Category Archives: Americana

Happy 50th, Portola Valley

Americana, Around home

Portola Valley-0826 Portola Valley celebrated its 50th Anniversary last weekend. That’s 50 years as an incorporated Town – in California, there is no legal difference between a Town and a City but Towns do seem to be smaller and often use the County Sheriff for their Police – not 50 years of being inhabited. The area had been inhabited by the Ohlones for only – probably and approximately – 600 years although there have been signs of human habitation around the Bay for about 4,000 years. What ever that exact timeline, by the time California became a State on September 9, 1850 – although we Californians didn’t find out about that for 38 days because news had to come by ship, around Cape Horn  – people were already cutting down the Redwoods for San Francisco housing. By the turn of the Century, most of the Redwoods were gone and Portola Valley became a farming area mixed with a few big estates.

As an aside, one of the major estates was owned by the inventor of San Francisco’s cable cars, Andrew Hallidie. He built an aerial tramway, now gone, that went from Portola Road up about a thousand feet to Skyline. He also built the best swimming pool I have ever seen, it is probably about five or six acres and has a small steam train that goes around it. About twenty years ago, or so, Michele and I were walking through some second-growth Redwoods, on an abandoned logging road, when we chanced upon the pool in an open area. It was full of water and clean but looked abandoned. The next Fourth Of July, on a similar walk, we decided to go by the pool only to find it all decked out for the Fourth, complete with small sailboats and lots of bunting. We felt like trespassers and started to back out when we were spotted, told to stay on the roads, and then ignored. End aside.

By the 60s, the residents voted to incorporate in order to have local control over development. The goals were to preserve the beauty of the land through low-density housing and to limit services to those necessary for local residents. They thought they would keep the government small and cheap by having lots of volunteers and Portola Valley still has that tradition and, apparently, enough money has been saved to host a free dinner for the residents of the Town.

Michele wanted to go and I tagged along. Portola Valley-0796 When I first moved into Portola Valley, it was a different place. That was 1981 and the whole world was a different place. It would be two more years before the Macintosh would be introduced, AOL was still called Control Video Corporation,  and Silicon Valley was an inside joke rather than one of the richest places in the world.  Portola Valley was already a low density suburb but the houses – trending towards Sunset Magazine Ranch-house  – were modest by today’s standards. I was far from being the only forty something in town but we were among the youngest citizens. Most of our neighbors were older and, as they got even older and moved out, they have been replaced by young families from Silicon Valley with kids.

I knew that intellectually, still it was a surprise to go to a public gathering and see so many young kids.
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Portola Valley-0817The Birthday Party was also full of very nice adults, but Portola Valley has always had nice adults. .

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Referring to the San Andreas Fault – which is about a hundred feet from the hay bales  above – Michele said something along the lines of These are the people who want to live on the edge. It’s true that they are more on the edge than the people who are living in Menlo Park or Palo Alto, but it is a deceptive edge, nobody is growing their own veggies and we are 3.5 miles from the freeway. What is different is that the center of the world has change from where ever it was to Silicon Valley and this edge is now the edge of one of the most vital places on earth and one of the richest.

The new, very nice, adults are very smart, very rich, and very good looking – even their dogs are good looking – with above average children. They also are people who want their own way. The Town has a Yahoo! Group – PVForum – and an amazingly big part of it is about airplane noise from the planes landing at SFO 30 miles away, or somebody driving too fast in their BMW.

Still, this is one of the world’s sweet spots. Happy Fiftieth, Portola Valley.

Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg, random numbers, the A’s, and 9-11

Americana, Cars, Sports

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I want to talk about how random life is, but first a story about two childhood friends that have become enemies, Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton.

Rosberg and Hamilton became friends racing go-karts in Europe as young teenagers. Although they came from very different backgrounds and didn’t meet until they started racing go-karts, Rosberg was born into European racing royalty and Hamilton is a Brit who grew up in a lower-middle-class suburb of London, they were both very good at racing and met when they started racing at the inter-European level. They are about the same age and they became friends even though they were so different.

Nico Rosberg is the son of Keke Rosberg, a Formula One Championship winning driver and Gesine Gleitsmann-Dengel, a German interpreter. He considers himself German – speaks fluent German, English, French and Italian – and grew up in Monaco.  Lewis Hamilton is from a mixed race family that dissolved when he was two. He grew up with his mother and sisters and became very good at racing radio controlled model cars. Because of that, his father gave him a go-kart when he was six. When he was twelve, he moved in with his father to race. Nico looks like a Ralph Lauren ad and so does his wife, the daughter of a family friend he has known since childhood. Lewis favors a gangsta look, drives a purple Pagani Zonda,  and has dated – seriously, off and on – an American, Nicole Scherzinger who Wikipedia identifies as the lead singer of The Pussycat Dolls, a burlesque troupe turned-recording act.

In the words of their boss, Toto Wolff, These boys have calibrated their whole life…to win the Drivers’ Championship in F1. And here they go – they are in the same car, competing against each other for that trophy and one is going to win and one is going to fail. This is a new experience for them – a difficult experience maybe.

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I think – and I am far from the only one – that Lewis Hamilton is the best pure racecar driver in the world, but right now, Rosberg is leading in the championship even though Hamilton has won more races. That is because Hamilton has had an extraordinary string of bad luck. His Mercedes has had two race-ending mechanical problem and he had additional electrical problems in qualifying that forced him to start 16th and last for two races. He was forced out of the Belgium Grand Prix in an accident caused by Rosberg, and last week, in Italy, he had an electrical problem on the start. Out of the 12 races run so far, Hamilton has had problems beyond his control in seven of them and Rosberg has had problems in one.

It is easy to see a pattern here, but there isn’t any. It is easy to see a conspiracy of a German Team trying to help the German get the Championship, but I find it hard to believe they would pay Hamilton 32 million dollars a year not to finish races (and, when Hamilton doesn’t finish, his car doesn’t finish and Mercedes is also trying to win the Manufacturers Championship). Even people who don’t normally believe in conspiracy theories have a tendency to systematize random events.

When I was in college, I worked on several experiments with students watching Flat Worm Behavior. In an effort to get truly unbiased results, we assigned participants to different areas of the experiment on a random basis. Now, we can go on the web and get a random number generator, but then, in the olden days, we would use charts – for lack of a better descriptor – filled with lines of random numbers. Looking at the numbers, they often didn’t seem random. Often they would seem to have too many numbers that formed patterns or a chain of the same number that was too long to seem natural. That is the problem, true randomness has pseudo-patterns and we think of random as being patternless. True randomness often feels fake.

In the 2002 season, the Oakland A’s won the American League pennant with a season record of 103-59. That is a 64% winning average. but from August 14th to September 4th, the A’s won every game they played. They had a 20 game winning streak. No other team has done that since 1935 and before that 1916. If the A’s had their seasonal average during that period, they would have lost 7 games instead of having their streak. If somebody had been told to randomly list wins and losses so that the average was a 64% winning average, it is doubtful that they would have put a twenty game winning streak in the middle.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me some information on 9-11 being a conspiracy. I am not much of a conspiracy buff because I think that life is much more random than people want to believe (although it has always amazed me that one of the most likely conspiracies – that of William J. Casey, then head of the CIA  who was rendered incapable of speech and then died just hours before he was going to be questioned about Iran-Contra – has never gotten traction; if the head of the CIA can’t fake their own death, who can?).

We are pattern recognizing creatures, all animals are, and in the case of a huge catastrophe like The World Trade Center coming down, there are lots of random parts. We try to make all the random parts fit into a pattern and that often results in fantastical explanations but I am convinced that the only conspiracy was between al-Qaeda and the sorry, mislead souls, who flew those planes.

 

 

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The Donner Party, Community, and Ferguson

Americana, Current Affairs

Donner-0578 The last day we were at Squaw Valley, Michele wanted to work (when most of your work is in cyberspace, you can work from anywhere). For some time now, I have wanted to photograph Sierra Valley and this was the perfect opportunity.

As I left Truckee, I, passed by Alder Creek, one of the two sites where the Donner Party was stuck over the winter of 1846-47.  Tamzene Donner and her husband, George, died here as well as George’s brother, Jacob, and his wife, Elizabeth. Still, all five of Tamzene and George’s children lived as did three of Jacob and Elizabeth’s seven kids. In addition, there was one single woman who lived. But, out of the seven single men who were with the party as teamsters and animal handlers, only two lived.

Two of the children who lived were only three years old. The five teamsters who died ranged in age from 23 to 30, the two who lived were both 16. The only person over 16, who lived, was Dorothea Wolfinger, the single women (who had been widowed on the trail). Clearly, this was not survival of the fittest. Rather, this was a case of the fittest sacrificing for the least fit. If it had been any other way, the survivors would have been considered beasts. If the teamsters had lived by letting the children die, they probably would have been tried for murder.

But I don’t think that is the reason they saved the children, I think that they considered themselves as part of a large family. Family might not be the right word; maybe small community would be better.

Going into Sierra Valley, it struck me that this was a community also.

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It is a community that is spread out, but – in my imagination, at least – a community that would not let its three-year old children starve to death.

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As I drove through the Sierra Valley, passing ranches, separated by miles of seemingly nothingness, I kept mulling over the idea of Community and how it affects its member’s actions. When Romney was running for president, he seemed particularly hard-hearted and out of touch, but people who knew him thought that he was generous to a fault. However, his generosity was to people that he knew or were in the same church, in other words, in his community. When I think back on the Conservatives I know and have known, they were all generous. Indeed, they are often more generous than many of the Liberals I know but, they are only generous to members of what they consider to be their community. The Liberals, however, tend to consider their community to be more diverse – and, I think, larger – than Conservatives so that their community includes homeless Guatemalan children trying to get back to their parents (although Liberals are not so diverse that they would want to give money to the Westboro Baptist Church).

I entered Sierra Valley from Truckee, going through Sierraville and as I left it at the eastern end of the valley, I saw a train loaded with Armored Cars. They fascinated me, they seemed so out-of-place and, in a very strange way, so lovingly conceived. They were brutal with exquisite detailing, the kind of that can only happen when something is built with, close to, an unlimited budget. Donner-0707

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It also struck me that anybody inside that armored car – looking out through the bulletproof windows – was completely separated from whomever was outside. They are in a different community. Soldiers, riding in those behemoths, in Iraq or Afghanistan, are saying We are not you, we are separate, and we can do anything we want. Cops riding on city streets are saying the same thing, not only to the citizens outside, but to themselves.

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San Mateo County is about 42% white, 27% Asian, and 25%  Hispanic with a per capita income of $57,906 and we have an armored car. Our armored car – owned by the people but run by our local Sheriff’s Department, to be used against the people, if needed – even has a ring on the top so that it can be equipped with a  machine gun. There is no sane use, in my San Mateo County – anybody’s San Mateo County – for a mobile fort. More germane is that there is no sane use for a mobile fort in Ferguson.

But, it turns out, the Armored Cars – were pretty much free – through a Department of Homeland Security program to fund armored vehicles after 9/11 – so they are hard to turn down. But, again, they are actually bad for everybody concerned. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail; armored cars get used. The police, looking through the windows, are no longer part of the community, they have become an occupying army. They say things like Bring it, you fucking animals!

That’s the problem, the militarization of the police is not good for anybody except the people actually selling the military equipment. Armored Cars don’t help deter crime, they don’t help catch criminals, Armored Cars don’t help with crowd control, they don’t even help in riot control (although, I guess, one could argue that they would help in a mass zombie attack).

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.

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.