13 July 05
You Know It's Time To Go Home
...when at 5:20 in the afternoon all power to the building goes out and you’re left feeling around the partition in the windowless cave of your office for the emergency flashlight. Meanwhile, all around you UPS battery backups are shrieking insistently, not that they do your own computer any good.
It’s gotten quite hot here—tomorrow it should be in the hundreds.
11 July 05
Bike Helmets
bsag over at But She’s a Girl reports on the current discussions about whether or not to make bicycle helmets compulsory.
In the United States, they are only compulsory for children. Most people wear them wrong (too far back) so they are ineffective. But all I know is when I was biking down our mountain in Santa Barbara, looked back, and the next thing I knew I was seeing stars and a whole, perfect, irretrievable novel flash before my eyes, what got broken was my helmet, not my head.
10 July 05
L'empereur
Waddle or toboggon if you have to, but do make it to see March of the Penguins, now playing on the independent movie theatre circuit. We went to see this documentary today about the breeding cycle of Emperor Penguins and thought it was fantastic.
One question I’m left with though is how did these penguins ever evolve to be laying their single eggs in the dead of the Antarctic winter?
9 July 05
Fetishizing Reading
I’ve never been a big fan of the Levenger catalog. I know many people who read a great deal who are: they get it regularly, look through it (every single page) each time it comes, even though as far as I can tell it doesn’t change a lot from one to the next. Lots of nicely finished cherry book stands, lots of highly laquered fountain pens, lots of lamps you can’t possibly read a book without. It seems to sigh “I’m upper middle class but intellectual too, you wouldn’t catch me hanging around with those C-grade Yalie louts.” Though I fetishize pens myself, I write with them. The better they write, the better the pen. Not the most laquer or gold.
These friends who read a lot rarely buy anything from this catalog: nothing in there turns out to be indispensable to reading. I think it’s a pleasure, a secret pleasure, in its own right, a bit like the late J. Peterman catalog, which was ludicrously over the top but well written and somehow able to convince readers they really were world travellers from the 1930s without the inconvenience of world wars or non-existent air conditioning.
One of these well-read-Levenger-catalog-reading friends sent me a link to a New York Times piece on the Levenger catalog. I think I get it now. This is to books and letters what Martha Stewart Living is to tablecloths and housedecorating.
It’s a good thing, people.
8 July 05
Morning Balloons
On calm clear mornings here we sometimes see hot air balloons off to the west floating above the Central Valley floor. Usually these are 10 or 20 miles off, but yesterday three were fairly close. The one at left was landing in fields about a mile south of our house. The peak in the distance is Mount Diablo.
7 July 05
Stone
Three things:
I’m sickened by violence, this violence, our violence, the spiral this creates.
I’m certain Bush is mentally ill.
And I’m furious that our so-called leaders seem so quick to make political capital out of this morning’s attacks. It’s grotesque.
6 July 05
Luring Them In With WiFi
I like the following idea for encouraging people to use mass transit: the East Bay bus system, AC Transit, is planning to equip about half their transbay fleet with free wireless. So bring your laptop on the bus to San Francisco starting this fall. This project is being pushed by the Alameda County Congestion Management Agency with funding coming from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.
(From Beast Blog.)
5 July 05
Imagining Memoirs
Now that my project is put away like the straw bales from our field that got loaded onto tractors today, I’ve been pondering a bit more about Spain.
Specifically, I’m wondering whether the man who was hand-picked by a dictator to be his successor—from tender years, having seen his father exiled, always in the shadow off a minor tyrant, groomed, indoctrinated, cloned—has any plans to write about any of it. Because the minute the tyrant died, against all expectation, the new king called a general election, and when the military rebelled, he calmed them down and nobody died. How refreshing.
Whether he has plans to write about seeing the decades of Doña Carmen terrorizing the jewelers of Madrid as she was driven up in the black Cadillac, terrorizing them so much so they took out insurance policies against her. He was unable to speak up or say much.
Everyone assumed he was stupid; he never said anything at all. Present at minor foreign functions and royal weddings in Europe, diffident, silent, brooding. Turns out he was probably thinking all the time.
4 July 05
Summertime Bales
The wheat in the field outside our house was harvested a week ago Saturday, and a couple of days ago they went through and made straw bales out of the stubble. It’s a very pleasing thing, a field full of straw bales. Makes you want to build a house from them.
3 July 05
Emerging from the Deep
Advice to designers, editors, dissertation writers, and anyone who’s contemplating a big desktop publishing job in the future, imminent or otherwise:
a) make copious, redundantly copious, stupidly copious, backups. So when you accidentally overwrite a file of fifty pages with only the first page, all you have to do is go to the last backup and enter (tediously, admittedly) all the latest iteration of edits, not retype the whole thing. I know there are people who know how to retrieve supposedly lost file copies but they aren’t around at six in the morning or nine at night on the weekend. And I’m not one of those people anyway.
b) never, ever make global changes of anything when you’re tired. This is the way to end up with sentences that start like this: “In generallifornia…”
c) resize all your fifty gigantic maps BEFORE you need to go to Kinko’s on Friday night and it’s due on Tuesday after a holiday weekend with a skeleton staff of people who will be working at three in the morning with more or less of a clue.
d) don’t eat that extra scoop of ice cream before going to bed. Do you really need your heart racing that fast?
e) decide on a style and STICK to it. The Central Valley/Bay-Delta controversy has changed so many times over the last week I’m still not sure where we are with it, but I think it’s changing anyway, to Central Valley and Bay-Delta, hyphen not endash. But this will have to be in the next draft. As it went to press it was Central Valley and Bay-Delta (endash).
f) When compiling styles for multiple documents be sure, always, to set them in the master document, not in satellites. I have a style called Appendix Chapter Title, appchtitle, appcht, and probably one other one. They all do more or less the same thing. More or less. The less part is going to harrass me for days.
During this past week I’ve hardly even read email, let alone read blogs. I hope to rectify this now.
I did hear from my sister about the legalization of gay marriage in Spain: GO SPAIN. Thirty years ago, when we lived there, a mere suspicion that someone was gay or lesbian was enough to land them in jail. Reading through the Spanish press subsequently the general tone seemed to be this: and you have a problem with this why, exactly?