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.

The film by @RodLurie of “The Outpost” by @jaketapper (on Netflix) is very good, but one aspect of the book it couldn’t capture was how many troops rotated in and out of that base over the years. Hundreds, perhaps. All of them to defend an outpost that had no earthly use. A Tweet Peter Sagal @petersagal

“I’m now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan, two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.” President Joesph Biden.

President Biden has announced that we are pulling our troops out of Afghanistan. I’m happy with that but not as thrilled as I thought I would be and I’m not sure why. I have, after all, been ranting and whining for years about our being in Afghanistan. (A couple of examples are here, here, and here.) We currently have about 2,500 troops – although there are reports that there are an additional 1,000 Special Forces hidden away – in Afghanistan and our NATO allies have another 7,000 or so. At the height of our presence, under President Obama, we had about 100,000 troops in-country and, over the almost twenty years we have been there, over 750,000 different troops have served in Afghanistan with the main result being the drastic increase in housing cost in Kabul.

Interestingly enough, only the New York Times and the Washington Post seem to feature the withdrawal, the LA Times mentioned it below the main headline of an old murder case that has been solved – well, maybe not solved, but people arrested and charged for the murder, anyway – and FOX didn’t seem to mention it as a news item at all (still, they did have a commentator reference it, saying it was a mistake). Another guy who thinks it is a mistake is Conservative Bret Stephens, who, in an editorial in the New York Times, gave the biggest reason why we should stay. After writing about an Afghan girl’s soccer team, he writes, Those women are now being abandoned. So is every Afghan who struggled to make the country a more humane, hospitable, ethnically, and socially tolerant place ...

He is right, we will be abandoning a lot of people, probably, mostly, women and I would be in favor of staying if there was any chance of being successful. But, come September of this year, we will have been in Afghanistan for twenty years and are no closer to winning – whatever that is – than we were ten years ago or fifteen years ago. The mistake, in my opinion, is not in our leaving, but in the whole misguided adventure. I want to be clear that this has not always been my position, when Candidate Obama said that Afghanistan, not Iraq, was the good war, I agreed and it was one of the reasons I worked on his campaign. But, by the end of 2011, I realized I was wrong, writing When Obama first started talking about Afghanistan being the good war, I thought it sounded like such a good idea. I was wrong – which means nothing – and Obama was wrong, which means a lot. We should get out. Say it was a mistake, say we got Osama and we won, say whatever; just get out. This will not end well and it is time to cut our losses.

We should have treated the Al-Qaeda attack like the criminal act that it was. The Taliban didn’t attack us, Afghanistan didn’t attack us, an antiAmerican-in Muslim-countries terrorist group,  al-Qaeda, attacked us because we have stationed troops in Saudi Arabia. Osama bid Ladan, the founder and main motivation behind Al-Qaeda, was a Saudi, a rich Saudi, the heir to Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire. Of the 19 terrorists directly involved in 911, 15 were from Saudi Arabia (one was from Egypt and two were from the United Arab Emirates). Attacking a tribal, male-dominated, Islamic fundamentalist country like Afghanistan and expecting to leave it as a Democracy ’s was and still is a fantasy.

If President Biden persists, we will be leaving Afghanistan this year and, and, while I’m not thrilled, I am relieved.

To put things in perspective for my white friends: every single time I get in my car and go anywhere, because of police, there’s an underlying fear for my life. EVERY time I make it home safely, it’s like I’ve won the lottery. And I should never have to feel that way…Tweet by Henry Lake @lakeshow73

Last Saturday night Michele and I went to Napa for a small dinner party at The Pereira’s. The Ramirez/Kuhlmans came down from Boise and the six of us, all fully vaccinated plus two weeks, sat around the dinner table – inside – eating Vietnamese pork – yummm! – and drinking great wine. We told stories and laughed and it was all the sweeter because it seemed so normal. It’s as if the last year and a month hadn’t happened.

To get there, Michele and I drove across the San Mateo Bridge and then ran up the East Bay until we turned off for Napa, we came home through Marin County. Our route choice was based on time going up and scenery coming home. At one point, we passed a California Highway Patrol car pulled over to the side, and even though we were rolling with traffic, I glanced at the speedo to make sure I wasn’t speeding. It never occurred to me that we might be pulled over and shot. It didn’t even occur to me that I might even be pulled over for no reason.

Three or four years ago, late at night, I was pulled over by the local sheriff on a very dark and deserted Portola Road. It was a 40 zone and I was driving 45 (on purpose, on cruise control). I put my hands on the wheel and rolled the window down, when the cop came up asked for my license, and told me I was doing 45 in a 35 zone, I told him it was a 40 zone and could feel him tense up. My first thought was that I’d rather not get a ticket than be right, I’ll just drop that, let it go and I told him I didn’t realize I was going so fast. He looked at my license and my white face, commented that I lived nearby, gave my license back, told me to be careful, and drove away. It never occurred to me that the sheriff might pull out a gun and tell me – yell at me, fucking yell at me while pointing a gun at my head! actually – to get out of the car, to get down on the ground.

But getting beat-up- maybe even killed – did occur to U.S. Army Second Lieutenant Caron Nazario when he was pulled over in Windsor, Virginia on a dark road and, from what I read, it occurs to every black man under the age of, what? dead, I guess. Lieutenant Nazario was pulled over last December for not having plates, although the paper plates are clearly visible in the video from the on-board camera in the cop car. When the Lieutenant rolled his window down, the cops pointed their guns at him and told him to both put his hands out the window and get out of the car. When he could follow an obviously impossible command, he ended being pepper sprayed and pushed to the ground. At some point, realizing that they were in the wrong, the cops threatened Lieutenant Nazario and let him go. Now the Lieutenant is sueing the two cops involved in Federal Court. I hope he wins but, even if doesn’t win because of the cops qualified immunity, it is a great place to start. Somehow, cops are going to have to start paying for their constant violations of black people’s rights.

As an aside, under the guise of a letter to his son, Ta-Nehisi Coats wrote a book, Between The World And Me about the daily intimidation and humiliation black men live with. The book is short and very readable and, to quote Toni Morrison, visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. If you haven’t read it, I highly suggest giving it a try. End aside.

The reason why this has gone on so long without any recourse is that this kind of harassment and humiliation by the cops doesn’t happen to white people. If the harm being done by society doesn’t affect us white people, it is easy to overlook, even justify. That may be starting to change, but we have a long way to go before we reach a society that matches the bullshit we are fed in school.