All posts by Steve Stern

Lake Tahoe and The Galen Rowell Scale

Around home, Sierras

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Michele and I went to her Squaw Valley Cabin over a long weekend. It was great to get into the mountains and it brought back all sorts of childhood memories for her. Playing in the creek behind the cabin, hiking up to Shirley Lake, swimming in Lake Tahoe. Listening to her talk about her adventures reminded me about an article in – I believe – Outdoor Photographer in the February 1991 issue. It was January 1991 and, if all had gone as planned, I wouldn’t have been reading that issue.

Michael McDonald and I had booked a trip to go to the Hoggar Mountains in Southern Algeria on the same date Bush the Elder scheduled the start of the First Gulf War. I was starting to get cold feet about going into a Muslim country just when we were starting to bomb another Muslim country, but Michael kept saying that the war was all a bluff and there wouldn’t be a problem. Then, the night before our trip started, Pan Am cancelled our flight to Algiers. We now had almost three weeks off from work with no place to go.  However, in a couple of days, we would have free tickets to almost anywhere else.  As an aside, I had to get a Visa in my passport to go to Algeria and I had been to Morocco so I had an entry stamp and an exit stamp but they looked the same if you couldn’t read Arabic. After 9-11, this became a constant problem especially trying to get through Heathrow. End aside.

The day after our trip didn’t start, I saw the article by Galen Rowell. It proposed a scale to measure how much is still left of what you are going to see, at the place you are going to see; in other words, how uncontaminated is the place. As I remember, Rowell used Waikiki and The Galapagos as the one to ten extreme examples. Galen Rowell was – sadly, he was killed in an airplane accident while flying into Bishop in August of 2002 – a nature and landscape photographer and he was traveling to mostly natural places to see nature and indigenous people. He rated Kathmandu a six on the scale because, among other things, it had become so popular that it even had a Howard Johnson. Guatemala rated an eight.

For  me Tahoe City rated about a two, but up a dirt road out of Tahoe City is a trail that leads to a lake that rates about an eight.

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Driving through the empty backcountry above Tahoe and waiting in a car line, trying to get through Tahoe City, I realized that there was a huge flaw in the Galen Rowell system. Unlike, Rowell, most people come to Tahoe to see what is there now, shopping and dining with the natural beauty as a backdrop. That, I think is the draw of Tahoe, and the end of the day, even with all the people and all the traffic, it is an incredibly beautiful place.

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Fun in the fog

Americana, Around home, Cars, Local events

2014 Historics -0009Thursday, Malcolm Pearson and I went down to Laguna Seca to watch some old cars drive around in a fog heavy enough to be called drizzle. I can’t imagine doing anything more fun!

It was all part of the Cargasm that, according to Sports Car Digest, is now known as Monterey Classic Car Week, Pebble Beach Automotive Week, Concours Week, Holy Car Week or just Car Heaven. Car Heaven started out innocently enough, in 1950, when owners of what were then called Sports Cars, wanted a place to race those cars just like in Europe. The Sports Car Club of America put on several races, including the Del Monte Trophy which was run on part of the private Seventeen Mile Drive. The Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance was put on to compliment the nearby race. In 1956, Ernie McAfee was killed while racing a Ferrari in the feature race, making it obvious that racing through a forest on narrow roads was too dangerous, and the race was cancelled after 1956, but the Concours lived on, thriving.

In 1974, Steve Earle organized the Monterey Historic Automobile Races to show off his and his friend’s old sports and racing cars. In a sort of turnaround is fair play and, I suspect, hoping for synergy, they chose the same weekend as the Concours. They got synergy in spades, first an auto related Art Show and then a get together of Italian Cars; over the years, some car auctions were added, a get together for German Cars, another car show called  Carmel-by-the-Sea Concours on the Avenue. Sometime in the last thirty or so years, The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering, a very high-end car show started and became so exclusive that the $450 tickets are controlled by lottery. Now there is something happening every day of the week. Usually something very expensive.

This is the kind of Automotive Event that every car company wants to be part of:  it is where you can sign up for the Aston Martin experience – a week of luxury for you with your Aston Martin – for only $18,000 per person, where – on the same Thursday that Malcolm and I were at the racetrack – a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO sold for $38,115,000 at the Bonhams’ Monterey Auction, a place so important that Toyota repainted and reupholstered their FT1 concept car in order to tone it up for display.

Still, there are ways to mitigate the expense, the Concours on Sunday costs $300 a ticket but most of the cars take part in the Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance, which is on public streets, visible to anyone, and the Monterey Historic Automobile Races – now called the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion – has a sparsely attended practice day on Thursday that is cheaper than the usual Friday Practice. Malcolm and I chose Thursday and we got two bonuses.

The first was not a surprise, the Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance now takes a lap around the racetrack before heading out on the city streets, the second is that almost nobody goes to the Thursday Practice. Standing in the grandstands because the seats were too wet to sit on – and why don’t they call them grandseats? if you aren’t supposed to stand? – The Tour passed by in no discernible order.

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2014 Historics -0057It was like going back to the beginning of the Historics, when we could park close to the track, the stands were almost empty, and we could leisurely walk through the paddock talking to car owners and their mechanics. OK, the mechanic part is new, in the olden days, most cars were owned by people who did their own work, now it is a much bigger deal, even on Thursday. Unexpectedly – although, I guess it shouldn’t have been – the everyday street cars of some of the owners were absurdly spectacular. Absurd as a Ferrari, but not the kind of everyday Ferrari that anybody with a two or three million dollars yearly income could buy, no – this one had a special body by Zagato – or a McLaren P1 which is not to be confused with the standard, pedestrian, McLaren you or I might own, or two – count them, two! – 1955 Bentley S1 Continental, Mulliner Fastback Saloons.

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As we wandered around, I mentioned to Malcolm that I was having a hard time coming up with a theme on which to blog about this. Malcolm said I don’t know, but don’t make it about the money. He is right, in this case, it really isn’t about the money. Michele and I are going to Squaw Valley for the weekend, but after that, a bit – maybe a bigger bit than some people might want –  on several of the special race cars at the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion.

Good news in a Bad-news Week

Photography

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The barrage of bad news just kept coming last week. The war between Israel and Hamas – if it can be called a war when one side is almost in total control, maybe a Hamas prison riot would be better description – war in Ukraine, Ebola in Nigeria. And ISIS, the worst Islamic scourge the earth has ever seen, if the newspapers are to be believed, is taking over the middle-east at a surreal rate. The week ended with the police, in St Louis, killing an unarmed black boy.

By comparison, the good news is pretty weak sauce, still, it is good news and even better because it was a surprise. My trusty Canon 5D broke while we were in Oregon. The little flippy mirror – that makes it a single-lens-reflex, SLR – came off of the mirror frame, leaving the camera without a way to focus or take a light meter reading. In my imagination, this is a $400.00, or so, problem and I began to think it was time to replace it. I went down to my local camera store, Keeble and Shuchat, which is one of the best camera stores on the West Coast to test drive a new 5D. While fondling the new camera, I told them what happen to my old one. The salesman said, Oh, they will fix that for free.

I’m not sure that I really believed that, even when I brought the camera into the K&S Service Department. However, I now have it back with a new mirror, cleaned and serviced, at no charge. I wonder how long the mirror warrenty would last. Forever I guess, I got the Camera in 2005 and nines years later – alot of them in the desert – they are still fixing it for free.It makes me think of how poorly General Motors has handled their ignition switch problems. And, in my opinion has continued to handle the problems, and how bad it looked when it came out that GM did a cost analysis and decided that it would be cheaper to ride out a couple of lawsuits rather than fix millions of cars. Now they still have to recall all those cars and they have the lawsuits.

 

CIA torture, Mercedes, Audi, and the Nazis

Americana, War

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A little more than a week ago, during a news conference on Friday, August 1st, Obama said We tortured some folks, and went on to say It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. Either statement seems a little strange, together, they seem even more strange. Calling the US Army Military Police and CIA waterboarding, sodomizing, sleep depriving, freezing, and even beating, to the point of killing, various helpless people in their custody, tortured some folks, seems to be a bit aw shucksy. 

When I first saw the pictures of our troops torturing terrorist at Abu Ghraib prison, I was shocked and embarrassed. To me, it never seemed likely that it was just a couple of stupid, low-level G.I.s. Still, I had no idea how high up the chain of command, the crime of torture would go. And murder, as far as that goes.

It wasn’t until a week later, and – I think partially in response to what Obama said – that Dean Baquet, The Executive Editor of The New York Times, wrote Over the past few months, reporters and editors of The Times have debated a subject that has come up regularly ever since the world learned of the C.I.A.’s brutal questioning of terrorism suspects: whether to call the practices torture….Given those changes, reporters urged that The Times recalibrate its language. I agreed. So from now on, The Times will use the word “torture” to describe incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information. The gist of the article – editorial? – between the opening quote and the ending quote, where the four dots are above, is that, heretofore there was not enough detail to know if it was torture. Of course there was enough detail, there just hadn’t been enough time after the torture.

Shortly after Mercedes’ 100th anniversary, Daimler-Benz opened its private records that showed they were a major player in the Nazi regime. It started in 1931 when Mercedes advertised in Volkischer Beobachter, the Nazi newspaper known for its anti-Semitic tirades and culminated – I guess you could say – with Mercedes  using slave labor during World War II. BMW has now admitted that they used about 20,000 slaves during the war. Just recently, Audi has gone publicwith its culpability during the nazi era. In Audi’s – then called Auto Union but with the same four ring logo – case, Dr. Richard Bruhn, ran the company before, during, and after the war. Under his tenure Audi used about 20,000 slaves and about 4,500 disabled workers were sent to the Flossenbürg concentration camp where they were killed. There is talk that his picture may come off the wall.

I don’t know anybody who thinks what Mercedes, BMW, and Audi did was acceptable human behavior and it took them a long time to face that. Obama doesn’t want us to be too sanctimonious in the period of our national panic after 911. Organizations, like people, don’t like to admit to being criminals. Everybody wants there to be a justifying reason that makes it OK to torture, kill, or roundup and put people in Concentration Camps, this one Special Time. I think it is still too soon for us to admit that just because we were panicking, it isn’t OK to torture. Or kill people with drones.

MoveOn and Net Neutrality

Local events, Politics

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All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell, Animal Farm

I don’t know as much about this as I should so please, Please! let me know if I have said anything in error. All I know is what the speakers told me at the rally in the pictures (Ok, and what I read in the email propaganda I get on a regular basis).

In January, in a lawsuit brought by Verizon, an U.S. Appeals Court of three judges threw out the federal rules that required Internet providers to treat all Internet traffic equally. The Court said Given that the Commission has chosen to classify broadband providers in a manner that exempts them from treatment as common carriers, the Communications Act expressly prohibits the commission from nonetheless regulating them as such. In this case, the Commission, means the FCC which has said that broadband is not the same as a utility and the Court then said, in effect, if it isn’t a utility, you can’t regulate as such, come up with new rules.

In May 2014, according to ZD Net, the Federal Communications Commission decided in a 3-2 vote on Thursday morning that it will allow telecommunications and broadband providers to charge content providers for preferential treatment across their respective networks. Simultaneously, and confusingly, the FCC also stated that broadband companies could not slow down or block incoming traffic outright. The people who are good at reading FCC tea leaves, think that this is the end of Net Neutrality, AT&T and Comcast can now charge more for higher speed. Because of public outcry, this new rule has now been put on hold for 120 days so the FCC can hear public comment.

So, so far, the status of the Internet is in limbo, but the chances of Net Neutrality becoming the Law of the Land are pretty slim. Obama, who as you may remember, ran on Net Neutrality, appointed  Tom Wheeler to the Chairmanship of the FCC.  That may seem like a surprise because Wheeler was the top lobbyist for Comcast and AT&T who have fought Net Neutrality for over a decade (and Wheeler did much of that heavy lifting). But it really shouldn’t be too surprising. Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast, and Obama often play golf together – Roberts is a major donor and has had Obama over for dinner – and that means he has lots of time to present his point of view. I’m not saying that it is nefarious, they play golf together, they are friendly, Roberts pitches his point of view.

The way I see it is, can enough people make enough noise to outweigh Brian Roberts, one guy with alot – thinking of you Gail on that spelling – of money and the access it buys. Roberts has a point of view and he has a right to that point of view and, one on one, none of us has a chance to have our point of view heard equally. That may not be fair, but it is real. If two of us speak up, it still will not matter, if twenty million of us speak up, Brian Robert’s point of view probably won’t matter – although  the NRA may be so powerful that it is an exception – and I have no idea where the tipping point is. But I am convinced that there is a tipping point; I am convinced that, at some point, if enough people speak up, they will be heard.

Even though the chances of keeping the net neutral are slim, it wouldn’t hurt – and you might feel better about yourself – if you sign one of MoveOn. org petitions and send it along. If you really want to feel good about yourself, send the FCC a comment directly.

Internet-3-2Oh, the pictures? It was a MoveOn rally on an intersection that they thought Obama would pass on the way to a fundraiser in Los Altos Hills. He either went a different way or came by helicopter. I think the helicopter theory is more likely because several helicopters, escorted by two Marine V-22 Ospreys, were flying in the area.