I got a Standing Desk with the stimulus money I got from the government. I’m still not exactly sure where in the government the money came from, but the authorization was the $1,9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Since the whole point of the American Rescue Plan is to jumpstart the economy, I figured that it was my moral obligation to spend the money as soon as possible rather than, say, pay quarterly taxes or make a house payment. Additionally, it seems to me, the money is better spent here in the good ol’ US of A rather than buying something, like, say, a mechanical watch, from China. As an aside, I guess buying anything from China these days, is both verboten and nearly impossible to not do. End aside.

To be accurate, I didn’t get a standing-only desk, I got a desk that goes up and down – from sitting to standing – at the push of a button. The whole idea of a standing desk has sort of intrigued me since Donald Rumsfeld times – actually, Donald Rumsfeld intrigued me, he was so smart and so wrong, like a bad replay of Bob McNamara in Vietnam – but getting a standing-only desk was too big a step. The only downside is that the desk I got was made in Texas, however, Texas is still in the US so I’ll live with it.

So far, I am delighted, my thought was that a standing desk would be healthier but the big surprise is how convenient a standing desk is. I can just walk up to it and start working (if working is the right word for what I’m doing). Thanks, Mr. President, I wouldn’t have done it without you.

[This is] the best of all possible worlds. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz^[as quoted in Voltaire’s Candide.

You might have fantasized about an Obama presidency, perhaps, sailing on a generational wave of optimism, radically transforming American society by bending the arc of history toward moral justice, or whatever…No: it’s the gaffe-prone friend of insurance companies and segregationist Senators, the old guy who still goes to Mass for non-performative reasons, the non-threatening Scranton-made moderate who history perversely decided would become the agent of an attempted American revolution from the left. Andrew Sullivan in a Daily Dish Column titled The Strange Fate Of Joe Biden, The unlikeliest would-be revolutionary in American history

But we’re not talking about reality. We’re discussing the federal government. Sarah Vowell in an editorial in the New York Times.

President Joe Biden is the best President we could have right now.

I didn’t always feel this way, at the beginning of the primary, way back in 2019, I said: Joe Biden is probably the most extreme Trump is the [only] problem candidate and his campaign has a sort of restoration of virtue vibe about it. To my ear, that sounds like “Let’s go back to business as usual” and although I don’t see Biden getting the nomination, he has a lot of money and, seemingly, a big part of the Democratic Party Establishment backing him including the mainstream media. I say that because the questions at the debate had a distinctly pro-Biden, anti-Sanders cast. I went on to say that Biden, doesn’t speak about the oncoming Climate Disaster with much conviction and I hate his take on international relations… Lastly, he is really too old, really really and his age is showing; watching Biden stumble around mid-sentence on some semi-memorized bit, it’s hard not to laugh, he gets so befuddled. However, my opinion of Joe Biden has changed.

Part of my change in attitude is because I was wrong about Joe Biden and part of it is because Biden has changed in reaction to the changing world. I was wrong about Biden because I didn’t see him fitting the criteria that I think a President needs to bring about change. I used to think we needed an outsider like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton to bring a fresh viewpoint to Washinton but outsiders don’t bring change, insiders do. Don’t get me wrong, I still am a Barack Obama fan, he is the public figure I would most like to have dinner with, but Obama as President was a disappointment. He wasn’t the revolutionary President the country needed. Obama ran as a Revolutionary and I think believed he would be a revolutionary, I certainly did. I thought he would be a revolutionary President when I volunteered for his Primary campaign and I still thought he would be when he was elected President – his slogan was Change We Need, after all – but I was wrong.

I began to realize that during Obama’s second term. But I wondered Why? Why aren’t we getting the change we were promised? At the time, I began to come up with a proto-theory, Outsiders are not agents of change which covered Clinton in addition to Obama. Since then, I have become even more convinced that change has to come from an insider, somebody who knows and is not intimidated by the inside the beltway elites. Although I didn’t see it in January, a year and a half ago, Joe Biden is today’s ultimate insider. I think that he has a chance to be another Roosevelt (and he knows it, BTW ).

Back in November 2019, after the fifth Democratic Debate, I still didn’t think Biden could win. As an aside, at the time, President Trump acted as if Biden was his biggest threat, and I thought Trump was wrong or faking or something. End aside. After that debate, I wrote: the heavy hitters were Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, with supporting roles by Harris, Buttigieg, and Gillibrand. Bernie, in my opinion, is the most influential candidate up there, pulling almost everyone else left, still, I don’t think he will get the nomination. It just feels as if his campaign has peaked and I think that’s why Harris went after Biden first, thinking he is the top dog. Speaking of which, watching Kamala Harris eviscerate Biden reminded me of Trump taking on Jeb! only much more nuanced. Whereas Trump made an ad hominem attack, saying something like “Look at him, just low energy, he won’t get anything done”, Harris went after Biden’s actions and made them personal. As an aside, when somebody starts out with, “I don’t believe you are a racist, but…”, it probably won’t end well. End aside. The thing is, I think Biden is a racist, almost all of us are. It is how we react to that innate racism, acknowledged or not acknowledged, that sets us apart. In Biden’s case, I think he reacted defensively which is why Clarence Thomas’ accusation of “High-tech lynching” was powerful enough to get Biden to close those long ago hearings.

However, thinking back on Biden’s Vice-presidency, Biden, like Trump had a sense of the electorate that Obama and most other inside the beltway politicians didn’t, and still don’t. Biden felt the economic and cultural change and dissatisfaction in the country just like Trump did – and Bernie, for that matter – which is why then Vice-President Biden came out for gay rights before Obama (which caused somewhat of a kerfuffle). Biden could feel the country change in its general tenor towards Gay Marriage. I don’t think that makes Biden a Liberal in the Bernie Sanders sense but, rather, that it illustrates that he can actually see/feel what’s happening in the country and react to it, maybe because he spent so much time commuting on Amtrack. I do want to quickly point out that the difference between Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s reactions, however, seems to be that Joe Biden reacts from a place of compassion rather than anger, perhaps that is because has had so many setbacks that he can acknowledge other people’s pain.

By the time Joe Biden got the nomination, I was getting on board the bandwagon., writing: Wow! The Democratic Platform Is Encouraging…[Biden] is an old man with, seemingly little interest in Climate Change and a long history of being on the wrong side of what I consider the major problems facing our country and the world today. However, when times change, people change, sometimes; this has been a time of huge change, and Joe Biden seems to be changing with it. He is running on a platform that is substantially to the left from where he started. At last, he is taking the Climate crisis seriously, saying; “To reach net-zero emissions as rapidly as possible, Democrats commit to eliminating carbon pollution from power plants by 2035 through technology-neutral standards for clean energy and energy efficiency. We will dramatically expand solar and wind energy deployment through community-based and utility-scale systems. Within five years, we will install 500 million solar panels, including eight million solar roofs and community solar energy systems, and 60,000 made-in-America wind turbines.“

Now, in a sort of semi-State Of The Union speech, President Biden has doubled down on Climate Change Is The Problem (along with, as he said: “The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War”). What I didn’t take into account is that Joe Biden believes in government and, when we have national problems, that Government Is The Answer. In that regard, President Joseph Robinette Biden also seems to be the answer.

In the Future Is Here Department, I had a capsule endoscopy last Thursday and the engineering behind the whole thing is astonishing. In the capsule is a camera surrounded by a cluster of four strobe lights, a transmitter, and batteries good enough for eight+ hours. I haven’t gotten the results yet but I did get the results, below, of the barium X-ray that I was required to get before I got the capsule endoscopy.

Findings: Upright frontal scalp view of the abdomen was acquired and is grossly unremarkable. Status post oral contrast administration, serial plain film acquisitions of the abdomen and small bowel were acquired…The patient tolerated the procedure well. Impression: Unremarkable appearing small bowel.

I don’t think I’ve ever been told that I was grossly unremarkable before but, in this case, I think it is meant in a good news sort of way.

I have been at home for the last couple of weeks and I feel much better than I did, say, a month ago. When I entered the hospital, I had a hemoglobin level of 7.6 – the hemoglobin level measures the red blood cells which carries oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body – because my primary doctor, after looking at me trying to breathe and my blood test results, told me to go directly to Sequoia Emergency to check-in. After a blood transfusion and two iron injections, I left the hospital with a hemoglobin level of 9.5 – still not very good, it should be between 13.5 to 17.5 – and I felt much better although that should not be confused with feeling good. A week ago, my hemoglobin level was 9.0 which indicates that it is going down, going down from being too low to start with. The problem is that nobody knows the cause; my doctors’ informed theory is that I’m leaking blood somewhere, which can be serious, and my uninformed, but hopeful, theory is that a pill I am taking, Pantoprazole, is inhibiting red blood cell creation (and to be fair to me, that is something that occasionally happens).

We are now engaged in what can only be called a siege campaign to find the cause and the doctors are rolling up their big tests. Last Friday I got a Covid test, not because anybody including me thinks I have Covid-19 but to allow me to go into the hospital for a barium x-ray which I got on Monday. The barium x-ray made sure my gastrointestinal tract is clear so I can have a capsule endoscopy this Thursday. The capsule endoscopy is literally swallowing a camera/ transmitter which then broadcasts 3d, color, pictures to sensors taped onto my stomach. What a time to be alive, medicine is changing almost daily. Twenty years ago, I had my aorta valve replaced and they had to open me up and jack my ribs apart to get to my heart. Now, they are replacing heart valves by fishing a replacement valve up from the groin (in my imagination, the valve looks a little like the little paper umbrellas that used to come with rum drinks). In a week, I have a Zoom meeting with a hematologist to get – sort of – a second opinion so, maybe, we’ll see.

In the Life Going On department, what a strange Spring this has been, colder than usual – much colder, it seems to me, but that may just be because of my anemia – with almost no rain. No rain, as in this is going to be a major drought year. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor update, 97.5% of California is in some stage of drought. Another year of drought and the fires are already starting. But, at long last, the state is starting to go after the problem rather than just chase fires. According to the Sacramento Bee, the state will spend $536 million on preventing fires through forest and vegetation management, clearing fuel around rural homes and retrofitting buildings in high-risk areas to help them survive fires. Actually, chasing the fires has been a lot of the problem. Fire used to be part of the Western ecosystem. When President Trump said we should be raking our forests, we all laughed, but he was right – in a very simplified way – clearing out the undergrowth or letting fire periodically clear out the undergrowth means that the fires are not burning hot enough to kill the bigger trees and that means that big hunks of flaming tree limbs are less likely. Cal Fire has been relentlessly going after those fires for a hundred years and the result is a huge buildup of kindling that, when burned, produces fires that kill everything in their path and cause local firestorms. Now, at long last, with a newly passed budget of $536 million – too small, but better than nothing – Cal Fire is going after the underbrush.

Closer to home, our neighbor, the owner of the big open space behind our home, along with the Woodside Fire Protection District, has cleared a large area of the underbrush in the open space that backs up to our lot and we are going to clear some more in the area downhill from the newly opened space. It saddens me that we are getting rid of so much habitat, especially because the brush is quail and rabbit habitat and I love having them around, they are so much fun to watch. Still, it should be easier to sleep during Fire Season which is now, really, eleven months out of the year, twelve months this year with a fire near Gro.

In the backyard, this has been an especially good year for the Kurt Heath Memorial Dogwood – the pink flowers, stage left – and the Fremontia, the yellow flowers, stage right, despite the cold weather. The Dogwood was planted by Michele when her father died in 2000 and the Fremontia, our state bush, fell over a couple of years ago and is now making a comeback from what used to be a small side branch.

The Formula One racing season has started with three stellar races this year and it promises to be an interesting season with Red Bull and Mercedes being pretty evenly matched. I’ve been wondering what to write about Formula One, not so much to convince anybody to watch it as much as to acknowledge that the season has started. I have been following Formula One since I was about 14 or 15 and I read The Kings of the Road by Ken Purdy, a book about impossibly exotic cars, many that raced in Europe in places like Monaco, the Nurinberring, and Monza.

In those days, I would read about the races between the red Ferraris and Maseratis, the silver Mercedeses, and the British Racing Green Vanwalls; fabled cars driven by legendary drivers, impossibly fast cars with engines that burned exotic fuels – like the 1955 Mercedes W196 that burned a mixture of 45 percent benzene, 25 percent methanol, 25 percent 110/130 octane petrol, three percent acetone und two percent nitro-benzene – and put out a raging unheard-of 256 horsepower (BTW, today’s hottest Honda Civic puts out 306 horsepower on everyday gas).

As an aside, fuel is still a big deal in Formula one racing, Ferrari uses Shell, Renault BP/Castrol, Redbull/Honda uses ExxonMobil, and the Mercedes AMG/Petronas Team is a partnership between Mercedes and Petronas Gas Berhad, which bills itself as Malaysia’s leading gas infrastructure and centralized utilities company. The teams use gas, transmission fluid, and engine oil which must have the same ingredients available in any gas station for standard cars but the fuel and oil are custom formulated for each race to accommodate specific track and weather conditions. Lewis Hamilton, the current World Champion and Mercedes driver is the only Black driver in Formula One and has been very vocal in promoting more Black people in the sport. One of them, Stephanie Travers, is the Trackside Fluid Engineer for the Mercedes team and is the first Black woman to stand on a Formula One podium (an honor given to one member of the winning team in addition to the driver). End aside.

Of course, I never actually saw any of those 1950’s legendary race cars or even heard one in real life, I read about them and their heroic drivers, about two months after the fact, first in Road & Track and, later, in Autoweek. Now, I can even watch them on television, in real-time at 2:00 PM European time if I want, which I don’t because that is too early here. But I do watch them on our DVR recorder the first thing Sunday morning (and qualifying on Saturday morning). Now the cars are hybrids that weigh less than half as much as the old cars, put out close to 1,000 horsepower on, sort of, gas, and race around the world. The cars are still a good part of the fascination, however, and I am anxious to see them this weekend in Spain, then, in two weeks, in Monaco.

To be continued with President Biden.

“This is for anyone who has the faith and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves, and to hold on to the goodness in each other, no matter how difficult it is to do that. And this is for you. You inspire me to keep going.” Chloé Zhao, during her Best Director acceptance speech for her film Nomadland

“Our minds are big enough to contemplate the cosmos but small enough to care about who wins an Oscar”  Dean Cavanagh

I love the Academy Awards; I love the glamour and I love the meritocracy. This year, there was less glamour – although LA’s Union Station, this year’s Oscar location, was full of gorgeous people, properly social distanced – and a lot more meritocracy and I am thrilled. Growing up, we were told that, unlike San Francisco which is chock full of quality people like our family was aspiring to be, Los Angeles was a land of shallow people and that Hollywood – or the movie industry, or, maybe just actors – was the poster child for that shallowness and phoniness. But quality people is just a cover for who your grandparents are is more important than who you are and LA was a civilization almost devoid of grandparents in the middle of the last century when it boomed. Everybody came from someplace else. In the movie, biz, they pretty much still do.

Steven Soderbergh, originally from Atlanta, Georgia, was one of the producers and he is being given the most credit – or blame – for The Oscars looking so different this year. A charge that’s pretty hard to dispute with the Oscars opening with a super-long tracking shot of Regina King – looking mighty glamorous, BTW – striding into Union Station carrying an Oscar. I personally liked the whole thing even though I didn’t even know all the movies and even less of the winners. However, with way fewer movie clips and much longer acceptance speeches, I got a much better sense of who the people were. But whoever put the Award for Best Movie third from last made a big mistake…”And the winner is Anthony Hopkins…uh…a non-existent Anthony Hopkins… uh…the credits.”

The nominees were the most diverse group I’ve ever seen and it gave the Awards a slight feeling of a Star Treckian alternate universe. I’m sure that the strangeness of 2021 had a lot to do with the diversity of the awards, several expensive, whiter, movies are just waiting for theaters to open, but I also like to think that people in the Academy have done some soul searching over the last year and this is the happy result. Still, I don’t think we are going to see another Nomadland win the Award for best picture in a long time.

For me, the biggest surprise was a Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson who were the first Black women to win an Oscar for best hair and makeup for their work. It was one of those moments when I think What? the first Black women, that can’t be right…oh yeah, it’s right. BTW, my vote for Best Dress would go to Jamika Wilson and Regina King, if you are into that sort of thing (like me). 

I have not seen Minari but I thought Youn Yuh-Jung’s acceptance speech was the best of the night (and it was a night of good acceptance speeches). She somehow managed to be both touching and funny. I don’t know if she charmed everybody, with her thick accent, but she charmed me and I thought it was the best example of letting the acceptance speeches run on.

And finally, at the climactic end, where it should have been, is Nomadland. I’m a big fan of Nomadland and I’m both glad and surprised that it won. What I liked about it is that it is both very particular in its details and universal in its resonance. While it seemed to have the same sort of rough-hewn characters as Nebraska and Winter’s Bone – two movies that the critics loved but I have to admit, I didn’t – but seen through a more sympathetic eye that made all the difference to me. In both Nebraska and Winter’s Bone, I felt like a voyeur, disdainful of every character except Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree. I could never connect enough to get past feeling bad for the characters but, in Nomadland I felt these are just regular people. Maybe that is because I know – or, more accurately, knew – Empire the company town whose shutdown pushes Fern into her story, or, maybe, it’s just because Nomadland was that good. I think it is the latter.

The director of Nomadland, Chloé Zhao was born in Beijing in 1982, studied in England, finished high school in LA, and learned movie directing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where she studied under Spike Lee. She now lives in  Ojai, California, with, according to Wikipedia, three chickens and two dogs, and her partner Joshua James Richards. The lead in all the stories I read about her plays up that she is only the second woman and first Asian to win Best Director but I’m inclined to think that was at least partially because of this crazy year. More telling, way back in pre-Covid 2018, before most of us had even heard of Chloé Zhao, Marvel Studios hired her to direct a 200 million dollar superhero film, and I’m inclined to think that should be the lead. It is classical LA, after all, outsider comes to town with no connections, makes a small indy film most of us haven’t seen, and hits the big time. Actually, that is bigger than LA, that is the American Dream.