Brawl by the Bay

As of this writing (Wednesday, May 31st) the San Francisco Giants are 22-32, 10 games below .500 and 11½ behind the NL West-leading Dodgers. The Giants' best pitcher, Madison Bumgarner, is out for the first half of the season with a shoulder injury from a dirt-bike accident. It's only May, and the season may already be lost.

The Giants are currently hosting the Washington Nationals, one of baseball's best teams, in a 3-game series. The contests normally wouldn't have gotten attention, but Monday's game captured sports headlines (while we're waiting for the NBA Finals to start Thursday) because of a beanball thrown by Hunter Strickland against Nationals superstar Bryce Harper, apparently because the latter had hit playoff home runs off the former three years ago.

The batter took umbrage, fists landed, and the benches cleared. Several vignettes produced a multitude of memes.

Sad, but true, it's the most interesting thing to happen to the Giants all year.

Divorced from the News

Last fall we switched the automatic recording of the evening news from ABC to CBS. I watched CBS once or twice a week but grew appalled at how anchor Scott Pelley interspersed his anti-Trump opinions with the news. (He once led with "It has been a busy day for Presidential statements divorced from reality"--see video below.) And note: I would have been perfectly okay with an opinion section, identified as such, that Mr. Pelley inserted anywhere in the program.



When Hawaii judge Derrick Watson placed a preliminary injunction against the President's executive order on travel and refugees, the judge got pushback from Trump supporters, some of whom referred to Hawaii's remoteness from possible dangers posed by refugees:

They cited statistics from the State Department’s Refugee Admissions Office that showed since 2010 that just 20 out of more than 530,000 refugees settled in the United States since 2010 were brought to Hawaii for resettlement.

I still remember Scott Pelley's closing remark, something like "last time I checked, the flag had 50 stars." Wow. This is what people say when they are absolutely confident that listeners agree, not only with the policy position but also with the snideness of the remark.

Today's headline: "Scott Pelley to Step Down as Anchor of ‘CBS Evening News" [bold added]

Mr. Pelley has been anchoring the “CBS Evening News” since June 2011. The broadcast has been in third place behind NBC’s “Nightly News” and ABC’s “World News Tonight” and unlike the network’s morning show, hasn’t made gains in the ratings for some time.

Apparently, CBS has a limit on how long it can remain divorced from reality.

Step Away From the Green Onions

As one who makes fried rice regularly, I was alarmed by the following news item: [bold added]

A Florida man was found “covered from head to toe in pork fried rice and a red sauce” following an attack yesterday by his ex-girlfriend, according to cops who arrested the woman for domestic battery.

Once the California legislature hears about this, they'll require that I get a fried-rice license, which means taking classes, passing tests, apprenticing under a fried-rice master or mistress (which admittedly could be fun), and, of course, paying a license fee.

At least the weapon was gluten-free.

Fried rice transforms leftovers into something tasty. Shown below are before-and-after photos using hot dogs that would otherwise have gone into the compost bin.

Memorial Day, 2017

The colombarium at Punchbowl National Cemetery.

With the benefit of hindsight, a sadly wishful sentence from four years ago:

On this Memorial Day, 2013, two of the longest-running wars in U.S history are winding down.

Very different philosophies and strategies by different Administrations have yielded the same bleak result.

In a wide-ranging essay, Victor Davis Hanson reflects on the cross-currents of Memorial Day's themes and emotions. Excerpts:

As today’s disputes over the legacy of the Civil War and the Confederacy suggest, it has never been enough just to lament the sacrifice and carnage of our wars, whether successful or failed. We feel the need to honor the war dead but also to make distinctions among them, elevating those who served noble causes while passing judgment on their foes.

The Western tradition of commemoration also includes a unique idea of individual moral exemption. As first articulated by Pericles, we overlook any defects of character of the war dead, attributing to one brief moment of ultimate sacrifice the power to wash away all prior moral faults.

A noble death serves, in the words of Pericles, as “a cloak to cover a man’s other imperfections; since the good action has blotted out the bad, and his merit as a citizen more than outweighed his demerits as an individual.”

It was once universally believed that to die for a noble cause redeemed one's entire life. On this Memorial Day in 2017 I suspect that belief is still commonly, though quietly, held by most fellow Americans.

The Power of Three

The Trinity plate at Armadillo Willy's has three barbecued meats

Trinity means three, but its ancient meaning refers to the Christian God who is both all-powerful and three-in-one, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Trinity is the name given to the first nuclear test of the Manhattan project.  Robert Oppenheimer was inspired by John Donne's poetic reference to the Deity ("batter my heart, three-personed God")

Trinity connotes power, awe, and other-worldly mystery....

Lucky So Far

April, 2004: luckily no one was home

Thirteen years ago a young person's car sped over the sidewalk and front lawn of a nearby corner lot and demolished the side of the house.

After finishing repairs, the homeowner erected a brick and wrought-iron fence around the lawn.

The action may have seemed like excessive insurance against a freak recurrence, but tonight his caution paid off.

As we drove home, three police cars blocked off the two-lane boulevard and detoured all traffic through a residential neighborhood. Another car crash had occurred, but the house was spared.

Since 2004 the City has recognized the hazards of the intersection and installed two crosswalks with flashing lights. The public elementary school and a private pre-school are a block away, and we are lucky that so far no one has been hurt.

Go East, San Francisco Person, Go East

We visited the Railroad Museum in August.

We don't travel to Sacramento often, but when we do, we fantasize about living there. Houses cost 25-30% of their Bay Area equivalents, and traffic congestion is much less. Many acquaintances have cashed out from their Peninsula homes and have moved to the Central Valley, creating or adding to a nest egg. As for us, we have dallied too long (again) and have missed the buying bottom.

WSJ: Sacramento Is California’s Newest Real-Estate Hot Spot

Sacramento is finally seeing the kind of downtown resurgence that is been happening in cities across the U.S. over the past 10 to 15 years. And the region is partly benefiting from some spillover as San Francisco and Silicon Valley’s tech boom brings skyrocketing prices and a housing shortage, pushing buyers to look further afield.

About an hour-and-a-half drive northeast of the Bay Area, Sacramento remains relatively affordable. The median price a square foot of a Sacramento-area home is $228, compared with $531 in the Bay Area.

There's less risk with Sacramento real estate, not only because of lower prices but also because there are no major earthquake faults nearby. (To be even safer from tremors, if you do buy stay away from the levees.)

Why Price Controls Don't Work

CNN [bold added]:

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City is the latest insurer to announce it is withdrawing from Obamacare next year, citing big losses and uncertainty. The move would leave nearly 19,000 residents in Western Missouri without a coverage option unless another carrier steps in.

On the bright side, premiums aren't going up.

We Can Handle the Truth

In March your humble blogger expressed his frustration at the drip, drip, drip of information that is paralyzing the Administration (undoubtedly one of the goals of the leakers):

I'm fed up with dark hints of Russian election interference, influence and collusion, "evidence" that may or may not exist, the leaking by Trump opponents and a possible cover-up by the Trump Administration.

Let's follow the lead of that great American game, poker, and have everyone show their cards. And if Representative Schiff is obeying laws that enjoin him from revealing what he knows because the information is classified, let's have President Trump declassify everything so people can talk about it.

And don't hide behind "it will reveal sources and methods" because adversaries know more about American spycraft than the American public does anyway.

Two months later we're no further along in determining whether there's any fire behind the smoke. We have yesterday's testimony from former CIA Director John Brennan, who tells us that he warned Russian intelligence against "brazenly" interfering with the 2016 election:

Mr. Brennan described a previously undisclosed warning he made to his counterpart in Russian intelligence, Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the Russian FSB service, not to interfere in the U.S. election in an August phone call. According to Mr. Brennan’s account, Mr. Bortnikov denied any attempt to intervene and said Moscow is routinely and falsely blamed for such efforts by the U.S. government.

When asked for details

Mr. Brennan declined to discuss the specific information that his assessments were based on in the open hearing, saying that much of the information was classified. The House Intelligence Committee subsequently continued the hearing with Mr. Brennan in a classified, closed-door setting.

Mr. Trump has the power to declassify all this super-secret information, the selective leaking of which has been extremely damaging to his Presidency (already a special counsel has been appointed). He should approve the release of all of it. Though it may result in the firing and/or criminal prosecution of some on his team, he should know as a businessman that refusing to pay the price now results in a higher price later.

Note: just to be fair and balanced, the President ought to declassify all similar (the election, personal enrichment) information about communications between Russia, the Obama Administration, and the Clinton Campaign. C'mon, you know it exists.

I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing

At the Pali lookout in 2016---no pork, not even bacon
in our bellies, that morning.

Oahu kids are taught from an early age: don't carry pork over the Pali. If you do, the volcano goddess, Madame Pele, will cause bad things to happen. Although she doesn't appear to have visited Oahu recently, why take chances?

Pele's powers are more ascendant on the Island of Hawaii, where she is spending most of her time these days. Though they are warned, tourists have paid dearly for violating another rule--don't take lava rock off the Big Island!

Each year, hundreds of people mail, fly or hike pieces of lava back to the Big Island, hoping that by returning rocks they snatched, they will break the curse, appease the goddess and end their bad luck.

Lava is shipped back from Germany, Japan and Australia. Some lava thieves return to Hawaii so they can place the lava as close as possible to where they found it.

Skeptics may scoff, but stories abound of people whose fortunes turned around when they returned the lava. One example:

Steve Pariseau believes he can pinpoint the moment his life began falling apart: It was when he picked up a shimmering black lava rock while on vacation with his family in Hawaii.

Once he got home to California, one of his sons began having behavioral problems. His marriage fell apart. His mother died...

Mr. Pariseau said his family’s fortunes improved after they took another vacation to Hawaii and brought the lava rock back, nearly 10 years after they took it.

He got married again. His ex-wife reunited with her high-school sweetheart. His children are now both thriving.

Below is time-lapse photography that captures the power of Pele. What's also impressive is that photographer William Fintz knew where to set up his tripod hours in advance of the lava flow.

Water We Talking About

Tahoe: Filled in March with a huge snow-melt coming (David Braun photo)

For the past decade your humble blogger has listened to non-scientists claim with absolute certainty that the multi-year drought was caused by anthropogenic global warming, i.e., industrial civilization's excessive production of carbon dioxide. The State is running out of water, Lake Tahoe has dropped alarmingly, we have to change our evil ways, etc. etc.

How, then, to explain this good news? Tahoe [bold added]

is filling up fast, and about a foot away from reaching full capacity. Federal water managers say Tahoe will fill this summer for the first time in 11 years, and when it does, the total amount it will have risen across the water-year between Oct. 1 and Sept. 30 will be record-breaking.

"What we've come up so far and what we expect to come up will be the largest rise at the lake in 117 years of recorded history."

The winter snowfall seems to have discombobulated climate forecasters. This poor non-scientist is struggling to understand:
1) where did the climate models go wrong and how are they being changed to improve predictions?
2) what is the global temperature increase for 2017 and 2018, given that greenhouse-gas production continues unabated? (Temperatures will be higher because CO2 will be higher, isn't that the premise?)
3) Is the drought going to resume next year, or will rainfall be normal or better?

Lighting a Candle for the Old Window

My childhood church is renovating the sanctuary, and the last vestige of the original building's interior is being replaced.

The stained glass window over the altar is over 100 years old, but a century of exposure to Hawaiian heat and rain has taken its toll.

Blue is my favorite color (the new window's drawing is above right), but I'm going to miss the old green and gold.

Not Norwegian, Either

We can easily imagine how technologies like facial recognition can affect privacy adversely, especially if those tools are in the hands of the wrong people. Maybe we can take comfort that those technologies---at least in consumer versions---are far from perfect.

I've known "Timothy" for a long time, and "he" is definitely not Swedish.

Tail-Gunner Joe Was Early

The May 29, 2017 cover.

Senator Joseph McCarthy was one of the most vilified Americans of the 20th century. He saw a Communist under every bed.

To believe today's media, he was just early.

A McCarthy quote, updated for the 21st century:

Our job as Americans and as Republicans Democrats is to dislodge the traitors from every place where they've been sent to do their traitorous work.

Time Magazine is coming around to Tail-Gunner Joe's point of view...

Disavow Your Avocado Avocation

California: you call that an avocado?

In Hawaii everyone has, or knows someone who has, an avocado tree. Avocados, like mangos and papaya, were once abundant, and l don't remember anyone in my family buying them when I was growing up.

Imagine my shock when I moved to the Mainland in the '70's and found that people paid (high prices) for fruits that were a fraction the size of those in the Islands.

Fast-forward to 2017: it's bad enough that the puny avocados now cost about a dollar apiece at California markets; avocado (on) toast goes for $9 at restaurants in San Francisco.

The lifestyle that gave rise to $9 avocado toast seemed so extravagant to Australian millionaire Tim Gurner that he blamed the menu item as a reason why millennials don't own their homes:

Hawaii: now that's an avocado.

"When I was buying my first home, I wasn't buying smashed avocado for 19 bucks and four coffees at $4 each," Gurner told Australia's "60 Minutes."

(A quick math check showed that he was engaging in hyperbole; it would take hundreds of years of foregone avocado toast to pay for a Bay Area house, but point taken.)

If you must have avocado, get a bunch from the market and ripen them, if necessary, in a paper bag. But before you dig in, be careful that you don't cut yourself. Yes, avocado hand is now an emergency room phenomenon. [bold added]

It seems that the avocado-eating masses are mishandling their fruit, resulting in a multitude of slash and/or stab wounds that have led to "serious nerve and tendon injuries, requiring intricate surgery." In the most extreme cases, the Times reported that patients never regained full use of the injured hand. (In its coverage of avocado handling earlier this month, the New York Times stated the wife of one of its employees racked up a $20,000 hospital bill due to an avocado injury.)

Before you decide to eat healthy, make sure you know the dangers involved.