Not for Purists

My high school classmates Pam and Ina invited us to a small reunion of fellow graduates, most of whom I have known since sixth grade. Traffic was light, and the 39-mile drive from Foster City to Oakland took one hour, not bad for a Sunday.

We went around the room compressing the last 55 years into a three-minute summary, the maximum time our spouses would tolerate, when the bell rung. The discussion leader, Dianne, was a nice girl in high school, and her calling to the ministry has taught her how to be a boss lady when it's required.

After lunch Pam served shaved ice. A few purists muttered that snow cones, with their thicker ice particles, were not genuine "shaved ice." Having had neither for years, I gave her an A for effort and slurped away.

Let's Have More Gaslighting

Erika Minkowsky, co-owner of personal chef service The
Heirloom Chef, cooks at her Richmond, Calif. home
on a gas range. (Mercury News photo)

Earlier this month we noted how Berkeley's 2019 ban on natural gas in new buildings was successfully challenged in court by the California Restaurant Association. Other Bay Area cities who had followed Berkeley's lead are now suspending their bans: [bold added]

The Sunnyvale City Council recently temporarily suspended its ban on natural gas in new buildings, which was first adopted in 2022 to help cut Sunnyvale’s greenhouse emissions in half by the end of the decade.

Recently, Cupertino announced the city will suspend its gas ban until this fall. In the East Bay, the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors earlier this month agreed to pause their all-electric building requirement and gas ban in unincorporated areas of the county. San Mateo County and San Luis Obispo also recently suspended their bans.

Except for his grandparents' house before 1961, your humble blogger has never lived in an apartment or home with a gas range and likely will never do so. Although I agree with the nanny staters that cooking with gas is riskier to health and safety than electric, I don't agree that the decision should be made for people.

Besides restaurants, there are many home chefs who prefer gas--in Chinese cooking, for example, electric cooktops cannot heat woks to the temperature required--and they should be allowed their choice.

Sure, bombard everyone with warnings about the potential dangers to themselves and "the planet," but one of the country's basic principles is that informed citizens should make their own decisions instead of having decisions purportedly made for their own good by a government bureaucrat.

Can you feel it? The tide hasn't turned, but it has been stalled.

Containers: No Longer Just for Transportation

Shipping containers form a makeshift wall around
People's Park in Berkeley (Mercury photo)

My former employer leased large transportation equipment (airplanes, locomotives, barges) to industrial customers. Shipping containers were an adjunct to the main business.

Basic used containers then cost in the $5,000 range, and that market was highly competitive. To be successful, lessors had to be good at moving thousands of units. Specialized containers--for example those that are refrigerated and insulated--could be expensive, but the bulk of the business was commodity-like, not high-tech, and not subject to obsolescence.

Durable, heavy, relatively cheap and portable containers have been produced for decades, and estimates are that there are hundreds of millions of them in existence. It's not surprising that they are being put to uses that were not originally envisioned. In an ongoing, publicized example shipping containers are being used to keep out activists from People's Park in Berkeley:

After the overnight raid of the park to remove protesters of the development, as well as longtime unhoused residents, the block of open space was largely closed off by the 160 big metal boxes. Most were dirty yellow with a few orange and blue scattered in, with all wording and numbers haphazardly covered by blue or white paint.

The hulking boxes each weighed at least 5,000 pounds...

“We learned in August of 2022 that even a really sturdy fence, and an expensive one at that, that we put up, was not sufficient to withstand attacks on it by people who were ready and willing to engage in vandalism, and who would resort to just about anything to tear the fence down,” said Dan Mogulof, university spokesperson, adding that alternatives would probably be expensive and unsuccessful as well. The shipping containers “seemed to offer the best solution given that our primary objective was to close what is a construction site.”

An example of "cargotecture"

As for the other uses,

Shipping containers have had something of a rebirth in recent years, their typical job of transporting goods shifting to a variety of uses, including border security.

Arizona officials double-stacked 1,700 containers along its southern border with a plan for such a barrier to block 10 miles, but caved to protesters and threats of federal litigation, trucking the big metal boxes away for auction early last year. They are now being made into tiny homes.

But shipping containers have also been chic darlings of industrial design, becoming homes, restaurants, bunkers, pop-up shops and playgrounds, among a wide range of uses.

The famed Starburst House in Joshua Tree, which looks like a bunch of rectangular boxes sticking out at odd angles, is 2,000 square feet of living space made entirely of shipping containers.

Los Angeles has an apartment complex made from containers, designed for homeless people.

And then there was the 2022 FIFA World Cup stadium in Qatar built from 974 shipping containers.

The concept has become so trendy in recent years that it has its own moniker: cargotecture.

Accountants may have to adjust upward the 25-40 years they've been using for the useful life of containers.

No, I Didn't Need to See It

Tilden Park, Berkeley (Mercury News photo)

Getting out of town during the freeze, I got the timing right.

While the Bay Area experienced "its most famous snow day in close to 50 years" I was chilling in the 70°F weather in Honolulu. And no, I didn't need to see the snow.

Your humble former college student lived through his first snowfall in Connecticut. It was new and exciting for about a week.

Then I slipped on an icy sidewalk and landed ignominiously on a body part that fortunately had a lot of padding. After those college winters I've spent over 99% of my non-business life in California and Hawaii, as God intended.

California needs the water, so I'm glad rain and snow are pummeling the Bay Area...while I'm gone.

The Laws Don't Apply to Us Because We're the Good Guys

It was amusing when the town of Woodside attempted to forbid denser housing by declaring itself to be a habitat for endangered mountain lions. Unfortunately for those who enjoy a good debate, Woodside quickly caved in the face of a stern rebuke from the California Attorney General.

It's not a problem for UC-Berkeley to tear down this
112-year-old rent controlled building to build more
housing because the cause is noble.

In a similar manner California's strict environmental law has delayed the construction of faculty and student housing on or near State campuses. The delays have been so severe that UC-Berkeley has been forced to freeze enrollment. The Progressives' solution is not to repeal or amend the law for everyone but to carve out an exception for their own pet projects. [bold added]

State Sen. Scott Wiener says a housing and homelessness crisis on California’s college campuses has become so dire that the state needs to add a major exemption to its premier environmental law to speed up construction.

Wiener is expected to unveil a bill Tuesday that would streamline housing projects by allowing the UC, CSU and community college systems to skip the lengthy review process required under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Environmental laws are fine if they stymie greedy real estate developers and filthy industry. But if mountain lions get in the way of utopian dreams of denser housing in Woodside or if there's a little noise or smoke from developing land for public education (don't you dare try this, Stanford), let's get the Attorney General or a friendly judge or a veto-proof legislature to say the law doesn't apply to us Progressives.

We're the good guys!

Dog Bites Man

A Moraga man was bitten by a coyote: [bold added]

Kenji Sytz (LinkedIn)

That was until the end of their workout, when [Kenji] Sytz felt a sudden, sharp pain in his left leg. From a push-up position, he quickly rolled over to find a coyote clamped down, hard, on his shin and calf.

In a matter of seconds, Sytz jerked up his knee, wound up and slapped the coyote in the face to convince the animal to release him.

At first, it didn’t budge. It took nearly a minute for Sytz and his two workout partners to shoo the animal back into the Friday morning darkness.

Jack Wakileh, one of Sytz’ friends, said all of his years watching animal documentaries on the Discovery Channel prepared him for that moment. He chased the coyote from the football field’s 20-yard-line to an open gate on the other side. It would run 10 yards, pause, then stare back at Wakileh, he said.

It wasn’t until Sytz rolled up his jogger pants that he saw the deep puncture wounds, and dangling fatty tissue. Wakileh said Sytz tried to play it off as a minor flesh wound.

“I’m like ... ‘you need to go to the hospital,’” Wakileh said. “That’s not broken skin — I see your muscle.”

But Sytz said he was in good condition Friday after getting treatment at a hospital for the puncture wounds left by the coyote’s fangs in his leg — including rabies shots. Sytz said the shots were more scary than the bite. He said he’ll limp for some time, and lamented having to miss a planned 10-mile run this weekend.

“I’m an avid outdoorsman. I was more afraid of the needles,” he said.

Comments:
1) The coyote didn't attack an isolated target but a member of a three-man running group. Both mountain lions and coyotes are becoming more brazen and/or hungrier.

2) Kenji Sytz is an Engineer, Berkeley grad, and family man per his social media profiles. He showed grace under pressure; it's nice to know that macho-ness--not the blustering and boastful kind---is still alive in a few young men.

Not the Win, But the Game Itself

Why are moderate Senators like Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) reversing their position on voting for a Supreme Court nominee before the election?

I suspect that they feel compelled to fill the seat because of the high likelihood the Supreme Court will be called upon to rule on some aspect of the election. With the possibility of a 4-4 SC deadlock, a Court of Appeals or a State Supreme Court (e.g., Florida, 2000) somewhere could determine the next President.

It's more important that the mechanism be in place to decide the election, not whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump is President, or whether the Senate majority is Democrat or Republican.

I do fantasize that the President and the entire Senate can set aside their differences and agree on a jurist who is not "perfect" to either the left or the right. Wouldn't that be great if he or she gets at least 60 votes? Our constitutional democracy is at stake; like the Christmas truce of World War I, suspend hostilities for a week for the common good, then go back to killing each other.

Note: my ADD-brain flitted to the Play from the Cal-Stanford game in 1982. With 5 laterals, the Stanford Band, cheerleaders, and bench players on the field, the outcome was and is highly controversial. Now just imagine if there were no referees to make the call--it could be a foreshadowing of Washington, D.C. in December, 2020.

Okay, Doomer

It's like Omaha outlawing cattle-grazing or New York prohibiting lending.

Grilling at Chez Panisse, from Netflix documentary
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, based on the book

The City of Berkeley climate fundamentalists have banned natural gas on new construction, which cuts the legs out of Berkeley's renowned restaurant industry.

The California Restaurant Association has filed a legal challenge:[bold added]

The suit argues restaurants rely on natural gas and chefs are trained in using it to prepare particular types of food like flame-seared meats, charred vegetables, or using intense heat from a flame under a wok. Losing it will slow down service, reduce chefs’ control, and affect the food — plus cost businesses more, the suit said.

Nearly 50 years ago Alice Waters pioneered California cuisine (fresh, local, organic ingredients) when she opened Chez Panisse. Chez Panisse not only uses natural gas but grills over an open flame. Sure, Chez Panisse' kitchen will be grandfathered, but with restaurants going out of business all the time and gas-less new ones taking their place the Berkeley dining experience will inevitably go downhill.

I don't see any reason to go to a Berkeley restaurant for microwaved plant-based foods. Okay, doomer, but maybe that's what you wanted.

Berkeley Enforces the Law

Blowing through a stop in Berkeley (Chron)

Your humble blogger only rides a bicycle for weekend recreation, but even that limited experience enables me to understand why serious riders, including those who ride bikes for a living or use them to commute, hate to stop. A bicyclist expends some effort to build a full head of steam, wastes that effort by coming to a stop, and then has to start all over. Also, everyone has grown accustomed to cars' acceleration, and by comparison bicycle acceleration after a stop takes excruciatingly long.

Bicyclists--though not everyone, just to be clear--have long operated under the belief that the rules don't apply to them, for example, that they can ignore stop signs and stop lights if there are no cars, or even if cars are slow--often because of their presence! (Some states now allow bicyclists to yield at stop signs.)

However, the increasing crowdedness of our streets has made it more important that everyone follows the rules that apply to them, for example, pedestrians must use crosswalks and only when the "walk" signal is on, cars must come to a complete stop and proceed with caution when making a right turn on red, etc.

Now the City of Berkeley is strictly enforcing the bicycle laws:

Berkeley has taken a different approach to traffic safety: penalties of more than $200 for cyclists who roll through stop signs.

The enforcement campaign, carried out by police officers who patrol the city’s quiet bicycle boulevards on motorcycles, has caused anger to spill from Twitter into City Hall.

Police say they are trying to prevent collisions and fulfill the requirements of a $250,000 state grant to promote good behavior on roadways.

The progressive nanny-staters who are fond of passing laws--no plastic straws! no free grocery bags! penalties for not sorting trash!--to regulate everyone's behavior don't like it when they have to follow the law.

Resist Being Curmudgeonly

High schoolers, and some younger students, too, "share[d] their ideas for making the world greener, safer and happier."

(Chronicle photo)

The ideas included flying cars, giant holes to turn rising sea water into attractive fish ponds, streets paved with mah-jongg tiles, time limits for showers, a system of Tokyo-style capsule hotels and special dormitories made out of compressed dirt. Teachers would be housed in those...

San Francisco Bay would be a lot cleaner, said Vanessa Chavez, 18, if the city would install giant nets on storm drain outfall pipes. The nets would catch junk the way that mesh nets on home dryers catch lint.

Vanessa, a student at Kennedy High School in Richmond, said all the city would need to do is hire about 100 people to go around town during a storm to clean out all the nets.

Too often young scolds propose drastic restrictions on behavior (don't fly, don't eat meat, confiscate guns, etc.) to achieve their visions. The kids at the Youth Policy Summit, for the most part, are trying to invent new ways and products to nudge society in the right direction.

It would be easy for adult curmudgeons to throw cold water on such ideas, but this kind of creativity should be praised, not buried.

Dennis McKean (1947-2018)

To my regret I had not spoken with Dennis McKean for 20 years. Last month Dennis succumbed to duodenal cancer.

(Digression: what is the protocol when you meet someone through a blood relative, and the marriage ends in divorce? Continuing to communicate is awkward if you value the relationship with the blood relative and everyone in her family.)

We attended Dennis' memorial service at his home in the South Bay. His relatives and friends spoke eloquently about the man whose brilliance was known by few outside his immediate circle. An inveterate reader of history, Dennis had a "photographic memory" and could reference passages that he read years ago. His daughter asked that guests help themselves to books from Dennis' library. I chose Paul Johnson's The Birth of the Modern, which I'll be lucky to finish by the end of the year (Dennis read a book a week).

He was Phi Beta Kappa at UC-Berkeley and earned a Masters in Chemistry from Stanford. His former boss at IBM said at the memorial that he was so impressed with Dennis' work that the company moved his family to Fort Collins and paid for his PhD at Colorado State. Dennis spent 16 years at IBM, then moved on to Seagate. Most recently Dennis was a professor at UC-Merced and a consultant who spent years in Hong Kong. A colleague at Merced read testimonials from Dennis' students, many of whom had returned to Asia.

A list of 44 patents on which Dennis is named is found here.

A quiet man, Dennis chatted about lighthearted matters--sports, travel--at social gatherings, but for the most part he listened. Now I wish he had talked more and that I was doing the listening. R.I.P.

Information Costs and Benefits

The line between hypochondria and health fanaticism has been blurred for a long time. From the Foundations of Personality, 1922:

The faddy habits [hypochondriacs] form are the sustenance of those who start the varied forms of vegetarianism, chewing cults, fresh-air fiends, wet-grass fanatics, back-to-nature societies, and the mild lunacies of our (and every) age.

A 1-sq-inch sample (in bag) was sufficient for testing.

An acquaintance is very health-conscious and insisted that a ceiling repair be tested for asbestos, which had been used in post-war construction and is a known carcinogen.

[Aside: according to a conversation I had with an expert, California banned the purchase of asbestos in 1976.

Lobby display

A grandfather clause made it theoretically possible for a contractor who made a large purchase of asbestos-containing material in 1976 to still be using this inventory in 1984, when the subject building was constructed. Such a contractor who possessed such poor inventory management would be unlikely to be in business 8 years later, but the acquaintance insisted that the materials be tested].

And so it was that your humble blogger, who had a business interest in the matter, found himself in Berkeley to have the ceiling tile analyzed. As expected, the materials were asbestos-free.

The result was good, but even prior to the excursion I knew that the half-day trip wasn't worth the time and expense. (I wouldn't have gone if it were my ceiling.) We take greater risks every day--we live near the San Andreas fault--and this was one risk that wasn't worth obsessing over.

Negative results were a positive thing.

The silver lining is that I learned useful information for future dealings with this acquaintance and the name of an efficient testing lab that I will be happy to use again.

The Rioter's Veto

Mayor Arreguin (SFGate)

Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin believes in free speech, except for right-wingers:

“I’m very concerned about Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter and some of these other right-wing speakers coming to the Berkeley campus, because it’s just a target for black bloc to come out and commit mayhem on the Berkeley campus and have that potentially spill out on the street,” Arreguin said, referring to militants who have also been called anti-fascists or antifa.

Mayor Arreguin is saying that the "rioter's veto" is a legitimate reason to forbid speech.

Opponents of Black Lives Matter, I'm sure, are paying attention.

Eric Wogsberg

The logo: still the same.

I was in my 20's, we hadn't yet started a family, and it was the right time to take a flyer. I joined Jupiter Systems, a computer graphics startup in Berkeley, and helped it raise $2 million in venture capital (hey, $2 million was real money in 1982). Like the 9 out of 10 startups you don't read about, we quickly burned through the cash, missed product-development deadlines, and laid off half the staff.

Keeping the company alive was a day-to-day proposition. As the finance person, I spent mornings collecting receivables and cut deals with vendors in the afternoon; we pleaded for suppliers to keep shipping in return for partial payments on the amount we owed. Two years of intense cost control and cutting back a product line to two items stabilized the finances. The company might survive, but it was never going to go anywhere.

I said goodbye to founders Jack, Pete, and Eric and wished them well. Eric offered to buy back my stock for the option price that I paid, but I declined. More labor had gone into that certificate than some other pieces of paper that hung on the wall. I wanted to use it as a prop to tell my kids and grandkids about how dreams don't always come true no matter how hard one works, how honestly one behaves, or how smart a person (thinks he) is.

I received Jupiter's annual reports--always showing a loss--for a few years, then they stopped coming. Over a decade went by, after which a thin envelope came in the mail. Finally, Eric and Jack were calling it quits, I thought, Pete having departed in 1988. Shockingly, the envelope contained a check, a "dividend"--a word as alien to Jupiter as its namesake is to Earth. It was Jack's tech wizardry that kept Jupiter in front of the pack, but it was Eric's vision and persistence that made sure Jupiter was going in the right direction.

Eric, 1945-2015

Eric Wogsberg was a typical workaholic nerd, but he was atypical in that he would always greet people with kindness and give them all the time they needed. Even in the most stressful situations I never witnessed him getting angry.

In the last decade of his life Eric found happiness. The lifelong bachelor married Pam and loved her ready-made family, who loved him back.

At his memorial service this Saturday, the chapel was overcrowded with people mourning the loss of a man taken much too soon by cancer a week shy of his 70th birthday. R.I.P.

Lawrence Hall of Science

Part of the exhibit on Nano

Having a few hours to while away in Berkeley on Thursday, we visited the Lawrence Hall of Science. As science museums go, it's not as large as popular destinations like the California Academy of Sciences or the Exploratorium. However, featured exhibits like the one on nano technology are thoughtfully presented to non-scientists (like your humble observer), and the "toys" in the play area are well designed illustrations of scientific principles.

The 3-D movie was first-rate, as is the view of San Francisco Bay. The Lawrence Hall of Science is not on most people's top-ten list of Bay Area attractions, but for long-time residents it's definitely worth a visit.

Very useful when watching Thursday's eclipse

IKEA Weekend

30310 Whipple Road, Union City

I went to the IKEA warehouse in Union City to pick up a dresser, thereby avoiding the $60 delivery charge. (I happened to be in the area on another errand, and, by the way, I hope that I never reach the point where I'm totally indifferent to saving sixty bucks.)

While we're on the subject of watching one's pennies, a family member thought the dresser was a good value at $299, but that's only if you don't consider the four hours assembling the thing on Saturday and the three additional hours on Sunday tweaking it so that the drawers slid in and out just like they did in the showroom.

Next time, however, I'll probably pay for delivery and assembly. I may be cheap but I'm not crazy. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

The Greatest Play in Bay Area Sports History

Dwight Clark's career moment.

Today is the 31st anniversary of the Catch, the greatest play in Bay Area sports history. The 49ers beat the Cowboys and went on to win the 1982 Super Bowl.

(Cal fans may rank the Play higher because of the lift it gave to their desperate, impoverished lives.)

The Catch was the moment that it all came together for the Niners, who would become the dominant NFL team of the 1980's.

CDSP Graduation, 2012

A graduation ceremony with Holy Communion.

When the ceremony was over, the newly minted graduates let out a half-hearted whoop and smiled, exhaustion mingled with elation.  There would be no tossing of mortar boards, which they did as twenty-somethings years ago.

Many graduates of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific have wrinkles and gray hair. They have less energy than the nearby Cal undergraduates, but they more than compensate with their motivation, purpose, and, yes, experience.

They will soon be ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church, one of the oldest Protestant denominations. It is a denomination that is dying. The Episcopal Church in America now counts less than two million members, less than half the number of the mid-20th century. And there are no signs of a turnaround; one can attend services all across the country without seeing anyone under 30 years of age.

But the gloomy prognosis did not dissuade these students. They were fully aware of the church's problems when they entered seminary.  Not for glory or riches did they begin their journey. They were answering a call.

On this beautiful Friday morning in Berkeley, hope flickered but refused to go out.