I schlepped the family out to Sunol to ride the Niles Canyon’sM200 railcar. A railcar is a bus on rails instead of asphalt. The M200 was built in 1926, and was one of the early “skunk trains” named for the aromatic fuel it burned in its original gasoline engine, ferrying lumberjacks to their work sites from up in Willits. Later on it served as a school bus. When the Niles Canyon folks got ahold of it, they swapped in a diesel engine. I got to ride up front, next to the box that houses the diesel engine, taking in the heady aroma. I smiled to see that the rear view was a modern aftermarket backup camera system, and the speedometer looked like an old smart phone showing a GPS-derived speed estimate.
A happy coincidence: I wore my Wente t-shirt on the day we rode the M200. Wente Scout Reservation shares the skunk branding with the nearby railroad.
We rode East from Sunol along the original Transcontinental line from Sacramento to San Francisco, which used to run across the Dunbarton Bridge to connect with the now-Caltrain line up to San Francisco. The tracks had been pulled up long ago, but the volunteers have been laying “new” tracks East toward Pleasanton, which is as far as they own the Right-of-Way. The “new” tracks are old tracks that Caltrain replaced as part of the electrification upgrades. They may not be suitable for California’s future bullet train system but they’re plenty handy for a heritage railway running a motorcar at a top speed of 10 mph. The original line went up to 40 mph, explained our host.
Barry Lyndon
Of even more obscure appeal than a hundred year old railcar is a fifty year old Kubrick film. In July I took the Caltrain up to San Francisco and a Muni bus over to The Roxie. I left the family behind because I’m not a sadist. I had a burrito for dinner at Pacho Villa’s and because I’m an old-fashioned cheapskate who eschews online convenience fees, I had to wait in the standby line because it was a “full show.” After the train ride and the burrito, the standby line just added to the sense of adventure: maybe I wouldn’t get in!? The standby line self-selected down to four folks and we all made it in just fine. I sat mid-way near the aisle, behind a large afro that enforced good posture on my part and next to an autistic fellow who managed to unobtrusively stim during the more emotional scenes. I drank two cans of beer from the concession stand.
The movie was magnificent on the big screen. Worth the trek. A prideful young Irishman finds himself living an adventurous life in the 18th century. He learns to be wiley and shrewd and ultimately marries into Class, where that self-centered wily shrewdness renders him an insufferable Jerk. Rise and Fall. A good story with duels. If you like the musical “Hamilton” you might also enjoy the story of Barry Lyndon.
I had some errands to run so I ran them on my bicycle.
The ride up to OfficeMax was uneventful for the most part. In Mountain View, El Camino has a mostly very nice protected lane. At one point where the protected lane becomes a dashed green mixing zone, a Tesla tried to merge into me so that they could make a right turn. It was slow enough that I just yelled and yelled and yelled until they stopped. Something like “HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY!!!!!” I saw everything happening and didn’t feel endangered. When you’re riding on the street, you ride with hyper awareness.
Along the way, I also managed to share a thumbs down with a Nazi-era Tesla, and even flip off the cyber cab. You know: a great ride.
An intense ride to fulfill a dull mission.
I found the pens I wanted to buy. My current favorite is a Tul fine point gel. Specifically, the fine point gel pen they sell near the register for $1.70 versus the fine point gel they sell from the pen section at 4/$10. What’s the difference? No idea! But the one in my pocket looks like the cheap ones so I stick with a winner.
Next stop was Best Buy, just where the protected bike lane ends at the Sunnyvale border. I returned a hard drive the younger son had wanted, but which proved incompatible with their frankensteined donated Linux gaming rig.
I decided to take El Camino Real just in case I saw something tasty for lunch. Normally I would not ride my bicycle on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale, because there’s no bicycle infrastructure. It is a grim place to ride. But I felt it was my right.
I took the right lane, as one should. This ensures that I am highly visible, and my behavior is consistent versus riding along in the gutter and weaving into traffic whenever there’s a parked car or other road hazard. Right away, I heard honking in the distance. It was a blue Tesla purchased since Elon did his Hitler salute. The driver for which I have the least empathy. He got closer and honked some more. So I stopped. In front of him.
“Go around!” I gestured.
He put his hands up in frustration. What is going on here? This bicyclist is telling me to use one of the other three lanes of traffic!?
“Go around!”
“Go.”
“Around.”
“Fricking Nazi,” I mumbled as he merged into the next lane and I resumed pedaling. He turned right two blocks down, heading for an apartment building. For the next few lights I noticed the same gold-colored car following me. I was glad because it meant that in traffic, and with a shot of adrenaline, I am just as fast as any other car in the right lane. I sped right past The Greek Spot which I had had in mind. I was too full of speed to make room for gyros.
A Cadillac SUV honked its horn as it passed me in the next lane over.
“Fricking Slowpoke” I yelled as I rode past their open window, turning left at the next red light.
I cruised up to a four-way stop, and someone in a minivan who had the right of way tried to wave me through but within half a second realized that they would pointlessly hold up waiting traffic. I was proud of them for their awareness. They went on their way, and I resumed pedaling.
At Evelyn, near Murphy, as is often the case, some poor rideshare driver was waiting to do a pickup in the bike lane. As I do so often, I rode up to their open window, and at the volume of a bicyclist accustomed to conversing with automobiles on busy roads, explained to them that this was a dangerous situation, and that there were several parking lots and loading zones adjacent to where they were sitting. They politely agreed as I yelled “thank you for your cooperation” pedaling away towards home.
I arrived home wearing a sheen of well deserved sweat. A great ride! Time to settle in to a quiet Sunday afternoon.
Tonight is the last night for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I’ll watch it tomorrow on Paramount+. I canceled my annual subscription, which would have renewed in early June.
I never used to be a late night TV watcher. It is a nice format, though. Especially when the news has become such a grind. A friendly face samples the day’s crimes, chews a few bites into a bolus of rage, breaded in wry humor with a tangy glaze of hopeful frustration, and pops it down my exhausted, slack-jawed maw. Between All the Star Treks and Stephen Colbert, the Paramount+ subscription made sense for me. But I have watched All the Star Treks and tomorrow I will have watched All the Colberts.
Thank you for the past decades of entertainment, Stephen Colbert! I am going to miss you!
Here’s my gripe with how the show has been distributed. I’m not staying up late to watch. I’m not sure I can even get CBS on my antenna. I know we do get NBC because I “stay up late” to watch Saturday Night Live during the national broadcast at 8:30 pm Pacific. If late shows did that … I mean it is pre-recorded anyway … maybe just post the episode to the paid streaming service at air time?
… I wait until the next day. But why, as a paying customer of Paramount+, can I watch clips of the show on YouTube for free tens of hours before I can watch the show on Paramount+? Why the delay? Why? And what I would really really have enjoyed, since the show on Paramount+ has no commercials, why not let me hear the band play through the breaks? I assume that was a hassle with potential royalties if they played covers. “Move On Up” …
On Monday, they did at last let the band play on, by posting a full, un-cut episode, which you can watch for free … on YouTube. The band improvised and jammed and it was wonderful:
Away from the noise of social media, the Internet is still brimming with great stuff to read. The old way of finding a feed reader, subscribing to some sites, and coming back on occasion to be wowed still works great. Kagi has pitched in with their “Small Web” site to help folks find new voices. It takes a little more effort to get this going than it does to visit the increasingly barren FaceBookMegaMart or injecting TikTok into your retinas, but damn it is so much more gratifying.
Unlinked quotes here are most likely taken from The Sun Magazine, which has great writing in the even older and more convenient format of the printed magazine.
But, quickly, the feeling to be without a smartphone changed from anxiety to liberating. I felt really happy not to have a phone on me while outside. I was rediscovering my old way of getting lost in my thought, of sometimes talking to myself to clarify an idea. Which is less weird these days because everybody assumes you have an ear bud and are on the phone with someone else. In fact, when walking alone, I’m often on a call with myself.
“When you bury a parent, you bury the beginning of your life.” –Bob Hikok
No one who isn’t us is going to destroy the Earth, and no one who isn’t us is going to save it. The most hopeless conditions can inspire the most hopeful actions. We have found ways to restore life on Earth in the event of a total collapse because we have found ways to cause a total collapse of life on Earth. We are the flood, and we are the ark.
–Jonathan Safron Foer
“Grief doesn’t make an appointment. It just shows up while you’re doing the dishes.” –Lalaie Ameeriar
To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world.
Doomscrolling is a protection racket. Every horrifying headline you consume without acting on is a toll you pay to the algorithm in exchange for the feeling of engagement without the inconvenience of actually engaging. Power loves this arrangement. Power has always loved a population too exhausted and too demoralized to walk out the front door. The algorithm is doing work for authoritarianism that authoritarianism used to have to do itself. It’s very efficient. You should be furious about it. Preferably while moving.
Oxide.computer will sell you an on-premise cloud. Type some commands into a great big computer and it will build you a network of smaller computers inside the big computer. That is an exciting idea for an old Systems Administrator like me.
Oxide recently shared their internal guidelines on using AI. Good stuff here. The LLM Anti-Patterns are especially decent: don’t mandate that anyone use LLMs, don’t shame folks who do use LLMs, and, this shouldn’t need to be said: don’t date your LLM!
What Oxide advocates is responsibility. An AI is a tool to build things. What you build represents you. LLMs can generate code very effectively, but that needs to be code you understand and vouch for. Because, at the end of the day, it is your code and you are responsible.
It is all too easy to ask AI to take away your responsibility. When the cartoon or the video clip or the email was obviously penned by an AI, we can tell you aren’t representing yourself. Is your audience not worth your time? Worse: do you feel unworthy of being yourself? We can’t see you through the slop!
At the other end are the “never AI” folks. On Mastodon I see posts float by from people who grouse every time an Open Source project reveals that it will leverage AI to expedite the unrelenting work of building, reviewing, debugging, shipping, and supporting free code. Surely, some projects will incautiously ingest “vibecoded” AI Slop, but in general, Open Source maintainers are passionate and responsible volunteers conscientiously leveraging new tools to deliver a better service to their community. We owe these folks respect and good faith.
Use the tools. Or don’t. Both choices are correct. The wrong choice is to be the tool, by letting the tool be you. Having a “relationship” with your AI is a sad move, and expecting other people to have a relationship with your AI’s slop is disappointing and creepy. Step away from the keyboard and spend some time with a kindred spirit. Head outdoors to feel the sun and the cool breeze tango with each other across your skin. You are too beautiful and too precious to be outsourced to a GPU farm.
NOTE: in the spirit of exploration, I sought feedback from an LLM, “Kimi K2.5 (reasoning)” on how to make this post more readable and engaging. It suggested some early revisions to this post, but every word remains my own.
Easy: right-click on “Ask Gemini” and select “Unpin”
Right-click “Ask Gemini” and select “Unpin” …
… and the “Ask Gemini” button is gone! Poof!!
Yet another dull anecdote about Google sucking at UI:
I tried to ask Gemini by clicking the “Ask Gemini” button but it asked me for permission to spy on my stuff and I said no and so it wouldn’t let me ask anything of them.
Thank you, @14mission for testing the attribution feature for me!
This is a very humane feature, I think. If someone shares your content then Mastodon helps you to connect with their social media profile.
Then I got to thinking about how there are accounts on Mastodon that basically mirror Bluesky. But I never check or post to Bluesky. I could mirror my Mastodon to Bluesky? Yes! Skymoth was super easy to set up. Nice!
I was chatting on Discord and a friend said he wanted to see Mastodon without re-toots. Bluesky has a nice OnlyPosts feature but then I spotted the applicable feature in the Mastodon UI.
Squeeze the “two carats” element to get a submenu.
That left me with one last grouse I have had about Mastodon: the one thing I can not easily block is re-toots of screenshots of X. Or can I? Well, I think I effectively can. The secret is that stuff is mostly re-toots of George Takei, so blockingmutingGeorge Takei ought to do the trick.
George Takei is great but his social media is too much.
Now, I love George Takei as much as anyone. Unfortunately, his social media is a barrage of stuff I don’t want to see that is frequently re-posted. This technique is probably applicable for other popular folks as well.
“Our destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.” –Henry Miller
Hotel in Waikiki: from the balcony on the fifteenth floor I can see other high-rise hotels, but on our block are a pair of two-story apartment buildings. At the one apartment building, every patio is filled with stuff, and on the next building over, the patios are all completely empty. Between our high-rise and the apartment buildings is an empty lot with a fence around it, just across from our building. Between the street and the fence is a homeless man, who has occupied that same spot all week. He caught my eye on the first day, as he was visited by many birds, with whom he was sharing a Domino’s pizza. The next day I saw that there’s a Domino’s around the block. While most folks come and go through the day and night, he is always in his spot, like a video game NPC. I assume he doesn’t want to leave his stuff unattended for long. Aside from the difficulty of living outdoors, being tied to a spot to guard your possessions feels like an even worse burden. Humans need to stretch their legs, not be pinned down to a spot outdoors. “Lock down” without a roof or walls.
I am old enough to remember when The Internet wasn’t just screenshots of quotes from other websites.
What strikes me most is the difference between people who’ve learned to construct what I call ‘containers for attention’ – bounded spaces and practices where different modes of engagement become possible – and those who haven’t. The distinction isn’t about intelligence or discipline. It’s about environmental architecture. Some people have learned to watch documentaries with a notebook, listen to podcasts during walks when their minds can wander productively, read physical books in deliberately quiet spaces with phones left behind. They’re not rejecting technology. They’re choreographing it.
Others are drowning, attempting sustained thought in environments engineered to prevent it. They sit with laptops open, seven tabs competing for attention, notifications sliding in from three different apps, phones vibrating every few minutes. They’re trying to read serious material while fighting a losing battle against behavioural psychology weaponised at scale. They believe their inability to focus is a personal failure rather than a design problem. They don’t realise they’re trying to think in a space optimised to prevent thinking.
All the hype around AI this early may slow long-term adoption, as more people are drawn in to be underwhelmed and put off adoption longer than if they were lured in by a more mature product. That may slow the rate of job loss that we might anticipate due to the new technology. Also, perhaps, the AI bubble will have turned out to be a stimulus for deploying renewable energy generation faster than we might have otherwise, which will hopefully be put towards de-carbonization of the grid as the bubble pops.
“Our job is to keep up a police action against the possibility of a police state.” –Orson Wells
I do not mourn the Ayatollah. I think the Trump Doctrine may come to be defined as “Change the Regime and You Change the Nation” and I think it will turn out to be hollow. So far, Venezuela is as it was, and while Iran’s leaders have many challenges, there’s no reason to believe they can’t replace Khameni and continue more or less as they have for the past decades. Even in America, we elected a Great Leader who emits a great sound and fury and is doing real damage, but the People aren’t with him. Obama didn’t end Racism, and Trump can’t make us goose step. When you strike at the heart of a nation, you tend to make the State stronger. In America, after 9/11, we rallied behind a mediocre president, erected a new Police State, and looked the other way as our government tortured people. There is a reason that other presidents have been shy about following up on talk of “Regime Change” and that is because it can’t be achieved from the air. Change doesn’t come from the Top, it comes from the heart of the People. It is the hearts of Iranians that offer the greatest potential to change Iran. The same is true for Venezuelans and Americans. We The People are the change that we wish for.
I have no idea if people are reading what I write, and it really doesn’t matter. It gets the ideas out of the whirlwind in my head so I can make space for new things. —Michael Pusateri
There is a cloud of dread I can sense in the Bay Area. A shadow ahead of the Super Bowl, which will be hosted this Sunday a few miles from my house. Today it was the “nuke sniffing helicopter” zig zagging around a colleague’s house. Another friend reported that their car was searched by dogs on the way to the UPS store, as they live near the stadium. There’s a general dread of ICE and a surge of Federal Law Enforcement conducting raids while they are in town for game security. Now there are reports of pro-ICE billboards having gone up in San Francisco.
Today I headed home from the office not long after lunch, as I had some tasks to complete at the datacenter. I returned to the office for a spell because Caltrain was effectively shut down. I recognized a familiar pattern: delay due to police activity and single-tracking at the two stations in Palo Alto. I dreaded what that meant: another young person had succumbed to the worst decision they could make. The dread was later confirmed via Reddit.
Keep your eyes open for your neighbors. Ask for help when you need it. Be kind.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
