless headaches and his life and mental state are both badly on the slide.

There are people picketing outside because the hospital’s expansion plan requires the demolition of tenements across the street. At one point they have a meeting with the protestors and everybody wants something else. I have experienced enough public meetings to know that scene. Oh and it seems that maybe the medical staff are being carefully murdered.

Pairs really well with The Apartment. This time, the workplace affairs are conducted in broom closets, or, when a patient dies, in an empty bed in a room shared by a comatose patient. Young Doctors have no time for the shenanigans of Insurance executives.

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Whether you gauge the temperature with an F or a C, 40-something is nasty. That’s what we had this morning. I rode my bicycle as far as Caltrain, and figured that I could dress better, but I could just as easily hop on the train, in hopes of decent afternoon weather.

Casually sloppy: all these bikes are just riding to Palo Alto.

Today was also our “End of Sprint” which is weird becauce every other Tuesday feels like a Friday? Whatever. I had things pretty well wrapped up by shortly after 3pm, and announced I would head home.

“When you bike home all the way, how long does it take,” asked a colleague.

“I dunno: about an hour? Google says an hour. But I can just ride as far as I feel then hop the train.”

I got outside into around 63F and it was amazing! So, I started to pedal, not towards Caltrain, but home. And not in a very straight line: I had time to meander. A new hobby the past couple of years has been wandrer.earth, where I gradually fill in the map with places I have walked and biked. I pull the phone out, stick it in the handlebar mount, set Wandrer to full screen, and work my way towards home, favoring “red streets” where it doesn’t know I have been.

“This charming old house could fit in my backyard!”

Gotta stop at every Little Free Library along the way. At least half a dozen. And a table of free stuff where I picked up a black light for finding the mystery cat urine. (TMI? Sorry, toots!) And of course, making extra turns and rolling down red-lined cul-de-sacs. Is that a gorgeous house? I’ll need to stop and take a picture. Never went anywhere near Caltrain: things were too amazing out there. But as I neared the house and sunset, I decided some red routes can be saved for future adventures as I would prefer to get home before dark.

“Oh no wait, this is the house, scaled down, that I want to ask an architect to squeeze into an ADU!”

Total moving time? Around an hour fifteen.

Total elapsed time? Near an hour forty.

I gotta take the road less traveled. It is a habit my loved ones mostly tolerate. That’s how you can tell they love me.

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Excerpts from some brunch-time reading, penned by Cincinnatus Hibbard, via Metro Silicon Valley, transcribed by hand from the print edition:

“How often do you think about ICE?” I asked “Juan,” the gruff old ranch hand. He paused, reckoning, and replied, “Maybe 50 times a day.” That shocked me–was he that frightened? He had been stoical, like a rock, even when he had told me that he had not seen his wife or his children living in Mexico for 23 years. There were grandchildren now–grandchildren he had never held. His eyes were distant. Perhaps, looking inward, he was trying to see them now.

“Why don’t you go back to see them?” I asked, deeply moved. “I cannot re-cross the border,” he said. There is no work back home. My family, they need me here–working.”

We sat at a picnic table under a tree beside a field, where undocumented farmworkers volunteered after their work shifts, farming organic vegetables for the local food bank. Despite paying local and federal taxes, and despite their poverty, undocumented immigrants are inelegible for Calfresh foodstamps–as well as Medicaid medical insurance, disability insurance (though they work some of the most dangerous jobs) and Social Security retirement checks. They might be keeping those safety net programs solvent for us.

The winter crops were in. The workers were tending two types of onion, garlic, two kinds of cabbage, Brussels sprouts, jicama–and strawberries for the small children to pick. “Why do you work here, after working so hard in the vineyard all day?” I asked “Ernesto.”

“Because I know hunger,” he said. “I know what it is like …”

. . .

This is terror.

“Lupe” talked about a pain she had in her pelvis last summer. For months, the pain grew and grew intolerable, and still she told no one–she knew her friends would try to make her go to the emergency room–but the hospital wasn’t safe from ICE. What was this pain stabbing up like knives from her pelvis to her navel–“Was it cancer?” she wondered.

Finally, she admitted it–there was no hiding it; she would pause in her farm work as she breathed through the unbearable pain, swooning. Her friends and family were begging her to go, but she wouldn’t go–she would be taken by ICE. What would happen to her children then? Finally, she was taken in a faint for emergency surgery, by friends with H2-A papers.

This is terror.

. . .

“Sophia” fears for her teenage daughter, “Ana,” who was already given to panic-attacks. Like many Latino youth with undocumented friends and relatives, her social media algorithm is filled with shaky cam POV shots of raids and arrests at homes and school drop-off, or ICE contingents parading in full battle regalia down residential streets, guns pointed, or smuggled videos of immigrants deported to war zones (like South Sudan) or hell-on-earth prisons (like El Salvador’s CECOT prison.)

. . .

This shift to deportation work has caused slow-downs, stoppages, and/or unraveling of cases against “high level” child sexual predators, sex traffickers, smugglers, scammers, international criminals, embargo evaders and international terrorists. As the deportation arrests surge, the true bad guys are getting away.

I re-typed this stuff from the print edition because 1) I prefer reading print to begin with 2) my modest manual effort in transcribing the words means more to me and my soul than simply copying-and-pasting the same quickly-forgotten text around the Internet. I hope that in some small way, these words find meaning for you.

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Visiting the Upper Peninsula as a kid, we spent a lot of time relaxing on the beach. One time it was told to me that there was a fine collection of Model Ts at the bottom of the bay. “Why would you try to drive across the bay,” asked I? Well, you see, folks had been used to crossing the ice on foot or wagon–it saved a lot of time versus going the long way around in the snow. Unfortunately, combustion cars are heavier than some early owners reckoned, and the ice would give way.

Driving over ice on the road, I have learned, takes a special form of sangfroid. I have recently been thinking about the will and skill with which my people of the Upper Midwest drive over ice, and of how some folks are eager to tell their own version of a story without concern for facts.

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Previously: Movies I Seen Lately

Late last year I started watching movies on Fandango At Home, partly just to get away from the Big Tech Companies a bit. They have an extensive catalog and now I feel like I have re-discovered the old Netflix DVD service: I can just browse endless movies or search one up and have a good time for a few bucks. Here’s some movies I have watched since October.

Cat City

This is from October so I don’t remember too well. The cats and the rats have teamed up against the mice. There’s a lot of incompetent mafia action told in the style of a cheap 1980s Hanna-Barbera cartoon in Hungarian.

My Beautiful Laundrette

Uncle Explains the Situation

Young people. Pakistani Brits, the children of immigrants. London in the 80s. Hustle Culture. The Tube constantly trundling past the flat. Racist Thugs. The sickly father who, like Charlie Bucket’s grandparents, won’t get out of bed, played by Roshan Seth, feels comfortably familiar, because you recognize him from half a dozen other movies. The protagonist starts working for a successful Uncle and takes over running a funky little laundromat, which he fixes up nice. Hijinx ensue as secrets are revealed. A fun movie.

I swear there’s a sound effect in common with “The Toxic Avenger.”

The Fugitive

Holds up. We watched this with the boys and it really is a perfect action movie, well acted. Plus it is set in and around Chicago.

Burden of Dreams

This is a “making of” a movie I’ll now need to see, called “Fitzcarraldo” which tells the story of a man named Fitzgerald who in olden days sought to corner the rubber market in part by hauling a steam ship through the jungle to connect from the Amazonian to the Peruvian river basin. But “Burden of Dreams” is about a stubborn film director, Werner Herzog, making this film in the hardest way possible.

A badly pronounced and half-finished sentence out of a cheap, stupid suburban novel.

Part of the story is camping out in the deep Peruvian jungle for several months to film, with a large camp of Native people. Part of the story is getting chased off his first film location. Part of the story is having to re-shoot half the film with a new actor when the first star contracts amoebic dysentery and is forbidden by his Doctor from returning to Peru. The film is re-shot with Klaus Kinski, who irritates the film crew and the Natives enough that I read somewhere the latter offered to kill Kinski on Herzog’s behalf, but Herzog declined because that would have further delayed his filming.

I learned of this movie from a YouTube clip of Herzog condemning the jungle as obscene.

Americana

The information screen for “Americana” taken from the “Fandango at Home” app.

A bunch of fun characters. I liked seeing Zahn McClarnon, the sheriff from “Dark Winds” playing a Native American revolutionary. Ghost Eye at one point explains that his nom de guerre is an homage to “Ghost Dog,” a film, I guess we both like, where Forrest Whitaker plays a New York mafia hit man who lives by the code of the Samurai. We’re all just playing a role, might as well have a cool name, right?  With the violence, the non-linear storyline, and the compelling characters it felt a lot like “Pulp Fiction.”

Baurnya Salu

A kid is growing up in a village with his grandmother. He doesn’t know his birth parents beyond an old photo. He takes on extra jobs around the village to save some money to visit them. The filming is beautiful. Grandma goes to the city for a checkup and passes away. After the funeral, a bus ride brings him back to his birth family. Back with Mom and Dad and a little brother who understands how the farm works, and can ride a horse. Integrating back into the family is hard because the first born son is a stranger. It is very emotional and the story is really well told. A lot more showing than telling.

The Blues Brothers

The Wife had never seen it. It’s pretty good. A Chicago classic, like poppyseeds on a steamed bun.

The Bodyguard From Beijing

An older kung Fu Cop movie. Fun.

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I heard on that ultra-trendy news site, NPR, that Social Media is On The Way Out in 2026. What comes next? Well, I kinda like blogs. And I’m not the only one. Joan Westenberg wrote a kick-ass piece here: The Case for Blogging in the Ruins about the long view of how sharing knowledge works and how social media kinda pissed all over things … I’m going to just drop some excerpts …

Before social media ate the internet … blogs occupied a wonderful and formative niche in the information ecosystem. They were personal but public, permanent but updateable, long-form but informal. A blog post could be three paragraphs or thirty pages.

When I write a blog post, I’m writing for an imagined reader who has arrived at this specific URL because they’re interested in this specific topic; I can assume a baseline of engagement; I can make my case over several thousand words, trusting that anyone who’s made it to paragraph twelve probably intends to make it to paragraph twenty.

When I write for social media, I’m writing for someone who is one thumb-flick away from a video of either a hate crime or a dog riding a skateboard. … The format actively punishes nuance, which means that a thoughtful caveat reads as weakness and any acknowledgment of uncertainty looks like waffling.

She explains the origins of Essays: provisional attempts to try out ideas.

Social media flattens all of this into statements: Everything you post is implicitly a declaration. Even if you add caveats, the format strips them away. What travels is the hot take, the dunked-on screenshot, the increasingly-shitty meme, the version of your argument that fits in a shareable image with the source cropped out.

I keep thinking about how many interesting folks have essentially stopped writing anything substantial because they’ve moved their entire intellectual presence to Twitter or Substack Notes. … It’s like watching someone who used to compose symphonies decide to only produce ringtones.

The capacity for hot zingers like the symphonies to ringtones analogy are maybe something we can thank our social media experiences for.

She’s got some advice on what makes a good blog and how to get started, and how to address “the Discovery Problem” with the observation that blog entries get indexed and surfaced over time, where social media disappears. I have to admit, though: since Social Media came about, this humble blog has received about zero comments over the past decade. Kind of a bummer. But the quiet exploration over here in my own space beats The Monetize Everything Hate Machine.

Anyway, it is nice to find another feed to add to https://theoldreader.com/.

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Around the end of the year, I sort through the photographs that have accumulated, and recall Things That Happened. Here, I will share, mainly skipping things I’ve already written about this year.

January

On January 8, I attended a City Council Meeting. Thanks in part to District elections, Sunnyvale sat its most diverse City Council ever. Eileen Le explained how to pronounce her name. Larry Klein explained how, as Mayor of Sunnyvale, he had to try 23andMe (a local business) and consequently discovered his birth family, who showed up to swear him in.

For my birthday, we took an overnight trip to Suisun City, pronounced “Susan” to visit the Western Railway Museum. I had a nice time riding an interurban trolley out and back with the family, then touring a car barn, which featured 1870s New York subway cars that had been refurbished into commuter service for the Richmond shipyards in WWII. They have the last remaining original BART cars, which, due to being computerized and broad gauge, will become static museum displays.

Wooden cars built in 1872, originally pulled on the New York El system by steam engines. Electric motors and controls were installed in 1902. They were in service in New York City until they were brought to California during World War II, to provide commuter service for the Richmond ship yards.

They have a couple of 80s-era San Diego trolleys that were built in Germany, and the control panel features mysterious pictograms that don’t make any sense to North Americans. The computer systems in those trolleys will be hard to maintain. It turns out that it is easier to restore and operate very old trains, because mechanical and electronic parts can be fabricated, much as they traditionally had been across the country. Advanced electronics and computers, however, are not (yet) something that craftspeople can build in the workshop.

The more things change …

I avoided Inauguration Day but I couldn’t help but notice our tech company CEOs made a special effort to show up together to be photographed in the front row. I understand that business needs to make an effort to have decent relations with the government, but there’s a difference between not stepping on the new President’s toes and throwing yourself to the floor to Lick His Heel. What gives? Well, the Curly-Haired Harvard Kid gave us a clue by peeking down the cleavage of his buddy’s trophy wife. He reminded us that Tech CEOs are just Lonely Boys who found they had a special talent for the video game of Capitalism, which can be a rush, but typically leads to being surrounded by sycophants. It is Lonely Boys that swoon hardest for the Siren Song of Fascism. So when these Lonely Boys see that one of their own, a master of the video game of Capitalism, is now to lead the country, suddenly everything makes sense, they forget all that old WWII propaganda, and they show up front row at The Party.

Later in the month, a week after the Pinewood Derby, a fella who was too much in a hurry tried to pass me aggressively. I didn’t cooperate, and he managed to merge into our Nissan Leaf, damaging his Prius in the process. Insurance found he was entirely At Fault and gave us some money to fix the scratches in our car. It is nice to get a check in the mail, doubly so when you don’t mind a few scratches on the old car.

February

Elon Musk gave a Nazi salute. “But did he really?” Well, he was raised by White Nationalists in South Africa, and funds the White Nationalist party in Germany. His new hobby is worrying that low birth rate will “destroy civilization” … because the only group the world is presently producing in surplus are dark-skinned people in Africa. Low birth rate is a challenge for existing models of capitalism, but it is a challenge the developed world is already managing, in part by practicing more socialism. It wasn’t like I was going to buy a Tesla anyway, but March 7 saw my last purchase on Amazon. Since then, really, I have bought Less Stuff, because it takes a little more effort to find things, and those things are generally a little more expensive, generally somewhat less shady.

Nothing here about paying a monthly subscription fee for two-day shipping.

March

I upgraded our not-too-old gas water heater to a hybrid heat pump. A gas line got replaced by a dedicated electric circuit to heat the water with a lot of electricity when the low-energy heat pump fails to keep up with demand, which is rarely. The contractor helped sign up for all the rebates, because it was way more expensive to swap the gas for electric than makes any sense to me. Best I can figure is the incentives mean some crazy marked-up profit margins to encourage the contractors to become eager to help homeowners electrify. Now we’re down to a gas furnace in a mild climate, and the garage is cool in the summer and like a walk-in refrigerator in the winter.

Birthday parties for both boys: laser tag for one, and a bouncy castle and a piñata in the yard for the other. Saint Patrick’s Day at the pub. The older son is nearly Mom’s height.

April

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father in Maryland, had been snatched off the street and sent to a Sadistic Death Camp in El Salvador. Kilmar’s story has haunted me through the year, and if they can do this to him, they’ll do it to anyone. I wrote in April:

I debate whether CECOT is a concentration camp or a death camp. It is a one way trip off of this earth into a mass grave. They haven’t added the gas chambers and ovens yet. The conditions are more horrific than what I read from Alexander Solzhenitzyen and the fuck of it all is is that if you’re having to parse your national policies in comparison to the Soviet Union or the Third Reich, you’re already in deep shit.

. . . I wish I was being hyperbolic and overreacting but it feels like the United States is Wile E Coyote having run over the cliff, pausing in mid-air, then daring to look down. It isn’t a Done Deal that we have lost our Democracy and I have some Faith that we’re going to Keep It Together but I am totally freaked out.

The photo of Senator Van Hollen and Mr Abrego Garcia was a relief.

The candle we often burn at dinner, and some of the wax of past candles it wears.

The 12-volt battery in our 2023 Ioniq 6 died. Pretty straightforward, but the car asked to be diagnosed by the dealer, and the dealer took way too long to do anything because they couldn’t open the door because my wife hadn’t given them the metal key that is disconnected from the key fob and nobody at the dealer could conceive of calling the customer to help get the car open. Now I own a jumpstarter battery. Nice to have around.

I took my wife to a nice restaurant for her birthday.

Throughout the year, we have had some magnificent clouds in our Bay Area skies. Too often our skies are a plain blue for weeks on end, but this year we have often been graced with clouds worthy of the Great Plains.

The boys hunted Easter Eggs in the front yard.

May

The Leaf had been missing its rear hubcaps and I ordered replacements online. The car looks sharper now, even with its scratches. I washed the living room carpet in the driveway. The younger kid built his rocket for the Cub Scouts’ Water Rocket Derby. I took Bear Bear to work. I rode in a Waymo. I read about enshittification.

Behold our Cerulean Chariot: the replacement hubcaps help draw the eye from the rusted old scratches.

Family came to town. The elder son earned his second-degree black belt. We dealt with a flat tire on the Ioniq 6. And a flat tire on the Madsen cargo bike. We have been buying the Sunday paper at the coffee shop, because Home Delivery is inconsistent and the boys love a chocolate pastry with the Sunday comics.

I flew to Las Vegas for work.

At the Santa Clara Caltrain station I saw a line of old Caltrain gallery cars parked on a siding, acquiring layers of graffiti as they awaited shipment to Peru, where they may serve on a new commuter line running East from Lima, including a station named Santa Clara.

BART promised in our future, an old Caltrain gallery car from our past.

We went up to San Francisco to watch the movie “25 Cats From Qatar.” We played air hockey at the Pinball Museum.

June

I rode my bike down to the new Micro Center. Since Fry’s went bust, we have been lacking a superstore for geeks.

I hired a company to repaint the front bathroom, whose ceiling was overdue for some love, and also the hallway. I discovered a very cost-effective way to make the house feel more wonderful.

I am very pleased with the shade of green we selected for the bathroom, which works well with the shower curtain and rugs.

On a Saturday, I marched up El Camino Real to protest President Trump, and then Sunday rode the train to San Francisco with the boys to watch “The Neverending Story” at the Roxie and then visit with college friends.

Pink was a bold choice for the hallway but I think it works really well. I painted the interior of the closet door frame myself.

I visited the Golden State Model Railroad Museum in Richmond. Solo. I enjoyed the model trains, wandered through the park, then down along the abandoned tracks along the shore to where the trains once loaded onto the San Francisco ferry.

July

I purchased the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy for the older son to read at Scout Camp. He enjoyed it. I purchased Reamde for myself, which I finished later in Tennessee. For my money, Adams beats Stephenson.

I drove scouts up to Camp Wente and stayed with them for the week. I wanted to get away from the news and while there is a wifi at camp it is weak and slow. A temptation easily resisted. I hadn’t been to Scout Camp in this century or in this time zone, so I was eager to see what was different and familiar. Same canvas tents, but no cots. The baseboards were flat plywood and comfortable enough with an inflatable ground cloth. Private showers!

The food was better than I remember. Tasty and filling. Camp Wente was pretty similar to Camp Blackhawk at Owasippe. Similar dining hall overlooking the lake, Flag ceremonies, enthusiastic staff, and scouts walking across camp to various activity areas, including the same little swimming skills chit cards and rigid check-in/check-out at Aquatics.

My older son taking aim at the archery range.

I signed up for a class for the week, brushing up on outdoor skills, but mainly to socialize. Among other things, I learned the basics of Dutch Oven cooking and a simple recipe for peach cobbler. At one point I was chatting with the woman who ran the dining hall, and she started showing me her stickers and talking about her craft projects and that is when I realised that Scout Camp is almost entirely run by Young People. Young People doing a good job of Running Things. Hell yeah!

I had plenty of idle time and I spent much of it catching up on print magazines. At one point I heard a small animal crying out in alarm. I looked up to see a raptor carrying a ground squirrel in its talons, maybe twenty feet ahead of me over the coast of the lake. The ground squirrel was crying out, venting their objections to the Universe, as the raptor flew towards a suitable lunch perch. Another time I was walking down a dusty camp road when a doe stood before me, and one of her young started butting her abdomen with its mouth. I guessed correctly: nursing time! She stamped her foot and another kid came running out of the bush and the siblings nursed together as Mom looked around. A scout coming from the opposite direction also paused for a moment before the meal break concluded and the deer continued along towards the lake.

Better than a wide-screen TV.

The animals at Camp Wente seemed really calm around humans. I credited that to the Scouts being good guests.

Conservation arises from the perennial human desire to dwell in harmony with our neighbors–those that creep and fly, those that swim and soar, those that sway on roots, as well as those that walk about on two legs. We seek to make a good and lasting home. We strive for a way of life that our descendants will look back on with gratitude, a way of life that is worthy of our magnificent planet.

Scott Russell Sanders

Back in the Bay Area, Google decided they can’t support a thermostat for more than ten years, so I replaced the Nest with an Ecobee. Ask me about this in 2035.

August

We have had a low-key problem at work: we bang a gong to announce A Deal at our All Hands Meetings, but Zoom tends to squelch the gong with its white noise filter. The solution is to toggle “original sound for musicians: on” when they reach for the Gong, to disable filtering, then turn the filtering back on for the rest of the meeting, because our office is a noisy little warren.

Grandma inspects a historic church at Great Smoky Mountains NP.

We flew to Tennessee to meet up with family to celebrate my mother’s 75th birthday at a rental lake house. The time spent with family was wonderful. Tennessee is wonderful and problematic. Some impressions:

• I rented an electric car at the Knoxville airport because it is 2025. The guy looked up my reservation and noted that I had requested a four-door pickup truck. Twenty minutes later he convinced the computer that the Ioniq 5 that the system had reserved for me was indeed reserved for me and I was relieved I wouldn’t get to drive a Tesla for the week.
• We rented this gigantic house for the family. It was in an exclave of rental houses from different companies. We noted the “Minuteman” rentals each had a different logo of a different patriot with a different gun.
• The house had beautiful balconies looking out over a cliff at the lake. I grabbed the balcony rail and gave it a good shake and found it was super wobbly and advised the kids to stay away from the balcony rail. All the houses in the area were built on sharp sandy slopes and I wonder how many years they will stand before The Storm comes through and wipes several into the lake.
• We drove to North Carolina for a train ride. There was kudzu covering much of the forest along the excursion route. The conductor explained that they once brought the kudzu in from China, and like the Chinese, it was difficult to remove. I left a one-star review along with a note that while kudzu is Chinese, the US imported it from Japan.
• After the train I drove the car to a fast charger that had a QR code to download The App from a European website, that said The App was not available in the United States. Twenty minutes on the telephone and the car was charging. We ate lunch at a place that was still opening, so the menu was limited to what they could prepare in the food truck. Tasty enough. Down the hall my younger son let loose an impressive scream from the bathroom, as the porcelain sink had fallen off the wall and shattered at his feet. He was uninjured but WTF?
• There was an Exotic Petting Zoo which had a building full of parakeets who would climb all over you. That was great fun.
• We drove down to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, just for a scenic loop through a historic community. Two churches, and a water-powered mill. There is a house that demonstrated the earlier “log cabin” construction along with an extension built from wooden planks once they got the sawmill going. We saw deer and bears, including a couple of cubs who got to playing with each other a few feet from the road.
• We went to a fancy tea place, which was a nice time. My Uncle asked for a straw, and the lady informed him: “this is a straw-free establishment.”
• The guy running the roadside BBQ stand was very nice, and he had the tiniest pupils I have ever seen in anyone’s eyes.
• A few weeks later the rental car company sent me an email that I would be charged for damage to the car. I wrote back requesting an explanation and some evidence. There was an invoice from a towing company for $45 to repair a tire. Plausible enough and a lot less than I figured.

The greatest treasure was time spent with family.

Window seats are the coziest.

September

The family spent a few hours sitting along El Camino as part of a No Kings protest. We got Pizza My Heart afterwards.

A Conservative Intellectual famous for aggressively debating Liberals was explaining that Gun Violence should really be seen as a problem of Gang Violence. He was then shot to death in front of his audience.

We watched “Little Shop of Horrors” at the community theater.

I got new glasses at a new place. The optometrist talked me into trying progressive lenses. I tried for a week and it was awful. Basically, there’s two places you can look where your eyes might be able to focus nearer or farther and everything else is like trying to peek through a dirty fishbowl. I had them replace the lenses with a normal prescription and now whenever I need to look close I either slide my glasses down to the end of my nose or I just take them off and get a little closer.

Anyone looks good in front of the right tree.

I switched to using Kagi as my search engine. It is like using Google in the old days, before ads. Just results, lickety split. They figured out an alternate revenue model: you pay $5/mo. That might retard the usual corporate slide towards evil. It has all the bells and whistles, including the ability to run questions through an AI. I still use Google Maps for its purpose. Of course, I can not remove or configure the Google Search function on my Android phone, so there’s a Kagi Search just above. A/B testing: I have noticed that searches through Google are followed with targeted ads and content on various websites, while searches through Kagi … don’t. One’s online experience is a little closer to “the world” than a personalized bubble.

The Corporate Offsite was held in Santa Cruz around when Jimmy Kimmel got canceled. The family has stayed in Santa Cruz a few times, at a motel across the street from the beach, but the offsite was at the hotel on the beach. It was a good time and I especially enjoyed sitting at a little campfire on the beach as the sun set.

One day I was walking down the street between my house and downtown, when I saw a vehicle coming my way that looked like a cop car, but didn’t have the lights. I kept my gaze on it, trying to see if they had any lights in the grill. Could this be ICE? Doubtful … but something felt Off about the whole thing, and I watched it drive past me, then circle wide at the light in a manner that implied swollen testicles. The car came up alongside me on the other side of the street, and the lone guy gave me his best menacing look through the glass. Okay, douchebag. He then sped off back towards downtown. I watched as he went, wondering if he was going to take another street to circle around back up into our neighborhood, but no; Whatever had happened between us he had changed his mind, at least for a moment, about doing whatever it was he intended to do in our neighborhood.

For Transit Month, one Saturday I joined a “walk audit” which was a volunteer effort to get folks to walk different routes through the neighborhood and identify sidewalk problems. After that, I tried the cobbler recipe that I had previously tried at Camp Wente in my new Dutch Oven, and shared the results with friends and neighbors at the block party.

The next weekend we had a great time with the Cub Scouts at Mount Madonna, despite damp weather. I made the Dutch Oven cobbler again. We must have counted a dozen banana slugs on our hike.

October

We got new enclosed garbage bins on Murphy Street.

I saw a clip online from Chicago. A man rides his bicycle up to ICE agents in an alley and one agent pulls a gun on him. People in the apartment building yell at the agents to go away, and they stand down and leave. The alley looks familiar, but don’t Chicago’s alleys all look pretty similar? I pulled up an address in Google Maps and yes indeed this was the alley behind my Aunt’s condo. She said she had heard yelling but hadn’t gone to check. I am really proud that my home town does what it can to Resist.

The new protected bike lanes on El Camino in Mountain View and Palo Alto are amazing and wonderful!

I tried the new protected bike lanes on El Camino in Mountain View and Palo Alto. They are a very nice direct route up and down, except trucks, especially FedEx, will block them entirely because the green paint and bollards obviously mean “loading zone.” Also, they don’t exist in Sunnyvale. A modest consolation is that our stretch of Evelyn beats the stretch in Mountain View.

An inconsiderate FedEx driver easily blocks the wide protected bike lane. You can’t fit around the truck without riding either on the sidewalk or committing to a traffic lane on a state highway until the next curb break.

One Saturday, the younger son and I caught the tail end of a protest along El Camino. He ran into a classmate and they sat together on a lawn chair sharing an iPad as drivers passed, honking in solidarity. The next day the Cub Scouts enjoyed their first Raingutter Regatta.

We went to the Western Railway Museum Pumpkin Patch event. It was great fun. You ride an old Key System Bridge Unit to the Pumpkin Patch, where there’s a straw bale castle, pumpkin chucking, a wagon ride, and other festivities. In my book, everything is better with a train.

November

In California, we voted to Gerrymander our Congressional Districts for five years. That sucks but we fear not counter-Gerrymandering Congress would be even worse.

I learned that T-Mobile had contributed to the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, so I switched to AT&T wireless. I also switched our Fiber service from Sonic.net to AT&T. Nothing against Sonic … the service I had been paying a premium for was an AT&T overlay … a service Sonic has since stopped offering … which came with its own support issues. When Sonic rolls out local fiber, I assume I’ll switch back. For now, my bill is down and my bandwidth is up.

When I drink at home, it is usually non-alcoholic.

We wrote a vacation-sized check to the local food bank to offset the withheld SNAP benefits. We also Scouted for Food as we do each year.

On Murphy Street they installed ADA access ramps in the curbs and then began re-laying the cobblestone paths that connect the ramps in a different color of paver. The guy at the coffee shop wondered if they couldn’t just paint the street for a lot less money, then I figured the city probably got a funding grant that required and paid for the change.

We took a family bicycle ride on the bay near the SMART station. The youngest still balancing on his bike, not yet pedaling. After that outing, he became motivated to master pedaling, and he has since become a full bike rider.

The youngest kid begins pedaling. I managed to catch the moment on video.

We went down to Santa Cruz for Thanksgiving. Splurging on the beachfront hotel where we had the offsite, eating dinner at the regular place. We saw butterflies and explored the tide pools and somehow neglected the arcade.

December

I watched as the city re-paved Evelyn and continued with the pavers on Murphy Street. Zareen’s has not yet reopened in place of Murphy’s Law, but soon? I figured out that both the squirrels and crows that enjoy our yard like to collect tasty bits of trash, probably from the adjacent school, and then drop the remains on our lawn. The crows favor foil.

Puma guards the Christmas tree.

We put up a tree, and hosted a holiday party. I helped with the holiday lights bicycle ride which was up in our neighborhood this year. Grandma flew in to spend Christmas with us, and I took sufficient PTO around the holidays to finish writing this. What do you think: was the time well spent? Hit Like and Subscribe and thank you as ever for your support on Ko-fi and Patreon!

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The Accidental Beauty of a Cybertruck

I saw a beautiful Cybertruck this morning. It belongs to a neighbor a couple blocks over. It is one of a few licensed liveries the neighbor drives. I had seen him washing it earlier and when I came back around it was glistening in the sunlight. It has a wrap that looks dark green at first but it also glistens in the sunlight, and shifts color as you pass by. This morning, there was a vivid pop of color because a few autumn leaves had come to rest on the shining clean windshield. I stopped and snapped a few pictures.

I don’t like the Cybertruck. They’re dumb. But they’re so over-the-top dumb that they’re kinda charming. Like a pug. Those poor dogs who got bred by dumb humans to look so dumb they can’t breathe. But there’s an accidental beauty in the stainless steel. The stainless steel is among the dumbest aspects of the Cybertruck because it stains at the tip of a child’s finger. Anyone who buys a Cybertruck needs to get a wrap from the aftermarket. That means that every Cybertruck has to be done up in its own personality. These rusting toasters of Brutalist uniformity by their very nature are forced to become objects of individual expression.

CyberTrucks are dumb, and as a result, they are sometimes beautiful.

2025-11-05 Wednesday

I have been in the process of disentangling from Big Tech. I’ve been wary for some time. It was Elon’s “Roman Salute” that left me done with buying stuff on Amazon. Shopping around is a little more effort but that and not just buying random stuff when it pops into my head are both gratifying. Less crap.

A few days ago I took the step of deleting social apps from my phone. Discord, Blewski, Mastodon, Reddit, all back up on the shelf of sitting down at a terminal. More time in my own head to work ideas through. Less clutter.

The monkeys are being peeled off my back. I feel a bit more like myself again. I start to feel like thing are more possible again. Let’s keep the feeling going. More life.

As I walked this morning I recalled an informal life goal had been days where I could spend a little time at the coffee shop, then hop on the train to work. I have this now. I am typing these words at my favorite cafe as my coffee cools. Some days I meet a friend for coffee and those are the best. It took time to get here. A tech job where their greater concern is that the work get done, not that I’m present at an office at a particular time. A home not too far from the train station: a bit under 20 minutes to walk. The final piece came, ironically, with the Pandemic, when management saw fit to downsize from a large suburban office site with ample parking to a hole-in-the-wall near the Caltrain. As a Pandemic Parent, though, I Work From Home three days a week, though I have been spending more of those mornings at The Office as well, to help our growing team find its speed.

Some days I make a new friend or two. Thanks to Rutvij and Amin, the above paragraph took somewhat longer to write, but I still made it to the office at a good hour.

The blustery wet weather and a degree of giddiness from last night’s election have made the morning feel like anything is possible.

Train Dreams

I saw the movie “Train Dreams” this weekend. I dragged the family to a small, nearly-empty theater. It felt like something that deserved a theater screen. It is the story of a guy with no family, who grows up in Idaho near the turn of the last century. He finds purpose when a woman introduces herself to him. They build a cabin by the river and have a daughter. There’s no work to be had in town so he’s a migrant lumberjack. Heading out each season to bring down old growth trees. It is hard being away from the people he loves.

One job with the railroad really turns him off future railroad jobs. When he was young, the Chinese had been forcibly removed from his town. Yet when he was out working, “he enjoyed the easy kinship” among men, whether they came from Shanghai or Cleveland. One day he’s sawing a tie with a Chinese guy and some motherfuckers come around, grab the man, and throw him off the bridge. The man’s face lingers in dreams for the rest of the protagonist’s life.

My grandfather grew up in a sod cabin in Montana, his father a Swedish homesteader. Grandpa wasn’t thrilled with the life out there so he rode boxcars to Chicago, and made a new life with his mother’s English name. There was a story I learned from that side of the family, in Upper Michigan, where logging is a major industry, of a relative, a young man, who got crushed to death by logs that had fallen off a truck.

The movie was filmed last year but to see Americans as migrant workers, amid racial violence … the history of a hundred years ago feels fresh. There’s a very soft-spoken scene near the end of the movie, when he visits a “big city” and sees men in a space capsule on a color TV in a store window. He’s never used a telephone. “What’s this?” he asks the woman next to him. “They’re in outer space.” He then notices their reflection in the window, and she confirms they are seeing themselves. It had been a decade since he’d bothered to look at himself in a mirror. The woman is Asian.

The story is of a guy who lives an unremarkable life that is in keeping with his time. I enjoy the human time machine. “Barry Lyndon” and “Lawrence of Arabia” are movies of men living noteworthy lives. “To Live” and “A Man Called Ove” are similar portraits of unremarkable men. Also in the theme is “Ikiru.” Both “A Man Called Ove” and “Ikiru” have been remade in English. “Ikiru” means “To Live” and the Western version is “Living” which is all to say I am not the only person who enjoys this genre. Even if the small theater is empty when I go.

Bicycle Dreams

2025-11-15 Saturday

I feel that a lot of folks are upset that a few Democrats ended the Shutdown. I share some disappointment. I think the aviation delays coming into the holidays would have created a lot of pressure on the Republicans to make a compromise. Instead the Democrats who signed a deal put their party on a tactical retreat: President Trump was eager to hold back food from poor people for political leverage. (Just in case you haven’t already seen that he is evil.) So, the compromise is we’ll pull back on Healthcare for the moment, and in exchange, SNAP is funded through September, and the government through January. Come January, if the healthcare subsidies haven’t been fixed, there will be a crisis underway for 22 million Americans, and nobody need go hungry when the Democrats stand firm.

Republicans, for their part are like “gee we want people to have heath care but we have to do something about the growing expense! Obamacare is fundamentally flawed! We have to reform it somehow, which we have been promising for the past decade. We have sketches of an idea of how we might could do that.” And I’m like “yeah … Obamacare is what you get when you insist on having for-profit companies stay in the middle of the healthcare system so they can figure out how to save money. You could of course have a ‘public option’ but the private companies (supposedly infinitely superior to the government) said there was absolutely no way they could compete with the Federal government …” Which is to say, the rest of the world seems to have found ways to moderate healthcare costs and the answer is Socialism.

I know a guy whose health insurance premium for next year is set to go up $30,000. My hope is that by March some deal has been worked to end the First Government Shutdown of 2026 that fixes his out-of-pocket costs. But, whomever is paying for it, a family’s health insurance should not be that expensive! Reform is needed, but the current political class isn’t going to deliver it. The best we can continue to hope for is that the government throw money at the problem until we eventually elect decent leaders.

Here’s the deal. I have fancy private enterprise health insurance. One of the local clinics has a soaring central atrium crowned by a Chihuli sculpture. I think there is a decent case to be made that art and positive aesthetics are healing, and maybe Chihuli cuts a deal for a medical facility, but the extravagance, while nice, seems wasteful. I also visit my wife where she works, providing government healthcare to low-income people. There’s no Chihuly. Just the grim cost efficiency familiar to anyone who has spent some time in government services.

There shouldn’t be two systems: one for the wealthy and one for the poor. Whether you write code or hang drywall, you ought to be able to go to a reasonably nice facility and receive the same quality of care. Why is this not the case? For much of our history, Americans have been taught that while “all men are created equal” also “not really” because someone has to pick the cotton and someone else needs to be removed to create new farmland for the settlers. This is why, so far, we can’t have “socialism” — because some people are less.

What the immigration raids are showing, though, is many, and maybe most Americans no longer hold that broken truth to be self-evident. The awareness is growing that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights: among these is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We need our political leaders to catch up with this.

But equality isn’t a concept the elites like. Opportunity for All may be great for economic prosperity but it is no way to sustain the political power of an Oligarchy that writes the checks that fund the elections.

America, we totally can have nice things open to all!

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