Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2025/11/01/2025-10/
Rolling Stops
I was browsing my recent Reddit history and got to this comment about “rolling stops” and I am going to stand by this:
I roll stop signs on my bicycle, for this very reason. (Reasons: stop signs are placed with cars in mind instead of bicycles, it takes a lot of energy to start from a full stop instead of coasting near zero, and bicyclists have excellent visibility.) What happens in Sunnyvale though is a driver sees a bicycle coming to a stop sign and they go full panic and try to yield to me. I come to a complete stop and have to wait as they signal frantically from behind heavily tinted windows. I check my watch. I take a sip of water. If nobody has honked at them I yell “please go already you have the right of way its the law” &c. Then I continue on my way.
The best drivers take their turn. I don’t really care if they come to a full stop or not. Slow way down and check behind your a pillars and make sure there is nobody in your path. Bicycles have no a pillars, just tired meat motors trying to get somewhere on a hot day.
Waiting for the light
My Favorite Notebook
My favorite notebook. I found it in a book shop in Mountain View, near the turn of the century. It was small, like 4×6 or 5×7. The pages were a bit thicker than normal writing paper, suitable for sketching. It was spiral bound, so could lay flat and even flip open all the way. And the cover was rubber, maybe 3 millimeters. It was small and durable and good for taking whatever written or sketched idea came to mind. A wonderful companion to have at hand, especially for a guy whose daily wear at the time included cargo shorts.
Sometimes I contemplate The Best Tool for capturing thoughts. The modern smart phone is always at hand but the interface is optimized for consumption over expression. A paper notebook is less universally at hand, but that rugged little bugger with the thick pages that could lie flat . . . I still remember that one fondly.
Old traveling companions
Monuments of Past Hatred
I caught the tail end of a talk with Jelani Cobb at City Arts & Lectures on KQED. He described a museum in Russia that features Nazi artifacts. Because of what they represent and the blood price paid to acquire them, they are displayed on the floor. He suggested this as a good strategy for Confederate monuments. We should display them to remember history, but pull them off their pedestals and leave them lying in the mud. “Here’s a monument to that war that you lost.”
Remembering the Past
NPR Claims Anti-Fascism is a “Far-Left Ideology”
Earlier this month, President Trump welcomed right-wing influencers to the White House for a roundtable about antifa, the far-left movement or ideology opposed to fascism.
—Ryan Lucas, NPR
Far-Left Ideologues on Foreign Soil
21 Monkeys
Via https://www.wapt.com/article/monkeys-on-the-loose-near-heidelberg-mississippi/69181629:
All but one of the rhesus monkeys that escaped from an overturned truck in Jasper County were euthanized, according to officials. “We are continuing to look for the one monkey that is still on the loose. The monkey that got away actually crossed interstate, went out into a wooded area.”
The monkeys, weighing approximately 40 pounds each, are aggressive toward humans and require personal protective equipment to handle.
The Jasper County Sheriff’s Office originally said the monkeys carried hepatitis C, herpes and COVID. Tulane officials stressed that the animals were not diseased or infectious.
I am sure those monkeys have good reasons for being aggressive towards humans and I am rooting for the one that got away to find a nice place to hole up safe.
We are all diseased monkeys desperate to escape
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/08/14/liberty-dime/
We recently purchased a home, which was originally built in 1948. I was just puttering in the back yard when I discovered a sheared metal post in a cement foundation. I figured I would dig the post out. This wasn’t easy but it was gratifying. At the end I had a 1′ deep hole in my back yard and some angry ants. I saw what looked like a white button at the bottom of the hole.
A silver “Mercury” dime from 1943, which I just found in my yard.
After cleaning it off, I found that it was a 1943 US dime, with a bust of MercuryLiberty. Neat! I’m not sure what purpose the metal post must have served, (I reckon it was the base of a clothes line) but it must have been installed around the time the house was built.
I have to wonder if whomever dug the original hole left this souvenier to the future on purpose, or if the dime just slid out of his pocket.
Correction: per Wikipedia, this isn’t Mercury, God of commerce, but “the mythological goddess Liberty wearing a Phrygian cap, a classic Western symbol of liberty and freedom, with its wings intended to symbolize freedom of thought”
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/06/05/voting-day/
Voters in Mountain View, CA
I haven’t done any research, but I figured I would put in a vote for the cigarette tax, as well as local school bonds for asbestos removal. At current interest rates, government borrowing just sounds like an obvious thing to do.
I also got to vote for Obama for the Democratic Presidential Primary. His was the only name on my registered-Democrat ballot.
I am also hoping that the Cheeseheads give Governor Walker the boot.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/04/19/daily-routine/
Daily Routine
In a hospital room, the Daily Routine consists mainly of waiting.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/04/14/we-are-the-supermen/
“We are the supermen who sit idly by and laugh and look at civilization . . .”
I am reading a book by W.E.B. Du Bois, based on this quote which was captured in a photo of New York graffiti.
Even as America’s race problem has evolved since Du Bois published Dusk of Dawn in 1940, his perspective is valuable. A fuller excerpt from Chapter 6, wherein he conducts a Socratic dialogue with a pair of composite “White Man” colleagues, and delivers an excellent perspective on world history, and modesty: (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/03/25/lap-cat/
Most of the time, Maggie isn’t big on laps, but today my legs offer a warm dry spot to enjoy a sunny break from the wet weather.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/03/15/danny-paul-seb/
Our Frenchman flew over to San Jose from London, and wanted a picture with our American colleague in Tokyo.
Rockin’ the Cisco TelePresence!
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/02/27/california-snowman/
Taken Jan 2, 2012, this is as close to a snowman as you’ll ever get in Mountain View, CA.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/02/26/remains-jane-addams-town/
This triptych of a poem caught my eye from across a classroom at De Anza college in Cupertino.
Break time during a class at De Anza College, I wander across the room. The skyline . . . that’s John Hancock. I start to read . . . words written by Kevin Coval.
My home town, Chicago, the city of broad shoulders and ambition, is where the wealthy have pushed the workers and the workers have pushed back. Jane Addams, as my memory serves, founded the Hull House back in the 19th century, to look after the needs of working people: meals, health care, education, general community services. At a time when class divisions were sharper than they are getting to be today, Jane Addams bucked the conventions of her time to push for the American ideal: that we all, regardless of class or wealth, merit a helping hand, a warm place to sleep, and nourishment for our bodies and our minds.
Growing up in Chicago, getting educated in the Chicago Public Schools, the sense of perpetual struggle for a better, more equitable future, I think it gets in to your blood. People come looking for a better life, and they find that sometimes they have to push a bit to realize that better life, if not for themselves then at least to give their children a shot. We’re all passing through those gates, at our respective levels of society, and the struggle never dies and the struggle must never be forgotten.
Now I live in the Silicon Valley, where people struggle and strive, and while the ultimate aim is to make the world more comfortable and efficient, the focus is pretty far removed from the front lines of class warfare. Even so, I ride the train every day past miles of walled mobile home parks, and I wonder if there’s more going on beneath the surface than us privileged IT folk know.
A quote from Al Franken, via The Sun:
“In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her dead husband and then killed her. That is class warfare. Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top 1 percent is not.”
Arguing over the margins, in the grand scheme of things, describes my day job.
and we need heroes
who stand up to giants
who carry a big bat to home plate
though the pitcher is throwing money
balls and the umps are in on the fix.
I’m no hero and my bat is nothing to brag about, but I relish those occasions when I do get to step up to the bat and swing, however ineffectually, at a ball I’m not allowed to hit. Its the Chicago in me. I owe more.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/02/17/cat-o-clock/
On days I Work From Home, Maggie enforces her mandated 3pm Pet-the-Cat break.
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