Bite the Hand that Bores You

Today is a glorious day. It’s 85 degrees - in the city! - and the Republican plan to close 50 state parks (but save no money doing so) was defeated. Oh, and we’ve peeled back another layer of bigotry: we’re finally allowing that fags are people too.

We therefore conclude that in view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians,whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples.
. . .

Under these circumstances, we cannot find that retention of the traditional definition of marriage constitutes a compelling state interest. Accordingly, we conclude that to the extent the current California statutory provisions limit marriage to opposite-sex couples, these statutes are unconstitutional.

(California Supreme Court case S147999)

Tomorrow may see me weeping, but today I am granting myself the luxury of believing that my fellow citizens are essentially decent people and that there will be no state-wide effort, encouraged from the national level as a divisive issue in the election, to modify the Constitution via California’s direct plebescite*. No one would actually intentionally add bigotry to the constitution, right? Right?

* Democracy is the belief that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. - H L Mencken

My brother is an actual freaking race car driver. How cool is that?

In case you’re wondering, I can save you picking glass fragments out of your walls and wasting a bottle of beer:

The champagne-sabering trick, where with savoir-faire you knock the top off a bottle of champagne with a manly knife, then pour with aplomb?

It doesn’t work with beer bottles.

No, not even the ones with a big annular around the cork.

Not even a little bit.

Well, actually, the flowers haven’t even really stopped blooming on Berkeley campus this year. I spent my birthday at the beach by Fort Funston, lying in the ice plants, running up and down the hill with dogs, and playing in the monumental surf. So it’s hard to say what sort of winter spring is springing out of.

But it’s really spring because the semester is starting. Tomorrow marks the first day of a my second semester. A mind-bruising day: 9:30 to 7:00 pm, Eve Sweetser, John Searle, George Lakoff. Not much of an opportunity to be non-clever even for a minute. Oh, there is half an hour around 3:00 for food, that’ll be nice.

I also have a new office. I am installed in #544 on the fifth floor of the 1947 Center St. building, under the auspices of the clearly naive and optimistic International Computer Science Institute. (This is where the Neural Theory of Language group, FrameNET, the Semantic Web and several other AI projects live, too.) I have a view over Martin Luther King, Jr. park and the Peace Wall, over the bay to the fog on San Bruno, and on sunny days I can hear the bums fighting on the street below. I’m sure I’ll see many sunsets through this window and eat lots of cheap takeout in this office.

Around the corner from me is an antique clock repair shop. It contains, as one would expect, a panoply of tiks and toks, piles of gears, a well-stroked shop cat who is far too clever to get his tail caught in any of the exposed mechanisms, and a greying gentleman with glasses who works at a desk covered in brass clutter. Behind the desk stands a set of clock hands–the spare set from Stanford’s clock tower. The minute hand is about seven feet tall.

I’ve been there before, just trainspotting with the owner and the other fine gentlemen of the neighborhood who stop by to discuss the important matters of the day, month, and previous decades. Old agreements and disagreements with well-worn edges are brought up, polished once or twice, and put away, against the constant backdrop of soft clicks and swinging pendulums.

Today I stopped by to ask the owner about my new watch – an 18-ruby all-mechanical Raketa from the former Soviet union. It had finally settled down to a consistent speed – I’d been wearing it to let the lubrication distribute – and I wanted to ask him about getting it adjusted.

I wasn’t expecting much. No one shops the CCCP looking for fine mechanical equipment. But I hoped I could get it to reasonably accurate. It was, after all, a consistent 2 1/2 minutes fast.

“Five . . . that used to be the standard,” he said, pulling the watch away from his ear. I waited. “Modern movements use six beats to the second. Made in an old factory, then, if it’s new. . . elliptical gear has some oil frozen on it, that’ll have to be cleaned, if it can be. Hear it?” I could, once he had pointed it out; what I had taken to be a regular tik-tik-tik-tik-tik was clearly now periodically louder; tik-tik-TIK-tik-tik.

He told me several other details about how the watch was working, without touching it again, and gave me the name of someone who would fix it all.

I left happy, even though I now had a not-small price tag for making my watch run correctly. The presence of skilled artisans in San Francisco is always reassuring to me, somehow.

I got an email from Twitter, the web service that allows you to tell people you don’t know things they don’t want to know, so long as you can phrase it in fewer than 140 characters.

It seems they got their Series 1 funding - a lot of funding. Marc Andreessen, among others, has ponied up a lot of money betting he’ll get a return on his investment because a lot of people will want to tell a lot of other people what they’re having for lunch. He’s probably right.

Another item of note in the email was one of congratulations to Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. I think it speaks for itself, but I’ve added emphasis.

Congratulations Ev and Sara!
Twitter co-founder and chairman Evan Williams was married over the weekend to the lovely Sara Morishige. My toast at the rehearsal dinner was mercifully short, in true Twitter fashion. The event was well Twittered, as you might imagine. It’s not as easy as you think to text and dance simultaneously. Congrats to Ev and Sara!

When I lived in the Netherlands, the Dutch would always ask me with patient tolerance whether I knew how to ride a bicycle, much as you might ask the circus animal handler whether his bear played anything other than the banjo. They seem to view the bicycle as a Dutch invention, and were delighted that we’d picked it up in the States.

Like any other good red blooded American boy I grew up falling off bicycles. In San Francisco, though, bikes are a commitment to a lifestyle, and I didn’t ride much. After my hands went away, I didn’t ride at all for some years.

When I moved to Berkeley, I bought a nice, upgright, dopey Gary Fischer. It had nice shocks on the front to protect my hands, and to keep it solidly anchored to the ground. Nevertheless, Berkeley is a great town for bikes, and it was great fun and a good way to get around.

But my wrists have gotten better, or I’ve just gotten sick of coddling them. And I wanted a real bike. A light bike. One I can commute on and one I can throw over my shoulder in BART stations. A sexy bike.

Enter Uri, the superhero boyfriend of my friend Carolyn. Uri runs a bike shop (a damn good one - more on that later). Uri and Carolyn came over for dinner, and Uri grew very excited as he started to describe the perfect bike for me. He’s clearly a man who is passionate about bicycles.

He suggested I come by the bike shop, and kindly spent hours with me educating me and letting me experiment with steel vs aluminum frames, welded vs lugged, different tire widths, and different bar styles and positions to see what would work with my hands.

At one point, he said something about how lugged steel frames managed to combine some of the best qualities of steel while removing some of its flaws. “We only have one lugged steel frame here right now, other than mine. . . it’s the kind of thing that won’t sell around here, we’ll probably have to put it on eBay.” But he let me try it.

Needless to say, it was The Bike. “I feel like I am standing on tiptoe on the backs of two winged, cocaine-snorting gazelles,” I said at the end of my first ride.

It’s a 1960-something Ideor Asso. It has nice details, like a matching hand pump that is cleverly contrived to fit into the frame. The notion is that it may have something to do with the Italian bicycle frame builder Masi. Lineage is hard to determine here, I understand. This was largely lost on me, but the difference between a hand-built frame and a modern, welded assembly-line frame is tangible in a million tiny ways and a thousand not so tiny.

Uri’s bike shop, The Pedal Revolution, is a non-profit that employs at-risk youths and sells new and refurbished bikes. You should buy a bike from him.

It was on the phone with my insurance agency, getting insurance for my new bike. Everything seemed dandy; I got a great price, thanked them, and hung up.

They called me back to tsk tsk me and to tell me that my premium had gone from a couple hundred to. . . many more hundred. . . due to ‘your suspension’. They took my surprise for frustration and explained that even though it was in 2004, they had just heard about it, and had to raise my premium accordingly.

They’d just heard about it? That makes two of us. (more…)

I can’t lift my right arm over my shoulder. I did Something Stupid at the gym two days ago, apparently, and now it hurts if I move it wrong.

“So don’t lift your right arm over your shoulder,” says Reid, with his usual approximation of wit.

Funny as that might be, or funnier even, this is serious. Every chiropractor in San Francisco is on vacation, or at least hiding behind their office door and laughing at me ringing their doorbell with my left hand, and I can’t reach out and pick up my drink.

I’m not thirty for another five weeks. Maybe I’m still under warranty.