Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: such as it is
Bodega Bay
I was feeling stir crazy yesterday and wanted to see ocean. Jake must have been bored with his usual computer games, so he took a rare break from the monitor (hey! I almost called it a CRT!) to come with me.
It’s a quick drive from here to the coat — 20 minutes, perhaps? And pretty, although when you’re used to a more northern coastline, this particular brand of “pretty” feels rather thin. Still, I had high hopes.
We were greeted by the bellow of bull sea lions before we even saw water. They had flocked to the shoreline by the dozens, and two huge bad boys duked it out over a young female with a very attractive set of flippers. She wore a bit of seaweed on her head like a tiara, and you know those fancy reusable shopping bags they sell for a couple bucks at Trader Joes? She must have found one in the surf, because she carried it on her right flipper just like the latest Louis Vuitton handbag, and she used it to slap one of the bulls upside the head if he showed any signs of cowardice.
Sea snakes of all colors had swarmed the tide pools. There were lime greens and emeralds, magenta with creamy stripes, teals and mauves and puces, and one lonely spumoni. Young boys clothed only in Speedos dove into the pools for nickles and dimes thrown by jeering tourists while street vendors loudly hawked sno-cones and churros. A good time was had by all.
We drove up the coast, looking for something less commercial, and found a colony of sea otters. Here, too, dozens of day-trippers had gathered, and there were vendors selling dripping wet muslin bags. We parked and got out to take a closer look. Fishmongers loaded the muslin bags with live mussels and oysters, and folks were tossing these to the otters. Seemed like a fun idea — how often do you get to feed sea otters? But it wasn’t like that at all. The otters had learned to macrame kelp into satchels and hanging baskets. We watched in amazement as a Marinite in black Vuarnets heaved a muslin bag out to sea; one otter made off with the loot while another swam to shore, tugging a kelp afghan behind him.
Yeah, Bodega Bay sucked ass. We stopped off at a gift shop, bought some salt water taffy, and came home.
Sometimes the fantasy is better than the reality.
D.
Live-blogging tonight?
Anyone up for it?
BTW, I do “friends only” live-blogging since I got sick-up-and-fed with a$$holes who insult my friends and flash their wieners at me. If you’ve never live-blogged with me, you’ll need to sign up with Stickam so we can be . . . uh . . . friends. Special friends.
We’ll shoot for 7:30 Pacific, if folks are interested.
D.
Boom
First, let me say that no one was injured, thank heavens.
Second, what I know of the accident came to me from an eyewitness. If I have to explain what I saw, then it’s going to come out funny. I’m driving, a white car moves out in front of me, there’s kids in the back, I slam on the brakes, my car doesn’t stop in time. There’s a loud noise, more a thud than a crunch, when my fender meets her passenger side rear panel.
One split-second difference and I would have collided squarely with the passenger side back door. You know, where the kids were. Of course I’m only thinking about split-second differences now.
I ran back to her car, which had spun around and ended up backwards, I think, on the side street. I asked her if her kids were okay and she said, “Okay, okay.” They were in car seats (again, thank heavens!) and both were crying. She didn’t speak English. She seemed about ready to drive off and I would have let her. Then we could all get back to our lives — I to my office, where I had no patients to see for a whole afternoon, she and her kids to whatever it was they did. Surely they had something to do.
It seemed odd, though. Why wasn’t she coming out to check her own damages? Isn’t that what people did under these circumstances?
Fortunately, there were some bystanders (one of whom witnessed the whole thing), and they blocked her car and told her she had to wait. One of them told me to call the police, so I called 911. Only then did I think to check my car for damages.
It ain’t pretty. The front looks like a Road Warrior car: part of the fender is jutting forward like a spike. There’s styrofoam showing. Styrofoam! So that’s what cars are made from these days.
The eyewitness said that she pulled out into the intersection in front of me. Why would she do that? I didn’t have a stop sign, but she did. There’s a crosswalk sign posted on my street, but it doesn’t look anything like a stop sign. Either she didn’t see me, or she mistook the crosswalk sign for a stop sign. In other words, maybe she thought it was a four-way-stop.
The rest is pretty routine. The policeman showed up (thank you, Officer Deadman). (No kidding.) He took statements, told me that she didn’t have proof of insurance or her driver’s license, but she said both were at home. Oh, her ride? A Lexus.
I was sufficiently rattled that I called Karen and had her pick me up from work. I didn’t feel much like driving. I’ve never enjoyed driving, but now I REALLY don’t enjoy driving. And here I am.
I’m thankful that she and her kids are fine.
D.
Golden Gate Bridge
Our feet are in the soil, most of us. We’re rooted. Travel doesn’t come naturally nor is it entirely pleasant. Think jet lag. Think Traveler’s Diarrhea. We evolved to roam by foot, not by engine, and any deviation from that genetic dictum takes its toll.
When I travel, I kiss my wife goodbye as if I might never see her again. I’d do the same to my son except he’s not the physical type. (And when did that happen? Around age six, I think. Before that, he couldn’t get enough hugs.) People die all the time on the road. Shit happens. When I arrive, I call Karen to let her know I got there safely. I doubt I’m all that unusual to do so, but I also doubt that most folks are as bloody-minded as I am. Hi, Karen. I’m here. Which translates as, The vultures aren’t picking my bones . . . but they’ll still have another shot on the return voyage.
I prefer new places, given the choice, because I find displacement in space far less disturbing than displacement in time. If I could travel from new location to new location I would be just fine. I could imagine that those old places had never changed, that they would always be as I had remembered. The roots I had put down would rejoin me somehow and all would be as it was. I would be like Dracula with coffin-bearing safe houses all across London.
On the Stanford Campus, things look familiar but never too familiar. When I was there, I spent 98% of my time on the medical school campus, with a spot of time spent in the biology and chemistry buildings (across the street) and precious little time dodging the undergrads’ bicycles on the main campus. I still have to dodge bikes, only now the kids are listening to their iPods, smoking cigarettes, or texting — all while biking. I’m not kidding. So this campus has only vague familiarity, and when I try to come up with place names, my mind substitutes proper nouns from the Berkeley Campus. No, that is not Zellerbach Auditorium. No, that is not Moses Hall.
College campuses minimize the sense of displacement in time. They’re intrinsically conservative since it takes a major disaster to motivate them to tear down and rebuild. That’s what happened at UC Berkeley in 1989 after the Loma Prieta quake, and parts of that campus will never look the same to me. Still, I like it better than the Stanford campus. Berkeley is where I shed my childhood, made friends that have lasted a lifetime, met my wife. Stanford is where Karen and I spent some of the most challenging years of our lives together (and not challenging in a good way).
That photo of the Golden Gate Bridge was taken with a long exposure time. In real time, the towers loom less brightly. They’re ghosts, orange behemoths. They would lurch from their moorings, their dripping feet encrusted in concrete, and would vault north past Sausalito, past the Muir Woods, dragging their spans behind them like wedding trains. They’d do it in a steel heartbeat were it not for the fact that after 71 years, even a bridge puts down roots.
D.
Best doggone costumes
Come to the Dark Side. We have Kibbles ‘n Bits.
Enough with the Star Wars costumes, already!
Happy Halloween.
D.
Waddya think — Sara Benincasa?
This Palin impersonator clearly isn’t Tina Fey, who looks more like Palin than Palin does. But is it Sara Benincasa? Compare:
Warning on this next one: potty mouth language!
Well, maybe not.
D.
Fire!
We visited my sister-in-law and her family this weekend. They live in Kensington, a beautiful town in the hills above Berkeley overlooking San Francisco Bay. It’s a city of winding streets and dead ends, where locals whip around hairpin turns and visitors crawl at 10 mph. It’s a city where every home has a killer view.
Last night, this was the view.
Angel Island caught fire. We went out for dinner at 6:30 PM, got back by 8, and noticed the blaze soon thereafter. It was hard to miss. Initial news reports were laughable (ten acres? You call that ten acres?) The SFGate story seems much more credible (400 acres).
I’ve been to Angel Island. It was back in ’83, when my lab went on a picnic. We took a ferry there and explored the ruins. These days, Angel Island is primarily a campground (fortunately, all of the campers were evacuated without injury last night), but it has served in the past as a cattle ranch, quarantine facility, discharge depot for troops returning from the Spanish-American War, and Japanese/German POW camp during WWII. Briefly, the island hosted a Nike missile base.
By morning, firefighters had done their job and we needed binoculars to see the smoke. I drove down Grizzly Peak Blvd., something I had never done in all my years at Berkeley (not having any wheels might have had something to do with that). What spectacular views! The East Bay was an expanse of evergreens and homes leading out to the Bay; both bridges were in full view; the City’s skyline was crisp against a cloudless blue sky. Without binoculars, you couldn’t even tell there had been drama the night before.
D.
Hell hath no fury *UPDATED*
Wonder what he did to deserve this:
MANATEE COUNTY – A woman dumped a pot of boiling water on her husband’s groin area as he slept Wednesday morning, according to a Manatee Sheriff’s report.
Maverna T. Turay, 52, of the 600 block of 10th Avenue East, was arrested on a charge of aggravated domestic battery.
Her husband of two years, Ealy Jones Jr., sustained second-degree burns and was taken by emergency helicopter to Tampa General Hospital.
The couple was staying at a home in the 7000 block of Sixth Avenue Northwest watching Turay’s nieces and nephews, deputies reported.
Turay boiled the water as Jones slept and threw it on his groin area, the report said.
Jones ran out of the house screaming, and one of the children called 9-1-1.
Deputies reported that Turay had been drinking beer before the incident.
UPDATED:
My son rightly points out that this is a lame post, certainly not deserving of the Balls and Walnuts brand. He says if I don’t have anything to blog, I shouldn’t blog at all. But the world is full of blog-worthy topics! And so I bring you . . .
Intellecshual.s
First, watch the video:
It’s the comment thread that rawks. For example,
If it is “getting boring,” then the subtext is that you still find yourself watching these vids despite the logical part of your brain telling you that there is nothing here that you want to admit to liking. These vids are like watching kitten videos, and there are no political ideologies or religious debates to offend anybody. If you feel conflicted, maybe it is a conflict between “your preconception of what you like” and “what you actually like.” There is the analysis, now you can just watch.
and
my farts are more interesting
Eh, I don’t want to ruin it for you . . .
D.
Life extension
Nature recently published a review on the science of life extension. TWe can make a nematode (C. elegans) live longer; we can make mice live longer. We now know enough about the genetics of aging to stimulate the drug companies into frenetic bursts of research (although the FDA has already stated it will not approve drugs exclusively intended to extend the lifespan). I often kid people that I have no intention of dying, but more and more, it’s beginning to look plausible.
We’ve known for more than 100 years that dietary restriction extends the lifespan in mammals. No one knows if this applies to humans, but that begs the question (would you want to live like that?) Free radical inhibitors like superoxide dismutase are not the answer; recent studies have shown these drugs do nothing to reduce disease, and may in fact inhibit our defenses against certain infectious diseases.
What would the perfect pill accomplish? Not enough to add more years, else we’d all end up like Swift’s Struldbrugs. We would need youth, too.
***
Season three of Dexter debuted tonight. He killed someone.
Shoot! I ruined it for you!
***
One thing I always hate about moving: many of our pets die. They simply can’t handle the change. My water dragon died while I was in Chicago — not unexpected, since she had been off her food for quite a while. And at least three of my poison dart frogs have died, too. I found one of them this morning in his cage, a withered corpse, his legs filamentous. Karen insisted I try to rehydrate him.
You have to warm drowning victims; sometimes their hypothermia saves them. You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead. With amphibians, you’re not dead until you’re wet and dead.
Other people’s bathrooms, you’ll find a flower floating in a bowl of water. In mine, you’ll find a frog.
The mammals are doing fine. Cats, ferrets, even the degus are healthy and happy. The cats and the ferrets are the only ones I really care about anymore. I’m becoming ordinary.
***
I tell myself that it’s the thought of the death of loved ones, family, friends — that’s what disturbs me the most. You’d think it would be my own death I’d worry about, but no. Is it that my own death is unthinkable?
Folks in my family have a real problem with the big D. Why is that?
D. (the little d, that is.)