Life Imitates Art

If you have ever seen The Shawshank Redemption (and if you haven't, you really should), you know how this story works: "Pinups of Bikini-Clad Women Hid Jailbreak Route, Officials Say." I can't believe it actually worked.

The authorities should probably check Zihuatanejo.

The End of the Playoff Road

Kelly's soccer team, the Lemonheads, went down to defeat Saturday and Wednesday, ending their season. The campaign was a successful one, though, with a final third place ranking out of twenty teams. Strong defense was the team's hallmark all season, as it almost always is with good teams at any level. After squeezing through with two 1-0 playoff wins the week before, the Lemonheads lost 1-0 last Saturday. Then, in the game they had to win to get to the championship game, the Lemonheads staged an epic battle against the Beckhams, taking a 1-1 draw through regulation time and two overtime periods, before finally bowing out, 4-3 on penalty kicks. The game could not have been more tightly contested. (Ironically, the coach of the team that won is the same coach that led the team that knocked Kelly's team out of the playoffs two years ago.) The girls were disappointed, but are to be congratulated for playing so well as a team and competing with such intensity.

The last two games were played at the Glendale Sports Complex, on a full size artificial turf field. The very last game was actually played at night under the lights, in unexpectedly cold temperatures. There was a real East Coast feel to the whole experience (that many of the West Coasters did not adapt to well). It was a good way to wrap up the season. The girls will remember the experience of it much longer than they remember the result.

We will miss this AYSO region. It is exceptionally well organized and supported by the community, and has greatly enriched the lives of countless families, not the least of which our own.

Flight of Fancy

Last night's Mythbusters tackled one of my most cherished Walter Mitty fantasies: a civilian landing a commercial airliner. With all of the flights I have made lately (20 since mid-September), and my lifelong love of flying, the thought of playing the dashing hero who brings the airplane in safely after the pilots are mysteriously incapacitated is one that has played out in my head many times. By golly, I know lots about how planes work. For instance, I know airplanes have flaps! That ought to count for something.

Using a huge NASA simulator, the Mythbusters guys tried to land what appeared to be a 767 in Denver. In their first attempts, without any assistance from a controller, they both failed in spectacular fashion. Interestingly, with the guidance of an air traffic controller, both novices managed to land the plane smoothly right on the centerline of the runway.

I felt a lot better about my prospects for future glory. However, there are two additional facts to consider. First, a civilian has never been called upon to land an airplane in American commercial aviation history. Second, in the most modern airplanes, there is literally a button that can be pressed on the autopilot, marked "APP" (for "approach") that will essentially land the plane on its own. Drat.

Well, at least I know about that button now. Frankly, I wish some of the Southwest pilots would use it.

Pointless Internet Game of the Day

This is an interesting exercise in mouse control, spacial awareness and anticipation. A completely unfounded rumor has it that the Air Force requires its pilots to survive this for at least two minutes.

Linguistic Nitpick of the Day

Those colorful stones and other shiny adornments?

Jewelry.

Not Jewlery.

Thank you.

Hoops Renaissance?

Don't look now, but the UCSB Gauchos may be on the rise again. Well, what counts for a rise when you are a mid-major men's basketball program.

The women's team has had most of the success over the past 15 seasons, routinely winning the conference and making nine consecutive NCAA tournament appearances along the way, while the men's team has not made it back to the NCAA tournament since 2002, and has not really had a great team since 1992, when the Gauchos made it into the second round. The assistant coach for that team, incidentally, was Ben Howland, now head coach at UCLA, and a graduate assistant was Jamie Dixon, now head coach at Pitt. UCSB's other great teams all played between 1987 (the Brian Shaw years) and 1993 (including a win over eventual NCAA Champion UNLV, then at the height of its powers). The program has had modest success over the intervening years, but nothing resembling those exciting times.

This year, the Gauchos have started 8-1 after a victory over Pepperdine last night. Although conference games have not yet started, and most of the games have been at home in the Thunderhome, there is reason for Gaucho fans (or fans of small programs in general) to be optimistic. The team brings back a senior guard, Alex Harris, who is among the NCAA scoring leaders, and a solid, experienced supporting cast. Lacking a dominant center, UCSB is unlikely to be one of the disruptive mid-majors that Billy Packer hates so much, but the prospects are looking good that the Gauchos may go to the big dance.

Okay, it's only December, but the rabid support of all things Cal around here puts me in a college frame of mind. Expect to endure read more here as the season goes on.

All We Like Sheep

Southwest Airlines takes a lot of flack for being the Greyhound of the skies: the pack in a lot of people with no frills. In its favor, Southwest has always had good fares compared to its competition, it has a lot of flights since they are almost all relatively short-haul, and, in this era of rapidly disappearing onboard services, Southwest’s relatively austere cabin service no longer is out of step with the industry. In fact, with complementary drinks and peanuts (two packs!), Southwest is now ahead of some of its rivals.

[Okay, that may be the Stockholm Syndrome kicking in. Moving on…]

Southwest has recently overhauled many of their procedures, the most visible of which is the boarding process. Southwest has never assigned seats, favoring instead open seating, which had the downside of adding to its cattle-car reputation. Back in the day, they used to hand out California-shaped plastic, numbered boarding passes that you had to acquire at the gate, then surrender on the way to the airplane. They eventually did away with that in favor of three boarding groups, one of which would be designated on the boarding pass that the passenger would acquire from the ticket agent or (glory be!) his or her own printer. The problem with that system is that people would begin to line up at the A, B or C posts long before the scheduled departure time, often before the aircraft had even arrived. In my experience, as a person who, like most, does not like to sit in the middle seat, this would lead to some discord in the boarding area. People would keep an eye out over their reading materials to see if other passengers were starting to line up in significant numbers. It never failed that at a certain point, like solids precipitating out of a solution, a stampede to fill out the line would take place, forcing everyone out of their seats and into a line, only to stand there for the next half hour. (That’s a psychology experiment about crowd behavior waiting to happen.)

This past month, Southwest modified its procedure to subdivide the A, B and C boarding groups into groups of 5. Each boarding pass now has a letter and a number, and at the appropriate time (not before!), the passenger goes to the set of stainless steel posts in the gate area that display the number sets; a television monitor or rotating sign displays the letter at the front of the line. There are six posts; five passengers are to stand between each set, up to 30. Numbers 31 to 60 stand on the other side of the posts. The gate agent calls A 1-30; after they board, A 31-60 board while the people with boarding passes B 1-30 line up in the space the first A group just vacated (the TV or sign switches from A to B), and so on. The procedure takes up much less room and, more importantly, relieves everyone from competing with their fellow passengers for space in line.

Sadly, this appears to be far too confusing for some of the fine folks who live among us. I have made several trips under the new regime, and each one has featured several people wandering among the properly assembled boarders holding their boarding pass in front of them like a lost tourist with a dimestore map. These poor souls then complain to those of us who will listen (who had no trouble matching the number on our boarding pass to the number on the big, shiny posts arrayed in the middle of the boarding area) that this process just doesn’t make sense, it’s too confusing, etc.

I confess that it makes me sad that people can be so easily befuddled, especially when the actual result of the new scheme, if they could manage to think about it clearly, makes their lives better. These lost people did not have to stand in line for 45 minutes (where they surely griped about having to get in line anyway); even better, the entire boarding process takes only about three minutes from the order to assemble to the procession down the jetway.

Change simply for the sake of change can be a step backward. Sometimes, though, it is for the better. The refusal of some people to recognize this, and their apparent joy in complaining about “the new,” is baffling to me. Less time spent standing in line, more time for relaxing, eating, buying trinkets (whatever you do in an airport to pass the time)? Bring it on. If you can’t handle it, trade in your A pass for a C pass, take your seat crammed between two people who knew what they were doing, and eat your peanuts in shame.

Creeping Oldfogeyism, Part One of Many

In other "I'm getting old" laments, a remastered edition of U2's "The Joshua Tree" was released today. How can that be? Remastering is only done for old albums! It cannot be that the most meaningful album of my generation (I will defend that to the death) is old, can it?

The day you hear a Muzak version of "Bullet the Blue Sky" in a dentist's office, just take me to the nearest ice floe and set me adrift.

Nostalgia Tour

I finished a court appearance in San Jose today with enough time to dawdle in the South Bay before heading home for the evening, so I took the opportunity to pass through some of my old haunts. I've been by the old homes a time or two over the past number of years, but I had not been able to take the time to just soak up some of the more prosaic aspects of my old hometown. It was the kind of trip that would bore my wife and kids to tears, but just driving down roads that I took countless times in my youth is as meaningful to me as going to an old home.

I was pleasantly surprised at how bucolic Sunnyvale still is. I feared that I had romanticized it over the years as some Utopian Everytown, USA -- if not the perfect town to grow up in (which even I would not suggest), at least better than anyplace else I've been. The city center, including the library, really is a great expression of civic pride. Meandering through town today, tracing some of my many formerly habitual routes, I was amazed in particular at how wide the streets were. Even in the middle of neighborhoods, the streets allowed plenty of room for traffic, parked cars andbikes. Of course, in those days, my primary mode of transportation was bicycle. Buried deep in my psyche is a recollection of which streets were extended gradual uphill grinds; the slightest grade, as I learned back then, made all the difference in my enjoyment of the ride. Or, to put it into teen angst mode, my resentment at not being able to borrow the car. I must say, I got a bit of a kick out of toodling around the old neighborhood in my current ride. I never came out of the Sunnyvale Library to get into that.

For all of the deep resonance that just being in the same old neighboods brings, nothing stays the same forever. My first Sunnyvale home has been painted baby blue (a highly questionable choice), and both the apricot and pine (fir?) trees have been removed, the latter very recently, to judge by the wood chips and fresh, huge stump. Victoria Station and the Velvet Turtle, the only fancy restaurants I knew of as a kid, are both gone. The Victoria Station still has the railroad cars that comprised the restaurant, but now it is a Vietnamese restaurant. In fact, just about every business in that immediate area, including our old church, caters to either Mandarin or Vietnamese population that must be very prominent in that neighborhood now. I did deposit a check at the Bank of America that was my first bank, though. I even went inside just to see the old counter where I used to deposit my meager minimum wage checks.

In the course of being back in the Bay Area, I have learned how little I actually knew about my home when I grew up here. People at work now ask me questions about the South Bay, and I find that I have very few answers. I was out and about a lot back then, but, as it turns out, only within a very narrowly drawn area. I did very little more than about five miles from home. My travels encompass a much longer radius now. I'm thankful, though, for all the living I packed into those few miles. It is not likely that I will live there again, as much as I would love to do it. Still, it's nice to be able to visit now and then.

Serious Winter Storm

It appears that my many family members and friends in the Pacific Northwest are facing a particularly vicious winter storm, with hurricane level winds and 40 foot high waves at the coast. Certain details of news reports have me particularly concerned:

Mudslides halted north-south Amtrak passenger train service between Eugene, Oregon, and Vancouver, British Columbia, fallen trees and flooding blocked all highways into Tillamook, authorities said.

Think of the cheese, people, think of the cheese.

Shortening My Life, 60 Minutes at a Time

It's December, which means Kelly's soccer playoffs, of course. She was fortunate to be on another good team this year. She has been a solid contributing member of the team, usually playing right wing, in spite of the fact that she is the shortest kid on the team, and usually the gameday field as well. Her team went 9-1 to win their division outright, giving up only six goals along the way (four of those in one game alone).

The playoffs began yesterday, where they managed a 1-0 win. The other team finally mounted an attack right at the end of the game, but our goalkeeper stuck herself into the scrum to save the day. The next game was this morning against the team we beat in the first game of the season. We won that first game 1-0, with Kelly netting the only goal. That team went on to finish 8-1-1, with their only loss coming against us. It was no surprise, then, that the teams were evenly matched, with the flow of the game going up and down the field throughout the match. We got a nice putback goal midway through the first half, and we withstood numerous fierce challenges the rest of the way to finish up with another 1-0 win.

While most of my weekend trips home this fall have been a nice relaxing respite from the work week, I have slept poorly this weekend. Gameday adrenaline has roused me in the predawn hours each day, and I'm still bleeding off the tension of today's game, a couple of hours later. Fortunately, Kelly seems to handle it far better than I do.

With one more win, we're in the championship game, although it is likely we will have to go through a 10-0 team that scored five goals a game to get there. More sleepless nights ahead.

Shadows and Fog

Living in San Francisco for substantial portions of the last three months, I have spent more time in fog in that time than in the last three years combined. The hilltop home that I have called home thanks to the incredible generosity of my sister- and brother-in-law manages is either in fog or above it more than just about any other part of San Francisco. It is the fun, thick kind, too. On one occasion I missed a turn because an opposing car's headlights turned my view into an opaque white wall.

This week, it turned out that getting out of The City didn't get me away from the fog. Burbank experienced an unusual spate of ground fog this past weekend. As it turns out, my Friday night flight was lucky to land. We could see the fog hugging the ground, but it lifted sufficiently above the deck to allow the airplane to touch down. Sunday night was a different story; the fog shut the airport down. Unfortunately, that meant that there were no airplanes staged to take Monday morning's departing passengers, including me. So when the fog remained, closing the airport until the fog dissipated around 9 am, nobody went anywhere because there were no airplanes there to do the work. Worse, the aircraft were not released from their points of departure to get to Burbank until the fog was gone, so we had to wait at least an hour for any of the airplanes to show up. The first Southwest airplane in came empty from Las Vegas, and then planes started arriving in bunches, stacking up on the small airfield.

My 7 am flight was cancelled, but I rebooked on a 9 am flight while I stood in line with 200 other bewildered passengers at the Southwest checkin desk. After rebooking, I jumped out of line and picked up my new boarding pass at the electronic kiosk. I love living in this era.

Of course, my new flight was delayed, too. We finally boarded our airplane at 11:20, but it did not take off until noon. I finally got to the office by 1:45, after having arisen at 5:30 that morning, expecting to be in the office at 9 as usual on Mondays.

I was impressed that just about everyone kept their cool. The problem was as obvious as looking out the window: the fog was impenetrable, except to confirm that there were no airplanes to take us anywhere anyway. Everybody accepted their lot that day, and dutifully boarded their adjusted flights whenever the planes could jockey into position. There is hope for humanity yet.

Lost in the Sunset

Former Justice of the Supreme Court Sandra Day O'Connor retired from the Court two years ago, in part to care for her ailing husband of more than 50 years. He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1990, and is now living in an assisted living center for Alzheimer's patients.

The O'Connor family disclosed this week that John O'Connor had struck up a romance with another patient in the facility. According to the O'Connors' son, Mr. O'Connor was nearly suicidal at the thought of entering the home, knowing that his end was near, but then rebounded like "a teenager in love" shortly after moving to a new part of the facility. Justice O'Connor is reportedly "thrilled" that her husband is finally relaxed and happy.

Considering Mr. O'Connor's state of altered reality, the story cannot be anything but bittersweet. Having seen dementia up close, I know that it is terribly hard on the family. Although it must be crushing to be the spouse innocently left behind, however, I can also understand the sense of relief that comes from seeing someone who had previously been depressed and confused transition back into happiness. It is a gracious person indeed who can watch the transfer of affections happen and still find some comfort in it.

Remembering the Last Veteran

There now remains but one American veteran who saw time in Europe in World War I.

Consumer Goods of the Masses

There was a time, a couple of decades ago, when the mysterious retail center known locally as "The Price Club" worked its way into the edges of the collective consciousness. Odd tales of relish jars as big as toddlers and packs of toilet paper large enough to swaddle the White House worked their way into society like modern folklore. Only a privileged few were permitted to pass the gates of this fantastic place, however, the right to enter apparently based on come arcane formula of vocation, location and, possibly, ritual sacrifice.

The Price Club eventually merged with Costco and bacame a much less mysterious, and much more prominent, force in the American retail world. As with any purveyor of commodities in bulk, Costco has had to fight, accept or otherwise deal with an image issue that assumes that anything sold in such vast quantities must be of low-rent quality. Value, of course, has never been the guiding light of the shopping rich (also known as the idle rich, when they rouse themselves to wear out the AmEx). Scarcity, and its attendant high price, often seems to be the impulse behind the purchase. Why buy a Camry, to top selling car in the U.S. and a fine, competent machine, when you can have a Maserati Quattroporte, an exceedingly fine, and exceedingly rare Italian import? Costco, buy selling everything in staggeringly large quantities and, it must be said, at favorable prices, appears to appeal to the lowest common consumer denominator.

It must be said, however, that Costco is not quite the lowbrow affair its huge warehouses would indicate. Costco has developed a well-deserved reputation of offering high-quality baked goods and meats. Costco sells well known brand names, of course, which carry their own indicia of quality. But Costco also brands its own merchandise, everything from shredded cheese to slacks. Far from the dubious quality of "store brand" labels that we all know and avoid if we can help it, the ubiquitous Kirkland brand is not an identifying mark of cheap, marginal goods. While it is all well and good to wear Armani suits and Gucci loafers, sometimes you just need something that gets you through the week without looking like you are still buying out of the 1985 J.C. Penney's catalog, and without the risk that you will regret your newly-threadbare purchase before the season is out.

America, I'm here to report that you can trust the Kirkland brand T-shirts. Folding my laundry this morning (one of the hidden consequences of being half a state away from Cheryl), I found that the well-known and presumably trusted Jockey brand T-shirts demonstrated all the staying power of the typical overpriced concert shirt, whereas the Kirkland models had retained their size and heft. Economy and quality; whoda thunk it?

That was a long way to go just to find out that one brand of T-shirts is better than another, wasn't it? Man, I love blogs.

House Sellin' Blues, Verse 2

We're finally running up against some dates that will require action. If we cannot get our house sold within the next couple of weeks, we will not be able to get into a house in the Bay Area in time for the kids to start school in January. Plus, the real estate market typically goes into hibernation from just before Thanksgiving until the spring (or February in California).

We have had what appear to be some serious viewers (would you spend 90 minutes at an open house if you did not intend to buy the house?), but still no offers. We have asked our realtor to lean on a few of these folks as much as he can. We're now into the "if you call now, you will also get these fabulous gifts absolutely FREE!" phase. If we can't induce someone to jump on it within the next 10 days or so, though, we will have missed our window of opportunity for the fall.

Fortunately, we're not trying to fund two mortgages, so we can still afford to be patient. We figure were are within about 5% of the final selling price, but nobody is willing to take the final plunge. The house we like up here is still available, but will it be there in March? Will conditions be better in the spring?

I thought it was my birthright as a Californian to have buyers clamor for the opportunity to outbid each other for my home. Turns out that the old maxim, "location, location, location" has a seldom-quoted codicil: "timing."

Them Ol' House-Sellin' Blues

A quick update on the houseselling front. We have had several open houses now, with varying degrees of interest. The first were attended mostly by neighbors. The most recent was hardly attended at all, but has generated the most serious interest. We ended up with a personal showing this afternoon and two tomorrow. We have been whipsawed so many directions emotionally during this time that we do not know whether to be cautiously optimistic or hopefully cautious anymore.

Ironically, an article about our community's real estate market came out in our local newspaper this week. The recent rate reductions by the Fed are some positive news, but mostly the news is bleak. It is my belief that this has helped contribute to an artificial standoff between buyers and sellers, in that buyers seem to be stuck on the notion that all news is equally bad everywhere, and that therefore all real estate is overpriced everywhere. Without making offers to prove the point, however, that is nothing more than empty rhetoric designed to make the seller bid against himself, not an open market in which the true value of the property can be ascertained.

Okay, so I'm a little tired of people coming to our 95-year-old house and saying in surprise, "ooh, it's old." Well, of course it is. When you saw the ad for the "1912 Craftsman," what exactly did you think those funny little numbers at the beginning meant? Age seems to be an excuse to automatically deduct sums from the perceived value of the home. Again, that's not a free exchange market, that's huffing and puffing. We just want someone to make a real offer. Then we'll see what the house is worth.

Today's Brainless Entertainment, Take 2

Just when you thought you had killed off all the bloons, they're back! I haven't had time to play this one yet, but rumor has it that the "hard" game is pretty tough. Go monkeys!

This Is Depressing

And I'm not even suffering this loss.

Here is a list of addresses of homes lost in Rancho Bernardo so far -- ten pages of them. It looks like some entire neighborhoods are gone.

Thick Skies Over SoCal

Here is a recent satellite radar image of southern California:


Despite what the legend says on the map, I assure you that this is not a record of rainfall. The smoke and ash is so thick that the radar interprets what it sees as rain.

The 250,000513,000+ people evacuated from their homes should be so lucky.