Cristo di Cioccolata
Archive for March, 2007
Anatomy Lesson
Once, when my nephew Jonathan was a few months old, I picked up a packed of X-rays marked "J. Sacks" that had been left in the lounge. I started to leaf through them curiously, then perplexedly, then with horror -- for Jonathan was a nice-looking little baby, and no one would have guessed, without the X-rays, that he was hideously deformed. His pelvis, his little legs -- they scarcely looked human.
I went to my mother with the X-rays, shaking my head. "Poor Jonathan . . . " I started.
My mother looked puzzled. "Jonathan?" she said. "Jonathan is fine."
"But the X-rays," I said, "I've been looking at his X-rays."
My mother looked blank, then burst into a roar of laughter, and laughed until tears ran down her face. "J" did not stand for Jonathan, she finally said, but for another member of the household, Jezebel. Jezebel, our new boxer, had had some blood in her urine, and my mother had taken her to hospital to have a kidney X-ray. What I had taken for grotesquely deformed human anatomy was, in fact, perfectly normal canine anatomy. How could I have made such an absurd mistake? The least knowledge, the least common sense, would have made it all clear to me -- my mother, a professor of anatomy, shook her head in disbelief.
-- Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (New York: Knopf, 2001), 240.
Bay Area Land Conservation Organizations
A Shark Inside a Wave
William Willis's raft voyage from Peru to Samoa in 1954:
In the patterns of light around the raft, he once thought he saw an octopus extending enormous tentacles toward him, and he ran for his ax. Lying one afternoon asleep on the deck, he suddenly woke and in a wave looming above him saw a shark that looked ready to attack him. He jumped up to defend himself. The shark fell, and the raft rose on the wave that had contained it. Occasionally at night, the sparks of phosphorescence thrown up by the bow would seem to merge with the sky, and he would feel as if he were sailing among the stars.
Even though he wore sunglasses, the sun eventually blinded him, and he had to remain for hours at a time in the cabin, bathing his eyes with salt water for the pain. The first island where he might have landed was surrounded by reefs and had no shore. No one answered his radio call for help, so he had to sail past it. During a squall he heard a crash in the cabin but was too busy to address it. The cat had toppled the parrot's cage and killed the parrot. Willis sewed its remains in a piece of sail, put them in the cage, and lowered them overboard. After finding finding no way to enter a harbor on a second island, he saw an American ship headed toward him, and they towed him to land. He had been at sea for 112 days.
-- Alec Wilkinson, The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Papa Neutrino (New York: Random House, 2007), 68.
A Small Whale Inside a Wave
I enjoyed the Atlantic crossing an indecent amount. Even when the wind wasn't blowing I liked being there -- I didn't want any noise so I just drifted about until the wind came back. I read books, wrote little computer programs, enjoyed the sea. I didn't want it to be over. I wanted to move slowly across the water and never get anywhere.
One windy day I saw a small whale inside a wave. The waves were steep that day and I saw a grayish object in the blue -- it was a whale swimming along, inside the top of the wave, looking me over. The whale would ride to the top of each new wave and eye my boat, as if in a passing railroad car of water.
Congressional Vote Ratings, 2006
At National Journal: Senators and congresspeople voting liberal or conservative on economic, social, and foreign policy during 2006. Jim Ryun (R-KS) was easily the most illiberal representative.
Tom Swift
No one seemed to realize that any of several Swift inventions would have changed the shape of human history. In Tom Swift and the Cosmic Astronauts, Tom casually invents a gravity concentrator after repairing a kite for some younger kids in an empty lot, and in Tom Swift and His Space Solartron, he implements a gadget that converts solar energy directly to matter in the form of any chosen element or simple compound. . . . The Repelatron alone would have changed the shape of technological society, as hinted but never fully explored in Tom Swift and His Repelatron Skyway.
The author or authors seemed incapable of grasping the implications of what they wrote. In that title, Tom Swift lays "down" a floating superhighway in mid-air, to be supported on Repelatron beams, with a helicopter. Tom's creators didn't seem to hit upon the truth (as we all did, and discussed endlessly on Boy Scout campouts) that Repelatrons made all other forms of flying obsolete. We also realized that if the Space Solartron could convert solar energy to oxygen for breathing, to water for drinking, and even to sugar for eating, it could make gold as well. But Tom never hit on that. I guess he was rich already and wasn't ruled by crass financial motives.
San Francisco Bay Area Cities and Neighborhoods
Wikipedia has articles on around thirty-five East Bay cities, seventy San Francisco neighborhoods, and thirty Oakland neighborhoods. Cameron Marlow has a tableof equivalences between San Francisco neighborhoods and New York City neighborhoods. Alfredo Jacobo Perez Gomez has a guide for visiting, moving to, or living in San Francisco that includes lots of photographs of neighborhoods. Outsidelands.org has lots of history about Sunset, Richmond, and the other neighborhoods of western San Francisco.