My daddy, Alfred Joseph Stern, was born on December 2, 1906 in San Francisco. He died in May of 1968, I still miss him.
All posts by Steve Stern
Went to a Giants’ game, had pretty good seats
I was invited to a Giants Nationals Baseball game the other night and it was close to revelatory. To back up a little, baseball was always the game du jour when I was in grammar school and I grew up hating it (at least until I got to highschool). And hating might not be the right word, maybe being terrified of baseball is better. It’s not because I don’t see the grace and power of the game, that was pretty much the reason for my fear. I was so bad at it – the catching and throwing part in particular – when I was a child and every other boy seemed so good that my memories have been tainted.
My grammar school playground was asphalt. There is not much a kid could do on asphalt, sure, we had several handball courts – concrete walls with lines in front of them – but that was considered a girls game (it was played with a giant basketball-like ball). Baseball was the boys game – football was out of the question on the pavement and soccer hadn’t yet been invented in our neighborhood – so we played baseball almost every noon. We started by choosing teams and I was always the last one chosen – I had the distinct feeling that, if Nobody had been an option, he would have been chosen before me – and I hated the daily humiliation.
At home, it was even worse. All the boy-kids in my neighborhood used to play baseball in the street right in front of my house. We called it Cat of Ninetails, but it was baseball. Because we didn’t have enough kids for two baseball teams, we fielded one team of the usual positions and everybody else was a batter. A batter stayed a batter until he was put out, then he would be sent to left field and everybody else would rotate over one position with the – now successful – pitcher becoming a new batter and the first baseman now becoming the pitcher (and so on). As the game wore on, everybody played every position.
This was sixty-five years ago, or so, and I still remember how awful it was. It was worst when I became the pitcher – sooner or later, everybody became pitcher; hell, everybody wanted to be pitcher except me – because I couldn’t get anybody out. Standing there in the street, in the summer heat, tossing a baseball at a guy standing a short distance away – holding a stick he would use to drive the ball back at me – with everybody watching me, all I could do was throw ball after ball. For me, there was no strike zone; my only hope was for the batter to hit out. When I finally became a batter, I almost always struck out quickly and went to left field where I could hide for a while, but soon I rotated to third base and the nightmare began again.
I was tall and could run fast, faster than most people, and I discovered track and football as soon as I got to middle school, leaving my baseball playing days behind.
Anyway, on this day, I was very much looking forward to going to the Giants game because we were going to have the best seats in the house. Richard Taylor and I had been invited by Courtney Gonzales who, in turn, had been invited by her friend and our Ticket Goddess, Suzanne. Rather than fighting traffic and parking, I took the train from Menlo Park, feeling very urbane. When I was in highschool, I spent alot of time at the Menlo Park station and it is like visiting an old friend. The station was originally built in 1867 and updated to its Victorian splendor by Southern Pacific about 30 years later.
As I have ridden the train, off and on, over the last 60 years – first when it was Southern Pacific and now as a part of CalTrain – I watched the use level go down and now I am watching it starting to revive. I think the heyday was in the late forties and early fifties when men commuted to work in The City. Their wives would drop them off at the station, often driving them there in the family Station Wagons which was the only car the family had. In those days, the men wore grey flannel or dark blue suits and would read the paper – the paper being The San Francisco Chronicle – on their way to work. On the way home, they would often have a drink in the club car. It was not uncommon to see the same four men in the same four seats around a table playing bridge and having a martini on the way home.
Now, I got on the train with an entirely new kind of commuter. Then they were all men and all white, now there are more women and many more Asians, everybody is wearing jeans and short sleeve shirts. My trip started out with almost all Silicon Valley commuters, however, as we went north, they were replaced by more and more people going to the game. The mood got lighter and more festive. The random colors replaced by orange and black.
We got off the train, at San Francisco, and walked – en mass – the two short blocks to the stadium. I was really taken by the level of joy the crowd carried. It was a warm – for San Francisco, not for Portola Valley, 30 miles south – afternoon, probably in the 70s and everybody was there to have a good time. Not frantic or macho like football crowds can get, just a mellow crowd out to enjoy a warm summer evening watching a good game of baseball. Everybody was walking along, smiling, laughing, enjoying this day, this time, this outing.
We walked along like friends even though we didn’t know each other, all of us in the same moving crowd, going from the train to the stadium. At the stadium, the our crowd joined the stadium crowd in a big mass of happiness. The only downside is that I found it hard to find Courtney at first. Then she spotted me and we made a beeline into the stadium. We went from this
to this, following Suzanne through the players entrance and past the guard – who took one look at Suzanne and didn’t even check our IDs – like three ducklings following their mother. Not exactly hanging on, but definitely not wanting to get left behind.
Then it was through the maze of stadium corridors and passageways all the way down to the first row. Not just any first row but the first row just to the left of the backstop, with an unobstructed view of the field.
The stadium wasn’t sold out, still, there were alot of fans behind us.
The game itself was pretty close until the 7th inning and then the Nationals got five runs and just ran away with it. We left shortly afterwards.
On the train ride home, I was a little surprised at how happy everybody still was, after all our team didn’t win. I am sure that most of the people would have liked the Giants to win but, really, we were all here for a nice summer evening watching a group of very gifted athletes play America’s Pastime. Riding along with my fellow baseball watchers, I basked in our collective goodwill, thinking about how many books have been written about Baseball, how many poems and movies. How much pleasure Baseball has provided its fans over the years. And how much pleasure it provided me on this warm summer evening. I guess that I am ready to let go of my Baseball past.
Lucky Peach and Wired….thinking out of the box
Michele picked up an issue of Lucky Peach, an alternative quarterly journal of food writing, art, and recipes – as it bills itself – a couple of weeks, or so, ago. We were first introduced to Lucky Peach by Richard Taylor who gave Michele an issue, on Chinese shopping center restaurants, probably more than a year ago. Both Michele and I like Chinese food and cooking, so it was a welcome gift. But it was almost impossible to read. In an effort to stand out in a very crowded food and cooking magazine universe, to break out of that cooking mag box, Lucky Peach had gone overboard. It reminds me of the first year or so of Wired doing the same thing for the digital/Silicon Valley world. The first couple of issues – with about ten type sizes and faces per page – were way more unreadable than Lucky Peach (even Wired‘s table of contents was hard to read).
It seems to me what these two have in common is that they made a radical departures from what everybody knows works in magazines. Thinking outside the box is a conscious effort to not follow the rules. As an aside, I remember reading that, when Charlie Parker – the great American jazz saxophonist, who revolutionized jazz with bebop – was trying to break away from the Big Band Jazz-sound, he turned the score upside down to get in a different musical space. End aside. Without any rules to rely on, the change usually doesn’t work at first.
It doesn’t work, I think, for a couple of reasons. First, we are all still habituated to the in-the-box rules making the new stuff look weird. Even if an out of boxer decides to think out of the box, it doesn’t mean that we, the user, is agreeing to that (even if we think we are). We are still following the old rules, at least until the out-of-the-boxer convince us to change. Using the old rules, it is very difficult to make judgements on the new stuff and we often just resort to Well, that’s weird, and move on.
Sometimes it is actually weird more than good. The new stuff , by setting out to be outside the box, is, in some ways, just random and, in other ways, is just Do it NOT like they did it. Sometimes, it takes time to invent new rules and refine them. However, I suspect that this happens less than we think.
Often, when I look back at some radical design or piece of art that I thought was terrible 50 years ago, it looks great now.
The problem with epiphyllums
We have a half-dozen or so Epiphyllums in – mostly plastic – pots in the greenhouse. The problem is that they take up alot more space than they should. Way more.
Epiphyllums are cacti that have evolved to live in trees and they have big stems that work like leaves. Maybe twenty years ago, I got several cuttings of various hybrids and they are thriving. They are also unruly, growing every which way in a most unruly manner. The Epippies – as they are known to the cognoscenti, of which I am not one of them – have spectacular flowers. However it turns out that Napa Sunrise and Hawaiian Sunset and Pink Delight and everything else I have – except for one plant with white flowers – are pretty much the same flowers.
Most of the plants are small by themselves, however the oldest Eppie is large and blooming its little head off and we brought it into the house to admire.
Looking at Ricky Gervais’s photo and thinking about racial diversity
A photo posted by Ricky Gervais’s from a Gail Cousins Facebook share
A couple of years ago, I read Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade. It postulates the last fifty thousand years, or so, of human history through what we now know about DNA. (know is a fast-moving target here). I was knocked out. So much so that I tried to get everybody I knew to read it. Now Wade has published a new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History – technically, I guess, he wrote it and Penguin Press published it – in which he tiptoes through the minefield of race. I have not read Inheritance although I plan to even though it is catching alot of flack.
In America, there are only two views of race. One is that the races are equal – or there is no such thing as race – and the other one is that you are a bigot. Apparently Wade is not taking the we are all equal way and that is bothering alot of people. A couple of days ago, Gail Cousins posted this picture on her Facebook page and it reminded me how much variation and unequalness there is in most animals, including us. Reasonably enough, most other animals just don’t seem to care like we do. Still, we don’t like to talk about it in any real way. It is just too emotionally loaded .
That is too bad, because we are really learning alot about how we got to be who we are and that includes race. Most of the current known evidence indicates that, before we became Homo sapiens sapiens, we were almost wiped out as a species. According to Wade, in Before the Dawn, we were down to only about 1500 not quite-yet Homo sapiens. In fact, that close call probably is why we evolved into humans. It is much easier – more likely? – for a small group to make large evolutionary leaps and we did. As an aside, this is not a large evolutionary leap in any scale but our very limited We are special scale (and, as I reread this, on a what we are doing to the planet scale). End aside.
There are several different theories on why we were almost wiped out, ranging from a volcano near Yellowstone where there is still a super-caldera, to a massive volcano on the island of Sumatra, named Toba, but most anthropologists agree that most of the existing Homo species were wiped out by some sort of major natural catastrophe. What was left was a very small pre-human gene-pool under very stressful conditions, a perfect environment to force adaptation.
This small group, living somewhere around the horn of Africa, were our Adam and Eve. Of the 1500 humans, quoting Charles Mann, No more than a few hundred people initially migrated from Africa, if geneticists are correct. But they emerged into landscapes that by today’s standards were as rich as Eden. Cool mountains, tropical wetlands, lush forests—all were teeming with food. Fish in the sea, birds in the air, fruit on the trees: breakfast was everywhere. People moved in.
When a plant or animal moves into an ecosystem without natural predators, it flourishes. Think Scotch Broom in California, Zebra Mussels in the Great Lakes, Rabbits in Australia, and Humans anywhere outside of Africa. According to the people who know much more about this than I do, our distant ancestors crossed into what we now call Yemen. They flourished and expanded, following the coast eastwardly until they got to India. Then we just went everywhere at once.
One of the small subgroups of those Indians migrated to Europe, another to China, and another wandered through Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia to Australia. Along the way, each traveling group was a subgroup of the larger group they left and each subgroup is a smaller DNA sample. The group with the widest DNA spectrum are the people who stayed in Africa and the narrowest is probably the last places to be colonized (most experts think that would be New Zealand and Polynesia). The range of DNA in all of Europe is much smaller than the range in Africa (I read somewhere that an average African village has a broader range of DNA than is found in all of Europe).
This means that the smartest or most athletic European is much closer to the dumbest or least athletic European than their equivalent is in Africa. In other words, as a reflection of the different DNA ranges, the ability – mental, physical, among others – ranges in Europe is narrower than the range of abilities in Africa. Another way to look at this is, if you were trying to get the smartest, most athletic, people for – say – a professional football team, you would be seeking individuals who are at the top end of the physical and mental end of the spectrum and the preponderance of them would be from Africa or of mainly African descent because the range of ability is greater in Africa. .
In the real world, about 60% of Professional Football players are of African descent even though the pool of white players is much bigger.