The time I saw Steve Jobs
Posted on October 5, 2011 in Privacy Silicon Valley
I had this photography assignment for my color class, you see. The assignment was to create a presentation of about 50 slides with music. So I was out with my Pentax K-1000 taking pictures of small pieces of the city of Palo Alto. Someone had left some green and yellow balloons tied to the chairs outside of a coffee shop, so I put my color rules into play and took a couple of pictures.
I looked up and there he was, sliding down the street on his roller blades. The bad boy hero of Silicon Valley strode on wheels not twenty feet away. He saw me standing there. Almost instantly the happy smile dropped from his face. “A photographer! My afternoon is ruined!” I could hear the disappointed words flow out of his head and onto the pavement between us.
Looking him in the eye, I let the camera drop to my chest and took my hands off of it. Yes, Mr. Jobs, I was saying to him, you, too, are entitled to your private moments. He kept speeding on and disappeared into a tunnel that ran under the CalTrain tracks.
I never saw him again.
Taking The Picture at Bonneville
Posted on October 3, 2011 in Photography Photos Vacation Fall 2011
The world’s flattest place offers little if you can’t or won’t pay the entrance fee into the area where they run the test runs for the world’s fastest vehicles, but the one free memory it leaves you is potent.
My family visited Salt Lake City every couple of years because both sets of my grandparents (gentiles all!) lived there, but we always took the road that came through Las Vegas and Cedar City, never the one that shot through Wendover and across the Bonneville Salt Flats.
The highway here is so straight that the state of Utah has put up signs warning drivers against falling asleep. You start in Wendover, hit a few steel plates that the Utah road crews have left — just to wake you up? — and keep going for fifty, sixty, maybe seventy miles eastwards without a single curve to trouble your slumber.
The one big attraction other than the Great Salt Lake and its marshes (which are forty or so miles in) is the Bonneville Race Track which I first knew when the Spirit of America set a land speed record there. Drivers of bikes, motorcycles, and cars come to Bonneville because it is one of the flattest places on the planet. If you have ever seen The World’s Fastest Indian, this is the track that the protagonist had set himself out to visit.
It costs $20 to enter the track ($70 if there is an event), so we pulled out a hundred yards or so outside of it to take The Picture. There is only one picture that people come to Bonneville to take. You can, I suppose, capture the mudtracks that nearly claimed the cars of some, but the Picture features a long, grim view of the flats and a range of mountains about two to five miles away.
I got out of the truck and walked about 100 feet onto the flats. Immediately, I felt why it would have been a bad idea to have driven out there: beneath the thin salty crust was a grey mud that gently sucked in your feet. As I set up my tripod, another fellow who had not studied the surface as he got to this point, drove out just behind us and got stuck. I smiled at the Big Whoops and kept setting up my camera. He gunned his engine, spun his wheels, and finally got his wife to do the gas while he jumped up and down in the bed of his truck. This got him out and they parked just off the paved road behind us.
Now mind you, I brought seven cameras on this trip and I used five of them here. The most exciting for me — the one that had my hands trembling as I set it down on the empty lakebed — was the pinhole camera. I estimated the exposure and counted off the numbers as the man’s black dog ran up to my wife and barked as she bent over to pet it.
The couple came over and chatted while I took more pictures. They were on an unplanned road trip, going from place to place to gamble, eat, watch shows, and see the sights. The man laughed as he recounted how he had nearly lost his truck in the mud — everyone who comes to Bonneville wants to race right? — and shook his head at his own boneheadedness. As I brought out more cameras, he asked me if I was a professional photographer. No, I explained, just an enthusiast with a capital E. The camera that interested him most was the one I brought out last — my Instax 210. I took this version of The Picture:
then showed it to him. Word that there were still instant cameras about had not reached him, so I turned around and took a picture of him, his wife, and his dog, gifting them the photo. We all went our separate ways, but I said to Lynn “They were nice people. And they needed a memory.”
Clean Air at Fossil Butte
Posted on October 2, 2011 in Vacation Fall 2011
Morning started when we awoke at 6:30 am. We were in the truck and out of Jackson, Wyoming by seven fifteen. Our Mapquest directions took us through a list of turns that took us into Idaho for ten miles, but most of the way kept us in Wyoming.
They call the land around Fossil Butte a “cold desert”. It’s nothing like the desert that I have taken the time to explore on and off over the years in Southern California. This was no Mojave. No Joshua Trees or Barrel Cactus. Just miles and miles of sagebrush. I remember that the big landmark of the trip down was the World’s Largest Elkhorn Arch in a place that I believe was called Alton. The arch stretched over four lanes of road. They really took their Second Amendment solutions to heart here, I thought, but did not stop for this memorial to kitsch and carnage.
I drove fast until the brown signs telling the way to the monument appeared on the roadsides. That is usually a certain sign that you are close unless you happen to be heading to Great Basin National Park in Nevada. The brown road signs appear 200 miles away near Las Vegas and in Utah. I wonder how many people have become disheartened searching for the park only to discover that they were on one of Nevada’s many highways to nowhere?
Compared to those, the route we took through Wyoming was heavily populated. When we made the final left under the Union Pacific tracks and then the right on Chicken Ranch Road, we found ourselves in the land of sagebrush. A cold desert is what they called it, like I told you before. At the entrance sign we stopped and looked at the lonely promontory from which the NPS property took its name.
You might say it is plain, but I felt its power rearing out of the flats. Along the top, fossil hunters had found the bones of fish and other creatures dwelling around a tropical lake a few million years ago. There’s quite a market for specimens taken from the Green River Formation. The State of Wyoming, ever after a dollar, leases out a few quarries to collectors. The quarry at Fossil Butte is now closed.
I, a native Southern Californian, have seldom known a clear morning. This one felt as if you could make out every twig on every sagebrush bush. Yes, there was a nip to the air. But it was the clarity of the atmosphere that excited me the most. I took out my grandfather’s Ihagee Exakta and aimed it at the butte. Later I would use my Nikon and my Instax. It would be a good day for photography.
This is part of a nonsequential memoir of our recent vacation. Expect more.
Insert a Trite Metaphor for a Corral #114
Posted on September 11, 2011 in Roundup
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. — Susan Sontag
- While McConnell Opposes Infrastructure Investment, Major Kentucky Bridge Shuts Down Over Safety Concerns — How much longer will Kentuckians continue to sing along with Mitch?
- Goodbye to all that: Confessions of a GOP operative who left the cult
- Full Blown Civil War on Wall Street
- Fourteen magic words that can increase voter turnout by over 10 percentage points?? — Say them to everyone you can!
- Statistically, You Have a Better Chance of Being Executed by Rick Perry Than Dying in an Airplane Crash — That is if you live in Texas.
- How to become an expert
- Why you have a broken blog and how to fix it — Let me also mention the broken spell checkers which refuse to acknowledge blog as a legitimate word!
Insert a Trite Metaphor for a Corral #113
Posted on September 4, 2011 in Roundup
Writers are desperate people, and when they stop being desperate, they stop being writers. -Charles Bukowski
- Chant of “Tax the Rich” growing louder in America — They put us in this mess. They must pay to get us out of it.
- We the People: Your Voice in our Government — Perhaps it is time to press to take down the Citizens’ United decision
- Understanding The Anti-Reason Hysteria Of The Republican Party — What is there to understand in chaos?
- The 10 states with the worst economies in America
- Do we need the National Weather Service? — Yes, but we don’t need Fox News
- The Evolution of the Mistress
- Northern Humans Had Bigger Brains, to Cope With the Low Light Levels, Study Finds — This should put to death the notion that smaller brain sizes among humans necessitate that nonwhites are less intelligent — they simply don’t need to see in the twilight.
Insert a Trite Metaphor for a Corral #112
Posted on August 28, 2011 in Roundup
Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature. Cicero
- Concerns about the Religious Right are not Overblown — It seems that the Washington Post has been caught employing a clueless religion reporter
- Skeptics issue $1 million psychic challenge — Real money if you can prove that you have psychic abilities
- Official details on the Virginia earthquake — No reason for folks back East to feel ashamed for their panic. This is large enough to be scary and do a little damage. Amusing, though, that it happened in the middle of Eric Cantor’s congressional district. See Ezra Klein’s list of his favorite earthquake tweets.
- Is Steve Jobs Bipolar? — An illustration of what can happen if you surround someone living with bipolar with supportive friends and associates.
- Economic equality is linked to biased self-perception — In our desperation, we inflate our sense of who we are. Sad.
Insert a Trite Metaphor for a Corral #111
Posted on August 21, 2011 in Roundup
- Stop Coddling the Super-rich — Warren Buffet shows his true love for America. Also read this article on how bad economic inequality in the United States really is. (It’s bad.
- “Blue Gold”: T. Boone Pickens and the Privatization of Water — Oh dear. This article is from a known terrorist organization. But it is still interesting (and without calls for violence)
- White Nose Syndrome: Something is Killing Our Bats — Also look here.
- The 8 Worst Types of Blog on the Internet
- When the irrational is considered rational — Can you see the gorilla in the financial markets?
- Infographic: How Online Retailers Make You Spend More — Free shipping is the big one for me
- Japan Earthquake: Ethical Residents Return $78 Million From Rubble — Can you imagine Americans doing this? And the Japanese do it without Christianity, just a strong sense of honor.
Odd Logic by the Anti-Medication Crowd
Posted on August 15, 2011 in Mania Psychotropics
The anti-medication crowd among us bipolars sounds off in a strident voice. Medications, they tell us, are little more than an attempt by the pharmaceuticals industry to enslave us. According to them, psychotropics kill us and prevent us from experiencing the full impact of our glorious emotions ((Fuck you, [[Thomas Szasz]].)) . Psychiatrists are predators who don’t know how to cure people, only get them addicted.
Sometimes, their arguments betray a certain loss of reality as does this gem from a comment by an anti-med proponent:
Consider for example: “Drugs Work” because “We Tried Drug X on patient Y” and “Effect Z happened in response to Drug X tried on patient Y” and “We Liked What We Saw” and “We Are The Sole Arbiters Of What We Like” therefore “We are Right” and “We Know What We Are Doing” and “Drug X has effect Z” and “People like patient Y need Drug X” and “We Can Supply Drug X” so “Patient Y should get Drug X from us on a perpetual basis” is not explicitly circular, but if you try to complete the logical dependencies, logical circularities will result or else the explanation will grow out of control. Any thoughts on this kind of thinking?
Did you follow that? Later, when the talk turns to statistics:
[C]onsider these: 100% of dead people who have taken medication have died. 0% of living people who have not taken medication have died. Living people who have been given medication may die, and almost certainly will. So, based on these statistics, should we be offering medication?
This writer thinks he has hit on a profundity. I think it illustrates the tragic loss of rationality that can afflict us in mania.
Insert a Trite Metaphor for a Corral #110
Posted on August 14, 2011 in Roundup
Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible. — Frank Herbert
Memes. A couple of memes driving extremists caught my attention today. The first was suggested by the comment of a progressive who told an African American woman that she had to “get over being black”. The meme is that most African Americans have an unreasonable hair trigger about race and are only supporting Obama because he is black.
It’s an echo of a meme that the Republicans have been circulating for years, one that they apply until their black candidates get criticized for their positions. Then invoking racism becomes just fine as [[Alan West]], [[Clarence Thomas]], or [[Herman Cain]] will show you any day.
Another folk theory that I encountered this past week is “all politics is corrupt”. This dripped off the honeyed lips of a Tea Party minion. I’ve been hearing this one since Watergate and it is always Republicans who invoke it. The idea here is that if all politics is corrupt, then the Democrats do it, too, and we can’t fault them ((I don’t tolerate corruption from any politician regardless of party.)) .
There’s an insidious intent behind the meme and that is to block any attempts to reform the political process. A secondary aim is to treat corruption involving millions in donations from corporations or wealthy individuals as insignificant. “Ah, politics is always corrupt. Live with it.”
We must resist such memes. First, we must recognize that we are a long way from a post-racial age — just look in the prisons and in the unemployment figures ((For that matter, we’re hardly in a post-feminist age. We need to struggle for equality just as surely now as ever.)) Second, we must never let anyone tell us to give up — that we can’t do better than we are. Finally, let’s not knock down the good that has been accomplished because we’re told it’s just hopeless. It is time to tell the GOP that you can’t be a party of morals that takes paybacks. When you sell out to the rich, you are contributing to a national rot. Stop it now.
- Lessons from Wisconsin — Have the Democrats ever heard that they are having messaging problems? Is there wax in their ears?
- Voters Can Fix the Court’s Citizens’ United Mistake — Using an old trick from long ago.
- The error of political prayer — Roger Ebert explains why prayer in government or for government is a bad thing.
- Roger Ailes and the rise of Fox News — From liberal Mike Douglas to Nixon to world domination.
- Strobe Illusion — This will distort your reality without resort to drugs. Safe for non-driving situations.
- New Twitter Algorithm Could Out Dudes Pretending to be Lesbians — This has been going on for longer than you can imagine.
- Arctic Ice Melt Could Pause for Several Years, Then Resume Again — You can bet ALEC will use this as an excuse for helping the oil companies to keep squeezing petroleum profits out of the rest of us.
- You can count on this: Math ability is inborn — I kept telling them it was so!
- Narcissists look like good leaders, but they aren’t
Insert a Trite Metaphor for a Corral #109
Posted on August 7, 2011 in Roundup
A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom–he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold. — E. B. White
No AAA for Effort. The final news about what S&P will rate U.S. bonds is still waiting on its number crunchers to correct their accounting error that the Obama administration found late on Friday. (S&P seems to be off by a couple of trillion dollars.) In the meantime, we have another financial crisis brought on by the Republicans. As usual, a paucity of responses dominates the discussion on the anti-Obama side. Their primary talking point is the solo, monolithic “blame it all on Obama”.
The S&P report explaining the decision to lower the rating on U.S. bonds is clear: the problem is our lack of revenue coupled with the late proclivity of our Congress towards “brinksmanship”. Extrapolating from this enables us to level the finger at the party whose philosophy encompasses both of those: Republican ((Blue Dog Democrats have done their share on the revenue side, but the theatrics belong exclusively to the Tea Party-driven GOP)) .
Nonetheless, Obama-bashers of both sides obstinately get the story wrong. One of the most creative and wrong was that of a cowboy-hatted Tea Bagger who told me “read the damn document”. I did. And it said what I said it said, Mister.
Of course, this was never meant for me. It was meant for his fellow Tea Baggers and those who will never read the document for themselves. It suggests esoteric knowledge that absolves the Tea Party of all the wreckage they have caused in the last few months. Denial is the Tea Party way: ’tis better for these rabbits to call themselves coyotes so that maybe, just maybe, they will not be eaten by the wolves who back them.
- After the Debt Ceiling Debacle — Look at all the stories that went unnoticed while the Tea Party was trying to crash the nation.
- Did Obama Cave — Did the Pope convert to Satanism?
- Al Gore and Keith Olbermann Send A Wave of Terror Through Fox News — Is it time for an American Spring?
- Seven types of troll: a spotter’s guide — The stupidest for me are the Obama-bashing “progressives”, but they aren’t mentioned here.
- Five Scriptures You Won’t Hear at Rick Perry’s Event
- Life Hacking: How to sleep anywhere, anytime — The principles here seem sound.
- Is Land — This wonderful balloon is now adrift. Curse the clods who cut its anchor.
- Breeding Crops With Deeper Roots Could ‘Slash CO2 Levels’ — Those in my circle who dislike genetic engineering reject this approach, but I think it is worth thinking about.
- Northern Humans Had Bigger Brains, to Cope With the Low Light Levels, Study Finds — Big brains make you see better, not make you smarter than Africans.
- Blame Game: Sleepier College Students Are More Likely to Blame Others and Plan Revenge — I see this playing out all the time on Twitter. I am at my worst when I don’t sleep. Others?
Insert a Trite Metaphor for a Corral #108
Posted on July 31, 2011 in Roundup
Money, pardon the expression, is like manure. It’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around, encouraging young things to grow. — Hello Dolly
Letters from the front. I’m reminded of the letters and diary entries that survive from the Civil War. News of distant battles took time to reach people in the north. As the bad news — and the good news — filtered in, people would express their despair and their faith in the righteousness of the Cause of Union and freedom for the slaves.
When I look at Twitter or Facebook or Google+, I see that we’re still distant from the great battles that beset our nation. The media that covers it can at best be described as untrustworthy: who really knew the details of the president’s plan from watching Fox or even CNN? What can you say when the media announces that Reid’s plan is in trouble because 41 Republicans voted against it (but it still got 57 votes from a mix of Democrats and Republicans, meaning that it would have passed if the GOP hadn’t filibustered)?
Yet despite these distortions, some journalists get what is happening. They don’t reduce the issues to a sound byte. They explain. It is these that I seek out here. They come from all kinds of places. I avoid the panicky progressive and the cynical tea party minion. I strive to find what is accurate and provocative. That people are learning not to trust the news is a hopeful sign to me.
Then there was the tweet from a Democratic congressman that I saw yesterday. He described the silence that descended on the floor of the House after the squeaker win for Boehner’s poisoned deficit proposal. “#eerie” is how he tagged it. I am glad for him. I am glad for the others who go to demonstrations or Congress or write about the trials of their neighbors or their own sufferings. It means that the letters from the front with the facts are reaching us.
- Three ways Obama could bypass Congress — And each of them is legal. Even Paul Krugman thinks they deserve consideration.
- Why Democracy is Public: The American Dream beats the Nightmare — If you’ve been losing sleep, the Nightmare could be why.
- Smash the Ceiling — Where did the idea of the debt ceiling come from? Isn’t it stupid? Then read about these Republican debt hawks who are in serious personal debt.
- OMG! COLA! Cut! Duck, everyone! — The next time a panicky progressive tells you that Obama “gave it all away”, have her or him read this. Then send them: Earth to the Left: Obama Is Into You
- Axelrod claims Democrats passed 25 tax cuts last year without the help of Republicans — And Politifact rings “TRUE TRUE TRUE!” on this one as well as on this one!
- Why Anti-Abortion ≠ Pro-Life Also check this article on “The Fundamental problem with Fundamentalism“
- Privatization myths debunked — No, government costs are not going to go down if you hand services over to the private sector. Then check the statistics on who grew jobs and who didn’t.
- 12 Ways Rupert Murdoch’s Media Empire Has Made the World Worse
- How my message to Washington got taken over by the people — In less than 24 hours, the message went viral. I took part!
- Traveller’s Point — A neat way to plan and blog about your trips
- What do you do with old bumper cars? — Gosh, how I want one of these to tool around in. Someone send me the money!
- Bipolar patients show poor decision-making in all illness phases — Ah damn. I’m never gonna be any good.
Dream
Posted on July 27, 2011 in Dreams
I’m riding a bike along a winding mountain road when I round a bend and find an accident. A burnt tractor and an SUV have collided, blocking the way. A fire flickers on the slope beneath them. I pull out my cell phone and call 911. The operator wants to know where I am, so I pull out my GPS and give them the coordinates. When the fire truck arrives, I realize that they will block the way for some time, so I look for another way. There’s a road that leads around the hill. I find my way to it. A man tells me that I can reach the road following a particular path, but he can’t give me permission to cross a Latina woman’s property. I meet her at a white-painted wrought-iron gate. She allows me through, smiling at me as I nod to her daughters.
The dream fades to another scenario in which I am involved in a Civil War battle. We defeat the rebels, but at the cost of my captain’s ability to walk. What battle is this? I wonder. It turns out to be the capture of New Orleans. I meet several mulattoes with their escorts near the river. As I turn away, they begin sneering at me and at the troops. “Beast” Butler declares that any woman offending against a Union officer will be treated “as a woman of the town plying her profession”. I go off to find food.
