I'm a lasagna boy!

See me upside-down.

357 gallons of water; 168 double espressos; 55 cappucinos, with all that foam; 10 caffés latte.

136 shots of bourbon; 3-plus gallons of whisk(e)y, and a daily Imperial of beer; 15 occasions on which I drank a quart* at Zeitgeist; and a sobering 22 Bloody Marys.
* or several.

279 bananas (but never more than one each day); 68 snacks with brie; 128 days (!!) on which I ate pizza.

Roasted chicken, potatoes (russet, Idaho, red, purple, gold, and new), tomatoes, red peppers, garlic, cashews, portabella mushrooms, eggplant, peanuts, shiitake mushrooms, veal, fennel, almonds, sunflower kernels, sunchokes, zucchini, lamb ribs, muscovy duck, shallots, clams, beef tenderloin, squash, pecans, goose.

Mango hot sauce, pickle, chutney, jerky, sorbet, smoothie, guacamole, sushi roll, hot sauce, salsa, cheesecake.

Chocolate mint cookie, cardamom, dutch chocolate, mint chocolate-chip, chocolate fudge brownie, chocolate-chip cookie dough, coffee cookie dream, chocolate fudge chunk, chocolate-chip, vanilla, chocolate, coffee crunch, hulksicle, coffee cookie chunk, chocolate almond fudge, industrial chocolate, swiss mocha, Bailey's, chocfolate almond fudge, Cherry Garcia, brazilian coffee chip, Rocky Road.

Still life with dogs.

While gambolling through the 'hood this morning, saw a tow-truck pulling an out-of-state car away from the kerb on Haight St. Much to my surprise, two dogs were still inside; the meter maid, unaffected, said that they'd be taken to the pound. A woman rushed out of the café across the street and said that the car had been parked in the same spot for a couple of days, dogs and all; she managed to unlock the car door and let the two dogs (a huge black lab and a cheery golden retriever, both healthy-looking if somewhat stir-crazy) out. She took them for a walk; they were champing at the bit, eager to not be in the car.
The tow truck drew away a moment later, unrepentant, taking the car to the City Tow.

Walked through the park to the California Academy of Sciences, which is presently moving digs to Howard St. The Concourse at Golden Gate park is being torn up (again), and the cherished pedestrian underpasses, home to many a saxphonist's rehearsal, will be filled with cars and a parking garage.
Saw the beautiful Skulls exhibit, in which I learned that the halibut is born with eyes one on each side of its head, but that ultimately both end up on the same side.

Anna sez, "Eyes on the side / I like to hide / Eyes in front / I like to hunt".

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Gettin' stoopid, winter-stylee.

Thanks to a lunch-time visit to Citizen Cake, a rare treat, I discovered a delicious new concoction: spiced cider with bourbon! It's tastier than eggnog, even!

Bring some cider to boil, add clove, cinnamon, a sprinkle of allspice if you'd like, and fill a mug three-quarters full with the frothing cider. Top with bourbon and garnish with a cinnamon stick. Retire to the stoop and enjoy San Francisco in the winter-time! Guaranteed to keep the rain out.

On the street in the 'hood.

Today I was walking back from the coffee shop, and saw a man standing unsteadily between two cars. As I drew nearer, I saw that he was completing his toilet in the relative privacy afforded by an SUV. I held my breath and walked around the corner; I could hear him shuffling after me. As I walked past the Vapor Room, I saw a woman waking up from a night spent at the bottom of the stairs leading to the medicinal-marijuana dispensary; the man rounded the corner and called after her, asking if she wanted a bowl of cereal. She did, and stirred herself up the stairs and in his direction.

You comb my hair into a french chignon.

Drinking wine and eating cheese, reading the Western Neighborhoods Project web site.

Everything in its right place.

From my phone to the internet in two clicks: I've started a photoblog.

The first entry was, naturally, a photo of sprout.

Do not go gently, PG&E

(lights go out, etc)
One of my neighbours commented that -- aside from the red glow of the Marina afire -- the outage reminded him of '89. This was before we had any idea of what caused the darkness.
Even Davies, the squat grey monstrosity at the end of Scott St., was dark.

Slackers suffered: not all of our hardware is robust enough to come back up on its own. A restless night babysitting the systems, and they're still not all in apple-pie order.

My list of things to do today.

Movies with Scottish characters and thick talk:

Gosford Park (Mary Macheachern)
Rushmore (Magnus Buchan)
Trainspotting

That barefoot girl could run too fast.

New rules mean that the lonesome lowing of the train whistle will sound a little quieter.

December 18, 2003

Under Rules, Train Whistles Will Lose Some of Their Blare
By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 — The distant whistle of a passing train is about to get a little more distant.
The Federal Railroad Administration on Wednesday announced the first limit on how loud a whistle can be and set a procedure for towns to set up "quiet zones."
Allan Rutter, administrator of the agency, said the proposed rule resulted from a collision of suburban growth and a rise in rail traffic.
"People find themselves adjacent to busier railroads, that's where the conflict comes," Mr. Rutter said. He said his grandmother in the Texas Panhandle lives within earshot of a line that carries 80 trains a day.
Bill Withuhn, the curator of transportation at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, said, "The lonesome train whistle is not so lonesome anymore."
The museum has just opened a new exhibit on transportation, which includes a celebration of train whistles. But Mr. Withuhn agreed that the whistle could go from romantic to annoying. "Airplanes are romantic, too, but in small doses," he said.
Mr. Rutter said that 9.3 million people were "affected in some way by train horn noise" and that the rule would cut the number by 3.4 million.
Train engineers sound their whistles mostly when they approach roads at grade-level crossings, of which the United States has more than 150,000. Towns and cities have banned whistles at about 2,000 crossings, and in 1996, Congress called for uniform standards for such bans. Mr. Rutter said it took years to come up with them because there had to be a way to balance peace and quiet against the death toll at grade crossings, which last year was nearly 400.
The 500-page "interim final rule" is still subject to a 60-day public comment period and would come into force a year from now.
One provision will limit volume to 110 decibels, compared with the 120 decibels of some whistles now in service. The minimum since 1980 has been 96 decibels, and whistles must still be loud enough to be heard in a car with the windows rolled up and the air conditioner running.
Also, engineers will blow their horns 15 to 20 seconds before reaching a crossing. They now must sound the horn a quarter-mile from a crossing, which for a slow-moving train can be much longer than 20 seconds.
For those living near the tracks, that is probably still long enough to "hear the whistle blowing, rise up so early in the morn."

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For cribbin' out loud.

The thoroughly enjoyable Charlie LeDuff article on the Los Angeles River may have been plagiarised.

Consarnit.

Eats donuts, shoots, and leaves.

There's a classic bit o' humour involved.

So sweet / and so stoic

Thanks to lossy text compression, we find hidden treasures in the 'fridge:

I correspond sagacious with eaten
the plums
that were in
the freeze befuddlement
and which
you were principally ostensible
extrication
for energy
Condone me
they were achievement seeking
so sweet
and so stoic

Did you know that Wm. Carlos Wms. was paediatrician to Allen Ginsberg?

10.15 on a Monday night.

"I was in the back of the bus. The next thing I know, I'm flying through the air," said a man who declined to be identified. "It was a big bang. No brakes, we went full speed into the building."

Traffic flow in Lower Manhattan.

An article in today's New York Times discusses traffic flow around the rebuilt World Trade Center.
What is the Level of Service for the area around the site?

Two wheels on line!

Magicbikes promise wide-ranging, free wireless internet access through the everyday bicycle.
By using the bicycle as an amplifier for already-available Wi-Fi signals, artist and teacher Yuri Gitman hopes to broaden the reach of wireless to previously inaccessible spots: subways, wide avenues and parks, outer areas of the boroughs ...

Adventures in number portability.

After a few weeks of using different mobile services (and myriad phones), I decided to switch my phone number, oh that remote yet vital part of my identity, to a new carrier.

The trouble arose when I mentioned that I'd like to switch two existing accounts back and forth, swapping between t-mobile and SprintPCS. But I wanted to keep both accounts.

I balked at having to provide the password to my Sprint account to the t mobile representative, and she agreed that it was stupid ("why don't we just use one-time confirmation numbers?" she asked, sensibly).

Big on the Caltrain scene.

Just as the inbound N-Judah rolled up to Duboce Park, my mobile rang. Aram said, "I'm about o hop on the BART." We met at the MUNI / BART interface, had the cloak-and-dagger exchange of some fresh Oakland-made granola. As we were walking on to the next outbound N, Ted stepped out of an M and we talked about the new Gehry-designed Brooklyn Atlantic Gardens, which Herbert Muschamp immediately hailed as the most important civic development in New York City since Battery Park.

Once again outbound, we reached the Caltrain station and stood around the courtyard enjoying some commuter-hour sunshine with a paper demitasse of espresso.

Riding the pork barrel.

Thanks to some energetic work on the part of the San Francisco political machine, the long-awaited Central Subway now has $500 big ones.

The Central Subway project is part of phase 2 of the Third Street Light Rail Project, and provides for a much-needed light-rail extension north of Market and into Chinatown. Unlike the first phase of the project, this design calls for underground tracks, which is fantastic news.

Training exercise.

This morning hopped on the N-Judah to ride in to Caltrain. The driver was in training, and drove very gingerly through the two above-ground stops (Duboce Park and Church St.), and then slowly into the tunnels.
We stopped for several minutes while a train was stuck at the Van Ness platform, which made me wonder why MUNI doesn't have bypass (or express) rails anywhere in the heavily-used Market St. Subway. If a train or any of the five lines (!!) that use the subway fails, it blocks all traffic in that direction. The only switches are at the Embarcadero end of the tunnel.
Turns out that in this country, the only subway line with bypass tracks is New York's MTA.
The training driver overshot an intersection in SOMA trying to gun the Breda through a yellow; the mentor driver got him to stop, but too late, and we sat embarassingly blocking traffic until the lights cycled again.
Everyone sprinted from the MUNI across the street to Caltrain to catch the 8:07: we just barely made it.

A river runs through it.

The concrete-clad Los Angeles River, ever-unappreciated and oft-forgotten, comes vividly to life in this journal entry. Post-moden historian Mike Davis wrote in his 1998 Ecology of Fear about the flood that caused Angelenos, always water-crazed, to shy from this natural river.
It looks very different in the movies.
Quoth Mike Davis in The Ecology of Fear:

... the Los Angeles River -- growing from a sluggish stream to a storm-fed torren equivalent in volume to the undammed Colorado -- has been known to increase its flor three-thousand-fold in a single 24-hour period. Local erosion and sedimentation rates also acceleratae explosively. Fluvial environments in the Mediterranean Basin behave in the same way.

December 8, 2003
LOS ANGELES JOURNAL

Los Angeles by Kayak: Vistas of Concrete Banks
By CHARLIE LeDUFF

OS ANGELES, Dec. 5 — The Los Angeles River is a river denied, dismissed, diverted. It stretches 51 miles from its official beginning behind the bleachers of Canoga Park High School in the San Fernando Valley to its mouth at the Long Beach Harbor. It is often hidden from view by barbed wire, cinder blocks, hurricane fencing and poisonous oleander bush. By unofficial count, the river is crossed by more than 100 bridges and 12 freeways.
So subdued is the river that some maps do not acknowledge it. Rand McNally describes it as dry.
This is untrue. About 80 million gallons a day flow along its channeled, concrete-lined banks in the dry season, fed by the sewage treatment plant near the Sepulveda Dam, a few miles from the high school, and street runoff. In the dry season, it is 18 inches at its deepest point. In places where the water is a steady trickle on bare concrete, it looks like a broken urinal.
The Los Angeles River has appeared in movies as a setting for car chases. Some have suggested turning the riverbed into a freeway. Someone wanted to paint the concrete blue, to make it look more like a river. Little ever comes of such proposals. It is a glorified trench.
But to travel down it — not walking on its banks but afloat, in a kayak, as it lurches in successive straightaways to the sea — is to see the Los Angeles River as something else. It is still a sump trench, but it is also an uncharted adventure, and at rare times it looks and acts like something living.
The river is where shopping carts go to die. It collects dead animals along its banks. It accumulates light bulbs, motors, couches and other effluence of affluence. The Los Angeles County Department of Watershed Management says it is also full of invisible detritus: ammonia, a number of metals, petroleum, coliform, chlorpyrifos as well as other pesticides and volatile organics. The water makes one itch in odd places.
When flood season comes — it is nearly here — the river is fed by no fewer than seven tributaries from mountain ranges. At this time, the river becomes a torrent, as deep as 10 feet, and claims its rightful attention. People invariably drown in it this time of year. They are children and bums mostly. Occasionally, a thrill seeker rides the rapids in his kayak, the Los Angeles equivalent of Niagara Falls in a barrel.
"It will never be an East Coast river," said Vik Bapna, a watershed manager for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works, who says that one day the garbage will disappear, the concrete will be gone and natural wildlife will return to the banks of the Los Angeles River and more parks will appear on its banks.
"It's not going to happen in two years," he said. "It probably won't happen in 20, but there is some point in the future things are going to change."
Because of the physical and environmental hazards, recreation on the river is highly discouraged. A reporter, paddling and dragging his vessel through water and muck, was discovered and expelled before reaching the ocean.
The river, sheathed in concrete after the flood of 1938, which killed 87 people, still looks like a river in a few places. Near the Sepulveda Dam, with a string of ponds, the river is home to much water fowl. About 10 miles downriver are the Glendale Narrows, where the riverbed is left to nature and plant life grows from the bed. But the trees, reeds and filth that collect here make this section unnavigable and smelly.
Amphibians live here. They are heard in the darkness when the traffic thins. A homeless man is singing Christmas carols, and listening to him, one notices the sky. At moments like this, the river feels like a river.
Around sundown, Tom Webber and his mother, Lorraine, were bird-watching at the Narrows from a bicycle path that abuts the freeway. Mr. Webber, a 51-year-old biologist, says there are more birds now than when he was a child because there is more water from the sewage plant. But then he stared at the hillside, covered in new houses.
"It's sad to see it all get chewed away," he said glumly. "That's the story of L.A."
In the morning, the glaze-eyed commuter will notice the kayaker and applaud his sense of adventure. Downtown, just south of the Hollywood Freeway, Esmerido Zamora lives on the river in a shelf cut into its banks. His shanty is a homey little affair made of wood, piping and tarpaulin, and it is topped off with an American flag.
Mr. Zamora, 60, is a short man with the build and look of a military officer, which he once was, in Castro's army, with whiskers, eye glasses, clean neck and clean clothes all washed in the river water.
He waves two boaters onto shore and offers a breakfast of homemade bean soup and buttered bread.
"Jesus is coming," Mr. Zamora says after pleasantries are exchanged. Consider, he says, the great fire that recently consumed much of Southern California. The freak hailstorm in Watts. The impending mudslides. The Pacific rains when the river becomes a tempest.
"Man thinks he can control nature," he said, tossing a thumb toward the river. "He cannot."
A society of transients lives on the riverbanks, and they tend to be cleaner and more self-sufficient than the run-of-the-mill mopes on Main Street. The authorities pay them little mind, except when there is a killing. Last month, a woman was found in a drainpipe, raped and stabbed with a screwdriver. A few months before that, another woman was found in a plastic bag.
"Except for that, it's peaceful around here," Mr. Zamora said. He arranges a beer party and makes his visitors promise to come.
It is a dreary paddle down river. Miles of graffiti. Kids drinking malt liquor. Men waving from the weeds.
But once in Long Beach, the river actually looks something like a river. The banks are mud, not concrete. There are plants and plenty of birds, like egrets and pipers. The highway cannot be seen. And then the port of Long Beach comes into view, with the tankers and oil slicks, and one realizes the river can never go back.

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That's why they're called waiters.

After making peace with the ill-tempered waiter at Kate's Kitchen, we headed out to the beach equipped with a bag full of fresh chocolate-chip cookies and a copy of Linton Kwesi Johnson's Independant Intavenshan.
The wind was whipping through the razor wire at Mavericks, but the waves were closing quickly and only windsurfers were out on the water.

The question of the day: Why do mermaids wear seashells?

Because D-shells are too big!

Overhead and underfoot.

MUNI are replacing the overhead wires along the 6 and 7 routes; the construction will take 15 months and cause delays along several local routes.

A proposition on the spring ballot in San Francisco will allow voters to decide whether MUNI should replace all of its diesel buses older than 15 years.

Napa bridge collapse.

A new flyover portion of Highway 121 collapsed during construction today; a hydraulic jack failed, causing a massive section of the bridgeto fall about 75 feet.

More maglev.

UPDATE:
The Japan Times report that a passenger train has exceeded 580 kph.

Compare to the Japanese effort:

Maglev Train tops 500kmh

The Transrapid in Shanghai has set a new world for commercial
railway systems of 501 kmh (311 mph). The maglev (magnetic levitation)
train, which has no wheels, axels, engine or transmission, broke the 500
kmh mark on November 12 on the 30 km track between Long Yang
Station and Pudong International Airport whilst another vehicle
passed at 430 kmh on the adjacent track or "guideway".

The magnetic levitation of trains was first patented in 1934 by
Hermann Kemper and his idea has taken the best part of a century
to be realised.

See also http://www.transrapid.de/en/index.html

Red is the colour of love.

The New York Times always run interesting obituaries. When former University of California president
Clark Kerr died, this romantic anecdote appeared in the last column of the obit.:

In 1934, while at a student congress, he met Catherine Spaulding. She passed him a note: ``Are You a Communist?'' He replied: ``No.'' She wrote back: ``I'm not either.'' They were married nine months later on Christmas Day.