We went to the Getty Villa for Michele’s birthday. I had suggested that we go to Yosemite but Michele said that she was tired of the cold so we drove to Southern California. Our fantasy was that we could eat at a nice restaurant outside, in the sun, for Michele’s birthday dinner. The reality was that it was as cold in SoCal as it was here and we ended up eating in our hotel room, and very few hotel rooms – none that we found – are set up with furniture suitable for dining.
Meanwhile, on the immigration front, what started my thinking about immigration – this time – is a map in the Business Insider that shows, of all the states, California has the highest proportion of immigrants. 26.9% of our population was born outside of the United States compared to New York at 22.9% and Mississippi at 2.2%.
I think our high immigrant population is a major contributor to two things that, right now, influence – almost define, really – the state of our state. The robustness of our economy is mostly driven by high-tech and our high rate of homelessness. That’s unfortunate. I wish immigration was all good or all a plus, or whatever you want to call the new world coming out of Silicon Valley, without the negative.
To refresh our collective memory, last December, Lewis Hamilton lost the Formula One World Championship to Max Verstappen because the race director changed the rules to give Max the race and championship victory. It was a controversial call – to be charitable – that is pretty easy to interpret as fixing the results so that the White guy won and Lewis was understandably devastated. He virtually disappeared, at least on social media, although there were a few pictures, by others, of Lewis in Los Angeles so it was pretty big news when Lewis posted this enigmatic post today.
Along with emails entitled Word of the Day and Town of the Day – both unsolicited and not very interesting – I get an email entitled Animal of the Day. The Animal of the Day is usually pretty mundane, like Siberian Husky mundane, but today the animal was Whole Baked Fish in Sea Salt with Parsley Gremolata and it started with This oven-baked method will ensure your pork… I wonder how this could happen and what the point of these emails, anyway. I must get over a hundred unsolicited emails a day which I end up just deleting. Does anybody actually read them?
Southern California later.
I
A belated Happy Birthday, Michele. For once, the word ‘chill’, as it is currently used, seems to work well in both senses. But, Steve, agreed, handing the win to the blatantly wrong guy was deeply unfair, but surely you could have chosen some other adjective than White–younger, older, experienced, foolish, Dutch, Greek, whatever. It’s really hard to accept that White was the first thing that came to mind in that debatable context