For Michele’s birthday, we decided to go to Southern California to get away from the cold here. Not that’s it was that cold, but it was overcast and dreary which makes eating outside in a restaurant less fun and Michele wanted a good restaurant dinner for her birthday. I’ve been wanting to drive Highway 33 where it wanders through the empty space between the Coast Range and the Thatchapies south of the Carizzo Plain which led to Michele finding the Buckhorn in New Cuyama.

We drove through the Salinas Valley, cut over to Highway 33 just before we hit Paso, and followed 33, past the Midway-Sunset Oil Field, to New Cuyama and the Buckhorn. I was going to say that In the 1950s, America was a different country...and then write about how the Buckhorn was a result of the 50s Roadhouse culture that was brought on by the post-war car boom and the start of the Interstate Highway system, but, it turns out, that was not the case.

In the early 50s, New Cuyama was an oil town, essentially owned by Atlantic Richfield, and the Buckhorn was built to attract new residents to the “The Hidden Valley of Enchantment”. It was the center of the community. The Cuyama Buckhorn is what is now called mid-century modern and was designed in 1952 by George Vernon Russell, an architect I had not previously heard of but was fairly well known having designed the original Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas and the Library at UC Riverside.

As an aside, In the 1950s, America was a different country front, George Russell designed the Joyce Shoe Company Factory in Los Angeles, Avery Adhesive Label Building in Monrovia, and the JC Penney factory in Van Nuys, three buildings that probably, today, would be virtually undesigned tilt-ups. End aside.

1952 was 70 years ago and during that time, New Cuyama and the Cuyama Buckhorn slowly went downhill, the Buckhorn changing owners several times. Finally, in 2018, a couple of Los Angeles architects – Jeff Vance and Ferial Sadeghian, the founders and principal architects of iDGroup, a design-build company specializing in high-end properties in the LA basin – bought and revitalized the dilapidated remains. The pool had been shut down and then filled years ago so the new owners built a new pool along with a bocce ball court. Inside, the bar, which had been shuttered years ago was busy when we arrived and everything, from the rooms to the coffee shop, has been updated.

When we travel, almost every place we stay is designed not to offend which is another way of saying they all have beige personalities. They are clean, comfortable enough, and very forgettable. The Cuyama Buckhorn is different, it just oozes personality, the sheets and towels are luxurious, and we’ve been talking about it since we left. The bar, where Michele had a Mezcal Old Fashion and I had a Rye Whisky Sour, both to go, was terrific. The food was also terrific, organic, most of it is locally sourced, and it was delivered to our room; we split the Buckhorn Smoked Platter with red oak-smoked Santa Maria tri-tip and dry-rubbed pulled pork, a plate that I would definitely have again.

All this good news, however, was overruled by the weather. The Cuyama Valley is at 2100+ feet and that elevation was enough to make it considerably colder than the Bay Area. It was too cold to eat outside, the way I was dressed, it was too cold to even walk around outside once the sun went down. But these are the Covid Omicrown times so we ended up eating in the room. The room, for all its style, had no place to really sit down to eat. It also had a shitty heater and the only truly comfortable place was in the luxurious bed, under the covers.

The next day we wandered around the area looking for Condors – we think we spotted three, riding the thermals very high above us – talked about how we would like to come back when it is warmer, and then drove down a very nice Highway 33, through the southern tail of the Coast Range to an anonymous hotel near the Getty Villa.

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

With the Omicron variant spreading rapidly, the country is averaging more than 500,000 new cases a day, January 10th, 2022, New York Times.

covid is fucking horrible let me just say i dislike having it very much A Tweet by Talia Lavin @swordsjew queer jewish journalist. author of award winning book CULTURE WARLORDS. Writer, The Sword & The Sandwich.

“Our view is this is an extremely dangerous situation. We’re now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack in Ukraine.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki

Every day the New York Times shows a series of full-color maps that show the status of the plague in the United States, broken down by County. Pale yellow is the best – well, less awful, actually, no color is good but nobody has had that for the last twenty-two months – and deep purple being awful, terrible, bad. It’s been a fun image to go to because our area of California has, up until recently, looked very pale. Now, the entire map is almost all purple. San Mateo County, where Michele and I live, has a population of about 767,500 and we are now averaging 4,157 new cases a day. Each day! As the number of cases keeps growing, so does our fear and now both the number of cases and our fear are hockey-sticking.

As our fear grows, going out, eating in a restaurant, even outside, or going to a small party seems scary and foolish. So, we stay home, keeping cooped up, and our fear grows. “Oh, don’t worry about getting toilet paper, we can go out and get some tomorrow…or use leaves.” With inertia, comes isolation, and with that, acceptance. Not going out is beginning to feel normal again. A normal I don’t want.

Well, normal except that we are worried that Michele has been exposed. She was out walking with her friend Carol when they saw a fellow walker with a beautiful French Mastiff. In the admiration conversation that ensued, they got close enough to pet the dog, at that point the guy casually mentioned that he has been bedridden for the last fours days because of Covid. So we are now in the same house, masked when we are in the same room, but, usually, we each retreat to our desk for the day, where we even have Zoom dinners. I am truly surprised at how much more isolated this makes me feel.

Well, normal except that, in the background, the sounds of war can be heard just over the horizon. Russia wants Ukraine, they want it as a buffer between NATO and their Homeland because Mother Russia is afraid of being attacked. That seems like a very logical fear to me. Wrong, I hope, but every time a European country, or group of countries, got strong, it attacked Russia starting with Sweden – a couple of times – then Poland, France, Germany, even the United States had an expeditionary force in Russia (in the fall of 1918, we really were threatened by Communism). During the Cold War, Russia used its occupied Eastern European countries as a buffer, but, after the end of the Cold War in 1989 NATO gobbled up Russia’s buffer zone and Russia is pissed – or afraid – and is acting out. If this makes it sound like I’m minimizing the crisis, I don’t mean to, this could very easily end up being both a human and ecological crisis.

Sadly, what is becoming normal again, is that, over the weekend, another group of Jewish people has been attacked by another terrorist while praying in their synagogue. I used to get in low-grade arguments with friends who think Trump is the worst president ever because I’ve maintained that he was a pretty ordinary Republican with extraordinarily bad manners. But Trump’s bad manners were really just a cover for his racism and sexism. Trump’s racism made racism fashionable again. Maybe not fashionable, but OK and that is doing tremendous harm to our body politic.

Lastly – for today – according to National Geographic, the new normal will include more giraffes. There are about twenty percent more giraffes today than there were in 2017 (although some of that may just be better counting). As an added bonus, according to people who decide these things, there are actually four different species of giraffes and three of them are thriving. Also thriving are the California Condors, huge birds, with a wing span of up to ten feet, which, because of lead poisening, had gone extinct in the wild by the mid-1980s. A captive breeding program was started by the San Diago Wild Animal Park and Los Angeles Zoo and, as of today, there are over 500 California Condors with 92 flying in the wild in Central California and 225 spread out in Baja, Arizona, and Utah (171 are in captivity). They are still very rare and I’ve never seen one but we will be driving through Condor country in a couple of weeks, so we hope to.

Dr. King didn’t shrink from controversy. He spoke openly about American imperialism, unionization and labor rights, economic issues, and more. He was targeted, even called a ‘communist’ because of it. It’s on all of us to pick up where he left off. A Tweet by Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

We’re still in the Civil Rights Movement & don’t have the luxury of complacency. To honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we must abolish the Jim Crow filibuster, protect voting rights & legislate like democracy depends on it—because it does. A Tweet by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley @RepPressley

Dr. Martin Luther King was not treated very well by us White people while he was alive. As Representative Ayanna Pressley said: Dr. King wasn’t murdered because he was a preacher, pacifist with a dream, that is revisionist history. He was murdered because he was a radical disruptor of the status quo, considered by the FBI & white America to be a threat to our country. The FBI even tried to blackmail him, suggesting that he kill himself. He didn’t become an American hero until after he was dead and no longer a threat to White supremicy. Today is a good day to remember that.

Donald J trump was kicked off of Twitter about a year ago – January 8th, 2021 to be exact – and Margery Taylor Greene got kicked off last week so I wanted to make a couple of coments. I really like Twitter, it is my  social media indulgence and I really don’t like Margery, still kicking people off bothers me. I know she was warned five times to stop yelling inflamatory fasehoods the same as Trump, I know that Twitter is a private company and not subject to the First Admendment, and I have no alternative plan, but it bothers me. Twitter is,  in many ways, a public space and controlling who gets to say what seems like a slippery slope. But I like Twitter and they have to do something and it’s not a easy job.

I like Twitter because, it has it’s own, improbable, personality  A couple of days ago, when I opened my account, these were the first three Tweets. 

The Bill McKibben article is well worth clicking through to but the headline, alone, is enough to brighten my day. But, even without the article, seeing Shoebills popping up in my feed makes me realize that the world is a wonderous place. Shoebills, by the way, are about four and a half feet tall and members of the pelican family although they used to be classified as storks. Enjoy.