An Oldie and Goodie

(Album cover from Wikipedia)

San Francisco's most-streamed Christmas tune is a 1958 number:

This year, a new star has risen to the top of San Francisco’s holiday music charts.

Well, not exactly new. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” the famed rockabilly tune sung by a then-13-year-old Brenda Lee, was recorded 66 years ago. Since then, Lee’s song has enjoyed a slow and steady climb up the charts, and this time around even beaten Mariah Carey’s fabled “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to become the most-streamed holiday song in San Francisco heading into December, and the city’s 10th most-streamed track overall.

Below is 80-year-old Brenda Lee reprising her Eisenhower-era hit.

Gaudete Sunday

Today the Advent candle is rosy pink:

The third Sunday of Advent in the Roman Catholic calendar of the church year. The term is derived from the Latin opening words of the introit antiphon, “Rejoice (Gaudete) in the Lord always.” The theme of the day expresses the joy of anticipation at the approach of the Christmas celebration. This theme reflects a lightening of the tone of the traditional Advent observance. It was appropriate for the celebrant of the Mass to wear rose-colored vestments on this day instead of the deeper violet vestments that were typically used in Advent. This Sunday was also known as “Rose Sunday.” This custom is not required in the Episcopal Church, but it is observed by some parishes with a traditional Anglo-catholic piety. This custom is reflected by the practice of including a pink or rose-colored candle among the four candles of an Advent wreath.

The beauty of the rose candle on Gaudete ("rejoice") Sunday shines in a darkened world, foreshadowing the Light to come.

Paper is Still the Gold Standard

(Image from tvtropes)

You're on your deathbed and still of sound mind. Your estate is to be evenly split between your son and daughter, but Jack has never come around to see you while Jill has not only visited you daily but handled all the day-to-day minutiae of your finances and running your household.

You now want to leave everything to Jill, but there may not be time to get a lawyer to change your will. Surely it must be better to record a selfie on your smartphone rather than scrawl a note on a piece of paper. But that would be wrong.[bold added]

While most of the business of life has gone digital, estate law remains rooted to ink on paper. Americans who try to phone in or record their estate plans don’t realize that video and audio recordings don’t qualify...

Aside from audio and video, some states will allow an electronic will. But a paper will, drafted by a lawyer, and signed by you with a “wet signature,” witnessed and notarized, is still the gold standard.

If you insist on putting your final wishes on video, it behooves you to have a printer nearby. You can transcribe your speech using any number of programs and print the text. Make corrections by hand, and sign and date the final product. Et voilà! A piece of paper that should hold up in court with the bonus of having made a video that will add authenticity to the change in the will.

Estate law will undoubtedly catch up to technology in a decade or so, but many of us boomers won't be able to wait that long...

Timelines Timeliness

(Image from eBay)

Just in time to assuage unhappiness with current politics, the concept of multiverse timelines has caught fire:

On Joe Rogan’s podcast last month, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen explained his theory that “the timeline has split twice in the last nine months. . . . The world was going to head in two totally different directions.” The first split was when Donald Trump was shot in Butler, Pa., on July 13. The second was on Election Day. Twitter is awash with posts from some users exclaiming that they “love this timeline” and others lamenting that they “hate this timeline.” Ezra Klein, doyen of the intellectual left, said in a Nov. 19 podcast that he’s watching Mr. Trump’s nominees “to see what timeline we’re in.”

The notion of this timeline implies the existence of that timeline—an alternative reality in which things unfold differently. Much as the idea “We are living in a simulation” saturated social media during the Covid-19 pandemic, “this timeline” is the latest exclamation of discomfort with our present reality.

Though it’s especially prominent among those who are online and anti-Trump, references to the timeline aren’t the sole province of the left. Last month, David Friedberg, co-host of the tech podcast “All-In,” repeatedly used the term to indicate his elation with political circumstances: “I am so shocked and surprised in a positive way that we ended up on this particular timeline. . . . We’re on this timeline and I do think the United States, as Neo, dodged a lot of bullets here.”

The invocation of Neo, hero of the film franchise “The Matrix,” is telling. The concept of timelines originates in science fiction and is linked intimately with the multiverse, the idea of parallel realities with similar people and personalities but different events and outcomes. This connection to science fiction is perhaps why the theme has resonated with Silicon Valley’s newly right-leaning techno-utopians, as well as members of the left.

Human beings have always believed--or imagined--that there are realities different and maybe better than the one we are stuck in. From heaven to reincarnation, from a simulated universe to a multiverse, there may be a super-reality where our good behavior is rewarded or our lives can have a second chance.

Just as Marxists saw benefits in religion because it was the "opiate" of the masses, conservatives won't decry multiverse-ology because it keeps many leftists quiet, and besides, it may be true (!). Meanwhile, your humble blogger has given up trying to understand the current timeline and is just enjoying the show.

A Good Home

The truck arrived at 11:30, and the Volkswagen was winched up onto the flatbed.

Carlos said he would take a few months to fix it up. He will bring the car by when he was finished. Carlos intends to commute in the VW from San Mateo to his job in Redwood City. He was the only buyer among three who promised not to flip the car immediately for a profit.

A car is not the same as a beloved pet, much less a human child, but it's nice to know the car that I've had for 51 years is going to a good home.

Good Times

The 1976 pink slip

The California State Automobile Association clerk studied the Ownership Certificate ("pink slip") for the 1967 Volkswagen bug. The pink slip was 48 years old and was in a format that he was unfamiliar with. He called his supervisor for help in filling out the paperwork for the transfer of title.

After 51 years I said goodbye to the automobile that I had driven in college. In 2020 I thought I would keep it forever. In 2022 there were still strong reasons for holding on to it.

However, circumstances changed, as they always do. Repairs were required, and it is difficult to find mechanics who were versed in the electrical and engine systems of old Volkswagens. And even if I could get it fixed, no one in the next generation wanted it. Was I interested in using it as a local runaround car? Not badly enough to hold onto the Bug. In bygone days I had invested $thousands (pictures below) to keep it together, but no longer.

2012: before

2012: after

Carlos, who works in Foster City and lives in San Mateo, had been eying the Beetle for a decade. After he called in October, the time seemed right, especially since I'm on this kick to minimize the assets that my heirs have to deal with.

Goodbye, girl, we had some good times.

Nvidia's Management Secret: Top Five Things

(Bennett / aol photo)

Founders of world-class companies each have their distinguishing management characteristics--think Steve Jobs' perfectionism, Bill Gates' ruthlessness, and Elon Musk's first principles. Jensen Huang's is T5T (Top Five Things):

T5T emails began as a solution to a surprisingly tricky problem. Huang is allergic to the bureaucracy that infects organizations as they get bigger. But as his startup grew, he “needed to somehow keep tabs on what was going on inside Nvidia in order to make sure everyone had the right priorities,” [“The Nvidia Way" author Tae] Kim writes.

This turned out to be harder than etching billions of transistors on a silicon wafer.

The documents that make it to a typical CEO tend to get so watered down along the way that they’re liable to leave a puddle on his desk. Huang doesn’t bother with any of them. He doesn’t believe in formal strategic planning or status reports, either. “Status reports are meta-information by the time you get them,” Huang said last year. “They’re barely informative.”

He doesn’t want information that has already made its way through layers of management. What he wants is “information from the edge,” he said last month in a public interview with Laurene Powell Jobs.

The way he solved this problem was by asking roughly 30,000 employees at every level of the company to send regular emails to their teams and executives that even the CEO can access. Which he does—every single day. They’re usually brief and include a few bullet points, and glancing at them gives Huang a snapshot of what’s happening inside Nvidia, Kim writes.

It might just be the only way he can get the sort of unvarnished truth that nobody wants to give the CEO but every CEO needs to get. After all, Nvidia’s employees are not telling Huang what they think he wants to hear. They’re just telling him things.

T5T emails became a “crucial feedback channel” for Huang, Kim writes, because they allowed him to pick up on trends that were obvious to junior employees, even when top executives were completely oblivious.

All the aforementioned founders have been called workaholics because they don't make the mistake of over-delegation. Over-delegation tempts them to coast on their marketplace dominance, which dissipates often invisibly because they took their foot off the gas.

Through T5T Jensen Huang seems to have found an efficient way to access uncurated information flowing through his vast organization, but he still has to work around the clock. May he remain at Nvidia's helm for many years.

Too Much Communication, Too Little Specificity

OTOH, if they say it's an emergency
but don't self-identify, it's likely a scam.

The Two Most-Dreaded Words in a Text Conversation are "call me":

For years, people have complained about receiving “call me” texts from parents, siblings, colleagues and bosses.

Much like how generations interpret emojis differently and Apple’s tapback message reactions don’t mean the same thing to everyone, the meaning—and urgency—of “call me” isn’t consistent. If “call me” comes with a GIF or an emoji, it could mean the conversation isn’t serious. Used with a period, some may interpret it as a sign of trouble. No punctuation could indicate there’s an emergency.

The deliberate ambiguity of a texted "call me," IMHO, is a power play. The recipient is forced to call on the off chance it's an emergency:

Cindy Chang, a 48-year-old clinical health, weight-loss and wellness coach in Brooklyn, N.Y., frequently spams her 18-year-old son.

She calls him on FaceTime, texts him, and then continues to do both over and over when he doesn’t answer. She calls to find out when he’s coming home, what he wants to eat or what groceries to buy—all conversations Chang sees as important enough to warrant a call (or several).

Chang says while her son isn’t a fan of her “call me” messages, she loves them because they let her “be immature and bratty” with her son.

“I try to bring more fun and joy into our relationship even though it irritates him,” Chang says.

Maybe it's a generational thing, but this boomer sees "call me" as extremely discourteous: 1) If a call is necessary, I always initiate it and don't make the other party have to call me; 2) If I do text a phone call request, I always give a short explanation about the seriousness, i.e, "X is in the hospital" or "need to discuss dinner plans"; 3) at minimum I add at least add another word, "call me please."

I'm on so many text threads that I've turned notifications off (one reason: someone sends a picture of her kid, and 10 people respond with a love-it emoji). One benefit of being over 70: I can claim (feign) tech ignorance: "I'm sorry I didn't see your text--these phones are so complicated!"

The Restoration of Notre Dame

The 2019 fire at Notre Dame (WSJ/AFP/Getty images)

Like many who watched in horror five years ago, we thought that Notre Dame Cathedral had been lost forever to fire. Yesterday it re-opened, radiant and gleaming.

The limestone facade of Notre Dame Cathedral is radiant. Its ornate gargoyles and angels show no signs of the smoke and flames that once billowed from the church. The cavernous interior is immaculate, the soot having been meticulously scrubbed from its arches.

By almost any metric the restoration of Notre Dame has been a success, coming five years after a fire swept across the masterpiece of Gothic architecture, nearly destroying it. On Saturday, a host of global figures, including President-elect Donald Trump, gathered inside the cathedral for a solemn ceremony to mark its reopening.

Notre Dame’s revival is nothing short of a miracle to many, a sign that cooperation across France and beyond to achieve a singular goal is still possible.

We marvel that the skills necessary for the restoration had not been lost, that there was little dithering over what the "new" church should look like, that funds were raised quickly, and most of all, that beauty came back into the world.

Pearl Harbor: Receding into History

Last year's Pearl Harbor Day post was about Lou Conter, the last survivor of the USS Arizona. Lou Conter died last spring.

Conter died Monday morning [April 1, 2024] at his home in Grass Valley, Calif., according to his daughter Louann Daley.

Born in Ojibwa, Wis., in 1921, Conter was 20 years old when the USS Arizona was bombed by Japanese forces at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

The USS Arizona’s bombing was the deadliest of the attacks that day, killing 1,177 people—nearly half of the 2,403 who died during Pearl Harbor. Conter was one of just 334 people assigned to the USS Arizona who survived.

Conter escaped the burning wreckage. As he and others guided crew members to safety, “more often than not, their burned skin would come off on our hands,” he wrote in his 2021 memoir, “The Lou Conter Story.”

“It was horrible,” he wrote. “Absolutely horrible.”

Despite his work that day, he said he didn’t want to be called a hero.

“I consider the heroes the ones that gave their lives, that never came home to their families,” Conter said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year. “They’re the real heroes.”

...He got his pilot wings in November 1942, and was part of a team that flew Black Cat aircraft overnight doing bomb runs in the South Pacific, Conter said. He was shot down twice, once in September 1943 and a second time three months later. Both times, Conter said, he used a lifeboat to get to shore.

After World War II ended, he returned to California and signed up for the reserves. In the early 1950s, he served again in the Korean War.

Conter retired from the Navy in 1967 as a lieutenant commander and became a real-estate developer in California.

Pearl Harbor is nearly as remote from today's children as was the Civil War from the first Baby Boomers. We grew up in a world where the deeds of "ordinary" men like Lou Conter were taken for granted. Now such strength of character seems uncommon, and its prevalence in the World War II generation impossible to imagine. R.I.P.

Sam Wo: The End?

Chef David Ho (Strazzante/Chronicle)

Every month we hear a report of a well-known San Francisco restaurant closing--often these announcements come as a surprise--but Sam Wo's demise has been in the cards for at least a decade. Its closure (for health code violations) occurred in 2012, and it reopened in 2015 at a different address. In 2020 long-time chef and co-owner David Ho, then 65, was feeling the effects of age.

His body is full of aches and pains. He’s scared of catching the coronavirus. Still, he doesn’t want to stop working, despite the pleas of his business partners. Even his daughter has expressed concerns he’s working too hard without a staff to back him up, according to co-owner Steven Lee, who helped resurrect Sam Wo, Chinatown’s oldest restaurant, after it temporarily closed in 2012.

Sam Wo will probably close on December 31st.

A 116-year-old San Francisco Chinatown landmark, Sam Wo Restaurant, is set to close Dec. 31 — potentially for good — as chef and co-owner David Jitong Ho retires and his partners scramble to find a successor.

First opened sometime after the 1906 earthquake by Chinese immigrants, Sam Wo Restaurant became a haunt of the 1950s Beat Generation poets, including Allen Ginsberg, and workplace of the late Edsel Fong, whose colorful personality earned him the title of “world’s rudest waiter” from Chronicle columnist Herb Caen.

Ho, the second generation of his family to helm the restaurant’s kitchen, has been working at Sam Wo since 1981, except for a three-year break starting in 2012 when the restaurant temporarily closed. The 69-year-old said he is exhausted from the years of toil and needs to retire, in part, because of two torn tendons in his arm.

Sam Wo Restaurant was the subject of one of the first posts on this blog in 2003. At that time David Ho had already worked in the kitchen for over 20 years. He deserves a happy and restful retirement.

Tsunami Warning Cancelled

At 10:44 this morning three iPhones in our house blared an emergency warning. A 7.0 earthquake had occurred in the waters off Humboldt County, over 260 miles north of San Francisco. The earthquake was just close enough--and Foster City just close enough to the Bay--that we could not disregard the dangers of a tsunami.

And so it was that our eyes were glued to the TV on the off chance that an evacuation would be announced. To our relief the tsunami warning was canceled within the hour:

Temblor CEO and Stanford Geophysics lecturer Ross Stein gave ABC7 News an explanation for the change. He said the earthquake initially appeared to be a 6.0-magnitude shallow earthquake, the kind that involves “a lot of vertical motion of the seafloor, which tends to produce more tsunamis.”

It didn’t take long, however, for scientists to realize it was a much larger 7.0-magnitude earthquake and a different type of earthquake that is unlikely to produce a large tsunami, he said.

It was “a very typical, garden-variety event on this northern extension of the San Andreas Fault, which we call the Mendocino Fault Zone. In that respect it doesn’t move the sea floor up and down very much,” said Stein.

Of course, we were relieved that there was no tsunami. It would have drastically inconvenienced our Christmas shopping activities!

But seriously...this was another demonstration of the inadequacy of our evacuation plans. We did have "go" bags at the ready, every car had at least half a tank, and we did have an idea where to seek temporary shelter. However, what to take and what to leave behind had not been finalized, I had not digitized and stored key documents in the cloud, nor had we updated our wills since 2002 (we do have draft revisions that have not been executed).

At least we know what our top New Year resolutions will be.

Ramen Surprise

Three months ago we wrote about how the tonkatsu ramen purchased at Nijiya Market had soup that came in a plastic bag.

Perhaps enough customers complained to cause the supplier to eliminate the plastic bag; when I emptied the contents into a bowl, the gelatinized soup was on the bottom. (The soup was no longer liquid; the formula obviously had been adjusted.)

The other change was a 30% increase in the ramen price, from $9.99 to $12.99. I thought food-price inflation was over!

Egg Recall

The eggs we bought at Costco last week have been recalled:

Costco has issued another major food recall due to potential salmonella contamination, affecting over 10,000 units of organic eggs sold at its warehouses nationwide.

The recall, announced Nov. 27 by Handsome Brook Farms, covers Kirkland Signature Organic Pasture-Raised 24-Count Eggs. More than 250,000 eggs were found to have been potentially contaminated with salmonella after being mistakenly packaged for retail sale...

The affected units have the UPC number 9661910680 and a use-by date of Jan. 5, 2025. They were packaged in plastic egg cartons labeled with the Kirkland Signature logo and mostly sold in Southern states.

The Universal Product Code matches the eggs that may have salmonella. We've consumed nine eggs already to no ill effect, but we'll not take any chances and return what's left.

We've been buying foods labeled "organic" because of their putative health benefits, but there is a trade-off. Organic fruits and vegetables need to be washed thoroughly because they are grown without pesticides; some foods spoil faster because they don't have preservatives; and who knows whether egg salmonella has increased because hens are raised without antibiotics?

We still must be vigilant against food-borne illness, and buying organic is no panacea.

Not the McDonald's Demographic

The $14 honeymoon oyster at Water Grill is topped
with roe, sea urchin and a quail egg. (Cahill/WSJ)

The hottest trend in fancy restaurants: single-bite dishes that can cost $30.

Tiny portions of intricately assembled ingredients are gracing menus. Many incorporate caviar, seafood or Wagyu beef. The bites are meant to start the meal, and many cost $20 to $30 each, often more than heartier appetizers.

For restaurants, it’s a way to fatten check totals, since customers remain just as likely to pay for larger plates. And customers order their own because they are too small to share. Diners are drawn to the novelty—and the social media hype.

It's a way to taste very expensive ingredients without breaking the bank, as well as have something to brag about on social media. However, I suspect that many old-timers like myself will gag at the (lack of) value proposition and decline to order. Life is simpler and cheaper when one doesn't care about how many hits one gets on Instagram.

Hospital Chaplaincy

Spiritual care volunteers and staff at Stanford Hospital Chapel

Before an Episcopal priest can be ordained, he or she must complete several months of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE). In CPE the students minister to non-Christians as well as Christians, much as priests do in the real world.

Clergy that I have spoken to have said that their most intense and rewarding experiences have occurred while they did their CPE as hospital chaplains. [bold added]

Hospitalized patients and their families often struggle with religious and spiritual quandaries but can’t attend their houses of worship or don’t have one. Chaplains thus fill crucial gaps. As the religious makeup of the U.S. has changed in recent years, their profession has begun to do so too. Board-certified chaplains are now increasingly trained to help patients of diverse beliefs. To learn about their vocations, I [note: Columbia prof. of psychiatry Robert Klitzman] recently conducted an in-depth study, speaking with 50 chaplains from across the country and from different faiths.

While chaplains aid countless patients, they are in many cases marginalized and underfunded. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services allows for direct reimbursement for spiritual services only within the Veterans Affairs system. Offering spiritual care for hospice patients enrolled in Medicare is mandatory but not directly billable. As a consequence, many hospitals have no chaplains; some rely on local volunteer clergy, who know only their own faith, or on other healthcare professionals to fill in for spiritual care...

Chaplains are often the only staff with time to talk to patients, whom they can therefore get to know well. I learned of one patient who phoned the on-call nurse every day at 2 a.m., complaining of pain. The staff tried altering his medicine without success. Finally, a chaplain spoke to the patient, who turned out to be carrying significant guilt from his mother’s suicide when he was 18. When the chaplain arranged for the man’s elder siblings to talk about it, they were “aghast,” the chaplain told me. “They reminded him that their mother had mental-health issues: ‘Don’t you remember?’ It was like a 50-pound weight had been lifted. After that, he never again called the nurses at night.”

Chaplains also serve as critical mediators in conflicts among patients, families and physicians. At another hospital, a teenager who was dying wanted to donate his organs. Soon he was brain dead and on life support, which surgeons planned to remove in the operating room. The boy’s family wanted to be present when he died, but the surgeons refused for fear that they’d disrupt the procedure.

Presented with an impasse, a chaplain negotiated a solution: The family would dress in sterile gowns and stay in the theater for three minutes. The family and physicians sang “Amazing Grace,” the boy’s favorite song. When he died, the mother said to the chaplain: “Thank you for that gift. . . . We got to sing my son into heaven.”

In my research it wasn’t uncommon to learn of medical professionals wary of spiritual care, which they saw as having no medical benefit. Yet spiritual counseling can help patients choose palliative care when the treatments available are both futile and painful.

In facing serious disease, millions of patients find themselves pondering the eternal. Most of us will die in hospitals, far from any religious institution, and might benefit from chaplains’ care. Our healthcare systems would do well to recognize and value them more.

Spending one or two nights in a hospital changes a person. Although WiFi is now commonplace, the hospital environment is not conducive to endless Internet surfing or scrolling through social media. The patient confronts thoughts he may not be accustomed to having, especially if he is non-religious.

In his hour of need, there may not be family members the patient is comfortable talking with, and he can't bother medical personnel, whose focus is usually confined to the health of our physical bodies.

That leaves the hospital chaplain, whose job has expanded to being ready to converse with those who are members of different faiths-or no faith at all. In an increasingly irreligious society the irony is that the need for chaplaincy services has never been greater.