No Blogging Today. Christmas Tree Decorating

I love this photograph. I look like a power forward. I look like Lurch from the old "Adams Family." From now on, wherever I go, the ladder goes.

No Blogging Today. Christmas Tree Buying.

See the palm tree in the upper right hand corner of the photo? And it's December.

California, the gift that keeps on giving.

A Final Thanksgiving Thought: No Brag, Just Fact

Congratulations to Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emmanuel, Howard Dean, Charles Schumer .... and, of course, to me. I won the Magnificent Balco Cup this year.

My name will soon be entered right there under Kevin Berger's.

Postscript: Here's the cup, the whole cup, nothing but the cup.

Not Only a Trophy Wife, But a Wonderful Stepmother for You, My Son

I usually can't come up with a caption for the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, but this just popped into my mind.

Postscript: Or how about: She was stomping squeegee men the day we met.

Or: I had forgotten today was street cleaning.

Or: Some styles are timeless.

Or; Now, that, my boy, is a shiksa.

Question: How Do We Know Henny Youngman Was Not a Blogger?

This from NY Times via Romanesko:

(Google's CEO) said that by by Google’s calculation, a new blog is being created every second of every day. He said that Google now estimates that the average blog is read by one person.

Answer: Because he would never have said, "Take my wife, please."

So many bloggers would have, and quite gladly.

His Name is Tripod, and He Wears a Beret

A Wegman dog, front-loaded

I treat this blog in a manner very similar to those people who like to dress up their pets in little outfits. That is, it's my precious, of infinite fascination to myself even though to other people ....

not so much

Naturally, I like to give it pretty things, like a site-visit counter and a home on Technorati.

Thus, when I discovered a website that allows you to create your own free Internet polls -- and not only to create them but to rotate them through your blog, each return to the blog resulting in the appearance of yet another poll from your "playlist," I could not resist the opportunity any more than the average American could resist putting a Santa outfit on a kitty.

In the service of efficiency, I quickly knocked together a couple of polls to go with my first stoke, my prized "favorite bigot" poll, and out the blue -- a profound blue shading toward violet like Elizabeth Taylor's eyes -- came the poll question "If you had a three-legged dog, which leg would you prefer to be missing."

I have a strong admiration for three-legged dogs. I consider them brave, good, exemplary. I am not disrespecting three-legged dogs. But I somehow assumed that it would be better to be missing a rear leg than a front leg.

Early poll results suggest I was wrong, and maybe I was, the dog pictured above to the contrary. I suppose it is better to be able to rear up on your haunches than to be able to pull yourself forward like a car with front-wheel drive.

If anyone has some insight, personal or otherwise, on this question, I would certainly welcome it. I don't want to seem callous, not when it comes to three-legged dogs.

Coincidence is Weird. (Also, My Granny was so Dark They Called Her "The Little Gypsy").

Last night I put together the little "poll" now resting on the left side of this page, thinking that the answers might suggest something -- who knows what? -- about who actually engages with this blog.

And then, this morning, I read in the Chronicle that the ex-athlete Michael Irvin made some racially fraught statements on ESPN, talking about the surprising success of the "new" (lot of years on that bench, actually) starting quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys.

Here they are:

"He doesn't look like he's that type of an athlete," Irvin said of Romo. "But he is. He is, man. I don't know if some brother down in that line somewhere, I don't know who saw what or where, his great-great-great-great-grandma ran over in the 'hood or something went down."

(Dan) Patrick tried to suggest to Irvin that he shouldn't go there, but Irvin was having none of it, continuing:

"If great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandma pulled one of them studs up out of the barn, 'Come on in here for a second,' you know, and they go out and work in the yard. You know, back in the day."

This doesn't precisely offend me, and I don't know why. I don't think not being offended by the comment is misogynistic, rather the opposite, if we are inclined to honor the right of women to make an unencumbered sexual choice. Is there stereotyping at work? Well, yeah, but that fast twitch/slow twitch muscle business is more than a myth, right?

Or maybe my brain has been slowly boiled, like that apocryphal frog, by listening and watching too much ESPN, too much jock talk, over the years

I suppose there's a double standard in my lack of indignation, and I could think through it, given time. But that's a 45-minute intellectual workout, and I'm the 15-minute man.

Why I Spend Time in Every Class Telling the Students I Don't Know Who Will Pay Their Salaries in Their First Job, Much Less Their Last One

The feature writing class is going to visit Salon.com's SF offices tomorrow. Once upon it was going to make its visionary founders rich. Perhaps it has only made them proud.







Salon.com stock currently sells for a little more than six cents a share. I think maybe I'll buy some.

Stealing From Either Crooks and Liars or Daily Kos

Where I read that Richard Perle said:

Key Quote: “And a year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.” [9/22/03]

Eh, if one were talking Imperial Pride, how about your neighborhood vomitorium?

But then I read in Wikipedia that:

A popular misconception is that the Romans made use of a room called a vomitorium for the express purpose of vomiting between meals to make room for more food. Only a very small minority of the highest classes indulged in the practice of deliberately vomiting. A vomitorium is actually an entirely unrelated architectural feature – a passage situated below or behind a tier of seats in an amphitheatre, through which the crowds could "spew out" at the end of a show.

But we'll need something like that for our exit strategy, right, which is likely to be more of a spew than a triumphal exit.

We Love Having Young People in Our Home. Their Laughter Boosts Our Spirits.

What jolly pictures. Brother David and Sister Sarah came for a visit.

A Thoughtful Post from Another Blog

So you ask how, as a hot new religion, we deal with the problem of evil? Well, you're knocking on the wrong door. Try physiology, psychology and philosophy, though perhaps not in that order.

As in so many things, let us look to Darwin:

(Man has) some instincts as revenge and anger, which experience shows he must, for his happiness ... check. That is, external circumstances are so conditioned as they are effecting a change in his instincts—like what is happening with other animals. (This) is far from odd, nor is it odd he should have had them. With lesser intellect they might be necessary & no doubt were preservative & are now, like all other structures, slowly vanishing. The mind of man is no more perfect than instincts of animals to all & changing contingencies, or bodies of either. Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions. The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.


But mixing religion and the question of evil? That's a toxic brew.

As for our religion, we are deeply concerned with the origin of, and the problem of, naughty. We think there's not enough of it.

A Lesson in AP Style

As the AP Stylebook makes clear, there is no such thing as a "first annual" anything since annual is an adjective that should be applied only to what has been accomplished, not what is promised. Thus, this weekend I may correctly say that our 2nd Annual San Francisco Anniversary Celebration took place.

Since our wedding anniversary falls on or about Thanksgiving, we've never been able to mount much of an commemoration, but last year -- our 40th -- deserved something, I thought. So we spent a couple days at the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero, where we stayed on our first visit to SF in 1979 on a freebie trip back in my Atlanta Magazine days. We parked in Oakland and took BART in, which is journey enough on Thanksgiving weekend.

I wrote a piece about that 1979 visit. Without that piece -- the wit; the joie de vivre, the merde heureuse de cheval -- I would never have gotten my job at the Chronicle the next year.

Yes, it was a hell of a piece. But so much is contingent, so much is circumstance.

Ah, the accompanying photograph. The Hyatt drapes its lobby with lights during the holiday season. May I recommend you drop by some evening and order a nine-dollar drink in the lobby bar.

Does a Bear Sh*t in the Woods? Only under Proper Supervision.

Click on me, please. Arf.


















Well, this is new

As we walked through Briones Regional Park yesterday, we often stepped among the excrement of horses and cattle, both of whom have a presence in the park. But no dog flop, at least none that we recognized. Is this the reason? I doubt it. Is the next step the diapering of racoons! (Sorry about that exclamation point. It's not nice to shout.)

Thanksgiving on the Trail

We hiked in Briones Regional Park. We ate egg-and-salami sandwiches with Martinelli's Sparkling Apple Cider.

Hackitude

Big Pat Daugherty, he of the sauce and the pith, comes upside the head of Thanksgiving pretty good in his most recent column, which you can see in its abundance by looking left and somewhat down and clicking on the Sporting Box link. He speaks of a local columnist and his:


adorable, heart-tugging Thanksgiving column...the one he wrote in 1988, the one he replays every year, the one that brings a smiley tear to the face of every mom and dad, and a wonderment, like first snowfall, to every tousle-haired nipper. This annual tribute to self gives the columnist another day off and paints one more layer of hack sentimentality on the national common wall.

And I thought: how true; how sad.

And I also thought: Hey, I've got a post just like that, just as smarmy and just as capable of filling space and killing time.

And here it is.

(By the way, what are we doing this Thanksgiving? We're making sandwiches and taking a hike.)

Sunday, November 21, 2004

I Have Never Watched the Macy's Parade. Does That Mean I'm Not a Man for All Seasons?

I like Thanksgiving. It is a holiday you can handle on your default setting, by which I mean you don't have to think about it, or more to the point, there is no aspect of it you have to avoid thinking about. At least, that's how it works for me. I have a collection of memories all of which are more or less pleasant. They are varied. Got some family memories from childhood, got some travel memories because we haven't always stayed home for Thanksgiving. Got some anniversary memories since every seven years or so -- leap year makes a difference though I've never bothered to figure it out -- our wedding anniversary falls on Thanksgiving, so we have some mildly comic memories of trying to find a place to celebrate. About 15 years ago we gave up, throttled back our sentimental attachment to a particular page on a particular calendar and "seized the date," as it were, celebrating our wedding day at a time of our own choosing. The anniversary police have utterly ignored us.

We have had Thanksgivings at the homes of friends, and we have entertained friends as well. There's never been a pattern, but Thanksgiving is not so urgent, so definitive a holiday, that we feel any particularly need to do it one way. Its origins are murky, even questionable. It's more an excuse to have a holiday than an actual holiday, if that makes sense. You don't need to spend more than 30 seconds thinking about it. Give thanks? Why not? In fact, sure. I've never had a late November so grim it seemed inappropriate or evasive to "give thanks."

I am a lucky man, so thank you blind chance.

This year we are having a "big table" -- six friends, which means not just turkey but ham, an elaboration for which I am happy to have an excuse. Eight ferocious Bush haters will be together, three of whom interestingly enough are from The South, that part of the country whose residents are supposedly so misunderstood by outsiders. We know your secrets, my dears, and some of them aren't very nice. We were you, but now we aren't.

Thanksgiving!

Some years ago my wife and I went through a period when we spent Thanksgivings at the big table of a couple we knew and liked, but then the friendship started to ebb. It wasn't like a souffle that collapsed -- poof! It just sort of slowly deflated, and the evidence of the change could be seen at Thanksgiving. When first we were invited, we were high up the table, near the host and hostess. But then we started to slide lower and lower in the seating arrangement until we weren't even in the same room -- though we were at the same table. It was a phenomenal table, capable of remarkable, even unnatural elasticity, like the Bush vote count in Florida and Ohio.

Finally, we were demoted to the pie squad, those folk who came in late, just for dessert, like lepers invited in for the crusts and lesser crumbs. Continents have drifted apart faster than that friendship came to an end, and it's convenient to have this set of markers. Still it's as pleasant a Thanksgiving memory as any other. Good food, good talk, then the forgetting and the letting go.

Thanksgiving is not a holiday with that intense a level of expectation -- with one exception. I do expect that if you cook, either for yourself or for friends, there must be turkey and there must be turkey leftovers. This particular association was established for me when my family lived on Rugby Boulevard in Roanoke, Virginia, for the first ten years of my life. We lived next door to my mother's parents. A concrete sidewalk ran directly from my backdoor to my grandparents' backdoor. My grandfather had it poured when my parents built their little white house, more or less at my grandfather's direction. At night I would run up that sidewalk to my grandparents, run in my barefeet and pajamas not because I was afraid of that particular dark in that particular backyard but because I did not want to step on slugs. Running meant bigger steps and a mathematically diminished chance of landing on a slug, and I had also decided that the sudden flattening of a slug with a quick nasty splat was preferable to the relatively more prolonged crushing that went with walking. The sensation was different, I promise you it was. Bedroom slippers and a flashlight were not options, though I cannot imagine why I decided they were not. I apparently liked the risk of the thing. Strange but so, as with so much of childhood.

The point is that, naturally and inevitably, we had Thanksgiving, and many other meals, with my grandparents. Everything about the Thanksgiving meal was immense: the scale of the table, the number of guests, the amount of food. For days and days afterward we ate sandwiches of leftover turkey on white bread with mayonnaise. It was as if the passage of time, the ever-growing gap between preparation and consumption, concentrated the excellence of the turkey. Thanksgiving itself was a kind of sensory overload, too hectic to absorb. But those turkey sandwiches were the essence of the holiday, the distillation. An old lady in a long dress and an big apron put my sandwich on a plate as big as a manhole cover and set it in front of me together with a 6-ounce Coca-Cola in that squat beautiful bottle.

It was the best moment and is the best memory. Today the Thanksgiving meal itself with our friends will be the pleasure. But the sandwich the next day will the moment when I remember all those people around that table more than 50 years ago. All in all, they were sad people, my Southern family. Thanks I did not grow up to be them. Thanks that at the time I thought they, like me with my sandwich and my coke, were utterly simple and content.

The Poll I Want to See? Let Me Tell You the Poll I Want to See....

That would be a poll of Democrats on the person they would like to see get the Republican nomination in 2008, who would presumably be the person they think a generic Democrat would beat like a drum.

The point is that in 1979 I thought Reagan would be the guy for Carter to wallop and that in 1999 I thought Bush the Younger would be the guy for Gore to send back to cuttin' some brush. But those losers turned out to be winners for a variety of sick surprising reasons.

I'm just saying we should be careful who we wish for. We might get it. Right in the neck. Let's work hard to get our best guy (or gal), one who's capable of beating their best guy, be it McCain, Giuliani or Mitt "The Marrying Kind" Romney.

Let's not wish for Brownback or Gingrich.

Okay?

(All right. You do have my permission to root for Bill Frist. I think I could beat Bill Frist.)

I Am a Connoiseur of Tales from the Dead Cat

This one is pretty good. It's got a hippie, a resilient child and about half a bucket of tears. As a genre piece, I give it nines right across the board. Brother Moore sent the original link.

First time I wrote this post it was different, but Mr. Oliver walked across the keyboard and killed the initial version. He's almost 15 and has cat HIV.

Jon Carroll wrote today about how his boy cat is confused about how many people he lives with and the nature of their conspiracies. That's true of Oliver, too. Just paste in Oliver where Jon says Archie, and it's close enough.

Enough maudlin talk. Who wants to look at kittens!

Manners

We had Young Silver and his partner Sarah over to the house so my wife could check them out to determine if his recent hiring here at the U was yet another doomed academic appointment. She said no, and she is never wrong.

She can smell the crazy.

Now, I don't have her gift of divination, but there were clues that even I could pick up. I got out the old digital camera to capture a few images, just for the historical record, at which point Young Silver said, "Hey, let me just take a picture of you and your wife and anyone who chooses to stand with you."

Which he did.

Young Silver understands the song that sings in every photographer's heart:

me me me me me me me me too

So wise so young. Definitely tenureable, if that's a word.

Short Clever True Nonpartisan

We are one pretzel and one steep flight of stairs away from President Pelosi.

Rube

Back in the day I used to get my feelings hurt when I'd tell someone I worked for the Chronicle, and they would say that they had never read one of my stories, not one.

This was after I had written hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stories, most of them features but some of them quite long and some of them pretty good. But I was always comforted by the truism that people don't read bylines. They read headlines and they read stories, but more often than you think they skip right over the credit, the founder of the feast.

Today in Sunday's Chronicle the headline of an obit lured me in: Thomas Merigan -- S.F. pharmacist, soda fountain jerk.

I'm not certain if this hed is purposely clumsy. The phrase is "soda jerk," isn't it? But this is beside the point. Copy editors write headlines, not reporters. It got me into the story, in which were several interesting paragraphs.


In 1965, Mr. Merigan became a neighborhood icon after a man put a pistol to his head and demanded drugs. As the suspect fled with a box of narcotics, Mr. Merigan grabbed his own pistol from beneath the counter and shot the robber three times.

"I decided a long time ago I wasn't going to let my place be held up by some punk," Mr. Merigan told a Chronicle reporter at the time. "So I shot him.''

The robber survived his wounds and continued to commit robberies after being released from custody, but he never returned to Mr. Merigan's store.

What is it with style? And I mean writing, not the handling of firearms. That last sentence has it. And then I read.

He was married for 70 years to his wife, Helen, with whom he eloped to Reno one night in 1930 after he put a ladder to the window of her bedroom in San Francisco and escorted her to the ground.

"Escorted her to the ground?" And also just the sweet sweet line of that whole sentence.

At this point and this point only do I read the byline.

Steve Rubenstein. another old Chronicle lion, a buyout survivor, approaching his winter but still with plenty of spring in his legs.

Attention must be paid.

(Forgive the Arthur Miller reference. Rube's life and times are a lot more redolent of S.J. Perlman than Arthur Miller.)

Postscript: Already I'm being misunderstood because of my love for indirection. What I mean here is that Steve Rubenstein is such a good writer that he made me think, "Who the heck is this wonderful stylist?" And I was less than heartbroken to discover it wasn't some young pup.

For for that other thing, I'm the guy who tends to identify with Willy Loman.

And with Valentino. And with Einstein, and Emmit Smith on Dancing with the Stars. It's a long list.

So: mad props to Rube. Capisce?