 |
| Helen, 95 |
 |
| Doreen, 90, and sons |
 |
| Alfred, 94, and sons |
 |
| From March: tents outside the neighborhood library |
People don’t swim in the Ala Wai anymore. Contact with its murky water—filled with bacteria, heavy metals, pesticides, and who knows what else—can be hazardous to your health. As the dedicated canoe paddlers who practice on the Ala Wai are well aware, even light splashes can cause rashes, boils and gastro-intestinal troubles.I like to take a walk around the canal in order to meet the 10,000-step objective. On hot and breezeless days, however, it's best to keep one's distance from the noxious gases. Exercise is beneficial, as long as you're not crazy about it.
 |
| View from King Street: Mount Tantalus partly obscured by the rainclouds |
 |
| Numbers whir on the analog water meter, buried by the curb due to separated indoor and outdoor pipes. |
 |
| Allie, the humpback whale, breaches with SF in the background (Susie Kelly photo) |
Humpbacks have long pectoral fins and distinctive knobby heads and can grow to 52 feet long and weigh almost 80,000 pounds. The species, known for its acrobatic breaching, makes its north-south migration about this time every year, but unlike grays, which make a beeline to the arctic, a lot of them feed along the coast off San Francisco."Allie's" mottled skin shows that she's in poor health. Most humpbacks not only are in good condition, but their numbers are growing.
Humpbacks were first seen entering San Francisco Bay in significant numbers during the spring and summer of 2016. Since then, [Bill Keener of the Marine Mammal Center] said, 70 humpbacks have been identified feeding in the bay and many more congregate between April and November outside the Golden Gate, in Monterey and Bodega bays and around the Farallon Islands. This is the first one he has seen that isn’t healthy.
President Xi Jinping is willing to use China's military and economic power over many years to strangle Hong Kong into submission. He's playing the long game like other Chinese leaders of the past.Beijing is being challenged not by a great military rival but by hundreds of thousands of students, doctors, factory workers, lawyers and civil servants, armed only with a seasoned defiance and a determination to defend their cherished liberties.
Hong Kong protests on June 16th (WSJ photo)
That they are unlikely to succeed in the end is not just the predictable denouement of the 1997 agreement returning Hong Kong to China. The fact is that, as an economic asset and gateway, the city now matters less to Beijing than ever before.
on 11 June - a day before the protests turned violent - a group of Christians holding a public prayer meeting through the night started singing Hallelujah to the Lord.
The hymn was picked up by other protesters - soon even non-Christians were singing it.
Ratepayers, taxpayers, existing bondholders, and stockholders will all have to contribute to the fund. In the 1980's PG&E stock was one of our first investments, using Peter Lynch's investment principles. We got out 15 years ago when the energy industry began to change, and it didn't look like PG&E had a handle on what was happening.[Gov. Gavin] Newsom has proposed extending a Department of Water Resources charge that was originally imposed because of the energy crisis in the early 2000s. The charge could be extended for more than a decade, netting as much as $10.5 billion.
Paradise, 2018 (Chron photo)
Under the first financing option, known as a “liquidity fund,” the state would be able to provide a line of credit for utilities to pay wildfire claims. But the utilities would have to reimburse the fund.
The second option would work more like insurance, paying out claims directly. If all three utilities [Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric] participated, they would match the $10.5 billion charge by providing $7.5 billion up front and annual payments of $300 million to finance the rest, all with investor — as opposed to ratepayer — money. The insurance fund, which would be managed by the state, could take other steps — including buying reinsurance — to bring its total capacity up to about $40 billion, according to the governor’s office.
‘Avian Incident’ Knocks Out 84% of Massive California Solar FarmOne of the many dangers to solar panels is how the panel and its mounting system impact the combustibility of the overall roof system. Some solar panels, for example, include a backing of highly combustible plastic.
(Photo from blfirerisk)
In laboratory-based fire tests of roof assemblies, the maximum allowable fire spread is between approximately 20 and 40 ft2 (1.9 and 3.7 m2), depending on whether an A, B or C rating is desired. In actual roof fires with roof-mounted solar panels, fire damage has involved areas of between 1,000 and 183,000 ft2 (93 and 17,000 m2). In the most extreme case the fire spread to the inside and destroyed the entire building.
An “avian incident” sparked a fire at one of California’s biggest solar farms, affecting 1,200 acres and knocking out 84% of the California Valley Solar Ranch’s [250 megawatt] generating capacity.A Huge Solar Plant Caught on Fire, and That's the Least of its Problems
On Wednesday, May 25, [2016] Ivanpah's operator, NRG energy, confirmed the fire was indeed caused by mirrors that did not track the sun properly, which focused sunlight onto the wrong part of the tower [in San Bernardino County].
I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
(Image from boingboing.net)
------Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
 |
| Willie Brown with Beach Blanket Babylon Producer Jo Schuman Silver and scholarship judge Tracy Chapman. June 3, 2019. (Chron photo) |
No politician will admit it publicly, but I’d bet they would all say “yes” to a chance to look at any dirt dug up on their opponent from any source, foreign or domestic. I know I would have been tempted. At the very least, they’re going to have someone from outside the campaign, a hired gun, look at it so there are no fingerprints leading back to them.
Then, once they see what they have, they’re going to decide whether to call in the FBI — after leaking the dirt to the media, of course, assuming it’s true.
The curiosity of what the “dirt” may be is just too great a temptation.
Let’s be honest: If someone came to you with a hot inside stock tip, you might not act on it. But you would listen.
You would not say, ‘Hold on, I’ve got to call the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
And that is what Trump was saying.
 |
| The cover I remember (Amazon) |
The authors were disillusioned with the style and substance of U.S. diplomatic efforts in Southeast Asia. They sought to demonstrate through their writings their belief that American officials and civilians could make a substantial difference in Southeast Asian politics if they were willing to learn local languages, follow local customs and employ regional military tactics.In the book the "Ugly American" was actually a praiseworthy character who "got his hands dirty" working with the natives---it's cited as one of the influences on JFK to start the Peace Corps.
"Ugly American" is a term used to refer to perceptions of loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric behavior of American citizens mainly abroad, but also at home.One of the standing jokes through the 1970's was about how American tourists expected everyone to speak English, and, if the natives didn't understand, the solution was to speak louder. Later, American arrogance became chastened by Vietnam, Watergate, the Arab oil embargo, and political turmoil. The Ugly American stereotype receded, or so everyone thought.
One source of amusement is the translation of gender-neutral English into Romance languages, where gender is all-pervasive.
 |
| (Gif from NBC News) |
If you follow politics closely, chances are that you have encountered the word “Latinx” in recent years. From freshman congresswoman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to the DNC to left-wing outlet We Are Mitu, it has become a popular term among progressives who say it’s a more inclusive way to refer to people (like me) [writer Giancarlo Sopo] of Latin-American ancestry.Another Spanish-speaking person responds:
Spanish is not a gender neutral language. There are feminine and masculine words because that is how it has been spoken and read for centuries.Spanish speakers are perfectly capable of defending their language against these latter-day imperialists.
Hispanics will not accept completely changing their language just to avoid possibly offending some Social Justice Warriors. In fact, what is truly offensive is non-Spanish speaking SJWs demanding to change and completely upend the language of Cervantes.
would be a gargantuan undertaking meant to hit at the heart of the city’s homelessness crisis. But with no guaranteed source of funding, public health officials say it could also force the city to more than double its budget for those services.The City already spends $400 million per year.
often because they’re on steep hillsides and were never paved or because they’re narrower than regular streets. The city, therefore, has no responsibility for maintaining those stretches. According to the city itself, of course.The Chronicle runs a good-news story about how volunteers, with the help of charities, fixed up public lands that the City refuses to maintain in Bernal Heights (close to the intersection of Hwys 101 and 280):
Trees were uncared for and overgrown, making it dark and sketchy, even during the daytime. Homeless people set up camp. Drug dealers peddled their wares. Thieves dumped empty Amazon boxes, briefcases and backpacks after swiping their contents. The concrete staircase became broken and unsafe.In 2016
“It was disgusting,” explained Vicky Rideout, who lives near the stretch. “Full of weeds. Full of trash. Twenty years’ worth of trash had accumulated here because it was no one’s job to pick it up...It stank. That’s what I remember the most — how much it smelled. There was a lot of human feces, animal feces.”
That's San Francisco--it decides whether or not to "accept" street maintenance, a basic function of government in the rest of America--but still insists on controlling volunteers trying to remedy a problem that it won't fix.Andre Rothblatt, an architect, designed a gorgeous new staircase with zigzags of colored tile, getting approval from Public Works to redo the staircase and from the Arts Commission for the tile work. The neighbors also secured permission from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to close the stairs for repairs.
Kudos to the residents of Bernal Heights (Chron photo)
Yes, even though the city doesn’t want to care for the beleaguered street, it still put the neighbors who stepped up through the bureaucratic wringer.
“The structure of government right now is there are way more people whose job it is to slow you down and stop you than to help you,” Rideout said. “We did encounter challenges and slowdowns and obstacles and ‘No, you can’t cut these trees down’ and ‘You have to turn in these tile plans three times.’
the city would be required to build a drop-in center, and create a new Office of Coordinated CareHow much of the hundreds of millions of dollars would actually be delivered to the mentally ill homeless population? Will another byzantine bureaucracy be created? Can you tell that these are rhetorical questions?
 |
| Instructions for 2019 |
 |
| Instructions for 2017 |
 |
| Dad in January |
 |
| The cones come out on weekday afternoons. |
Because Foster City sits on the nexus between major highways 101 and 92 (the San Mateo Bridge), it's nearly impossible for residents to get into or out of the City in under 30 minutes during rush hour. (Compounding the problem, East-Bay commuters often use our surface streets when the freeways are jammed.)FWIW, your humble blogger thinks traffic problems have peaked:
Last week I spent 30 minutes on the offramp to Foster City in the late afternoon. And so it is on weekdays that I avoid going home between 4:30 and 6:30 p.m., nor do I leave between 7:30 a.m. and 9 a.m.
 |
| All good things...(SI's 5/20/19 cover) |
As noted previously, politicians say the reason is greed:The number of vacant retail properties in North Beach has jumped, alarming residents, business owners and City Hall.... Something deeper seems at play in North Beach, where the vacancy rate grew from 13% in 2017 to 21% in 2018, the sharpest increase in any San Francisco retail district.
Grant Ave., North Beach (Chron photo)
North Beach now ranks fourth among the city’s 24 recognized neighborhood commercial districts by vacancy rate; the citywide average is 12%.
Among the reasons: Long permitting times and high construction costs, as well as the need for seismic retrofits, which account for a quarter of the neighborhood’s current vacancies. San Francisco’s high rents and labor costs have also hurt. There’s been bad luck, too: Two fires have gutted historic buildings that housed a half-dozen businesses.
Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who represents North Beach, blames landlords who have “unrealistic expectations of value” and “greedy brokers” who inflate those expectations.Speaking as someone who spent over 20 years in leasing in a variety of industries, your humble blogger will state unequivocally that, greedy or not, a property owner should never hold out for higher rents if the property (unless it's taken off the market for improvements) will be vacant another month or longer.
There are no financial advantages for a landlord to intentionally leave a storefront vacant, said Said Kordestani, a partner and tax expert at law firm Farella Braun+ Martel. Property owners can declare a loss on a property if their operational expenses exceed their revenue, but there’s no loss that can be declared for rent that isn’t being collected, he said.
“Leaving a property vacant is mind-boggling to me,” he said. “There’s no tax benefit.”
 |
| (Image from Henkel.com) |
If you live somewhere with clean, safe tap water, relying less on bottled water is a great place to start reducing your plastics exposure, [Univ. of Victoria Dr. Kieran] Cox says.When out and about, plastic bottles of water are convenient, cheap, and sanitary. At home, however, a tall glass of iced water from the tap is quite pleasurable, and for me fewer microplastics tip the balance.
Bottled water was such a big contributor of microplastics that the researchers did a separate analysis; when people drink their water only from bottled sources, they ingest about 90,000 microplastic particles every year from that water, but people who drink only tap water get 4,000 of such particles a year.
“It’s a 22-fold increase in plastic consumption from a single lifestyle choice,” Cox says. “With these kinds of issues, small choices can make a big impact for you personally and for plastic pollution.”
 |
| The Queen served the Trumps lamb last week (Lipinsky) |
As one theory goes, while awaiting deployment to mainland Europe during World War II, US troops were fed mutton — meat from older sheep — and told it was lamb. When they returned home in 1945, the story goes, they refused to touch lamb meat ever again.I remember that Mom cooked leg of lamb during the '50's and '60's because it was cheaper than beef and, IMHO, tasted pretty good when accompanied by mint jelly. I also remember that Dad hated it for precisely the reason in the article--it reminded him of the horrible, gamey mutton that the Army served to GI's during and after World War II.
 |
| (Image from nakedsecurity.sophos.com) |
Cathal McDaid, Adaptive Mobile: One very popular way of doing it is that you ring up the carrier and you say, “My name is X and my phone number is X. However, I’ve lost my SIM card or it’s been damaged or been destroyed somehow and I need to get it assigned to a new phone.”To review, the first move by a thief is to transfer the phone number to a different cellphone by claiming that the equipment was "lost". The next step is to log in to the bank website with the victim's email account (some sites require that the userid be the same as the email, I actually prefer to have a user name--e.g., My3rdDogFido--that's harder for the hacker to know), and go through the "forgot password" routine. The bank will send a code to the stolen phone number, and the hacker now controls the bank account.
Allison Nixon, Flashpoint: When the SIM swappers steal a phone number, for that very short period of time they own the victim’s phone number. Then they do a password reset against their emails until they take over the victim’s financial accounts and steal what they want.
Allison Nixon: if [banks’] policy required a period of time to pass [after a password was reset] before you could empty out an account, that would definitely prevent SIM swapping. The attackers can only hold on to a phone number until the victim gets it back—usually not that long. However, most of the time when people are doing password resets, it’s legitimate, and when you lock down an account for a period of time it makes people very frustrated.
 |
| A phone that doesn't need electricity |
 |
| "In Western Churches, Pentecost is usually represented with the color red, which symbolizes the fire of the Holy Spirit." (From 10 Things You Should Know About Pentecost Sunday) |
 |
| (Chronicle photo) |
Based on an 800-acre Arkansas farm, Cooks Venture will begin selling its heirloom-breed, pasture-raised chickens in California on Wednesday at Golden Gate Meats in the Ferry Building. The cost is $3.98 per pound,The feature that makes this chicken special is that it is raised according to the practices of "regenerative agriculture":
The basic idea behind regenerative agriculture is this: the more organic matter in soil, the more carbon it can sequester. Another added benefit is increased water retention, so that less irrigation is needed.
 |
| From 2015: an acquaintance raises chickens in Hawaii. She's ahead of her time. |
Was Mr. Doyle II another example of perfidy by a Republican businessman and ex-state senator? (Providence Journal: "Doyle, a Democrat representing Pawtucket".) The fact that his political party was never stated in the tax article or in AP/U.S. News is a clue. It's another example of "name that party".Pawtucket, Rhode Island: Former state senator and businessman James E. Doyle II, 47, has been sentenced to two years in prison for engaging in a $74 million dollar check-kiting scheme in which he wrote tens of thousands of worthless checks and failed to report more than $1 million dollars in income.
Media failed to disclose that he's a Starbucks
customer, too (Providence Journal photo)
He admitted that as owner of Doyle Respiratory and Doyle Sleep Solutions he engaged in a fraud during which $74 million in worthless bank transactions were executed in check-kiting schemes through his accounts. He also admitted that for tax years 2013 through 2016, he and his wife failed to report to the IRS more than $1 million dollars in income and failed to pay $305,426 in federal taxes. Doyle executed the scheme daily, at times in excess of 50 transactions per day, including using ATMs to lengthen the time it took for checks to be presented for clearing.
He was also sentenced to three years of supervised release upon completion of his prison term, and ordered to pay $426,707.25 in restitution.
every time a Democrat is caught in misconduct, the media will either “accidentally” forget to mention his party affiliation or will bury it at the tail of the article were [sic] fewer people will see it...On the other hand, when a Republican is caught in a crime his party affiliation either leads the piece or even appears in the very headline of the report.Some media outlets have begun mentioning the party affiliation of every crooked politician, but just once I'd like to see such an omission for a Republican miscreant.
Barbara Lane's advice is born out of hard-won experience that coincides with other small associations (not books) in which your humble blogger has participated. Long may her book club flourish.
Organizer of another book club. First and foremost: You have to talk about the book....Once we sit down at the table, we talk about the book. And only the book...Once all agree we’ve exhausted the discussion and the book for the next meeting is chosen, we’re free to report on our own fascinating personal and professional lives and, more importantly, gossip. The choice of book is another area where book clubs run into trouble...At the end of the evening’s book discussion, the host brings a pile of books (real books that can be passed around) to the table. He/she is supposed to read into the book a bit, 50 pages or so, to find out if it’s worthy of our attention. a book club of more than 10 means fighting to get a word in. There are intentionally no spouses.
 |
| Maya coaching "Bald Soprano" actors (Chron photo) |
Her work, staging intimate scenes in plays, “could include a simulated sex scene, a kiss, a hug between family members, nudity, a first touch between ‘Romeo and Juliet’ … whatever feels vulnerable and intimate” ....In the era of the #MeToo movement, provoked especially by bad actors in the arts and entertainment industry, the Intimacy Choreographer fills a need that didn't seem important a few years ago:
Herbsman makes those scenes “specific, technical, repeatable and highly choreographed.” She compares her job to fight choreography, in its use of standardized practices to keep actors and everyone else in the rehearsal room safe — physically, emotionally and psychologically.
“But I find when I work with actors over the age of 40, it sort of takes on this whole new meaning, because they realize all that they’ve been putting up with for their whole career. In that moment they realize the things that they didn’t know how to say no to, they didn’t know they could say no to, they didn’t know they were allowed.”There are lots of choreographers on LinkedIn but so far no "intimacy choreographers." That omission should change in the near future.
Comments:The pop-up is a ticketed event at $49.99 per person. Included in the purchase is a 60-minute live interactive show focused on the “the weird, twisted dark side” of San Francisco’s history, according to a press release. After the show, patrons will have 30 minutes to spend touching and picking up the rats before heading to an upstairs cash bar that will serve drinks like the Ama-RAT-O Sour, which is a riff on an amaretto sour, and non-alcoholic drinks.
(Chronicle photo)
 |
| 22 years ago in the movie Fargo. |
Despite the scientific advancements, we're no closer to understanding time's essence. However, there is consensus on several of time's properties: [bold added]Today’s cutting-edge clocks are based on measuring the vibrations of atoms and molecules. The most precise atomic clocks are so accurate that, over a period of time equivalent to the whole history of the universe to date, they would be off by less than one second.
WSJ Gif: best if viewed
with recreational substances
Today’s quantum horologists are looking to improve things further. For instance, it might be possible to monitor atomic nuclei, which vibrate faster than whole atoms.
Most physicists agree that time had a beginning, and that it is measured from, and indeed came into being with, The Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago. Whether, how and when time might end in the future is a more open question, depending on different notions of the ultimate fate of the universe and other mind-bending concepts like the multiverse.Our extremely precise methods of measuring time are akin to counting the wrinkles in Einstein's brain. We can observe and record all the data we want, but we're no closer to finding out what makes it tick.
The so-called arrow of time refers to the one-way direction or asymmetry of time, which leads to the way we instinctively perceive time as moving forwards from the fixed and immutable past, though the present, towards the unknown and unfixed future. This idea has it roots in physics, particularly in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, although other, often related, arrows of time have also been identified.
(Image from medium.com)
Your humble blogger loves food bargains like the above offering from Costco. At 50 cents per serving, it's tempting. However, I'll have to pass.Costco is selling just the thing—a 27-lb. bucket of one of America’s favorite comfort foods. The big box retailer is offering a massive bucket of mac and cheese with a shelf life so long that you won’t need to venture outdoors until the year 2039.
