All posts by Steve Stern

A winter walk on the edge of the continent

Around home, California

Kehoe Beach-2639I have been looking at the picture above – taken from Tracy and Richard’s backyard – for a couple of days, trying to put together an interesting post. To un-stall myself, I’m just going to list what I want to say, post a couple of pictures and go on from there (or let it go and get on with my life).

  • First I want to say Here, on the coast of California, the long nightmare of winter is over.
  • We went for a walk on the western edge of the North American continent but we also went for a walk on the eastern edge of the Pacific plate.
  • Saturday was Michele’s birthday and Sunday was Super Bowl Day. Saturday was clear, warm, and calm (when I took the top picture). Sunday started foggy and warm – when I took the picture below -then cloudy and warmer, and it seemed like a perfect day to walk on a beach.

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Now, I’ll try to do some ‘splaining. When I say that the long nightmare is over, I’m just bragging. I love the weather here, I love that it is so micro-climatish, that it can be cold and windy at Candelstick and hot where we live. I grew up here, it just seems natural. Although it may not look like it in these pictures, this doesn’t mean we don’t have four seasons, just milder and different seasons. Winters are the rainy season and the summers are the dry season. Spring is spring and the fall is summer; it’s simple. I should say used to be rather than are because, rather than just being a drought, the rainy season has slid to Late Spring. This means that the rains are warmer and we get less snow in the mountains. Because we used to store our water in the mountains as snow, that change is not for the better.

Kehoe Beach-2648Meanwhile, back in the Winter Walk department, on Superbowl Sunday, after celebrating Michele’s Birthday on Saturday at Tracy and Richard’s weekend home, the people who stayed over went for a walk at Kehoe Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore. Our guides choose Kehoe because Michele’s sister, Claudia, was with us and had brought her dog,Emma, and Kehoe is a Dog Beach. It is also at the western edge of the North American continent.

I don’t know how old I was when I learned that there are seven continents, but I do know that I was much older when I figured out that the whole continent thing is Eurocentric phony baloney-ness. Continents are supposed to be large land masses with an inference that they are separate areas. But Europe isn’t a separate landmass – any more than, say, India is – it is a part of Asia and is about the same size as China which doesn’t get awarded Continental status.

Point Reyes National Seashore, where we went for a walk, is on the western edge of the North America continent but we are really walking on the Eastern edge of the Pacific Plate. Almost all of  the so called North American continent is on the North American Plate. Unlike continents, plates are real things. The hard outermost shell of Earth – the part where we live – floats on a viscous interior. This hard crust is broken into rigid plates like the sections of a soccer ball. Where the plates bump or rub against each other are most of the world’s geologically active areas. One of these boundaries is our very own San Andreas Fault which separates the North American Plate from the Pacific Plate.

The North American plate is some what misnamed because it not only consists of most of the continental North America, it is also Greenland, Western Russia, and part of Japan. What isn’t on the North American Plate is Point Reyes, that is on the Pacific Plate. The Pacific Plate is probably better named because it is mostly the Pacific Ocean along with Point Reyes, part of southern California, part of southern Japan, and part of South Island in New Zealand.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Tectonic plates
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Tectonic plates

Point Reyes, the peninsula, seems to have been very loosely attached to the rest of California, but that is only partly true. It is attached, but it is just passing by as its homeland plate slides serenely north (of course, that is only serenely on a geological, deep-time as John McPhee calls it). North of us, the San Andreas fault runs along the coast of California, as it goes south, it comes inland and, almost to Los Angeles, it bends more easterly and runs along north of the San Gabriel Mountains. Along the way, the fault cut off a little of the granite batholith basement of our Sierra Nevadas. As the Pacific Plate moved north during the last 80 plus million years, it has dragged this southern section of the Sierra base-rock with it. Just north of where we went walking is an area of exposed granite that used to be 300 miles south, near Tehachapi, east of Bakersfield.

Back at the trail to Kehoe Beach, we follow a small stream down to the beach where the seagulls are standing around, feeding on what ever is washed down the stream. I guess it is the animal equivalent to a desk job.
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We walk along the beach in the cool air with a soft, warm, sun. We walk in groups of, mostly, two; stop and cluster; then walk in a different pattern.

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As we walk back to the car, I think  about the drought, that it is real and as unstoppable as the incoming tide. Walking, in the soft air, I fall in love with Life again. In love with California, with the lovely people I am walking with, with their shadows and reflections that join them at their feet.

 

A walk by the Bay

Around home, Bay Area Walks, Photography

Don Edwards-2603A couple of days ago, I went for a walk in a reclaimed section of the San Francisco Bay shore. It is a very strange place, and I mean that in the best possible way. It is almost flat – because it is the very bottom of the alluvial fans coming out of the mountains around the Bay – and many of the remains, of what used to be there, are still there and they don’t fit any classical notion of beauty. Don Edwards-2586

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Historically, we have not valued the coastline of our Bay. Most of it has been ignored except for that used for some sort of nasty work. In this case, the nasty work was harvesting salt and using the marshes along the shore as a place to run heavy-duty electrical transmission lines. Five miles north is the port of Redwood City, built to ship the cut redwood needed for the Victorians of San Francisco. The cut redwood that had been hauled down from the hills of neighboring Woodside and my home town of Portola Valley.

As an aside and a comforting sign that Nature Always Bats Last, some of the children of those redwoods have grown high and dense enough to block out view of the Bay. End aside.

Five miles north of the Port of Redwood City are the housing tracks of Redwood Shores and then Foster City, with their thousands of houses facing away from the Bay in one last act of indifference. Now the salt harvesting area – what we used to call The Salt Flats, when I was a kid – are being returned to Nature, a job that is not as easy as it might, at first, sound. This section used to belong to Cargill Inc., and it was turned to The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project which describes itself as the largest tidal wetland restoration project on the West Coast which when complete…will restore 15,100 acres of industrial salt ponds to a rich mosaic of tidal wetlands and other habitats.

I am proud to say that Senator Dianne Feinstein was a chief motivator and backer and now everybody is getting on board (including the State Coastal Conservancy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Santa Clara Valley Water District, Alameda County Flood Control and Water Conservation District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Resources Legacy Fund, and the East Bay Regional Park District). This area of ex-salt-flats is now called the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay Wildlife Refuge.

Don Edwards was a friend of my father’s and he was instrumental in getting me my first real Job. I had just turned sixteen and, in those days, a teenage boy – as I remember it – was expected to work during the summer. The problem was that most of the available work were pretend jobs that didn’t pay very much. The good paying jobs required joining a Union and that was not very easy for a privileged, white, teenager still in school. My dad knew Don Edwards through the Democratic Party and he – Edwards – was able to pull some strings to get me in the Laborer’s Union and additional strings to get me a job with Charles Harney Construction which was building the section of Bayshore Highway between Marsh Road in Menlo Park to University in Palo Alto (Highway 101 was El Camino then and Bayshore was a bypass).

Like a typical privileged teenager – OK, maybe not typical but typical for me and my type – I was both eager to accept the gains of that privilege and felt slightly guilty, which I probably expressed with disgruntlement, that I hadn’t earned the job and was taking it away from somebody who really needed it, which was why the Union made it difficult in the first place. But the money was great  and the guilt was assuaged by my being given every shit job for the first month. The second month, I moved up to the position of SLOW Sign Holder and would have had a great view of the Bay if I had cared.

Like the rest of California, that came later, and with that public care, the birds are starting to come back. The beauty – and some strangeness – was always there, I suspect, we just didn’t see it.
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The triumph and tragedy of Jean Bugatti in three and a half cars

Cars

Bugatti-1965In a comment on the Art of Bugatti post, Michele made the very good point that a lot of Bugattis, including all the existing Royales, have bodies designed by outside coachbuilders. But Bugatti did make complete cars, in a variety of flavors, as the picture above can attest to. Still, when almost everybody says Bugatti, they mean Ettore Bugatti, Le Patron, and the art of his machinery. However, some of the most beautiful Bugatti bodies were designed by Jean Bugatti, Ettore’s son.

Jean Bugatti was born in Germany in 1909 just as the making of automobiles started changing from backyard tinkerers to actual companies. Almost all the companies were the progeny of hard-driving egomaniacs who, of course, usually named the company after their own magnificent selves. Think Henry Ford, or the Swiss racecar driver turned engineer, Louis Chevrolet, or the Duesenberg brothers, former bicycle and, then, motorcycle racers. Some got rich enough to join the 1%, some were always on the edge of bankruptcy, like the Duesenberg brothers, but they were all Alpha Males. Jean’s father was one of the Alphaist of them all.

Our collective myth is that powerful men produce weak sons and I suspect that it is usually true. As an aside, one notable exception is the Rothschild family with three generations of Alpha Males. By the third generation, the family was rich enough to finance the British purchase of  the Suez Canal and Japan’s war with Russia, End aside.

In this case, Jean Bugatti was as talented as his father and became very influential while he was still young. He was only 18 when he designed his first car. It was a two seat coupe in what is known as the Fiacre style (to save you the trouble of googling Fiacre which I had to do, it is a small, horse-drawn, carriage).

Photo by Michael Furman, courtesy Mullin Automotive Museum

By the time Jean Bugatti was 20, he designed one of the all-time, classic Bugattis, the Type 46 Semiprofié (from Fiacre to Semiprofié in two years seems like a steep learning curve to me).

PC-1945During the 1930’s, Jean Bugatti became a bigger influence on his father and Bugattis became more modern for it. By 1935, at the age of 26, Jean designed the Bugatti Type 57 SC Atlantic.

Bugatti Type 57 SC Atlantic

This was, in almost every way, a modern car. It was low, lightweight, had a straight eight, double overhead cam engine, hydraulic brakes, and could go 130 miles per hour. The prototype which was made of Electron, an alloy of magnesium and aluminum, no longer exists. As an aside, one story is that, because the Electron was so flammable, the prototype had the ridges on the fenders and over the top to hold the parts together, thinking that the actual holding together problem would be solved later. The car was shown to Lord Philippe de Rothschild who was looking for a suitable car for his college bound son and he was told that the ridges would be removed, Rothschild said that he wanted the car but he liked the ridges and wanted them to stay. End aside.

Only three more Atlantics were made – although a total of 710 Type 57s were made with other bodies – one Atlantic was destroyed when it was hit by a train, was re-manufactured, and is now owned by Nicolas Seydoux (who Business Week says is very, very, rich). One of the 57 SC Atlantics is owned by Ralph Lauren, and the last one, the 57 SC pictured here, the Rothschild car, is now owned by Peter Mullin in whose museum it resides. As another aside, the blue metallic color matches the original color which got its metallic sheen from ground-up fish-scales. End aside.
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On August 11, 1939, Jean Bugatti was testing a racing version of the 57 SC. The car was often referred to as The Tank because of its streamlined body shape and it had won the 24 Hour Le Mans race in June of that year. It was a hot afternoon, all the better to check the cooling on the streamlined car – and Bugatti had arranged to close a section of the road near the factory. Unknown to everybody involved, a bicyclist somehow got onto the road – the stories vary as to how, it may have been a postman cutting across the road or a drunk that didn’t heed the closure signs – and Jean Bugatti, traveling at a speed somewhere in excess of 125 miles per hour – swerved to avoid him. The car hit the trees along the side of the road and Jean Bugatti was killed almost instantly.

The hopes and future of Bugatti died with him, all that was left were unfinished drawings, unexecuted ideas, and a broken-hearted father. Three weeks later, World War II started and Bugatti never built another meaningful car (Volkswagen has built some very nice cars under the Bugatti name, but they were not really Bugattis).

As a Postscript, Malcolm Pearson and I have had several discussions on very rich people and their cars, which we are allowed to ogle. Malcolm is …well, here, let him tell you in his own words: I for one am grateful to those One Percenters for sharing their beautiful toys with us. Each one of those fabulous cars is a museum, each one of the owners a curator. In the case of Peter Mullin and the Mullin Automobile Museum, I completely agree, especially in regards to the last Jean Bugatti design.

The last chassis designed by Jean was the Type 64 and three were built; however, only two of the three had bodies the day be died. Somehow, Peter Mullins acquired the remaining bare chassis. He decided to have a body made for his new chassis and after a couple of years, thinking about it, decided to have it done in the style of Jean Bugatti based on some preliminary sketches. Then to make it more authentic – and harder and much more expensive – he decided to use the same materials and techniques that would have been done in 1939.

He found a coachbuilder, Kleeves Automobile Metal Shaping, near Detroit that did various concept cars and they found a 1940s hammer press used by the General Motors Tech Center. Using mahogany forms, sheet aluminium was formed into a new, old car. Well, an almost car. The project is not finished and may never be finished. The chassis is exquisite with aluminium beams riveted together, wonderful sand cast aluminium mechanicals, and a double overhead cam, straight-eight engine, with all the distinctive Bugatti details. For a long time, the chassis sat by itself  in the Museum and covering it must have begun to seem like sacrilege. Now the unpainted, hand-made, aluminium body levitates over Jean Bugatti’s last work of art; for us to admire.

Bugatti Type 64-1948

Bugatti Type 57-1964

Charlie Hebdo and censorship

Politics, Psychological Musings, Religion

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Almost everybody is against killing people over a cartoon, especially if the cartoon doesn’t push any of our buttons. That is because we believe in free speech. Of course, if a Muslim cleric in Yemen is instigating violence against us, then we think it is OK to kill them, especially if we use drones. As an aside, according to The Guardian, In Yemen, 17 named men were targeted multiple times. Strikes on them killed 273 people, at least seven of them children. At least four of the targets are still alive. End aside.

About a week ago, I posted two cartoons from Charlie Hebdo and, now that I have thought about it, I am sorry. Making fun of the weak and disadvantaged may be easy, still it is closer to bullying than I am comfortable with. The jokes that work best are jokes about the powerful – especially if they are pompous as well – and jokes on the joke teller. It is easy to make fun of religion, to a non-believer like me, the facts just seem so goofy. I like to think that the bedrock of Love, Compassion, Tolerance, which, I am told, underlie all the religions, are not goofy but the details are. Jokes about the details, especially when they are told by somebody who is a member of the religion, can be funny – I think that is why Stephen Colbert’s jokes about Christianity are so funny, he is a Catholic who even teaches Catholic Sunday School – or not.

The problem is who decides if a joke is funny?

I contend that it should be the person being offended. If a person – a Methodist, say – doesn’t like being called a Methoddy, they have the right to not like it. Of course, I also have the right – the absolute right under our constitution – to call them a Methoddy, I just don’t have the right to judge if they are offended or not. If the Methoddy is offended , I don’t have the right to say they shouldn’t be, no matter what my intent. If I continue to call them a Methoddy, if I am going to be honest with myself, I have to admit that I just don’t give a shit about them or admit that I want to be offensive.

A lot of Muslims – I have no idea how few or how many, there are about 1.6 Billion self identified Muslims in the world so a few can be alot of people – are bothered by any image of Mohammed, some are very bothered, just like some Christians were bothered by the Piss- Christ and, as I recall some were very bothered. I don’t understand it, these are not things that rattle my cage, but that doesn’t give me the right  to say it shouldn’t rattle theirs. It also doesn’t take away my right to say pretty much anything I want, it doesn’t take away my legal right to be as boorish as I damn well please.

Thinking about the water we swim in while listening to Tina and Amy joke at the Golden Globes

Americana, Art, Film
Jelly Fish at Monterey Bay Aquarium-
Jelly Fish at Monterey Bay Aquarium

After a day of football playoffs, mostly droning in the background as we did other things, Michele and I sat down to watch the Golden Globe Awards. I love the Golden Globe Awards and I love the Academy Awards, both for the same reasons, the meritocracy of the awards. This year’s Golden Globes, however, seemed to be especially interested in diversity which made it even more interesting to watch. Selma did not do as well as I had hoped but it is hard to argue against Boyhood.

For me, the best part of the show was Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. For the third year in a row, they managed to make fun of the people they were there to honor and still honor them. I guess they will be not be back next year and I miss them already.

I especially liked their Bill Cosby rape riff. Cosby is a showbiz icon and, to go after him like Tina and Amy did, in a bit about Into the Woods, takes nerve. The kind of nerve that only great comics have.

Another distinctly pertinent bit was at George Clooney’s expense – and by extension, most of the people there. George Clooney married Amal Alamuddin this year. Amal is a human-rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an adviser to Kofi Annan regarding Syria, and was selected of a three-person U.N. commission regarding rules-of-war violations in the Gaza Strip. So tonight, her husband is getting a lifetime-achievement award. 

This joke seemed even more pertinent when I read the New York Times reporting of it this morning. As he accepted his award, Mr. Clooney joked about celebrities using the night as a chance to apologize for all the “snarky” things they said about one another in hacked Sony emails, but he too turned serious when talking about his new wife, Amal, a human rights lawyer, saying that it was “humbling” to be in love at last and that he was proud to be her husband. She wore a Dior haute couture sheath...

That’s it, the New York Times didn’t tell us what George Clooney wore but, for some reason they thought it was of major importance when describing Amal Alamuddin. Our culture, if the New York Times is any indication, has a long way to go before it catches up with Amy and Tina.