I'm a lasagna boy!

Reading day

Engineers of Dreams
Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation
Vintage Book of Amnesia
The Secret Life of Lobsters
Locust

Of verbal raspberries

ah, Latin: here I was, thinking that it's only good for reading a Greek lexicon, while a humble Carmelite toils in obscurity to preserve the lingua franca of ancient courtesans and cheats:

Father Foster prizes simplicity. His office is as spare as his work clothes, which he buys while visiting relatives in the United States. It contains a table, a few books and a bonsai tree. A bottle of vermouth, which he occasionally sips while working. Across the hall is his manual typewriter. He dislikes computers, though he did provide Latin text for the screen of a Vatican Bank teller machine"

full text
VATICAN CITY — Let us now enter the inner sanctum of the Vatican. Walk past the Swiss Guards, up the marble stairways of the Apostolic Palace, through corridors adorned with wondrous Renaissance frescoes rarely glimpsed by outsiders, to a hushed spot near the residence of the pope himself.

There, in a small office, toils a plumber's son from Milwaukee with a shaved head, rascally sense of humor and fondness for janitor outfits that look as if they came from a J. C. Penney. (Which they did).

He is a Carmelite priest, but do not address him as father. The name's Reggie, as he is known to admirers around the world. Or perhaps Reginaldus.

Part ecclesiastical oddball, part inspirational educator, the Rev. Reginald Foster is a master classicist who has devoted his life to saving Latin from extinction. Not just quill-on-parchment Latin. The conversational Latin language of Cicero, wellspring of Western civilization and, at one time, mother tongue of the Roman Catholic Church.

It still is, technically, but in his 35 years as one of the Vatican's premier Latin translators, Father Foster has watched its role in the church wither. Church documents continue to be issued in Latin, but fewer and fewer priests know the language well, if at all.

Father Foster believes that Pope John Paul II and the church establishment no longer value Latin, and as a result are spurning two millenniums of tradition. Without Latin, how can anyone truly grasp St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas and Erasmus, not to mention Descartes and Newton and countless others who worked in the language? To those who carp about the language's difficulty, he retorts, "Every prostitute and bum in Rome knew Latin."

"The fact that you don't have Latin, you are just sitting out there in left field," he said in an interview in his office. "You have no sense of history, no sense of continuity."

"If you do Latin, all this other stuff is just peanuts," he said. "It's nonsense. If you do Latin well, Spanish and French, you can do that over the weekend. All these languages and all this culture came out of Latin, whether you like it or not."

Father Foster, 64, has immersed himself in Latin since he was a teenager at a Carmelite seminary in New Hampshire. He says he dreams in Latin, and considers it his first language.

As one of a handful of Vatican Latinists, he writes and translates a daily regimen of documents weighty and banal, from encyclicals to a recent congratulatory letter issued by the pope - Summus Pontifex Ioannes Paulus II - to the bishop of Rochester, Matthew Clark, on the 25th anniversary of his appointment. Most of his translations are into Latin from Italian, the Vatican's real lingua franca.

Father Foster prizes simplicity. His office is as spare as his work clothes, which he buys while visiting relatives in the United States. It contains a table, a few books and a bonsai tree. A bottle of vermouth, which he occasionally sips while working. Across the hall is his manual typewriter. He dislikes computers, though he did provide Latin text for the screen of a Vatican Bank teller machine.

His antics and candor have long exasperated his bosses, but he is apparently too valuable to be cast out. At least on the issue dear to him, he does not shy from criticizing the pope, who, he says, "uses Latin less than anyone in history.''

"The use of Latin in this pontificate has gone right down the drain," he laments.

It is Father Foster's outside work - teaching classes in Rome to clergy and laity - that has garnered him much of his acclaim. Alternately abrasive and endearing, he brings the language to life by drawing on works of titans like Ovid and Virgil, not grammar primers. Classics professors around the world send him students.

"You people have to learn these things, and pass on this flame of Latin," he exhorts his students at the Pontifical Gregorian University. While Latin is enduring or even thriving in academia, he worries that inside the church, he might not have successors. It matters little that a prominent cardinal recently ordered a commission to issue a report on how to improve Latin education in the church. It has all been done before, and amounted to little.

"We do not need any more documents or letters!" thundered Father Foster, whose oratories, whether in Latin or English, require a storehouse of exclamation points. (His many guffaws, grimaces and verbal raspberries are not so easily transcribable.)

There was a knock on the door from a fellow Latinist, this one wearing the more customary garb of a monk's brown habit. The two engaged in a rapid-fire exchange in Latin, causing the visitor to plumb his brain for any remnants of his high-school Latin. It seemed to be something about a routine papal letter. Or maybe plans for lunch.

Father Foster is not one of those ritual-clinging Roman Catholics who rail against the Second Vatican Council of the 1960's, which largely did away with the Latin Mass. He has nothing against the vernacular, and in some respects is theologically liberal.

He merely believes that the church should compel priests to study Latin extensively at seminary, and encourage the laity to learn Latin as part of religious schooling.

Father Foster dismisses as a sideshow recent Vatican attempts to invigorate interest in Latin by issuing dictionaries with newly coined words for modern concepts and things, like "escariorum lavator" for "dishwasher." Instead, he uses all of Italy as a teaching tool. On the Ides of March, he takes students to significant places in Julius Caesar's life, including the spot he was assassinated. "Oh, it's a glorious day!" Father Foster said.

"Latin is not going to die," he said. "There is so much interest - all outside the church!"

The classes are uplifting, some former students said. Gone is the old-style approach of relentlessly drilling pupils in declensions ("hic, haec, hoc") and their ilk.

"For me, the big revelation was this idea that Latin could become part of your living life, and you could have friends to whom you could speak only Latin," said Leah Whittington, 24, a Latin teacher at the Nightingale-Bamford private school in Manhattan.

Her boyfriend, John Kuhner, 28, who is writing a Latin textbook based on Father Foster's methods, said the priest was driven by fear of the language's demise.

Back at his office, Father Foster was asked how the Vatican could rescue Latin. He pecked an answer on his typewriter: "Exemplo non documento est linguae Latinae inculcandus usus," which means, he said, "The Latin language should be encouraged by example, not by a document."

He yanked the paper out. The pope, he said, "should stand up at the United Nations and speak Latin. And say, "If you don't understand this, it's too bad, jack!' "

Then he sighed. He was not optimistic.

Even at the Vatican, he said, when the pope leads senior church figures in the Lord's Prayer in Latin, after "Pater Noster," their voices often descend into mumbles.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Bedbugs and

BALLYHOO

A free show given outside a sideshow to attract a crowd (a 'tip') of potential patrons. Word came into being at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The fakirs, gun spinners and dancing girls from the Middle East that were working at the Streets of Cairo pavilion spoke no English, only Arabic. The interpreters used the expression "Dehalla Hoon" to call performers outside to the show fronts. The Western ears of the pavilion manager, W. O. Taylor, mistook it as 'ballyhoo' and used it when the interpreters were away for lunch. The phrase was picked up by the other showmen working at the fair and was spread throughout the outdoor show business industry.

A-propos of the 1893 Exposition, a few months ago I devoured Erik Larson's wonderfully-written Devil in the White City, the story of a greedy and cruel 'doctor' in the heady days of Chicago's Columbian Exposition. I later lived for two years facing the Midway Plaisance, part of the beautiful areas of Chicago constructed for the Expo.

Heroic and extraordinary

This traversal in the Massif Central of southern France lays claim to the title of tallest bridge. The Millau bridge was constructed by Eiffage and designed by Sir Norman Foster, it stretches 2500m across the Tarn valley; its pillars will reach a height exceeding the 343m of the Eiffel Tower.

Written on the walls

... long have I sought to build a site like grafitti.org. Curiously, there's not (yet!) a Walls/US/San Francisco section.

When you come to a fork in the road ...

Reports of larceny in the 'hood abound: this morning we walked in to Coopers and greeted Peter, only to hear the startling story of how his bicycle was parted in five minutes. He arrived to open the shop at 6h10, and locked his 26" BMX -style cruiser to a street sign immediately outside the shop. Eight minutes later he looked up from his preparations and saw that the front wheel, fork, and sundry parts had been stripped off the chromed bike.
Bicycle thieves in this neighbourhood congregate, ironically, in the Duboce Bikeway, between the U.S. Mint and the urban strip mall. Shopping carts full of bike parts litter the narrow path.
Peter said that he accosted a raggamuffin who was loitering nearby; the kid said that yeah, he saw someone around ten minutes ago, he could maybe find out something.
Why a fork? Taking the fork has destroyed the use value of the bicycle -- Peter's transportation -- and will have very low resale value. Goddam junkys.

Pirates of the Malaccas

Reading Giles Milton's account of the bloody Spice Wars, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. His loose collection of anecdotes prevents the book from being a strong history, but some of the anecdotes relate very exciting incidents from the struggle amongst the feckless Dutch, cunning Portuguese, and desperate British.

During this time of intrepid, daring, and stupid exploration, the Dutch innvoated map-making technology. Today,
this online mapping tool produces interactive maps (with nearby transit stops marked!) for almost any address in the European Union.

James Lancaster, who inadevertently created the trading triangle between England, Gujarat, and the Spice Islands when he pillaged Portuguese carracks in the Indian Ocean, ran into weather on his return to England:

Even Lancaster felt the end was near. Descending into his cabin, he penned a letter to the Company in London, a letter whose unfailing spirit would become legendary among the sailors of the East India Company. 'I cannot tell where you should looke for me,' he wrote, 'because I live at the devotion of the winds and seas.' And then, sending the letter over to the Hector, he hade her head for England leaving his own ship to her fate. The Hector's captain refused and shadowed the Red Dragon until the storm finally abated. And so, side by side, the ships sailed first to St Helena and then into the English Channel.

When the adventurer Wm. Hawkins arrived in Gujarat to arrange English trading rights, he found strong pro-Portuguese sentiment, backed by Shah Jehangir's official pact with Portugal.

Hawkins was annoyed but placed his trust in tact and diplomacy. He sent a polite but firm letter to the Portuguese command reminding him that their two countries were at peace and asking that 'he release my men and goods, for that we were Englishmen.' The commander was in no mood to be lenient and sent Hawkins a return letter 'vilely abusing His Majesty [King James I] terming him King of Fishermen, and of an island of no import'. Worse still, he described Hawkins as 'a fart for his commision'.

Were the book more well-written (it's not, as the dust jacket claims, a "modern-day Robert Louis Stevenson"), then the story of the lone Englishman, eponymous Nathaniel Courthope, who held off the formidable Dutch for four years, might be more exciting. As two-thirds of the pages lead up to the res, and the connexion between Nathaniel and the treaties is never clearly drawn, the book reads like a second-rate high-school essay. And it lacks commas (which perhaps Adam Gopnik could spare from his best-selling "From Paris to the Moon," which I haven't read; the first sentence put me off horribly).

Like Mercator

This online mapping tool produces interactive maps (with nearby transit stops marked!) for almost any address in the European Union.

Library of babel

I'm working on a bibliography of books about bridges.

inquotes

Syntax and semiotics are sciences, and Bob the Angry Flower is our relict, at least when it comes to the inappropriate use of quotation marks, apostrophes, and possessives (or should I write possessive's?).

Spotted this stern warning on a van in Camden Town.

Yo fixie!

A commercial for Nike shows Lance Armstrong speeding past a diesel engine, a herd of buffalo, and a pack of San Francisco messengers.

Decaying machinery

Photographs of urban decaying mechinery in the sublime Forgotten Substations and Eliza.

Errare humanum est

The collapse of the new terminal 2E at Paris' Charles de Gaulle must teach us lessons: we learn from the structural failures more than from our successes.
This is the moral of Henry Petroski's excellent To Engineer is Human, in which he makes this point again and again. We must learn from this mistakes, further our understanding of structures and their failure modes.
Another, more technical book on this same topic is Mario G. Salvadori's Why Buildings Stand Up; of course, when his grandmother saw the book, she said, "It'd be much more interesting to read about why buildings fall down, so he (with Matthys Levy) wrote about that, too.

The Kansas City hotel disaster which figures prominently into Salvadori's and Petroski's writing also forms the plot of Paul Auster's recent Oracle Night.

The tube-obsessed engineers who constructed CdG's new terminal attempted something revolutionary; the unfortunate aspect was that the structure was heavily-used and very public. To construct a tunnel in the open air, without the natural forces of the enclosing ground, is audacious.

Anchoas

This isn't some kind of metaphor

Prayer To God from the album 1000 Hurts by Shellac

Listening to "History Lesson - Part II" by Minutemen.

Round up the usury suspects

Heard Muhammad Yunus, the Bengali economist and founder of Grameen Bank, speak today.

His autobiography, Banker to the Poor, touches on Bangladesh's historical patriarchy, terrible fight for independence, and periodic natural disaster as sources of its contemporary poverty.
Yunus is plain-spoken and inspirational: in fact, many of his stories sound too good to be true. While the economic ideas behind the bank are revolutionary, the social aspect is rooted in an almost unbelievable faith in human nature. But it works, and has worked for almost three decades; moreover, the system of microcredit he pioneered has been implemented in dozens of countries and cultures worldwide.

Shifting gears

Events rolled neatly one into th' other today. Got up and rolled out down Market St., expecting to see crowds for San Francisco's Bike-to-Work Day. I grabbed a banana and a sticker, chin-wagged with a few cyclists, and then scooted down to the Embarcadero BART station.
The motto for the event was "Shift Gears, Bike to Work". I was riding the trusty ol' Dutchess.
A volunteer for the SFBC tried to get me to sign something in favour of the Jefferson St. transit plan. He was surprised to hear me offer an objection ("There's another point of view?" he asked naïvely, disingenuously, stupidly). I jumped down into the Embarcadero BART station, where I met up with Peter; we rode down to the Union City station, met up with Lupe, and then rode through the baylands, over the Dumbarton, and through the bird preserve in to work.

The power of independent trucking

After about two hours of steadily pounding the keys yesterday, I took off my headphones and wondered why I was feeling so energetically angry. And then I looked at the iPod and realised that I'd been listening to a mix called "Surgically Precise" full of Shellac and Big Black. And I've got the 8-track playing really fucking loud. The mix also has a song ("Il Duce") from one of the very first CDs I bought: The Wailing Ultimate. I got it from the Phantom of the Attic back when they sold vinyl as well as comix.

Independent truckers in the Bay Area are on strike to protest rising gas prices (an increased monthly expense of $1500).

Me, I'm a-lying on my back enjoying the sunshine. To-morrow is Bike-to-work Day.

The Boxer of Berkeley

Jen and Pete complete their domestication trifecta with Maxx, the handsome four-year old boxer they rescued.

Because they were squirrels

While waiting on the Palo Alto platform for the 20h21 northbound Caltrain, a tattooed youngish man rolled up on a tricked-out downhill bike. We were talking about how or why the train was late ("possibly because they're testing new electronic switches," offered a cheerful German riding a bike-boom Fuji). The very shaved-scalp young man wandered around the platform. "That's your bike?" he asked. "That's sick!" and I felt a swelling of pride.
On the train he and the German talked triathalon ("You swam Escape from Alcatraz in 40 minutes? That's sick!"), and I saw jimg climb on board at the San Mateo stop. He had been counting on the train running a few minutes late. We rode back to the Lower Haight together.

Today was a good day and a bad day for trains. Caltrain has enjoyed successful tests of its new "Baby Bullet" high-speed Peninsula rail service; but the long-rumoured high-speed rail from North to South is stuck on the siding.

Poop-powered and then some

While organic dairyman Albert Straus fixes up the masses of manure into useable energy on his Marin County farm, the entire country of Denmark hopes to be fossil-fuel free by 2008.

California has invested $10 million in a program to explore the use of biogas, primarily through methane-digesting systems such as the one in use at the Straus dairy:

The tax incentives of the late 1970's and early 1980's encouraged the construction of approximately 18 commercial farm scaled digesters for energy production in California. Only 5 of those systems are running today and 3 of these are on pig farms and 2 of these are on dairy farms. Only 0.37 MW of power is generated from existing 5 digesters in CA although the total potential for animal waste to energy in California dairies is over 105 MW. Energy can be produced from different types of livestocks including dairy, swine, poultry, turkeys and sheep and lambs wastes in California. California dairies have 1.4 million milk cows and is the second leading state in total number of milk cows. There are 2,308 dairy farms in California with an average size of 602 cows. Currently, only less than 1 percent of the livestock manure generated in CA is utilized.

The demand for their real happiness

Published: May 15, 2004

To the Editor:

The Mormon student at the University of Utah who was forced out of a theater program after refusing to read a script containing profanity is wrong to suggest that the university violated her constitutional right of free exercise of religion (Religion Journal, May 8). The student could have dropped the class if she was offended by it, or she could have gone to a private school organized around her religious beliefs.

Public universities have a constitutional duty not to tailor their curriculums to religious dogma. A student who takes a geology class and writes on the final exam that the earth is only 6,000 years old is probably going to fail the class, even if the student insists that being compelled to give any other answer would force her to renounce her religious beliefs.

DAVID R. DOW
Houston, May 8, 2004
The writer is a professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

La vomitera

Un altre conte fantàstic sense cap relació amb la realitat real... Aquesta setmana un virus m'ha destorbat la digestió, m'ha... (comentaris: 2) [Sarcophilus.blog]

m4d sk1llz but l33t to the game

I blame Aram for getting l33t speak into my craw. Then again, I also have him (or the most eligible bachelor in Chicago) to blame^W credit with the introduction of Röyksopp into my video and audio life.

This photograph is kind of hippie bling, I suppose:

A subway named möbius

Many years ago, I read a collection of science-fiction short stories that included A J Deutsch's "A Subway Named Möbius:" in this story, a new addition to the Boston T resulted in a topological anomaly, and the train carriages went missing on the track.

An Argentinian crew moved the story to the labyrinthine subway of Buenos Aires; I can't find this on disc, though.

... this seems to be the most popular story associated with the author; it turns up all over the web, but very little else does!

For the what now?

yesterday I got the word nonce in my noggin.
Does nonce have a notion of ephemeral tucked into it? What of the gentle decay of the moment? The decay of machinery?

The oracle of MUNI

For the second day in a row, I found myself waiting inordinately long for the J-Church. An older man resignedly said that he'd been waiting quite some time: "The trains come every thirty minutes now. This used to be a good line."

Despite the uncanny predictions of NextBus, the J hasn't shown up according to schedule three of the last three occasions I've waited for it; today when we finally boarded (based on predictions obtained at 0800, three J cars should have passed by), the carriage was jammed. A lot of the passengers were students, wearing signs in memoriam Ray Ray.

The Dude abides.

Heading down to the ol' corporate shuttle (as the steelworkers had the inclines, so have we our company transport), I hopped on the J-Church. For the second time in as many weeks, the driver had taped newspaper over the window and pulled it to: the fare-box was broken. Unsurprisingly, because the guy who repairs them was indicted for pilfering last week.

On return trip, I jumped over to the ever-expanding BART and promptly ran into Celeste, who was riding a bicycle saved from my basement (she has recently added a spiffy new saddle). Then I walked up to the front car and saw Anna!

And the whole excursion took us over to Chez Shumariley, where we, along with Jender and He-Who-Is-Full-of-Wrath, took in The Big Lebowski. Although I still don't care for the movie, I did enjoy hearing The Monks as background music in one of the early bowling scenes. This led me to a side-trip through the M section of the ol' iPod: The Minutemen ("West Germany"), Mission of Burma ("This is Not a Photograph"), and, of course, Modest Mouse ("Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset"). How full of vitriol the Ms are!

A matched control subject

The subject of a landmark case in scientific ethics as well as the physiological basis of
sexual identity died last week.

May 12, 2004
David Reimer, 38, Subject of the John/Joan Case, Dies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WINNIPEG, Manitoba, May 11 — David Reimer, a man who was born a boy but
raised as a girl in a famous medical experiment, only to reassert his
male identity in the last 20 years of his life, died on May 4. He was
38. His family says he committed suicide.

Mr. Reimer shared his story about his life in the pages of a book and
on Oprah Winfrey's television show.

His mother, Janet Reimer, said she believed that her son would still be
alive had it not been for the devastating experiment, which led to much
emotional hardship.

"He managed to have so much courage," she said Sunday. "I think he felt
he had no options. It just kept building up and building up."

After a botched circumcision operation when he was a toddler, David
Reimer became the subject of a study that became known as the John/Joan
case in the 60's and 70's. His mother said she was still angry with the
Baltimore doctor who persuaded her and her husband, Ron, to give female
hormones to their son and raise him as a daughter.

As he grew up as Brenda in Winnipeg, he faced cruelty from the other
children. "They wouldn't let him use the boys' washroom or the girls',"
Ms. Reimer recalled. "He had to go in the back alley."

His sexual reassignment was then widely reported as a success and proof
that children are not by nature feminine or masculine but through
nurture are socialized to become girls or boys. David's identical twin
brother, Brian, offered researchers a matched control subject.

But when, as a teenager, he discovered the truth about his past , he
resumed his male identity, eventually marrying and becoming a
stepfather to three children.

In 2000, John Colapinto wrote "As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was
Raised as a Girl," providing David an opportunity to tell his story. He
wanted to save other children from a similar fate, his mother said.

While he had spoken anonymously in the past, he entered the public eye
after the book was published, beginning with an appearance on "Oprah"
in February 2000.

His mother said he had recently become depressed after losing his job
and separating from his wife. He was also still grieving over the death
of his twin brother two years earlier, she said.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Togs

Do the clothes make the man? Today I'm wearing socks with a warthog on a fixie and a t-shirt with a buffalo

+

An empty space, or a missing part?

lacunary appeared as a predicate adjective at work today, but I didn't realise that the term applies more commonly to mathematical problems than to linguistic.

Everything comes together this summer

The San Francisco Chronicle issued a warning about "licker" shock: the rising price of ice cream.

Blame it on bad timing. A combination of political unrest and natural disasters overseas, and fluctuations in the dairy industry in this country has left ice cream manufacturers grappling with higher prices for key ingredients including milk, vanilla and cocoa.

For instance, a pint of Ben-and-Jerry's is going to cost eight percent more. And a multipack of Klondike bars will cost about ten cents more.

Massachusetts-based Friendly's ice cream chain cut its half-gallon tub from 64 ounces to 56 ounces earlier this year ... and it just increased its retail prices by five percent.

www.sfgate.com Return to regular view

DIET: Higher prices may cause ``licker shock'' at the ice cream stands this summer
J.M. HIRSCH, Associated Press Writer
Monday, May 10, 2004
©2004 Associated Press

URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/05/10/financial1511EDT0163.DTL

(05-10) 12:11 PDT (AP) --

Already staggering from sticker shock at the gas pump, consumers may suffer "licker shock" at the ice cream stand this summer when they see some of the industry's biggest price hikes ever.

Blame it on bad timing. A combination of political unrest and natural disasters overseas, and fluctuations in the dairy industry in this country has left ice cream manufacturers grappling with higher prices for key ingredients including milk, vanilla and cocoa.

"I have been in this industry for nearly 20 years and I have never seen all of these things come together at one time," said Lynda Utterback, executive director of the National Ice Cream Retailers Association.

Although large manufacturers can absorb some of the higher production costs, consumers can still expect to pay more for everything from pints in the grocery store to cones at the stand and push-pops off the truck.

How much more? Estimates vary from 6 percent to as much as 20 percent or more, depending on region and product.

A pint of Ben & Jerry's is going up 8 percent, the most in the company's 26 years. Klondike bars will cost 10 cents more per multipack, according to manufacturer Good Humor-Breyers Ice Cream.

The rising prices also are accelerating a recent trend -- companies shrinking packages but keeping prices the same in what effectively is a net price increase. In January, Wilbraham, Mass.-based Friendly's rolled out its 56-ounce half-gallon tub -- down from the standard 64 ounces -- and this month increased its retail prices by 5 percent.

Consumers irritated by the increase aren't likely to find much relief, said Danielle Tirrell, manager of Arnie's Place ice cream stand in Concord, N.H., where the price of a regular cone is up 20 cents from last year to $2.35 and may go higher.

"Every once in a while I hear someone say, 'Wow, that's expensive,"' she said. "I've had one guy say 'Your prices are up over last year. I'm going to go someplace else.' Well, you can go someplace else, but their prices will be up, too."

Retail and restaurant ice cream make up a $20 billion business in the United States, where nearly 1.6 billion gallons are produced each year, according to Bob Yonkers, chief economist for the International Dairy Foods Association.

The average person eats 26 servings of ice cream a year, according to The NPD Group, a market research firm.

Until recently, the price of ice cream was moderated by a glut of milk. But low prices drove many farmers from the industry, and those who remain have fewer cattle following a mad cow-induced ban on importing them from Canada.

This year, demand is up and farmers can't keep pace. That's driving up the cost of the milk and butterfat needed to make ice cream, Yonkers said.

The industry also is squeezed by vanilla prices, Utterback said. A series of cyclones that hit Madagascar in recent years damaged much of the vanilla crop, driving the price per gallon for vanilla syrup from $75 to between $400 and $800.

And cocoa prices are up about $1 a pound because political unrest in the Ivory Coast -- where roughly 40 percent of the world's cocoa crop is grown -- drove many farmers from their lands, she said. The jump in prices is the highest in 17 years.

Many in the ice cream industry have some consolation in the fact that it's early in the season, and therefore easier to post higher prices than it would be during the summer.

"Once it's out on the street it's very, very hard to raise prices. A child comes out one day and it's $1. The next day it's $1.25. That just doesn't work," said Steve Feldman, owner of Houston-based Southern Ice Cream Corp.

Utterback is optimistic about sales. She said ice cream generally is protected by the comfort food factor -- when the economy is bad, ice cream sales go up.

Although the price increase is painful, some manufacturers say dairy farmers are long overdue for a break.

"Obviously we're concerned, but our main concern is for the small family farms and making sure they can make a livable wage," said Chrystie Heimert, spokeswoman for Ben & Jerry's.

But people like Nick Nikbakht, owner of San Jose, Calif.-based Golden State Ice Cream, wonder how long they can hold on. His company supplies ice cream to those iconic trucks that jingle their way through neighborhoods

He said he can't pass on the price increase to the trucks' owners, who also are feeling pinched by gas prices.

"The bottom line is they will not like it and they will just complain a lot and they won't be able to absorb all the increases," Nikbakht said. "We have to absorb it and hope the price will stabilize."

So what's an ice cream lover facing a long hot summer to do? Debbie Carpenter, a Concord, N.H., woman who recently treated her 4-year-old son to an ice cream at Arnie's, said the prices mean choosing where, not whether.

"It's ridiculous," she said. "You can go to the market and buy a half-gallon for the same price as a small (cone)."

©2004 Associated Press

Pile-up at Church and Duboce

Where is the Church on Church St.? And what happened to the N-Judah this morning? Just before 0800, a 2-car N stopped outside the Market Street Subway entrance and sat there for several minutes. The next warning came from the destination sign: it started rolling towards "J" and then "F" and finally came to rest nowhere in particular.
Two 2-car trains stacked up between the Duboce Park station and the intersection(*) of Sanchez/Steiner and Duboce; another two Ns were stopped between there and Church. Automotive traffic was not pleased: another reason for a transit-first policy on this stretch.

Old Men Who Get Fat In The Winter

A 50-year old mustachioed man, wearing shorts with the motto "Ride to Eat / Eat to Ride" ("It was a Father's Day gift from my wife," he said. "She thought it was a joke." I nodded knowingly), told me that the railroad right-of-way from Samuel P. Taylor out to Point Reyes Station will be made accessible as a bicycle path sometime this summer.
Perfect for a summer weekend ride: spend the night out at a B&B, and then bike back the next day.

The Lake Project

Some sculptors (photographers?) have an obsession with interpreting the implications of environmental degradation.

Like the Spiral Jetty, the physical evolution of the piece is important; as with Andy Goldsworthy, photography is integral.

May 9, 2004
Hell From the Air: California's Toxic Landscape
By AMEI WALLACH
`David Maisel: The Lake Project'
James Nicholson Gallery, 49 Geary Street,
San Francisco. Through May 29.

SAUSALITO, Calif.

RIDING in a steeply banking Cessna four-seater three years ago, David Maisel leaned out into a clamorous, icy wind and photographed the toxic, desiccated surface of Owens Lake. "You feel like you're descending into these layers of hell," he says of the plane's dive from 3,500 feet. "You're a disembodied eye and the lake bed has this corporeal aspect. It's like a body that has undergone surgery, with red veins that seem internal."

As Mr. Maisel renders it, the lake, which has been drained over the last 90 years to green the lawns and ice the whiskeys of Los Angeles, looks scourged and flayed. The red veins are concentrations of bacteria and minerals, making the Owens Valley in southeastern California the country's largest source of particulate-matter pollution when the winds blow. Local residents call the relentless clouds of cadmium, chromium, arsenic, chlorine and iron the "Keeler cloud" in honor of a small settlement at the edge of the lake best known from Roman Polanski's 1974 film "Chinatown."

In Mr. Maisel's photos, the vistas are majestic, terrifying and weirdly beautiful. They seem more intimate than microscopic data, vaster than extraterrestrial space. They are on view at the James Nicholson Gallery in San Francisco and have just been published in "David Maisel: The Lake Project," by Nazraeli Press.

Mr. Maisel, 43, belongs to a growing category of photographers — like Richard Misrach, Edward Burtynsky and Emmet Gowin — obsessed with interpreting the implications of environmental degradation, often seen from the air. (A more romanticized version of the form was popularized by the French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand's traveling international outdoor exhibition and book, "Earth From Above.")

Mr. Maisel was a student at Princeton when he helped Mr. Gowin photograph the aftermath of the Mount St. Helens eruption. He compares his own work to the apocalyptic, mythological landscapes of Anselm Kiefer. Like Mr. Kiefer's paintings, which draw the viewer into a contemplation of history, "The Lake Project" implicates both photographer and viewer in the horror and beauty of what they see. "I want the images to be troubling," Mr. Maisel said recently in his studio here. "You're seduced by the incredible images and their strange unworldly beauty, and then you find out what they're about and you're betrayed. It parallels the ways we are seduced as a contemporary society into believing that how we live doesn't matter."

After graduate school in architecture and landscape architecture at Harvard, he photographed Rocky Mountain copper mines "and the whole miasma of destruction associated with the process," as he put it. But when he processed the film, he found himself unwilling to play the blame game. "Who am I to criticize?" he asked. "I live in the 20th century. I have copper rivets on my jeans." So he dropped the give-away titles, like "Cyanide Leaching Fields," and began numbering his images, so that their hallucinogenic mystery would take precedence. The specifics of environmental decimation, along with images from his many photographic series, are available on his Web site, www.davidmaisel.com.

But the images never entirely resolved into abstract form. "It occurred to me that I could be taking pictures of my studio floor," he said, lifting a foot off the red-stained concrete that was scored with lines left by the glue that once secured linoleum tiles. "It does look like something I would shoot," he noted. "But to me it would be meaningless. There is a way that I'm trying to move back and forth between the content and the process of abstraction, where the image alone can take you in and you can respond to it as metaphor."

He first photographed Owens Lake on Sept. 5 and 6, 2001, concentrating on the creases of salt that ruptured the shallow pools of blood-red bacteria. After Sept. 11, he didn't want to look at those pictures so connected in his mind to the bloodshed in New York, where he grew up. When he returned to the project in 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency had begun flooding the lake to control the polluting clouds of minerals. He started to feel that he was viewing a process of artificial resuscitation, as if the lake were a body under a surgeon's knife. His mother had died in 1998 after a succession of heart operations, and he said he equated his photography to "an autopsy, with the idea that you can assemble the parts of a body and think you might actually reveal a whole person."

Geometry, however, remains the more prevalent theme in his work. It emerges in his latest project, "Terminal Mirage," which chronicles the Great Salt Lake and the re-emergence of Robert Smithson's earth sculpture, "Spiral Jetty." In one extraordinary photograph, the jetty is a diminutive line of coiling white, like a drawing that dissolves into stained washes of amethyst and Pompeiian red.

"I used to make imaginary drawings that were like these images — it's in my brain, and it has to come out one way or another," Mr. Maisel said, lifting photograph after photograph out of a box. "With this new body of work, I don't feel the burden of the history of Owens Lake or the death of my mother." He closed the box. "I'm much more free," he said. "I'm tempted to draw again."

The art critic Amei Wallach has written for Art in America, ArtNews and The Nation.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Adventures in larceny

An early morning: as Anna and I were walking down to Kate's to meet Aram and MD MD, they rang up: "The Kate's doesn't open until 830." So we agreed to detour to Cooper's, where we sat outside an enjoyed the first cup of coffee.

Over a plate of the Fruit Orgy, I wondered what would remind me of my love for this country. Aram promptly said, "The Minutemen." They wrote songs that expressed quiet optimism, while acknowledging the frustration of the Reagan era.

Anna had a soccer game: we walked over to her apartment to pick up her gear on the way to the Polo Fields. Her apartment building has a locked iron grate, and a locked inner door: we passed through these and traipsed up the stairs. On the landing of the third floor, I saw a new-looking pair of Camper trainers. How odd, I remarked. As we approached the door of her apartment she stopped short. Her smelly turf shoes were gone. The shinguards remained, but someone had just absconded with her Adidas (and left their Campers in exchange, apparently).
Perhaps this was a blessing in disguise: after Anna put up a very polite sign asking if someone had taken (she didn't write 'stolen') the shoes, she grabbed her cleats -- fortunately, Saturday was a nice day and the game was out-of-doors, so the loss of the turf shoes was a big irritation but not catastrophic to enjoying the day's game -- and scooted over to the playing field. I rode over to meet her. While the team were playing (and they won, 1-0), I chatted with another cyclist. Upon hearing the story of the purloined sneaks, he said, "You should go over to the Sports Basement, where my best friend works. You can't miss him: he's got a beard out to here."
And indeed, we went down to the shop looking out on Crissy Field, and Anna got a very comfortable ("better than the Adidas!") pair of turf shoes. And then we got ice cream, dipped in chocolate.

Shakes alive!

While sitting at home this evening, I felt a minor quake centered near San Simeon.

Respect to Studio One!

Legendary Jamaican record producer Coxsone Dodd died this week.

A few weeks ago, Brentford Road in Kingston was renamed in his honour.

May 6, 2004

Coxsone Dodd, 72, Pioneer of the Jamaican Pop Music Scene, Dies
By KELEFA SANNEH

Coxsone Dodd, the record producer and entrepreneur who helped invent the Jamaican music industry, died on Tuesday night at his studio in Kingston. He was 72.

The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter Carol Dodd.

Mr. Dodd was best known as the force behind Studio One, a record label he started in 1963; in the years that followed, Studio One released some of the most influential and enduring Jamaican records of all time. His popular tracks were endlessly recycled and rerecorded, often without his knowledge or permission, in a musical tradition built on borrowing and collaborating.

Mr. Dodd ran a record shop on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, Coxsone's Music City. But he maintained his studio in Kingston, on a street known until recently as Brentford Road. During a ceremony held last Friday, Brentford Road was renamed Studio One Boulevard.

Two days before the ceremony, Mr. Dodd told The Jamaica Observer, "It is a wonderful tribute to my contribution to the industry and my years in the business and it shows that my work is highly appreciated."

Clement Dodd was born in Kingston and he began his career in the mid-1950's when he set up his own sound system. Sir Coxsone's Downbeat, as it was called, was his entry in the competition among other Jamaican sound systems to see who had the loudest speakers, who could get the best records and who could attract the most revelers.

He was among the first to realize that instead of importing American R & B records, it might be more profitable to produce some Jamaican originals; soon, Jamaican records were outselling American imports.

At one point, Mr. Dodd was running no fewer than five record labels, including Studio One, and he assembled a remarkable roster of talent that included the Wailers, Bob Marley's first group, who released their hit "Simmer Down" on Studio One in 1963.

Soon ska, the sweet and up-tempo Jamaican style that dominated the early 1960's, gave way to the styles called rocksteady and then reggae, each slower and tougher than its predecessor.

Mr. Dodd kept pace, thanks in large part to session musicians like the keyboardist Jackie Mittoo and the bassist Leroy Sibbles.

In the late 1960's, Studio One created a series of rhythm tracks, or "riddims," that would serve as the foundations of songs for decades to come. A 1967 instrumental track called "Real Rock," for example, quickly came to seem like part of reggae's DNA, as successive generations of singers and producers reworked the track.

Mr. Dodd's daughter Carol remembers that the ubiquity of Studio One tracks like "Real Rock" was a mixed blessing for her father, who wasn't always compensated, or even acknowledged.

Even as it made him proud, she said, he was concerned that he wasn't given credit.

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Dodd is survived by six other children and by his wife, Norma Dodd.

The reggae historian Rob Kenner, editor at large for Vibe magazine, compared Studio One to pioneering American labels like Stax Records. "The Studio One sound is kind of like Stax," he said. "It never gets exhausted."

Mr. Dodd never fully embraced dance-hall reggae, the computerized, heavily percussive, sometimes-foul-mouthed style that has ruled reggae since the early 1980's.

But he kept working, dividing his time between Kingston and Brooklyn while working on the Sisyphean task of figuring out exactly who owned the rights to which records. Just as Mr. Dodd claimed that lots of latter-day producers used his music without permission, some of the musicians who worked for him claimed that they had not been fairly compensated.

But Chris Wilson of Heartbeat Records, who collaborated with Mr. Dodd on a series of releases and reissues, notes that Mr. Dodd was, above all, pleased to see that his music had stayed so fresh.

Mr. Wilson said, "He was kind of amused by the fact that some of his songs are 25 or 30 years old and people were still, for the umpteenth time, rerecording them."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Lime in the cocoa-nut?

I am re-reading Robert Kanigel's evocative biography of Srinivas Ramanujan The Man Who Knew Infinity.

Amongst the thrilling problems presented in the text is the case of the guavas and the monkey:

"Two monkeys having robbed an orchard of 3 times as many plantains as guavas, are about to begin their feast when they espy the injured owner of the fruits stealthily approaching with a stick. They calculate that it will take him 2 ¹/₄ minutes to reach them. One monkey who can eat 10 guavas per minute finishes them in ²/₃ of the time, and then helps the other to eat the plantains. They finish just in time. If the first monkey eats plantains twice as fast as guavas, how fast can the second monkey eat plantains?"

Meanwhile, in the practical aspects of mathematics: I attended a talk by Raissa D'Souza, a statistical physicist who studies organic networks:

locality = decentralized control self-organization: scalable growth, grow indefinitely without need for additional controls

fluctuation: distribution of tasks and load; of data and processing;

Preferential attachment:
Zipf's law, power -law distribution
Zipf 1949

Polya 1923 "Attractiveness is proportional to size"
dP(s)/dt [alpha] s

One of the slides she presented was based on statistical collection of sexual contact in Co Springs!

fertile vertices
Nash eqm (network game theory)
sortative vs assortative mixing (M E J Newman Phys. Rev. Lett, 2002 UMich)

immunization models vs network topology

Small World Networks:

model power graphs on a taurus / tauroid, not a square / cube

Catalans and bears, oh my!

Perhaps not as graphically compelling as one of my all-time favourite links, the On-Line Encyclopedia
of Integer Sequences sports a spiffy "webcam" for examining sequences in the database.
Spiffy sequence of the day, although with a misnomer:

The Catalan sequence was first described in the 18th century by Leonhard Euler, who was interested in the number of different ways of dividing a polygon into triangles. The sequence is named after Eugène Charles Catalan, who discovered the connection to parenthesized expressions.

A modern-day Robin Hood

A MUNI repairman has been charged with stealing from the fare-box to the tune of at least $80,000. He also has "a bank account in his native country of Malta."
Matier and Ross also report:

Speaking of Muni: Muni riders have been catching an odd sight these days -- Willie Brown riding the bus.
The 1-California bus, from his Nob Hill apartment down to his new Embarcadero office.
Reason: "Have you seen how much parking costs in this town?" the former mayor asked. "They want $40 a day -- $53 with in-and-out privileges.''

What a day to be eating a lasagne!

Plaque honors the man.

Name an airport after me!

For king and country

I'm trying to figure out whether I have to show up at the Superior Court on Monday: I received a summons for Jury Duty in the City and County of San Francisco. The phone system tells me (after I key in 1,1,1,my juror badge #, and 1 to confirm) that "No-one is available to take your call. The next time Jury Clerks will be available is May 3rd at 8:00 AM".
And the web site doesn't offer an interface to this information.

Who da man?

ADDENDUM: According to Google, Tilney da man. What timing.