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Books I Read in 2025

In 2025 most of the books I read were courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library. I read parts of books and checked out books that I was simply curious about. The San Francisco Public Library is an amazing resource. You can even check out vinyl records!

Below is a list of books that I finished. I do this exercise to simply reflect on the previous year.

Books I Read 2025


Crow Planet Essential Wisdom From the Urban Wilderness
Haupt, Lyanda Lynn
New York : Little, Brown and Co., 2009.


The Explosion of Deferred Dreams Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965-1975
Callahan, Mathew
Oakland, CA : PM Press, [2017]
see review

This is a really interesting book for those interested in San Francisco history.

Eiger Dreams Ventures Among Men and Mountains
Krakauer, Jon
New York, NY : Lyons & Burford, c1990.


The Fifth Risk
Lewis, Michael
New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Michael Lewis has spent the last few years investigating what the federal government does. The Fifth Risk illuminates how behind the scenes, dedicated, often eccentric federal employees do jobs that are very important for our safety and also simply to advance pure science.

James A Novel
Everett, Percival
New York : Doubleday, [2024]
see review

The review of James linked above is the most viewed post on this website.

Rasputin The Untold Story
Fuhrmann, Joseph T.
Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, c2013.

Bless Me, Ultima
Rudolfo Anaya
TQS Publications 1972

barbariandayscover200
Barbarian Days A Surfing Life
Finnegan, William
New York : Penguin Press, 2015.
see review

Indeed, underestimation is practiced with the greatest aplomb on the North Shore of Oahu. There, a wave must be the size of a small cathedral before locals will call it eight feet.

 

Buzzy Trent, an old-time big wave rider, allegedly said, “Big waves are not measured in feet, but increments of fear.” If he said that, he got it right.
– “Barbarian Days A Surfing Life”

Knoxville: This Obscure Prismatic City
(American Chronicles) Neely, Jack
The History Press; Illustrated edition (November 13, 2009)

Technofeudalism What Killed Capitalism
Varoufakis, Yanis
Brooklyn, NY : Melville House, [2023], ©2023

Indeed we are all serfs in the new economic order, with every social media post adding to the coffers of the the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. Give not your children away to these schmucks!

Notes From Underground
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Grand Rapids, Mich. : William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2009.

1984
Orwell, George
San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, [1984], ©1949

It is always good to revisit the dystopian works of the twentieth century. 1984 rings true still.

The Song of the Hawk The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins
Chilton, John
Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c1990.
see review

Walden and Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau
New York : Union Square & Co., 2023.

Simplicity is a virtue. I think that Thoreau has vanished from the American psychique. We are a country where more is better and the accumulation of stuff is really the only virtue.

Tropic of Cancer
Miller, Henry
Mexican Publisher

Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
Miller, Henry
New Directions

“The language of society is conformity; the language of the individual is freedom. Life will continue to be hell as long as the people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality. Switching from one ideology to another is a useless game. Each and every one of us is unique, and must be recognized as such. The least we can say about ourselves is that we are American, or French, or whatever the case may be. We are first of all human beings, different one from another, obliged to live together, to stew in the same pot.”
– Henry Miller from “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird”

Teaching to Transgress Education as the Practice of Freedom
hooks, bell New York : Routledge, 1994.

Abundance
Klein, Ezra
First Avid Reader Press

Good grief! I have no idea why this book was taken seriously. The rose-colored glasses this book takes on the current situation is so devoid of the realities on the ground. It is for those who have this delusional idea that somehow technology will fix all our problems (Bill Gates is in this camp). Climate change is but a bug that we can fix. Miraculously affordable housing will emerge just as long as we get government regulations eradicated. It is as if the authors have no understanding of history.

The World’s Fastest Man the Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America’s First Black Sports Hero
Kranish, Michael
New York : Scribner, 2019.

Highly recommended book about Marshall “Major” Taylor and a view into the Gilded Age, extraordinary racism, courage and a short period of time when bicycles were the modern thing. The odd fact that the story of Major Taylor is obscure is unfortunate.

The Pirate’s Wife The Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd
Geanacopoulos, Daphne Palmer
Toronto : Hanover Square Press, [2022]

King of Kings The Iranian Revolution : A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
Anderson, Scott
First Doubleday hardcover edition
see review

Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service
Lewis, Michael
New York : Riverhead Books, [2025]

The Phantom Tollbooth
Juster, Norton
HarperCollins 1964

Not really a kids book, Norton Juster was a genius.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Turner, Fred
Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2006.

From 2006, From Counterculture to Cyberculture is a bit of love-letter to Stewart Brand and an interesting view of how counter-culture morphed into the techno-libertarian world we live in today. It was written before “social media” and illuminates how the New Communalists of the early 1970s morphed into a notion of a digital utopia where people became one and could communicate for the good of all humankind. Enter, Newt Gingrich and an ethos of libertarian deregulation and we have the current world we live in today. It briefly goes into the Telecommunications Act of 1996 but does not even mention the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – DMCA of 1998.

While Tanner’s thesis is correct, the book ignores a lot of the events and forces that were going on at the time and instead redundantly drives home the point that the people who drove VW Westphalia’s in the seventies are now surely driving Tesla’s and living in gated communities, counting their millions.

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In Defense of Knobs

Eventually it happens. Your perfectly functioning, twenty-year-old TV becomes obsolete. When it was born it was state-of-the-art. Great color. Big screen. A remote that had the channels, the volume control and the all-important mute button. There were other buttons but they were never pushed. No need. The game is on. Let’s make some popcorn. But that old SONY is not “smart.” It does not connect to the internets. Out with the old. In with the new. A rather large Smart TV is but $200 these days. A pleasant but rather laconic young gentleman at Best Buy will get you all set up. Bring in your old set. They will recycle it for free.

The new model is a Samsung. A very nice picture and when turned on greets you with an assortment of options for entertainment that would leave you with no time to bathe, sleep or go to work. YouTube. Netflix, Hulu, Disney, AppleTV – just for starters. Anything seems possible on this thing but as time goes by you realize that you begin to feel like Humphry Bogart in the African Queen, hacking your way with a machete out of the swamp, picking leaches off your back, regretting that Kathern Hepburn dumped out all that fine gin into the river. There is no way to easily control the menu items. No way to get rid of things you will never use. New things are marketed to you like you are in a Vegas casino. Go for broke. Roll the dice. Various shows you have no interest in automatically play while you try to figure out the search features. The voice activation only works with the proper remote (not included in the box). When you do click on a “platform” you get a spinning icon with a bunch of blue juggling balls. This can go on for a 10 to 40 seconds until things load. Evidently intelligence takes time. Could I have purchased the Moderately Smart TV? Did she graduate from Smart TV University? What were her grades by the way? And what is strange is that simply playing a slideshow of your Google Photos Album is next to impossible. Once you get it working, you realize that it only plays in portrait mode. No bueno.

After a few months, I began to reminisce about the old TVs. The ones with tubes, dials and knobs. As a user you were in complete control of these beasts. Finding your show was instantaneous and automatic. UHF, VHF. Two dials and you had your channels memorized. You could turn the dial and “bamm” you were there. If the picture got fuzzy or began to float up and down, usually a swift angry bang on the side of the box would fix the matter. Was is great? No. Did the technology work? Most of the time quite well. Was it smart? Seemingly more intelligent than many of the current models.

Recently Cory Doctorow came up with the term “enshittification” for the three-stage process whereby online platforms become progressively worse for users as companies prioritize profits. The companies lock customers in, often simply by controlling their personal connections and address book and then they begin selling more ads and littering your channel. To this observer, the new “Smart TVs” are really no different. Users get locked in, then they start selling subscriptions. In some ways this “enshittification” has been going on for a long time. I remember when cable TV first started, the big sell was no ads! That did not last long. Like cable TV your Amazon Prime subscription now lets you watch many movies with this same caveat: there are ads.

Many years ago, in the 1980s, out of pity, we were given a little fourteen inch black and white model. We watched Star Trek Next Generation on that thing. Jean Luc Picard took on the Borg and came out with his brain still intact.  Joe Montana made amazing fourth quarter drives, winning games with seconds left on that box. Somehow that fourteen inch screen was larger than life. The old black and white movies, late at night on Channel 9, obviously looked authentic. And when you had had enough, all you had to do is get out of your chair and turn the knob that controlled the volume counter-clockwise all the way to the left. You heard a decisive click and the screen would flash for a second and disappear. No one knew you had turned the dial. All was quiet. I miss knobs.

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The Quarterly Report – News From San Francisco – November 2025

The Quarterly Report: A brief synopsis of the news in San Francisco over the last three months. You are now reading “Slow News That Doesn’t Break” – the exotic internet.

Weather

October and November are always pleasant months in San Francisco. The marine layer pushes back and we get warmer weather, often beautiful sunsets and good surf.  The water temperature at Ocean Beach was often around sixty degrees which is warm for around here. A large swell came in and surf at Maverick’s near Half Moon Bay had some forty foot ridable surf. The longer period swells from the Alaska always means storms in California. Starting on November 13, 2025 the seasonal rain began. Hopefully this is just an omen for a good snow year, but these days anything can happen.

If you are visiting San Francisco, bring a light jacket, layers and a rain jacket.

National Politics

There were a few weeks in October when people in San Francisco were a bit on edge. Donald Trump threatened to send in Federal Agents into San Francisco.  Somehow, Mayor Daniel Lurie convinced Trump that there was no reason to send in the troops. He told him that the fentanyl situation was getting better and that the city has things under control. Lurie must have read some behavior management and child psychology books about how to deal with toddlers as he was able to redirect Trump away from the beautiful city where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars. It probably helped that Lurie is a very wealthy white guy (a millionaire, for sure,  but no one knows) so he surely knows how to deal with other wealthy white guys.  For the time being Trump has forgotten about San Francisco. This is good. Please, for the love of God – stay away. There are already enough creepy billionaires around here.

October 2, 2023 New Yorker cover humorously commenting on the geriatric qualities of people in power these days.
October 2, 2023 New Yorker cover humorously commenting on the geriatric qualities of people in power these days.

https://www.newyorker.com/

Nancy Pelosi, will be retiring and not seeking another term. She has had a long and illustrious career in the United States House of Representatives and was a huge force in the ACA (Affordable Care Act). Time to move on and let the younger folk take over. This probably should have happened a decade ago. Her contemporary Senator Barbara Boxer retired in 2017.

My favorite curious episode involving Nancy Pelosi is when in 2019 she let on that she prays for President Donald Trump, for which Trump took great offence. I felt at the time that this was interesting seeing as his base are Christian Nationalists. I have a feeling that Trump’s religious education is a bit lacking. Remember, there are still a few Trump Afterlife Insurance policies left so make sure to call and get yours by midnight tonight!

“Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying “I pray for the President,” when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense. It is a terrible thing that you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I!”
– Donald Trump’s letter to The Honorable Nancy Pelosi – 12/18/2019

Please do not pray for the President – It Creeps Him Out

The San Francisco Journal would like to thank Nancy Pelosi for her epic public service and for always being an adult in the room.

Local Politics

If you want to keep track of San Francisco politics, probably the best place is https://missionlocal.org/. They actually have a few beat reporters and report on things like homelessness and the police.

In September, District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio lost his recall election. The Sunset District is very car-centric and people in his district want to be able to drive their cars on the Great Highway. The rest of the city wants to use it as a park – Sunset Dunes.  Stayed tuned for how this will play out, but let it be known that Sunset Dunes, on a clear day is a great place to get outside and play by the ocean. It is getting a lot of use. San Francisco kids will be healthier because of it. More young people will be riding bikes.

Sunset Dunes Park – San Francisco

There is not much else to report on the local front except the Waymo driverless cars are everywhere, sometimes running over cats. It seems the Waymos are retreating to a barn at night and somehow procreating. They are starting to drive around San Francisco in litters.

Waymo Driverless Taxi
Waymo Driverless Taxi

Sporting News

The San Francisco 49ers are 6-4. I do not often pay attention to that sport until the playoffs.

Speaking of the playoff, in baseball the lead up to and the MLB World Series in 2025 was one for the ages. In the end, the Los Angeles Dodgers won in seven games. The quality of the games throughout the playoffs was amazing. The Yankees got booted out in five. The Brewers were looking good but then ran out of gas and faced what was to be a very difficult opponent – Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and the LA Dodgers. The Toronto Blues Jays were looking good until they had to face Yamamoto and could not connect with their bats. The Dodgers had been slumping at the plate until Game 6 when they slowly came to life. Like as it happens so often in baseball, it was almost as if the tide began to turn. First Mookie Betts got a key hit. Then veteran Venezuelan journeyman Miguel Rojas, playing second base, starts making plays and hitting the ball and you knew the Dodgers had it. The Blue Jays ended the baseball season by hitting into a double play with the winning run on second. And so it goes.

Congrats to the L.A. Dodgers. We will see you next year.

That is The Quarterly Report – November 2025

Photo Gallery of SF

The Quarterly Report – November 2025

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San Francisco Photos – October and November

San Francisco Photos from October and November, 2025. Always nice this time of year between rains. The sunset are are often spectacular. It gets dark around 6 pm.

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Baseball, Big Pharma, 30 second ads and We Must All Just Be Sick

At one point it seemed that when you watched sports on television all you saw were either car commercials, truck commercials, insurance company commercials or fast food commercials. Everyone seemed to need both a Ford F150 truck towing off-terrain vehicles and of course – a Big Mac, fries and super-sized Coke. Some gravel road in a mythical mountain scenery with junk food trash strewn around the floor of your vehicle was the idea of nirvana. Those ads have not exactly gone away but now about a third of the commercials seem to be for pharmaceuticals whos names are as forgettable as they are sometimes impossible to pronounce.  Are these the new Greek gods of our era? “Dear Camzyos. Must I have this splitting headache for days? Ask my doctor?” Of course, at some point during the ads you get the warning about side effects. These always include nausea and dizziness, anxiety, diarrhea, muscle aches and frequently unfortunate side effects, things like death.  Oh well. Mortality has arrived, but at least my eczema cleared up and my poops were fine.

During the MLB Playoffs and World Series I have been keeping track of all the drugs advertised. Below is my running list. Remember to ask your doctor, provider or now prescriber about the list below and whether you need any of them.

Calquence – ask your doctor
Camzyos – ask your doctor
Dupixent – skin medicine
Ebdyss – skin medicine
Entyvio – ulcerative colitis
Keytruda – cancer
Panvorya – ask your doctor
Pluvicto – prostate
Ro – weight loss, Serina Williams endoresed
Skyrizi – chrons disease
Sublicade – opioid dependence
Tremphya – ulcerative colitis
Vandos – In the pursuit of happiness (this is a pharmaceutical company)
wegovy – weight loss
Xiafra – eye medicine

The irony of this advertising on such a large stage is that we live in an age of targeted advertising. Online we see ads dependent on what web sites we have visited and what products are in our “carts.” That a company has such deep pockets with niche “products” to buy ads in the expensive World Series market says something about the chicanery in our healthcare system. Health insurance premiums are going up.  Soon, many people will not have health insurance at all. Sorry for the buzz-kill folks. It may be time to pop a few Vandos.

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No Kings Day – Photos from SF

No Kings Day on October 18, 2025 in San Francisco was a day of peaceful protest. There were over 100,000 people that turned out. Below are photos from the march from the Embarcadero BART to the Civic Center.

IF GEORGE WASHINGTON was alive he’d be MARCHING on NO KINGS DAY!
– Sign held by protester at the October 18, 2025, NO KINGS DAY! march

SOME OF THE SIGN’S MESSAGES – So many clever signs!

No Health Care For You Peasants, But a Ballroom For The Queen.

No Kings in America SINCE 1776

WAKE UP, THIS IS A FUCKING COUP

HEY AMERICA, are you feeling GREAT YET?

THESE CRIMINALS DESERVE DUE PROCESS (arrow pointing to photo of Trump. Miller and the rest)

RADICALIZED BY BASIC DECENCY

MORE MESSAGES – CLEVER!

WANT TO END ANTIFA? STOP DOING FASCIST SHIT

IT’S GETTING SO BAD, EVEN THE INTROVERTS ARE IN THE STREETS PROTESTING

TRUMP TRAITOR

I PEDGE ALLEGANCE TO THE REPUBLIC – NO KINGS

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King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution – A Review and Reflections

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation is the full title of a book by Scott Anderson published in 2025.  The gist of the book is that the United States, distracted by the Soviet Union and the cold war, overly compartmentalized in its state department and spy networks, did not take the religious fundamentalism that was growing in Iran seriously.  Few people in the state department or even at the embassy spoke Farsi. Not many were in the smaller towns and countryside. Important warnings were ignored. Crucial reports where just filed away. While the book looks at the history of Iran and things like the 1953 coup, it mostly focuses on the leadup to the 1979 revolution. Three key sources are referenced throughout the book: Farah Pahlavi, Michael Metrinko and National Security Council officer Gary Sick.  Through this lens you see clearly the catastrophic miscalculations of the U.S. that lead to the fall of shah and the Iran hostage crisis. There are some juicy moments like when President Carter visited Iran in the 1970s and brought Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan along for entertainment. Their improvisations and informality were perplexing to the stiff Shah and gave Gary Sick insights into the monarch he was dealing with. Additionally, Michael Metrinko who was one of the hostages provides some interesting and humorous  observations along the way.

“By my count I worked with nineteen different American generals over there,” Metrinko observed in the autumn of 2021, shortly after the American forces had abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban, “but at this point I’d be very hard-pressed to tell you which one was the dumbest.”

When it gets to 1978 the book moves slowly and recounts the tense daily events leading up to the storming of the U.S Embassy and the Iran hostage crisis. The details and complexity of the situation are well-researched and conveyed. Eventually, you learn that the shah, battling cancer, leaves Tehran with his family – the shah in the cockpit of a Boeing 707, piloting the jetliner out of Iran. The book is quite the page turner and begs the question that if the state department was so incompetent then, it must be even more a disaster today. 5 stars.

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Doubleday
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 5, 2025
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 512 pages

NOTE: The author of this review lived in Tehran from 1970 to 1972, attended fourth and fifth grade at Iranzamin international school, and while he does not speak much Farsi, he does remember a few swear words that he learned by listening to frustrated Tehran cab drivers. The photo above is indeed from the author’s stamp collection from that era.

RELATED POST: Later, while in high school back in the United States, he questioned a United States senator about the situation in Iran. The senator seemed a bit stumped by the question. In a way, it foretold the disaster about to unfold.

 I had always wondered how it was possible for the two disparate worlds to get along and how the meeting of the West with the Persian world would work out in the end. Stylish woman getting off the plane from shopping sprees in Paris, wearing the latest fashions  in the same streets with Muslim women in traditional chadors.  How is this possible?

Dear Senator, I have a question

 

 

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October San Francisco Photos

October is a special time of year in San Francisco. The fog usually moves out and the long period swells start rolling in. The surfing gets good. This year we have had some early season rain which is quite welcome seeing as fires have been a major problem of late. With the cumulous clouds in the sky the sunsets have been magical.

There is no reason to send in the National Guard or troops of any kind into San Francisco. As you can see by the photos there are no major disturbances. There is a fentanyl problem but that was actually started by the U.S. pharmaceutical industry and both the City of San Francisco and many non-profits are working on the problem and helping those involved. On Saturday many of us will take to the streets for a No Kings – No Thrones – No Crowns  protest.  If George Washington were alive, he would surely be joining us.

We are not crazy. We are the Americans.

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Google AI Mode and Artificial Persectives

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies – captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Journeys in AI and looking at how Google sees your website.

In the old days of SEO there was the Page Rank which was a cute play on words. Larry Page, a CEO at Google invented the phrase but everyone knew it was about how good your SEO (search engine optimization) was ranking. It was a scale of 1 to 10 and a 6 or a 7 was good and maybe meant you were on the first page of Google search results. About eight years ago Google got rid of exposing your Page Rank. No longer could you look under the hood or see the dirty laundry in the Google closet.

The other day I experimented with Google AI Mode and discovered some interesting assumptions by this everchanging technology. Little does Google know that I write these posts for fun and sometimes to vent and scream at the stars, but most often to embrace the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution and simply speak my mind. At one point the internet was meant to be a force for equalization and democracy. Imagine that!

Google AI Mode - September 28, 2025
Google AI Mode – September 28, 2025

Anyway, Google AI Mode is always changing. When I query “who writes for the san francisco journal?” over time I have gotten different results. At one point it came back with:

It is important not to confuse The San Francisco Journal with the much larger and more widely known daily newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle which has a large staff of reporters and editors.

This I thought an odd and and interest observation. It could have also said “It is important not to confuse The San Francisco Journal with the much larger and more widely known daily newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle which survives by advertising from major corporations (petro-chemical, pharmaceutical, big-tech, banking, etc.) which they rarely cover by doing real investigations and perhaps finding malfeasance and bad news. The editors do seem a bit spineless.” Evidently not being beholden to large corporations is no longer a good thing. For Google AI, independent journalism is not a value-add. Bigger is better. A monopoly is the best.

A few weeks later I did the same query and got different results. This time it stated.

The search results for “San Francisco journal” also show numerous journalists from the city’s main newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle.

Google AI Mode - October 9. 2025
Google AI Mode – October 9. 2025

My goodness! How did that happen? Numerous journalists from the Chronicle? It must be that darn “ghost in the machine” thing. The SF Journal is unrelated to the Chronicle though I do subscribe to the Sunday paper mostly to get the funnies.

Which brings me to one of my ideas that no one seems to get. The internet is all just publishing. It matters not whether the content is produced by aunt Gertrude and posted on Facebook or a fancy computer algorithm, it is all content which is owned and often “monetized” by someone – usually a big tech company.  While tech companies like to distance themselves from the responsibilities of this content with what they call “platforms,” in the end they are simply publishers.

And do remember, the San Francisco Journal is not the San Francisco Chronicle Just stating the obvious.

Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.
– Kurt Vonnegut

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Hardly Strictly 2025 SF Journal Awards

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2025 took place in Golden Gate Park on Fri, Oct 3, 2025 – Sun, Oct 5, 2025. It is a free event and you can learn more about it at https://hardlystrictlybluegrass.com/.

The weather during the festival in 2025 was quite pleasant with light winds out of the west and mostly clear skies. The temperature for most days was around 70 degrees Fahrenheit. By Friday, the warm temperatures and sunny skies ruled. Unlike years before, when you could wander in from anywhere, the festival has entrances and a security checks. Fortunately the entire festival was peaceful.

There are basically two approaches to HSB. One is to travel light and get in as many acts in as possible, roaming from one stage to the next. The other is to bring a tarp or blankets, chairs and a small cooler full of food and drinks and park at a single stage. If you get to the festival early, it is easy to get a great spot. This year we did a bit of both. I had family and friends in town – great times Phil, Judy, Andrea, Patricia and Steve! Thanks for coming to the festival!

Without further ado, here are the 2025 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival SF Journal Awards.

Outstanding Set: SAMARA JOY and Her Killer Band

Samara Joy came with an outstand band and delivered a phenomenal set. Her band was alto sax, tenor sax, trumpet and trombone, piano, bass and drums. They played mostly standards at very fast tempos and each solo got two choruses. No eight bar breaks for this band. Near the end the trombone and trumpet traded solos. Alexandra Ridout did an excelent job coming in on trumpet. The arrangements were cleaver and punchy and the phrasing and articulations were spot on.
https://www.samarajoy.com/

Trumpet: Alexandra Ridout
Trombone: Donavan Austin
Saxophone: David Mason (alto sax/flute), Kendric McCallister (tenor sax)
Piano: Connor Rohrer
Bass: Felix Moseholm
Drums: Evan Sherman

Outstanding Soloist: Trombone Player Donavan Austin in SAMARA JOY’s Killer Band

It is a bit odd for an outstanding soloist at a bluegrass festival to go to a trombonist, however I do believe that Mister Bill Monroe would probably not argue with me if he had heard Donavan. A wonderful synthesis of Slide Hampton and Frank Rosolino. Look out! Donavan can play!

Best Cumbia Groove: CHUCK PROPHET AND HIS CUMBIA SHOES

Chuck Prophet is an interesting guy who brought together an eclectic band of Latino players. His stream of conscious lyrics float over various cumbia and rock grooves and along with their coordinated brown cumbia outfits it all just works. Chuck is a fun guitar player to listen to, often venturing into sonic landscapes while the other guitar player rips on the metal licks. Excellent set.
https://chuckprophet.com/

Chuck Prophet

Best Bluegrass Groove:  DAN TYMINSKI BAND

Dan Tyminsky is the guy who sang “I am a Man of Constant Sorrow” for George Clooney on the movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Of course they did sing this song and all was well. Solid band that at one point invited Sam Bush up on stage to add to the party.

Bob Wills “No Mumbling” Award: CIMAFUNK

Bob Wills was the leader of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, who some say invented Western Swing. One thing Bob did not like was band leaders that mumbled on the mic between songs. He was of the the belief that people came to hear you play and dance not to hear you talk. He played his sets with songs back to back, never pausing to reflect, always keeping the couples on the dance floor. Bob probably would have enjoyed Cimafunk, the powerhouse international band (mostly from Cuba) who played some funky grooves, almost reminiscent of Tower of Power at one point. They played one song after another. Unlike some of the country acts that told stories that were difficult to hear and attempted to tune their guitars between songs, Cimafunk just busted into the next groove.

Best Vocal Harmonies Award: I’M WITH HER

I’m With Her are three outstanding female musicians who can both play and sing – Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O’Donovan. Their sound brings to mind Crosby, Stills and Nash in their early days with beautiful three part harmonies. If they pass through town, buy the good seats.
https://imwithherband.com/

I’m With Her

Most Energetic Show: CIMAFUNK

In terms of total calories burned, Cimafunk won this award. No contest

HSBG 2025 – Cimafunk

Up and Coming Artist Award:  KAIA KATER

Kaia Kater played on the Horseshoe Stage which was a cute little stage on top of a hill. I really enjoyed her clawhammer banjo playing and interesting song writing.

Best Sign On a Backpack Award: GUY WITH CLEAR BACKPACK

Fuck the NRA for making me Buy This

HSBG 2025 - Fuck the NRA For Making Me Need to Buy This
Fuck the NRA For Making Me Need to Buy This

SURF REPORT & WEATHER

This report would not be complete without a surf round up. A large short period wind swell which was unruly and unsurfable was at Ocean Beach on Friday. This gave way to some shoulder high glassiness and outstanding surf by Sunday. This surf continued on for a few days until the fog rolled back in.

Band We Listened to:

ANDERSON EAST
SHAWN COLVIN
THE WAR & TREATY
NITTY GRITTY DIRT BAND

JEFF TWEEDY
SAMARA JOY
CIMAFUNK
DAN TYMINSKI BAND
KAIA KATER
SAMARA JOY

CHUCK PROPHET AND HIS CUMBIA SHOES
NICK LOWE & LOS STRAITJACKETS
I’M WITH HER
EVOLFO
LUCINDA WILLIAMS
ALAN SPARHAWK w/ TRAMPLED BY TURTLES
EMMYLOU HARRIS

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Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2025 – Preview

HSB 25

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2025 will take place in Golden Gate Park on Fri, Oct 3, 2025 – Sun, Oct 5, 2025. It is a free event and you can learn more about it at https://hardlystrictlybluegrass.com/.

I have been attending the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival for many years and even do a sort of review and give out awards. It is all in good fun and looking back over it I did notice something. This year there are fewer headline acts and not many bands from New Orleans. In the past years there were big name artists like Steely Dan, Boz Skaggs, Rickie Lee Jones, Asleep at the Wheel, Elvis Costello, Mavis Staples, Jon Batiste, Alan Toussaint to name but a few. This year it seems to be more of the standard bluegrass people with a sprinkling of alt-rock, country, singer-songwriter thing thrown in. But it is all good. Who can complain about a free music festival! One thing for sure about the festival is that you always discover someone that you never knew about that knocks your socks off.

I am looking forward to a few bands I have heard before: Samara Joy is a beautiful singer and Cimafunk is a young Cuban band that is forging new terrain. A few bucket list bands like Nitty Gritty Dirt Band who hopefully will sing Mr. Bojangles and new-comers like Max Gomez. The adventure starts Friday. Pace yourself!

AFTER HOURS IN SAN FRANCISCO

If you still have some energy after you flew in from out of town, and you want to hear some local players, maybe have a beer, here are my suggestions. These are all slanted towards the San Francisco jazz scene in town.

The Royal Cuckoo Organ Lounge
3202 Mission St at Valencia – Music from 8-11pm
Often some of the best working jazz players in town. The place is small and intimate and very old school spinning the vinyl on the breaks.

Keys Bistro
For another outstanding jazz a good spot in North Beach is Keys Bistro 498 Broadway. Excellent food at the venue and many excellent restaurants nearby.

Madrone Art Bar
And if you are still going on Sunday, I highly recommend the session at Madrone Art Bar not far from Golden Gate Park. Sunday B3 Sessions Hosted by Adam Shulman and Mike Olmos Swinging soul jazz with a jam session to follow 9pm-Close No Cover
500 Divisadero Street.

Past SF Journal HSB Awards

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The Song of Hawk – The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins – A Review

The Song of Hawk – The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins is a biography by John Chilton of Coleman Hawkins, one of the most influential tenor saxophonists and musicians of the twentieth century. John Chilton was an English trumpet player and working jazz musician, who has methodically chronicled every recording session that Coleman Hawkins ever played; this was a lot of sessions. Interspersed with the details of these sessions, are life events, gigs, travels and various quotes from musicians and others that give light to Hawkins and the environment he was living in.

Coleman Hawkins was born in 1904 so most of the recordings were 78s. The book chronicles each of these recordings as a timeline of Hawkins’ life. How Chilton got his hands on these records in unknown and unfortunately the book does not have a discography.  The book does gets a bit lugubrious at times with the author’s impressions of the various soloists and recording qualities, but it is for true fans who do not mind the details.  For this reader, it was about finding needles in the haystack. Hawkins indeed played and recorded with John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Thad Jones. These are surely interesting listens that I was unaware of and want to pursue. For many years he took Thelonious Monk under his wing.  Many people asked him why he used Monk, who’s playing was unorthodox, when he could have hired a “real” piano player. Hawkins knew genius when he heard it. It is interesting to muse how differently Monk’s career would have been without Hawkins.

While many biographies delve into the personal, The Song of Hawk – The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins, mostly stays away from Hawkins’ personal and family life. The one aspect where this is not true is the insane quantity of liquor consumed. Coleman liked his scotch and brandy.

We just happened to be living in the same hotel in Nottingham, only living about three doors apart. So Fats would bring by my breakfast every morning – a glass of Scotch, full glass, a water glass of whiskey. You see that is the way we drank. It would take me an hour to drink a glass of scotch; he’d drink it in two minutes, straight down, just like he was drinking water. He was a big drinker and a big eater. Yeah, Fats was something else.
Hawkins reflecting on a stint with Fats Waller at a European hotel

We got along nicely. He was such a wonderful person. I couldn’t believe that anyone could drink so much alcohol and that it would have so little effect on him.
Arthur Briggs

But what was amazing about Hawkins was even though he smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and drank all that booze, people generally found him to be a great guy. While he was in many ways a very private person and did not say much, he did often help out younger players and talent.

First, he taught me to put expression into singing ballads, and he did it saying, ‘Carp, if you’re putting a song across, you’ve got to regard it as if you are making love. You greet the song, then you slowly get closer to it, caressing it, kissing it, and finally making love to it, and when you bring your performance to a climax you don’t just end it there and then, you have to be just as tender as you were when you began, so that the audience feels the flow of your expression and they end up peaceful and satisfied.’
Thelma Carpenter

From 1934 to 1939, Hawkins lived in Europe where he played long residencies in various clubs and hotels. Sometimes he was backed up by other Americans but more often by local European players. At one point he took to the slopes.

Hawkins’s success in Switzerland were just as great as those he had enjoyed in other parts of Europe. During the winter of 1935-36 he worked in St Moritz (where he learned how to ski)… his main base was Zurich.

St. Moritz - Wikipedia
St. Moritz – Wikipedia

If there is ever a movie made of his life, the film should start with Coleman Hawkins skiing in the Alps, Hawk bundled up, smoking a cigarette, looking out at the sublime mountains, ready to head down the mountain. Needless to say. Mr. Hawkins, while being a fine saxophone player, could also be known as an early predecessor to the modern ski bum. I have a feeling he probably mostly enjoyed the apre ski.

He was amused and sometimes vexed, when local jazz critics praised only black musicians, automatically excluding white performers from any listing of  favorites. Having always kept an open mind when listening to jazz musicians, he had difficulty in making Europeans understand that there were some white jazz musicians he genuinely enjoyed. “After all. I played with Benny Goodman and all of them and I didn’t know any clarinet player that played more than Benny.”

In 1939 he returned to the United States. In that same year he recorded the ballad Body and Soul which was a big hit and set the stage for the modernism on 52nd Street – tritone substitutions, irregular measured phrases, harmony derived from the vocabulary of Ravel and other impressionists, complex polyrhythms and ridiculously fast tempos which soon challenged the pop tune and riff-based music of the big band era.

It is always important to note that Coleman Hawkins idea of a good time at home was kicking back and listening to classical music. He had a vast collection of operas and symphonies on vinyl and a state-of-the-art high-fi. People commented that when they visited him in his apartment they would find him in a comfortable chair with an opera playing on the hi-fi and tears streaming down his face.

Competitive to the end, you get a real sense of this with a recollection from Cannonball Adderley.

A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous; I told him Hawkins was suppose to make him nervous for forty years.
Julian “Cannonball” Adderley

hawk-record-smWhile The Song of Hawk – The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins is a welcome addition to the genre of jazz history, one can get a very good idea of the life of Coleman Hawkins by simply reading the liner notes by Dan Morgenstern of The Hawk Flies which won a Grammy award for liner notes. Morgenstern knew Hawkins well and later in his life helped him get gigs. There was a heartfelt personal relationship there which is non-existent  in The Song of Hawk – The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins. The Song of Hawk digs very deep in a very methodical way into the life of Hawkins in a very detached way. I doubt anyone will take the time to write it again. It is a welcome addition to understanding this music called jazz.

The Hawk Flies reissue with Dan Morgenstern liner notes
The Hawk Flies reissue with Dan Morgenstern liner notes

CODA

When I was fifteen years old, living in Madison, Wisconsin, one summer I went out riding my bike looking for a job. I road down State Street and outside a French restaurant, The Ovens of Brittany, I saw two cooks on break outside. They were hanging out on a stoop, and as people do in the restaurant business, having a smoke break. I asked them if there was any work. After a few moments they asked me if I wanted to clean up and paint the staircase behind them. Somehow a bucket of molasses had been kicked down the stairs. It had splattered everywhere – on the carpeting, against the door, on the walls. We must have agreed on a wage and I then commenced with a bucket of hot water, rags, mop and a sponge. When I had finished later that day, I went to pick up my pay. They were happy with my work and asked what my plans were for the evening. I said that I was free, to which they asked if I wanted to wash dishes. The dishwasher had called in sick. I told them that it sounded great but that I would need to call my mother.  And so ensued my decades-long career in the restaurant industry.

The Ovens of Brittany dishroom was in the basement of an old corner building that was probably from the last century. Every ten of fifteen minutes a tub of dishes would make its way down via a manual dumbwaiter. The people who worked at the restaurant were mostly college students, so at a young age I was conversing about adult topics with people five or ten years my senior. From a Jewish guy from New York I learned about the term anti-Semitism. You grew up fast in those days.

With the tips that I made as a dishwasher I would mosey on down to the record stores on State Street and buy vinyl, mostly jazz cut-outs. One of those records was The Hawk Flies a remastered Milestone reissue of various dates. On that record are amazing sidemen – J.J. Johnson, Hank Jones, Nat Adderley, Idrees Sulieman, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk. The sound of Coleman Hawkins and that sophisticated modern music coming out of New York City was the perfect sound track for the feeling I had after a six hour dish shift. I was hooked.

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The Quarterly Report – News From San Francisco – August 2025

The Quarterly Report: A brief synopsis of the news in San Francisco over the last three months. You are now reading “Slow News That Doesn’t Break” – the exotic internet.

Weather

The weather in San Francisco in the summer is always foggy and cold. This year has been one of the coldest on record. Unlike many parts of the state, country and world, 2025 so far has been a year when San Franciscans have not had to deal with wildfire smoke, however, there are many months to go before the typical rainy season in the winter.

Historically, summertime is when people leave The City and go inland. There are entire neighborhoods in Oakland that were built in the early twentieth century that are mostly cottages for people escaping the fog. In the summers I like to head to the mountains and feel the sun on my neck and get some fresh air. When the skies are clear, it is difficult to get too much of the Sierra.

Lake Alpine

National Politics

Good grief! I need not write about the state of the federal government  and the current president. Recently, Californian Governor Newsom has taken to rhetorically mocking him. It may be the only way in this Age of Delusion. Below is a quote by Newsom published on a social media website  concerning attempts at redistricting and gerrymandering.

A follow-up post tonight read: “DONALD ‘TACO’ TRUMP, AS MANY CALL HIM, ‘MISSED’ THE DEADLINE!!! CALIFORNIA WILL NOW DRAW NEW, MORE ‘BEAUTIFUL MAPS,’ THEY WILL BE HISTORIC AS THEY WILL END THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY (DEMS TAKE BACK THE HOUSE!). BIG PRESS CONFERENCE THIS WEEK WITH POWERFUL DEMS AND GAVIN NEWSOM—YOUR FAVORITE GOVERNOR—THAT WILL BE DEVASTATING FOR ‘MAGA.’ THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! —GN”

It is 2025 and politics is now truly a place of sarcasm, dark humor and unavoidable childishness. I think “Donald Taco” is a good one. Let’s stick with it

Local Politics

If you want to keep track of San Francisco politics, probably the best place is https://missionlocal.org/. They actually have a few beat reporters and report on things like homelessness and the police. For the last few months there has been a lot of coverage about 16th and Mission Street, a place that has for decades been a bit rough around the edges. With the crackdowns of activity in the Tenderloin, many people moved on to the Mission District This has happened many times in the past.

Who needs humans?

If you drive down Interstate 101, most of the billboards are for tech companies and speak in terms only programmers would understand. Many are for selling AI. Of course, politicians are embracing the new technologies as a panacea for all our problems. AI plus crypto currency? Sounds like a disaster to me. It is definitely the formula for the next financial crash. You heard it here first.

Sporting News

As of this posting the San Francisco Giants are nine games out of first place and are under five hundred. And so it goes. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION ON THIS MATTER!

That is The Quarterly Report – August 2025

Photo Gallery of SF

The Quarterly Report – August 2025

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If You Park Here, They Will Come and Other Expressions of Guarded Spaces

If You Park Here They Will Come
If You Park Here They Will Come

There is something a bit whimsical and wry about this sign. It is a bit mean, passive-aggressive in a good way, and oblique. Everyone knows who “they” are. First, the little white golf cart looking vehicle with the guy wearing a bike helmet and the $63 blocking residential door ticket. Then the yellow tow truck and the $500 tow charge. Then the crazy hourly fees for storying your car far away from where you parked it. The parking tickets in San Francisco are all outlined in
https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2024/05/sfmta_fees_and_fines_for_posting_effective_april_16_2025.pdf. One of the constants of living in San Francisco, is that parking tickets always go up.

Please DO NOT BLOCK DRIVEWAY Thank You
Please DO NOT BLOCK DRIVEWAY Thank You

Then there is the nice way to say “do not block my driveway.” Do take some fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies on the top stairs before you head off, drive around for 15 minutes and try to find that elusive place to park. Have a wonderful day. Thank you!

DON NOT BLOCK DRIVEWAY UNAUTHORIDED VEHICLES TOWED AT OWNERS EXPENSE
DO NOT BLOCK DRIVEWAY UNAUTHORIDED VEHICLES TOWED AT OWNERS EXPENSE

Then there is the sign you buy at the hardware store that is very direct. It does not matter what your first language is, this one, with the universal iconography of the tow truck and the car, tells you exactly what will happen. It is a bit like those instructions for IKEA furniture. Does it really even need words?  This one is the opposite of the snarky “if you park here they will come” sign. It is ADA approved but forget about the cookies at the top of the stairs. Do not even think about ringing the doorbell.

NEWSPAPER THIEF STOP, STOP STEALING OUR NEWSPAPER
NEWSPAPER THIEF STOP, STOP STEALING OUR NEWSPAPER

Indeed, crime is on the rise in San Francisco. Someone, evidently,  cannot get enough to read and is walking off with the neighbor’s San Francisco Chronicle.

NO SE PRESTA EL BANO - The bathroom doesn't lend itself
NO SE PRESTA EL BANO – The bathroom doesn’t lend itself

The grand finale of this signage journey is a handmade sign from the counter in a local Salvadorian bakery. While  “NO SE PRESTA EL BANO – The bathroom doesn’t lend itself” is not a NO PARKING sign, in a way it is. It is telling the world that you are not welcome. In this case, it is you ass on the throne in our water closet. The literal translation works just fine. Impressive that they got the apostrophe in the correct place. I am glad that they did not draw any pictures.

 

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Open History – San Francisco Photos

Excelsior Playground - 1912

If you want to get an idea of how San Francisco was in the early twentieth century, it is fun to check out the photos at https://www.opensfhistory.org/ Not too long ago people got around on horses and entire neighborhoods had dirt streets. Empty lots where now there are houses that look like they have been there forever. Less trees.

Excelsior Playground - 1912
Excelsior Playground – 1912

It is a bit shocking to see how a neighborhood on the south side of the city, the Excelsior, looked a little over a hundred years ago. At the time there surely were farms close by. Cows, goats and sheep. I attempted to get the same shot today of the photo above but so much has changed and the angle was tricky. There is a baseball field there now where you see the lumber. The playground today has fences, basketball and tennis courts, a kids playground and a clubhouse.

Excelsior Playground - 2025
Excelsior Playground – 2025

If you go north of here, there is a similar story with Bernal Heights.

Here is looking up Cortland from San Bruno. Now, every speck of land is a lot with a house on it.

On the other side of Bernal going west, looking down to Mission Street. Too bad the trains are no longer running. Now you can take the 24 Bus.

Above is the “proposed” Alemany Boulevard. Now Alemany Boulevard runs next to a massive interstate interchange where 101 and 280 meet and go their own ways. Cars and truck roar down raised concrete highway cloverleaf structures, banking to the left and the right. A hundred years ago it must have been very quiet with probably hundreds of rabbits hiding in the brush.

No collection of historic  San Francisco photos would be complete without a photo from 1906, the earthquake and the fire that destroyed a lot of the city.

Photos at https://www.opensfhistory.org/ It is a fun website to get lost in.

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Pirates of the Digital Era – This is No Captain Jack Sparrow

It has made it so tech companies and publishing empires no longer have responsibility for what is published on their applications, websites and what they now call “platforms.” Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars.
Digital Millennium Copyright Act 25 Year Anniversary – SF Journal 

Piracy is the foundation of the commercial internet. It is all just stuff. The digital world is a non-destructive medium. I can copy and paste anything, it loses none of its quality, and it is all mine, evidently free to use (except if it is owned by Getty Images). It matters not whether someone “owns” it. Indeed, no one owns the stars. Furthermore, my experience of your art is just as valid expression of art as your art.  Today, the experience of art is often now monetarily more valuable than the art.  Copyright laws are meaningless. This is why music fans can create a YouTube channel and make more money off of a musical artist than the artist. In 2025, I can create software that gobbles up your art and creations and create new creations. They call this Artificial Intelligence or AI. It is just the latest version of the piracy that has been going on since the beginning of the internet.

While early photography was analog, using silver and glass plates and large box cameras, it always seemed fascinating to me the observation of some of the Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century when they first interacted with this technology. When they saw the photographs they thought the white man was stealing their souls. They may have been on to something. Today large tech companies are not so much stealing souls but making money off of them. The most important events and parts of peoples lives are being “monetized” and in a way stolen. Who really owns your address book, contacts and photos from that last birthday?  “Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars.”

In the realm of recorded sounds, a similar dynamic happened at the beginning of the twentieth century.  New Orleans trumpet player Freddie Keppard feared that if he was recorded, people would steal his ideas. He was definitely on to something. The development of “jazz” was moved forward by recordings and people playing along and transcribing solos of the greats. Evidently, if you wanted to cop Freddie Keppard’s licks, you had to go to Bourbon Street. “Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars.”

New Orleans Jazz Fest 2016
New Orleans Jazz Fest 2016

It is now 2025 and the mining of original creative content by the tech companies is on full throttle. The pirates are in control of the ship as they have always been.  The AI bots are sucking up all the work of the creative class and “monetizing” it. I was reminded of this when author David Baldacci made a video of how his novels have been ingested and now can be spit out by AI. In his own words  “[they] backed up a truck to my imagination and stole everything I ever created.” These services now spit out novels that read as if they were written by Baldacci, with similar plots, dialogues, and even character names.  “Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars.”

Novelist David Baldacci: ‘AI Stole Everything I’d Ever Created’ – YouTube

Waymo driverless taxi in San Francisco
Waymo driverless taxi in San Francisco

Where this will all end, no one really knows. The control of information, the manipulation of people and the censorship of ideas is as great as ever while at the same time the billionaires mine and pillage the movements and work of just about everyone on the planet. I did have a strange dream the other night. I dreamt that a driverless Waymo taxi pulled up to our house in San Francisco and a robot passenger got in the backseat of the car. The taxi drove off. Not a soul onboard. “Safe harbor. Everything is just content. Stuff. No one owns the stars.”

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Donald Trump at The Pearly Gates

One day it will happen. Though billionaire Peter Thiel thinks he can become immortal, the beauty of life is that it has its seasons. One day we all die. I did not make up this rule. It is just the way it is.

No Kings Day - Grass Valley, California. It always amazes me the signs at demonstrations in 2025. The biting humor and the clever observations. "Happy Birthday, Now DIE!" Good one!
No Kings Day – Grass Valley, California. It always amazes me the signs at demonstrations in 2025. The biting humor and the clever observations. “Happy Birthday, Now DIE!” Good one!

So when Donald Trump dies and finds himself at the pearly gates and meets his maker, he asks God to let him into heaven. God  then asks Donald why? What virtues he has lived, whether he believes and loves Jesus and why he should give him eternal life. Donald responds that he Made America Great Again, deported all the brown-skinned people. God responds that the immigrants were just his children looking for a better life. “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” —Leviticus 19:33–34. God goes on to say “even my only son Jesus had to escape tyranny and travel to foreign lands. And besides, the lettuce and tomatoes on your Big Mac hamburgers were picked by these hard working immigrants.”

Donald then says that he should go to heaven as he dismantled the corrupt federal government and the deep state that ruined so many lives. But God  answers that “the federal government programs he cancelled were mostly virtuous, programs that feed the poor and needy, aided the sick, infirmed and elderly.  It aided people that respected the natural world and lived to protect and defend God’s many wonderful creations.”

Donald, in a bit of distress, then asks God if there is anything he can negotiate to gain his entrance. Perhaps New York real-estate, Jeffery Epstein’s favorite underage hookers or perhaps an undervalued crypto-currency to which God just shakes his head. Then Donald said that his greatest accomplishment was banning abortion. That it rallied the troops to save the unborn, to which God says “au-contraire.” “You never really had any true beliefs in your heart on the subject but used it to simply divide people. In the end, many women who were not ready to be mothers or were raped had to give birth to children that then had little food and support. Others died of sepsis and suffered painful deaths. Your heart had no compassion for the poor and suffering.”

No Kings Day - Grass Valley California
No Kings Day – Grass Valley California

So then Donald, out of options and realizing he did not have the cards, asks God what his plan is for him, to which God said it is best that Donald J. Trump spend eternity in a hot and humid climate, like the Florida Everglades, in a cage, surrounded by a cheap poorly made tent, surrounded by hungry alligators.

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Book Recommendations for Understanding Our Political Realities

If you are interested in learning about how our world got to this gilded age, where a few billionaires have amassed great wealth on the backs of ordinary citizens, a good place would be to check out of your local library Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Thiel believes that monopolies are a good thing. His book is a business school manual and outlines how to create a monopoly and squash the little guy by getting the wealthy and hedge funds to invest in your company. You intentionally sell products for a loss. This process can last up to even ten years. Your competition eventually goes out of business. You then jack prices back up and become the only player in town. Such is the business plan for monopolies like Amazon and Walmart. Meta simply buys any competing company and often just shuts them down. This is the recipe whereby you dominate a market. It is the formula for our gilded age.

Creative monopolies give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopiles aren’t good for the rest of society, they’re powerful engines for making it better.
– Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

Of course, Thiel makes the usual ignorant assumption that all over the world people lived a “extremely hard life.” p.9 An anthropologist he is not. He then goes on to admit that during the late 1990s, while working on PayPal he worked 100 hours a week. Surely more hours and stress than fishing, gathering berries and root vegetables, playing with your kids and sitting around a fire and weaving baskets.

Today, Peter Thiel and his company Palantir Technologies is a key contractor for the U.S. defense department. It is presently taking all the data from various systems and creating a digital footprint for every citizen and probably non-citizen in the U.S.. It is very much like Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984.  We are all being surveilled.

But why should anyone care what Peter Thiel thinks or does? Because he is a very wealthy and powerful behind-the-scenes player in our world. It is a bit like why General George Patton  read Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography. If you want to understand the powerful, it is best to study their work which is often in plain view. Zero to One. is an easy read, a little book and less than 200 pages.

Peter Thiel’s influence in politics is large. He bankrolled JD Vance’s senate election. In this way he is a bit of a king maker. Of course, another book to check out of the library is Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by JD Vance. I read the book before watching the movie. It is a “rag to riches” memoir where the hillbilly instincts of his grandmother are idealized and the driving force of his character. JD Vance, in real life has steely blue eyes and a bit squat. In the movie, the actor playing him has soft brown eyes, and is much leaner. In our image-obsessed world, where fact and fiction are constantly blurred, biographic films often become a way to define the narrative.

Perhaps as long as we are going down this road, another book to read would be Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal  but Trump surely wrote little of that book.  It was written by Tony Schwartz who regrets writing the book. He has stated that if the book were written today, he would name it The Sociopath.

Peter Thiel is 57. JD Vance is 40. Both will be around for a few more decades. Thiel wrote his book with a student, Blake Master. JD Vance did actually write his memoir. These two men will be very influential for years to come.  Understanding the realities and myths of where they have come from will be important to understand the future.

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The Three Crosses – Reflections on a California Journey

This is a follow up essay from my bike trip down to Big Sur last month – The Henry Miller 2025 – Bicycle to Big Sur.

The Bixby Bridge along Highway 1 south of Carmel
The Bixby Bridge along Highway 1 south of Carmel

Recently, I tried to explain to a friend why I like doing these weeklong bike trips, camping out, eating in diners, living the simple life. I explained that what is really valuable is that the trips make me much more aware of the world. When you get done with the trip, you notice things in your everyday surroundings that you did not before you left. You start hearing things that you had somehow ignored. You see things about your city that you never noticed. Trees. Graffiti. People waiting for the bus. It helps to make a person fully alive.

When I was on the ride I discovered an interesting theme – the crucifix. While I was not riding El Camino Real, the road that the first missionaries traveled, I did pass by a number of old churches. In the end, I realized that there were three crosses that told a story of my journey and of the time and geography I had pedaled.

ACT 1: RIP Our Beloved Eurovan

RIP Our Beloved Eurovan 12-4-2001 - 7-27-2023
RIP Our Beloved Eurovan 12-4-2001 – 7-27-2023

You would never see this cross from a car. It is along Skyline Boulevard, about 20 miles outside of Santa Cruz, high on the road, before you make it to Highway 9. If you were in a car you would have zipped by it and never knew it was there. I saw it out of the corner of my eye and had to stop, thinking it was a cross for some poor person who had perished in an automobile accident. I paused and drank some water and took it all in. Fortunately, it was just a van. Obviously, the climb up the coastal range  finally did in the German engineering. The Eurovan surely had a good life and was much loved but maybe overheated and the engine seized? The twentieth century and into the twenty-first was a time when the internal combustion engine became something often more loved than other humans. At some point we are all guilty of this fetish. We all at one point gave our cars names and bathed them on the weekends. Cleaned their hubcaps. Worried about their overdue oil changes. That we anthropomorphize them to the point of an afterlife is a bit strange but it sort of makes sense. This must have been a Christian Eurovan. Surely Catholic.

ACT 2: Mission Carmel Basilica

Of course, Mission Carmel Basilica was the second mission in California, and was one of the places where in California the “saving of souls” all began. In this land where all the manmade things are so new, something that has a bit of history stands out.  I wonder what the first Indians thought of this place and the cross that adorns the top?  The story of the tragic demise of the native peoples and the history is well-known at this point. RIP dear friend. I am sorry you got one of those nasty viruses that came over on the boat. Some day your great, great, great grand daughter will be able to drive a Ford F150 pickup and get vaccines for the diseases that wiped your people out. Let us pray.

ACT 3: Henry Miller Library

Christ on the MacPlus's - Henry Miller Memorial Library
Christ on the MacPlus’s – Henry Miller Memorial Library

The third cross that I came across, that really grabbed my attention, was this sculpture above at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur. The cross is made out of old Apple MacPlus computers, stacked up so that you do not realize what you are looking at. Jesus, is but a twist of wiry vines, dried and dead.  Is this a statement on the futility of progress and the modern life? Is it a complex diagram of our soulless world that has been usurped by technology, where even Christ gets eaten up by the mayhem of technology and becomes but a tangled mess? Is it a battle between the inorganic and the organic, where the machines always win and both sides die in a tragic death? One obsolete trash. The other just a tangled mess of organic wires impersonating their master? Who’s to say, but it does seem like a tragic omen to our feeble chances of survival.

This genre of art I like to call technomacabre. Along the coast you see it every now and then. Found objects from our recent technological past that are turned into a statement of demise, oppression, humor or even violence. There is no service out here anyway. These things are useless.

Technology, Nailed to the Fence - Mendocino County
Technology, Nailed to the Fence – Mendocino County

There is no ACT 4. There is no coda. That is all.

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Trump Afterlife Insurance – Take it With You

For a limited time, Trump Enterprises, LLC is offering something no one can possible refuse: Trump Afterlife Insurance. Have you ever worried that when you get to heaven, all those days toiling away, flipping burgers, answer the phone, driving a truck ten hours a day, doing the hard work of trading stocks or crypto would leave you nothing when you get to the pearly gates? WORRY NO MORE!

Now with Trump Afterlife Insurance, you can rest assured that all that hard-earn loot can follow you to heaven. Stocks and  bonds? Gold and other precious metals? No problem. Even crypto will still be yours for eternity. No believing some strange, loser communist crazy guy with a beard, who looks like he never showers or gets out of his pajamas anymore – and you do not even have to go to church on Sundays!

Take it from me, Donald, THE BEST PRESIDENT EVER, not some loser who ended up impaled on some two by sixes from Home Depot. Trump Afterlife Insurance gives you the peace of mind, that when you leave this world and go to the next, all your hard-earned money will still be yours. Now, you can take it with you!

DON’T DELAY!
Send $999.95 this moment to make an investment that will last for eternity!

PLAN LEVELS:

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  • $999.95 sign up fee
  • $99.95 monthly dues
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  • Guarantee, that if you, by some administrative error, end up in hell, you get to still keep your money

Trump Afterlife Insurance Silver Super

  • $999.95 sign up fee
  • $99.95 monthly dues
  • No hell guarantee and no poster

Trump Afterlife Insurance Bronze MAGA

  • $499.95 sign up fee
  • $49.95 monthly dues
  • No hell guarantee and no poster
  • Proud Boys will get 20% of your income to make sure you are safe from non-white folk
  • English speaking representative will be available by phone to discuss further details
Guaranteed for all MAGA supporters and U.S. citizens who voted for Donald Trump. Not available in Puerto Rico or certain communist parts of California or Maine. Results may vary. The whiter your skin, the better your odds of full redemption.

 
Emma Lyons contributed to the writing of this post. Thanks Emma!

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Great Highway: Journey to the Soul of San Francisco Surfing – A Movie Review

Great Highway traces the roots of Bay Area surfing and explores the changes that time reveals. The history is told by those who lived it in the freezing cold Bay Area conditions. Starring Jack O’Neill, Jack LaLanne, Fred Van Dyke and Michael Ho. The local surfers of Northern California are full of character, and offer their own perspectives on the history and the future of surfing.

Great Highway: Journey to the Soul of San Francisco Surfing is a documentary film about surfing in San Francisco. You can read more about the movie at  https://www.greathighwaymovie.com.

What makes the movie all the more valuable and entertaining is that it is not just about surfing, but really about the history of San Francisco, especially on the west side of town. It goes back to the nineteenth century and takes a geographical perspective on Yerba Buena. Eventual, it focuses on what was called The Outside Lands, the sandy desolate place out by the ocean that is now called the Sunset District. We get a view of the various scrappy settlements that took hold out there including Carville, which was made of reused abandoned horsecars (horse-drawn trolleys) and, later, cable cars for housing and public buildings. You get to romp through the period of the heyday of Adolph Sutro’s Sutro Baths and the massive  Fleishhacker Pool where now the San Francisco Zoo is located. Eventually the salt water of the ocean had its way and these public places are long gone, though there is still a good left exactly where the Fleishhacker Pool bathhouse once was and old timers still call it Fleishhacker’s. The bathhouse eventually did burn down.

The actual Great Highway was built in the 1929.  The movie then romps through grainy footage and interviews of the various surfers who braved the cold water and surfed without wetsuits on crude, homemade boards. It highlights the rebel nature of these early surfers. a persona that interestingly has sort of disappeared as surfing has become more mainstream. The audacity of people like Fred Van Dyke, Bill Hickey, Bill Bergerson and Rod Lundquist to name but a few who broke trail, surfing without wetsuits in the frigid Ocean Beach waters. The movie goes on to talk about the wool sweaters, the fires on the beach and Jack O’Neil inventing the modern wetsuit. The movie has a very raw, low-budget appeal, just like the early days of the sport. It was timely that the film came out in 2017 as many of the old timers that were interviewed have now passed. Their recollections and candor are awe-inspiring. A great movie for people of all ages.

FIVE STARS *****

There are a few ways to see the movie. You can stream on Amazon Prime for a fee or buy the DVD at https://www.greathighwaymovie.com/product-page/great-highway

DIRECTOR
MARK GUNSON

EDITOR
MARK RUEGG

PRODUCER
KRISTA HOWELL

NARRATOR
JIM NORTON

MUSIC FROM
WRITTEN BY
MARK GUNSON
JIM NORTON
MERMEN
KATDELIC
TIM FLANNERY & The Lunatic Fringe

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The Quarterly Report – News From San Francisco -June 2025

The Quarterly Report: A brief synopsis of the news in San Francisco over the last three months. You are now reading “Slow News That Doesn’t Break” – the exotic internet.

Weather

April turned into May and now it is June. Summer in San Francisco has begun. Along the coast you often have a marine layer, otherwise known as fog. This marine layer will sometimes burn off in the afternoon and then we get the strong onshore northwest winds. It is a time for morning walks and afternoon kiteboarding. The surf season is pretty much over until the fall as most days the ocean is blown out. If you are visiting San Francisco, bring a light jacket and layers, maybe even a beanie. Summer is great time of year to walk along the Embarcadero or better yet to visit wine country where it is much warmer. If you have more time, head to mountains and enjoy the streams and lakes.

Sunset lighting San Francisco City Hall
Sunset lighting San Francisco City Hall

National Politics

Nothing to report on the national politics front that you probably do not already know. The news cycle is manufactured for the attention span of gnats. The current president is a cunning and treacherous man (pay not attention to that strange man behind the curtain). His weird notion that raising tariffs will bring back manufacturing is silly and naïve and more of a marketing play for some nostalgic bygone era.  In the twentieth century,  the growth of U.S. manufacturing was a decades-long process. We have sold all the manufacturing equipment to Mexico, China and Brazil (Punching Out – One Year in a Closing Auto Plant by Paul Clemens).

Matt Stoller in his Newsletter Big illuminates this slow news quite well.

In truth, America’s vast productive capacity was built on skill with machine tools, which are the specialized tools that cut, bore or bend metal. In the 20th century, it was America’s capacity to create factories that sparked the “arsenal of democracy,” and America led the world until the 1960s in machine tooling. We were a high productivity and high wage nation, and the basis was a fierce competitive drive to pull out costs in production as aggressively as possible, using our ability to wield machine tools creatively and cheaply.
 China Is Not Why America Is Sputtering – Matt Stoller on Substack

In the 1980s, the United States economy moved to finance and transferred power to Wall Street where the easy money is had and the people in power could make a quick buck. All the major industries: housing, healthcare, pharmaceuticals,  banking, transportation are controlled by Wall Street. It is but a financial game where the oligarch leaders are the casino dealers and they get to count cards. Sorry for the buzz-kill Donald. Tariffs will simply be a tax on mostly poor people. Price inflation on consumer items will be the only result. The factories are not coming back. We are truly living in the Age of Delusion.

What is really happening, if one looks at the larger picture, is that we are in an economic state of Technofeudalism as outlined in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis. Big data now dominates our lives and we are unknowing serfs volunteering our time and energy for the oligarchs who rule the day. Pretty fair assessment. Yanis Varoufakis solutions are a bit overidealistic and impractical, but his birds-eye view of our modern economy is right on.  Very chilling.

Another of Donald Trump’s deplorable initiatives is deporting migrants, many whom are in the U.S. legally, and most who do not have a criminal record. Most are here to simply work, make $15-$20 an hour and send some money back home. This is all more than ironic as Mr. Trump is a convicted felon. Our supposed free press has done a deplorable job investigating Trump’s businesses hiring practices. It is common knowledge that people who do the grunt work in hotels, real estate and golf courses are often recent immigrants, often undocumented and living in the shadows.  Where are you New York Times and Washington Post? It’s pathetic.

Local Politics

When you visit San Francisco this summer, you may be surprised that there are less unhoused people on the streets. Major Daniel Lurie has done a fine job getting them out of Civic Center, 5th Street and Market Street areas. Often times they do end up getting services and he has been creating more beds. Sometimes the homeless simply move on to the next neighborhood. The Mission District around 16th Street has had a new influx of unhoused people. Indeed, they have made it five miles south of downtown all the way to the sidewalks of the Excelsior District where they camp out on a sidewalk with a  fifth of something strong and a cardboard sign pleading for mercy. We have seen this playbook before. However, I do give Mayor Lurie credit. The Civic Center is free of tents and Park & Rec are there with some cool games to play.

Jerry Day in McLaren Park is around the corner on August 2nd

Sporting News

The Golden State Warriors made it to the playoffs but were trounced by the Minnesota Timberwolves. Steff Curry was injured. the team is getting a bit older and without the usual depth. As the saying goes: you can’t win them all.

AT&T Park where the SF Giants play
AT&T Park where the SF Giants play

As of this writing, the San Francisco Giants are playing well and just 2.5 games behind the Dodgers in a tough Western Division.

Paul Lyons and Trumpeter Luis Gasca
Author Paul Lyons and Trumpeter Luis Gasca (85 and still doing it)

Road Repairs, Parking Tickets, Do Not Parks Signs and Other Treacherous Endeavors

I recently had to get a new set of tires after just four years for a car that rarely leaves San Francisco. Many of the roads in San Francisco are terrible. This is especially true in the less affluent parts of town.. The City tries but it is odd that high-traffic streets like Mission Street get very little love (this was once the “royal highway” where the early missionaries first traveled). It must be pretty high maintenance for the 14 and 49 Mission buses that bounce their way down the El Camino Real. Below are some of the photos of the roads that I took without even trying. There are worse spots on Mission Street. No bueno!

That is The Quarterly Report – June 2025

Some photos from the last few months.

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Beware the Next Time You Honk the Horn

From Steve Leiner’s The Honest Truth Real Happenings Far Funnier Than Fiction

A woman’s car broke down at a stop sign. As she tried to restart it, the car behind her kept honking. The woman calmly got out, walked over, and politely asked the man at the wheel. “Sir, if you could help me start my car, I’d be happy to sit here and honk your horn for you.”
– The Honest Truth: Real Happenings Far Funnier than Fiction by Steve Leiner

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San Francisco Carnaval 2025 Photos

San Francisco Carnaval in 2025 took place on May 24 and 25. Both days were mostly sunny with strong westerly winds in the afternoon. I caught a little of the 17th Street stage on Saturday. Sunday we went to the parade. True to form, San Francisco Carnaval is an amazing display of the diverse cultures in San Francisco from the Latin American and Afro-Caribbean worlds – Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Brazil, Peru, Cuba, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, Trinidad. I am sure I missed some countries. It is festival and parade were there are no corporate sponsors. So refreshing! It is a once a year event not to be missed.

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Valencia Bike Lane Construction Updates

UPDATE: 5/28/2025

The Valencia Street Bike Lane Project is really pretty much done. They got rid of the ugly silly center lane earlier in March and repaved that part of the road with fresh blacktop. The bike lane now zig zags around parklets. Cars have to park further into the street (I like it how now car folks need to watch out for the bikes when walking to the sidewalk – the narrative is flipped). Also, there is plenty of space for cars to drop off people. This is the plan that I thought would work best a few years back. It is like how the bike lane was implemented originally at 14th Street. Bravo!

With the advent of the Great Highway closure and Sunset Dunes Park at the beach, San Francisco is becoming a fine bicycle town.

Cars are still getting use the bike lane. This driver thought that it means that's where you park?
Cars are still getting use to the bike lane. This driver thought that green zone means that is where you park.
Valencia at 22nd
Valencia at 22nd
Valencia at 21st
Valencia at 21st. As bicyclists we are use to going around stuff.

SFMTA News

https://www.sfmta.com/projects/valencia-bikeway-improvements

SFMTA News: What is happening now:

https://www.sfmta.com/projects/valencia-bikeway-improvements#2

This is a breaking story and updates will be posted here.

 

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No Need for Alcatraz, You Can Stay at Rikers

“That is why, today, I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”
Donald Trump = May 5, 2025, AP News

It never ends. The crazy, ridiculous ideas. Donald Trump wants to save the government money but at the same time wants to open a prison that was closed sixty years ago because it was far too expensive to maintain and run. He seems to have a fetish with incarceration. Someone should inform him that there are many famous prisons in California. For just one of his many offenses and felonies he could be locked up in say San Quentin. That has a ring to it. Or perhaps Folsom Prison where Johnny Cash made that famous album. I am sure they could round up someone to sing the Folsom Prison Blues while Donald lunches on some toxic thin gruel. But I always thought Rikers Island Jail in New York is the most appropriate. Like Alcatraz, it is an island and this way he could get easier visiting rights from the likes of Melania and other friends and family.  Just saying.

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The Henry Miller 2025 – Bicycle to Big Sur

“The Henry Miller” is a bike trip that I did solo in late April and early May of 2025. I had always wanted to do this ride and get down to the Henry Miller Library along Highway 1, past Big Sur. The trip was encouraged along by a website page https://www.bestcoastbiking.com/san-francisco-to-big-sur. This website has the maps and itinerary. I followed the maps more of less but instead of Big Basin Redwoods State Park on the first night I stopped by my friend’s place in Boulder Creek. Julie, the sister of a high school buddy and her husband Al were great to get to know and hang out with. Thanks for the awesome dinner!

“The language of society is conformity; the language of the individual is freedom. Life will continue to be hell as long as the people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality. Switching from one ideology to another is a useless game. Each and every one of us is unique, and must be recognized as such. The least we can say about ourselves is that we are American, or French, or whatever the case may be. We are first of all human beings, different one from another, obliged to live together, to stew in the same pot.”
– Henry Miller from “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird”

Some of the riding highlights are the first day’s climb out of Woodside up the Old Honda Road. This is 2000 feet straight up an old wagon trail through the redwoods. More bikers than cars do this maniacally climb. Once you reach Skyline Blvd you take a sip of water and have to climb another thousand feet. Light traffic and a good route when the coast is fogged in. Very wild with many nature preserves.

Old La Honda Road

The traffic from Boulder Creek to Santa Cruz is a bit nasty no matter what route you go. Highway 9 for a lot of it with a few backroad detours. Once in Santa Cruz the bike paths are many.

New Brighton State Park in Capitola south of Santa Cruz is a very good park for both bikes and campers. Killer bike camp spot. There are some premier ocean-side camp sites on top of the hill. Would some day be nice to reserve that for car camping.

New Brighton State Park

Biking through the farms of Watsonville is fun as you are definitely in farm land. It is interesting to see where the food comes from and take in the climate. Acres and acres of strawberries that go on forever as far as the eye can see. A lot of lettuce and broccoli this time of year. People hard at work picking and farming. One lettuce-picking crew far from the main road flew a huge Mexican flag and were blasting mariachi music out of a converted school bus.

When you hit Moss Landing there is about 10 miles of dreadful highway shoulder riding which is never fun. The highways in this part of Monterey County are pretty bad. Two lane roads where they need four. Traffic gets backed up with people just trying to get to work. It would be brilliant if there was a dedicated bike path all the way from Santa Cruz to Monterey.

In Monterrey I camped in a spot the bestcoastbiking.com recommended, Veteran’s Park which is up a hill from the wharf. It worked out fine but next time I would get a hotel.

Day three headed down the coast. Checked out Carmel Mission Basilica, started up by Captain Gaspar de Portola and Franciscan Father Junípero Serra. Portola and Serra are the names of streets, schools and shopping malls throughout California. Serra spent most of his life in pain from probably an infected insect bite. Thank science for modern medicine and antibiotics.

Carmel Mission Basilica
Carmel Mission Basilica

It is fun to be around a classic place like Carmel Mission Basilica, where the bones have a presence and seem to talk though the floor boards. Cool paintings like Leon Trousset’s 1887 Father Juniper Serra’s First Mass. Everything looks so orderly. The ship in the harbor. Native Indians looking on in the shadows. I then rode down Highway 1 to Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park with strong tail winds. The further you rode, the less the cars.

Leon Trousset's 1887 Father Juniper Serra's First Mass
Leon Trousset’s 1887 Father Juniper Serra’s First Mass

Day four had a fun ride to the The Henry Miller Memorial Library and hung out with the locals while the foot traffic rolled in, stopped for five minutes then got back in their cars and moved on. In our family are a few Henry Miller classics, one, a signed version of the banned “Tropic of Cancer.” The book was printed in Mexico to avoid the authorities. The books where definitely my father’s. Henry Miller was a great writer and thinker and lived an amazing life. One of the inspirations for the ride is that Henry Miller liked to ride bicycles. He did not care for cars. In his late fifties he moved to Big Sur.

“After a time, habituated to so many hours a day on my bike, I became less and less interested in my friends. My wheel had now become my one and only friend. I could rely on it, which is more than I could say about my buddies.”
– Henry Miller from “My Bike and Other Friends”

Julia Pfeiffer State Park (let’s just call it Julia) is an 11 mile ride down the coast from the other Pfeiffer Park. At one time there were many Pfeiffer’s down this way and according to the bulletins the women obviously kept things together. Ranching and massive honey farms. Julia has great trails and waterfalls where the fallen redwoods wrap around other redwoods by streams in an obscene orgy of interactions. Much to explore.

Big Sur

On a Monday morning I left early and headed north. The traffic was light. There were clear skies and no wind. To Carmel, then along the coast to Monterey. Up a coast bikeway that runs along the beach, golf courses and opulent ocean mansions and then over to the scrappy Salinas Amtrak Station. The northbound Coast Starlight leaves every day at six-thirteen pm. I caught the train right on time.

Also see:

Bike Packing Gear Essentials – My Set Up

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Stand Still Like the Hummingbird Quote – Henry Miller

“The language of society is conformity; the language of the individual is freedom. Life will continue to be hell as long as the people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality. Switching from one ideology to another is a useless game. Each and every one of us is unique, and must be recognized as such. The least we can say about ourselves is that we are American, or French, or whatever the case may be. We are first of all human beings, different one from another, obliged to live together, to stew in the same pot.”
– Henry Miller from “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird”

Photo is from the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur California along Highway 1. I am not sure the cast of characters or the photographer but the photograph almost seems like a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. Brilliant! What laughter!
Photo is from the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur California along Highway 1. I am not sure the cast of characters or the photographer but the photograph almost seems like a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. Brilliant! What laughter!
Henry liked the bicycle.
Henry liked the bicycle.

 

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Quotes for the Week

Way out west we demonstrate daily against the fascist and authoritarian take over of our country.  The president ignores the rule of law. He views the courts as some sort of football game where you pay off the refs and the press. I do not know these two in the photo but their quotes are timeless.

Quotes of the day from April 5, 2025 at Civic Center:

Resist much, obey little.
– Walt Whitman

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
– Aldous Huxley

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Earth Day Celebration – High on a Wire

In celebration of Earth Day here is a song I wrote last year in 2024 named High On a Wire. Paul Lyons on guitar and voice. Bird recording is from the Kickapoo River in Wisconsin at dusk that I made while on a bike tour (there are seven different bird songs). Indeed, we are “burnin’ this place down.” I have a strange feeling that the birds will again outlast us.

Em7/B A7/C#  Am7 G

VERSE 1
Those are birds
that sing them songs.
Been doing that
all along .

Those are birds
that sing them songs
Quite alright
to sing along.

VERSE 2
High on a wire
they sure looked tired.
From that flying
around.

High on a wire
They sure looked tired.
Chased away
by a fire.

CHORUS 1
D C G //
We’ve been burnin’ this place down.
Just like they said we would.
Got to move now
to higher ground.
A7 // D7 //
The river’s rising all around.

VERSE 3
Up in a tree
they build a nest.
Looks like now there’s
thirty-three

Up in a tree
they dance around.
And sing their songs
because their free

CHORUS 2
D C G //
Sixty-five million years ago
her grandma once roamed these same lands.
Had a big tail and very small hands.
Never played in no rock-n-roll band.

VERSE 4
Those are birds
that sing them songs.
Been doing that
all Along.

Those are birds
that sing them songs.
If you want
just sing along.

Paul Lyons – San Francisco, CA – 6/2024

All Rights Reserved

 

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Sunset Dunes Park – Ocean Beach – Saturday, April 12, 2025

Sunset Dunes Park - Ocean Beach in San Francisco

Photos of opening day at the new park on the Upper Great Highway at Ocean Beach. They call it Sunset Dunes. People will probably always call it “OB.” It is great how they got things in motion so quickly. So many great ideas! Skate park, public art, open pianos, great spots to view the waves at Noriega Street.

 

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Rants and More Rants – Everyone is a Customer

We live in a time when everyone is a customer. People are no longer citizens, patients or students.

People do not see themselves as citizens. Sacrifices are just for suckers. Many people voted for Donald Trump because they liked his brand and product and did not like Harris’s laugh. They chose a president like they would toilet paper. They identified with his selfishness and saw themselves or a version of themselves.  Rich, selfish, scatterbrained, pugnacious, white, demanding and full of ego. Game the system. Look out for number one. Greed is the new virtue.

The health care world no longer has patients. Now they are customers. “Would you like a pill for that problem? On a scale of one to ten, what is your pain level? After the visit, please fill out this survey to let us know how we are doing.” It is not about health care but more about money.  Customer satisfaction is our goal! Oh. Sorry about that opioid epidemic and all those dead people. We got them hooked on those funny pills.

In universities people are no longer students. If a professor can no longer entertain the class, she gets bad reviews. Make students read books. You must be out of your mind! With the advent of the cellphone, the majority of students go to college having never read a single book from cover to cover. I brought this up online about five years and the parents got quite defensive. It has just gotten worse.

No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.
Hilarius Bookbinder Mar 31 Guest post – Persuasion Newsletter

The student is now a customer. Anything that makes them uncomfortable and they simply do not show up. An opposing point of view? An angle that is perhaps rarely seen? Reading that is difficult with big words? Learning to expand the mind? No. Sorry. I am here because if I get this degree it will hopefully mean I will not have to work in fast food, microwaving hamburgers for the next thirty years.

The irony is that we live in a world when in past times you were actually a customer. Gas stations pumped your gas. Baggers in grocery stores were common. A travel agent would make sure you got the right flights when things got complicated. When you called a company for information, you could actually talk to a real person. Maybe now we are often just disgruntled customers.

Keep it small and in the neighborhood. That’s what I say.

That is my rant for today. I am sticking with it.

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Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan – A Review

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies – captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

barbariandayscover200William Finnegan’s – Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life is a memoir. It is mostly a true story of a life where the common thread is surfing. Finnegan grew up in Southern California and Hawaii and at one point when he was just a grom the waves were not far from his family’s humble house near Diamond Head, Hawaii. He took to surfing at a very early age and though he does not admit it, became a big wave surfer, riding huge waves on the North Shore of Oahu, Ocean Beach in San Francisco, discovering a wave in Fiji and later in life, Portugal.  When he was a young teenager he began to experience the power of the ocean.

 

I was shaken to the core by the sound of the waves detonating a few yards behind me. I was convinced that if I had been caught inside I would have died.
William Finnegan at fourteen surfing the Rice Bowl in Hawaii

For some inexplicable reason, he kept coming back to these harrowing experiences.  He seems to have remembered the minute details of various rides from previous decades were he thought the end was near. Captivating read indeed, and much of it surely somewhere near the truth.

The book is a romp through various times in his life. It is a very fun read not just because of the surfing tales but it gives a window into a time in history when people had the ability to be very mobile, flying to faraway lands, but at the same time communications back home did not exist. A telegram now and then. Regular letter writing but making a call on a phone was far too expensive and not common. People out in the world traveling used random message boards, taping hand writing messages in often feeble attempts to contact others.

In the end, I teamed up with other Westerners, bribed some Bulgarian border guards, made my way through the Balkans and over the Alps and, with the help of an American Express office message board in Munich, found [his girlfriend] Caryn in a campground south of the city. She seemed fine.
William Finnegan at nineteen bumming around Europe

For this reader, the chapters where he travels around the world for a few years chasing waves with his friend Bryan is truly amazing. With nautical charts they head off to the South Pacific and discover a phenomenal wave in Fiji, unknown to the world but for a few. Now the spot is an expensive surfing resort destination. A year in Australia surfing and working odd jobs, searching for waves. Buying a beater car and driving it clear across the country, always a bit concerned if it would overheat or the next day would even start. Such road trips are times when living in the moment seems to take precedence. They seem to be not so much in nature but a part of nature.

Then there is the peculiar way that wave size is measured. While this may not be of interest to people who do not surf, it gets pretty funny.

Indeed, underestimation is practiced with the greatest aplomb on the North Shore of Oahu. There, a wave must be the size of a small cathedral before locals will call it eight feet.

 

Buzzy Trent, an old-time big wave rider, allegedly said, “Big waves are not measured in feet, but increments of fear.” If he said that, he got it right.

Barbarian Days – A Surfing Life is a very fun read, especially if you enjoy travelogues, you are a surfer or just love the outdoors. There may be times when the author delves into the finer points of a two wave hold-down, or the advantages of a certain fin set up or length of board.  This talk must be a bit perplexing and perhaps a bit tedious to the non-surfer. One thing that Finnegan claims is that it is just about impossible to get really good at surfing  if you pick it up later in life. I am living proof of this theory and would agree.

Getting old as a surfer, I’d heard it said, was just a long, slow, humiliating process of becoming a kook again.

CODA:EVERY SURFER HAS A STORY
I started surfing at the age of thirty-five, an age far too advanced to every actually get really good at the sport. I mostly do it for the exercise, be with friends and to commune with nature. It is amazing the wildlife you see out in the water. I regularly surf with dolphins and certain times of the year there are whales within twenty feet.

Paul Lyons surfing Ocean Beach - March 2008
Paul Lyons surfing Ocean Beach in his late forties – March 2008. This session was complete luck. I remember paddling out with a board that my friend had found while on the job cleaning out student housing. I found a channel right away and caught three really nice waves. This was a rare session. I have always been a bit of a kook. – Photo by Doug Oakley

I remember the thrill of the first time I took off on a head-high wave and made it. I also remember the first time I took off on big wave on a long period swell. The waves were overhead at Ocean Beach back in the days when you would sometimes be the only person in the water. It did actually get lonely out there.  I went right, stayed high on the shoulder and remember just flying down the wave faster than I had ever surfed. I had never ridden a wave with such power. I also remember a day when my surf buddies and I when out at Ocean Beach and the waves were big but seemed at the time nothing scary. I had only been surfing a few years. We made it out past the shore-break and white water only to discover that the swell, in the course of the next hour, had increased quickly. A huge set came and we tossed our boards and dove underneath. I broke my leash, lost my board which eventually washed into shore. We both paddled in a bit terrified by the whole ordeal. I pledged to never to do that again. It scared the bejesus out of me. Later I saw the buoys from when we were out. It  had jumped up to 11 feet at 19 seconds. Big waves. That’s my one captivating story and it is all true.

William Finnegan lives in Manhattan and the end of the book loses the wild adventure of earlier years. Parents die. He becomes a father. Life becomes more urban. In his seventies he must still be a really good surfer as he surfs off of Long Island in the winter and will chase waves in the summer and even during  hurricanes.

For those who love the adventure of youth and want to escape into that magical time of traveling before the internet, I highly recommend William Finnegan’s – Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life is a Pulitzer Prize winning memoir.

5 Stars

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The Quarterly Report – News From San Francisco -March 2025

The Quarterly Report: A brief synopsis of the news in San Francisco over the last three months. You are now reading “Slow News That Doesn’t Break” – the exotic internet.

Weather

After a very dry January, while Los Angeles burned, San Francisco had weeks on end of glorious sunshine. Then in February  we got two major storms.  The wind hit from the west and the storms came down good and hard. The roads turned into rivers and snow piled up in the mountains. People had to drive with chains, just like the good ‘ole days. At Donner Summit they have had over 250″ of snow.  I think in the next decade or so people will begin to realize that the weather is actually the real news. Water will be all that really matters as we guard our front doors with our Second Amendments rights terrified that someone will steal a few gallons of Hetch Hetchy. March arrives with unsettled weather and reservoirs not quite full. The snow pack in the mountains is less than average.

National Politics

Donald Trump took office in late January and began a sort of mobster data coup. His billionaire henchman Elon Musk and his minions started snooping around the Federal Payment systems causing havoc. Cutting off payments to USAID, various research grants and much more. If I was talented in the graphic arts I would make a comic where you see Donald Trump sitting on a toilet and there on the toilet paper rolls is the constitution: “We the People… ” …in scribe of course. And to top it off he is taking a dump while looking at his phone. Such is the state of our world.

On March 4 he gave an address to Congress were he lied continually. He spews out lies and more lies and people begin to believe the lies. I think people are so numb to his antics that the use of the word “lie” has been purged from the English language.  I read a transcript of the speech as I have not time to listen to his performances. It is full of lies.

Local Politics

Daniel Lurie is Mayor of San Francisco. The City is still here. For the average citizen it is difficult to notice that anything is changing. The forces in our world are far greater than any individual.  He just started the gig and if he can solve homelessness in San Francisco he could set his sites on running for higher office. I am not holding my breath.

Sporting News

Nothing major to report on the sporting front. The Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Kansas City Chief in the Super Bowl 40-22.  This is important knowledge for when you have to remember such trivia years later.  Of course, far more important than the actual Super Bowl are the people that you watch the Super Bowl with. For me this a “third space” type of group who has returned to a sacred ground near a sacred screen often with sacred herbs,  tobacco and cigars.  Wagers are made. People marvel at the passage of time. Consumption becomes naturally moderated.  We marvel at the connections. See you next year. Same place. Same time. We need some constants in life.

Road Repairs, Parking Tickets, Do Not Parks Signs and Other Treacherous Endeavors

As predicted they are heading north up Mission Street and repaving the bus stops and intersections. Its and big job and everyone seems to be able to drive around the mess. At some point they may have to actually repave where we drive on Mission Street, but anything is progress.

That is The Quarterly Report – March 2025

Photo Gallery of SF

The Quarterly Report – March 2025

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The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis – On Ignorance

Indeed, if you are seeking to preserve a world view, it actually helps to gut science. Trump’s budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire – to remain ignorant. Donald Trump did not invent this desire. He was just the ultimate expression.
Michael Lewis – The Fifth Risk

The Fifth Risk is a book about how the federal government does all sorts of things people take for granted. They make sure our food is safe. They make sure nuclear waste does not end up in the ground water or our rivers. They make sure airplanes do not crash into each other. The list is long and Michael Lewis illuminates just a few stories. It is a fun fast read and the type is large. With the cutting of the federal workforce it will be only time before the American public gets pissed off.

UPDATED: 3/5/25

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“James” the Novel – A Review

James is a novel by author Percival Everett and is based on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. It tells the story in the first person not from the character Huck but through the enslaved person Jim. Huck Finn is a classic work of American literature that everyone has heard of but as I am finding few people have actually read. Ernest Hemingway is quoted as saying “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” A few years ago I wanted to revisit this Twain classic. Thinking I could pick up a copy at a local Goodwill I found myself out of luck. I did find one eventually and when I read the introduction I soon realized I had picked up a sanitized, censored version. I had purchased the 2011 edition of the book, published by NewSouth Books. This version replaced the term “nigger” with “slave” (not even enslaved person) throughout the book. I am sure that Twain would have not approved as he got bent out of shape when his editors simply changed his punctuation.

But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me.
– Letter to Harriet Whitmore, 7 February 1907

Huck Finn Illustration
Huck Finn Illustration

In any event, Huck Finn has been banned from the beginning.  I did eventually purchase the original Huck Finn, complete with illustrations. This was the version Mark Twain approved. It is always best to read the original.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a complicated tale that brings up many timeless themes. It makes perfect sense for Everett to use Huck Finn as a springboard for a reimagining of this classic. James  tells the story of Huck Finn through the eyes and ears of Jim; in this way he is pulling one on Twain by making a “stretcher” out of his “stretcher.” Additionally Everett goes a step further than Twain and allows the character Jim to not just be freed but to become empowered.  James like Huck Finn challenges assumptions about race, sex, gender and identity and in the end through a combination of education, courage, reason and the performative, James finds agency by embracing the ideals of The Enlightenment. James is a book about the “American dream.”

In order to get the most out of James it is best to have first read a few books that are referenced otherwise these references will make no sense.  Start with the short novella Candide: or, The Optimist (1759)  by Voltaire (it is around 100 pages). Like Huck Finn this book was banned and Voltaire did spend time in prison for his writings. Candide is a bit like a comic book in that it moves very fast – there is sex, rapes and violence, gold and jewels. Like Huck Finn it is really for adults. Characters and places from Candide make their way into James.  Of course the next step is to read Huck Finn – the original version with all the bad words. Take your time.

A major theme throughout James is the performative and the anxiety that surrounds identity. In modern times this has been often called code-switching. Jim has to be careful that he does not slip out of the language of being a slave and give away that he can read and write. Of course he pulls it off mostly until at a crucial point in the book (which I will not spoil). An important thing about this code-switching is that it is handed down through generations with the elders teaching their youth how to speak and act like a slave as a means of survival. In modern language, this is perhaps a psychological aspect of what is called systemic racism. You also have a few characters who’s sex or gender are misidentified – Doris and Sammy. This is not thoroughly explained but surely has to do with black people being controlled and abused by their owners. Interestingly, the people concerned are so abused they simply accept their lot in life. Of course the King and the Duke are all about code-switching and impersonating royalty. I think it was a missed opportunity that James does not play around more with these two characters as Twain did, revealing the arrogance, corruption and incompetence of royalty. How soon we forget.

In James, the historical characters Voltaire and Locke enter the novel though Jim’s dreams. The first time is soon after he is bitten by a snake and delirious. In this way, history becomes surreal and less believable than the fiction – we only see historical figures in dreams. Jim’s dream-induced conversations with Voltaire are brief but we get a references to Westphalia and the notion of “tending your garden” and near the end Cunégonde, the love interest of Candide. Besides references to these themes the philosophical themes that Voltaire brings up in his work are not ventured into. There is no Professor Pangloss and his dogmatic “best of all possible worlds” mantra. By the time James reunites with his wife Sadie and daughter, the Voltaire references are long gone. Unlike  Cunégonde, Sadie has not lost her charm and is not irritating to be around. And unlike Candide who’s identity is a constant, Jim becomes James and this identity is reinforced with the notion that you claim your identity through courage and the performative. James discards that layer of his self that is disenfranchising. If you no longer speak with the diction of a slave, then you are no longer a slave.

Race in America has a complicated history and Everett helps to illuminate this complexity not dumb it down or simplify it.  In the end, James does begin to live his dream of freedom and is empowered by his literacy and the ideals of The Enlightenment that all men are created equal. As the plot twists and turns, by the end James is not anything like Huck Finn. We find ourselves back in Hannibal then another city with Jim looking for his wife and family on a “breeder farm.” Good grief! Things move quickly and become a bit like a Cohen Brothers thriller movie with lots of violence and fireworks. It is probably a good idea to read the book now. It is a thrilling page-turner and James will be in theaters soon.

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The Explosion of Deferred Dreams – A Review

There are many ways to learn about history and events. One is by researching published accounts of the time – books, newspapers and magazines. Another is to get first hand accounts through interviews. A third way is to actually have lived through the time and events and report what happened through first-hand observation. The The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965-1975 by San Francisco native Mat Callahan, published by PM Press uses all three. Often times books about popular music become fan literature and lightweight puff-pieces, highlighting the usual tabloid events. In contrast The Explosion of Deferred Dreams looks deeply into politics, the music business, journalism and human interactions of the time and shows how for a very brief period a special sort of music freedom and political idealism existed in San Francisco only to eventually be coopted and controlled by the press and music industry.

While Callahan is not an academic, the book at times takes on the flavor of a graduate-level thesis with an abundance of footnotes and references. It is a very well-researched, insightful look at a dynamic time in the Bay Area. No stone is left unturned and the interactions between the Black Panthers, The San Francisco Mime Troupe, Sly and the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, The Diggers, Bill Graham and many others shows how different the actual history was when compared to how the history eventual was marketed by the music industry and press.  Callahan likes to set the record straight. He points out how journalists and the music industry coopted and invented terms such as “The Summer of Love,” “hippie” and the “The San Francisco Sound.” that were actually foreign to the people and movements of the time. (There is no mention of the term “groovy” but I have a feeling that was some marketing department as well.) In actuality, the time period was really about protesting the Vietnam War, the movement, consciousness and liberation,  ideas and goals that were revolutionary and a bit too much for the people in power. In short time the music industry relegated the music and time period to a genre or style while the music at that time was about doing away with categories and genres.

“..there was no “Summer of Love.” This was a media creation that passed into popular usage the same way Tampax became the generic name for sanitary napkins. Journalists and publicity agents (is there really a difference?) repeated this phrase so often that it became a common referent; it was a short easy way to identify a time and place without doing the hard work of chronicling what actually transpired , thereby preventing its lessons from  being learned.”

With all history there is nothing like the ability to be a fly on the wall. The book begins with a personal story of being on the Hoover Middle School playground in 1965 and the life-changing event of simply learning about the Beatles. There are many interesting parts of the book that relay these  personal experiences during his youth including the interactions between certain San Francisco High schools and what was going on in the Haight-Ashbury and Mission Districts. Definitely insider knowledge where you sometimes get the feeling that you a talking to some local at a corner bar. With all the careful research this barstool wisdom does come off all the more believable.

While the music industry is so often a slick packaged product wanting things in neat buckets we all know that in reality, events and people are complicated. I never knew that Bill Graham got his start with the Mime Troupe, a very anti-corporate, leftist theater group still in action today. There are other interesting facts along the way.  Reaching back a few decades you learn that Jerry Wexler was the guy in 1949 who came up with the idea of replacing the category “Race Music” with “Rhythm and Blues.” Who knew?   It is this sort of romp through an academic angle and the first-hand accounts that makes the book so compelling.

Anyone interested in San Francisco, music and politics and the history of this time period will enjoy The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965-1975. Some university should give Mr. Callahan an honorary doctorate. He did his homework.

SKU: 9781629632315
Author: Mat Callahan
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781629632315
Published: 1/2017
Page count: 352

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Elon Musk and the Refactor of the Treasury Payment System

Can I call you back? Busy helping Elon put “buy” and “share” buttons on all the individual financial records in the U.S. Treasury payment system. Just a minor refactor.
– joke by Paul Lyons intended for IT professionals and marketing people

While we read about the Elon coup d’état of 2025 the news reports lack significant information. The system that Elon and his young henchmen are accessing is called “Secure Payment System, or SPS.” They evidently have “read-only” access. Some reports say “read-only” access to the code base.  This is very reassuring. I like my Social Security number just the was it is, thank you very much! In another report it states that Elon is running the data through AI Tools to find waste and fraudulent payments.  This from a guy who works for a billionaire who somehow gets away with never paying taxes. Elon is part of that billionaire club that does not pay taxes as well. It is so virtuous for him to be looking out for our money!

When I first read that Elon is looking into efficiencies in the federal payment systems I thought that his goal was to somehow modernize the system. Refactor the code base. Get rid of crappy patches. Upgrade the documentation. Review the database design. Traditional systems like banking, healthcare, transportation are notorious for having systems build upon very old systems. They often were created in long defunct languages and architectures. People often get things done via command line. I have worked with such legacy many times proprietary systems. They are often obtuse, clunky and were built for a much early time. Even things ten years old seem antiquated.

One could optimistically surmise that Elon, in his benevolence wanted to upgrade the public system in a content agnostic way out of some sort of  altruism.  (I always wondered why the San Francisco Public School System never got any love from the tech sector for their systems.) But nothing is further from the truth. The Treasury Department with this Secure Payment System, up until now, has always paid out everything on time. Every invoice, Every tax return. Every bill on time. That is incredible.

What Elon is doing is not content agnostic. He thinks he can shape public policy via cutting payments to things he does not like. He thinks he can undo public policy. He obviously has never read The Constitution and how the U.S. system of government works. What Elon Musk is doing is illegal. He is not an elected official.

Update: 2/7/2025
I actually got a lot of this story correct. See https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/02/elon-musk-doge-security/681600/. The added feature is that the systems are so complex that they are like nested Russian dolls. ” It’s less a database than it is a Russian nesting doll of databases, the experts said.”

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Rants and More Rants – February 2025

I have created a new category Rants and More Rants. It is where I can write rambling screeds and jump from topic to topic. In George Carlin’s monologues he would often break into these types of rants by starting with “whhhhhhhhhhy”?  Sometimes in this crazy world, you have to just freestyle it.

I don’t know anything and have no perspective, but here is my comment…. I feel better now.
Barnstorm in 2013 on the defunct website Stoke Report

Why do the security people at federal buildings allow Elon Musk and his henchmen in the door? How is it possible that a private citizen can access government systems without security clearances? It is more difficult for a seventeen year-old to get into a bar these days.

Why are half the people interviewed on news shows from the Heritage Foundation?  Does the Heritage Foundation have a monopoly on white guys in ties talking about politics or the state of the news? Rarely do you get the likes of Ralph Nadar, Noam Chomsky or hundreds of other qualified and intelligent people on the main-stream press. Why does David Brookes always get the mic? He is one guy. We all know what he is going to say.

Why was there so little reporting about the avian flu before the election? Before the election many people thought the price of eggs was all Joe Biden’s fault. The media did little to report on what was actually happening. The larger issue is about large agribusinesses and large egg farms with 10.000 chickens all coughing in each other’s beaks in unison.

Why does the media rarely delve into the history of a subject but instead writes about personal narratives and a conflict? You see this with wars, environmental tragedies and the medical world. One after another stories about a transgender person struggles or running from a hostel environment. Endless pictures of transgender people and the narrative is always right versus left. Conservatives versus liberals. Never in the discussion is the recent history of the 2013 DSM 5 which is the real reason for this sea change. Rarely do you hear of the AMA (American Medical Association) or the AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) and their medicalization of gender and their ability to profit off of the DSM 5.  Why not interview right-wing doctors and their take on the AMA? Why are the pharmaceutical companies not held to account for the fentanyl crisis? In 2025 the media seems to think that its goal is simply to confirm people’s biases, make issues into binary conflicts and do corporate America’s bidding.

Why are street cleaning tickets in San Francisco $97?
Seems a bit extreme for a situation where the city drives a truck around and mostly just blows the trash and leaves from one side of the street to another. Knock on wood. I have not had a ticket in a long while.

Those are my rants. “I don’t know anything and have no perspective, but here is my comment…. I feel better now.”

 

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Sierra Mountains – Early January 2025

#ski-cheap, #ski-deals, #donner-summit, #mid-week-ski-deals-tahoe, #ski-bumming

On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday you can ski at Donner Ski Ranch for $69 which they call Old School Days. You buy your ticket at the counter which you attach to your jacket with a metal wire. Ask your dad.

Donner Ski Ranch is one of the last family owned ski resorts. It is a medium-sized place with a lovely backside where on power days runs can remain untouched into the afternoon. It is an historic mountain where the early California skiers made some of the first turns. On the top is Signal Peak.

In early January, as the fires blaze in Los Angeles, the Sierra has clear skies and a diminishing snow base. The slopes are a bit icy and the groomed trails are the way to go. I headed up to Donner Ski Ranch to try out some new boot liners. I had a great day on a sunny Wednesday. Even though it was Old School Days, I basically had the hill to myself.

After skiing I headed down Highway 89 to visit and stay with a friend and then did a day exploring South Lake Tahoe and then headed to Echo Summit, just to look around and figure the place out.  Think snow!

PHOTOS FROM JANUARY 8 AND 9 2025

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Photos from San Francisco – December and January

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Books I Read in 2024

In 2024 most of the books I read were courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library. I read parts of books and checked out books that I was simply curious about. The San Francisco Public Library is an amazing resource.

Below is a list of books that I finished. I do this exercise to simply reflect on the previous year. One of my favorite books of the year was Tropical Truth a Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil by Caetano Veloso. It is a book written by the musical artist and illuminates music in Brazil during the 1960s and 70s. It opened up a journey into the music of such great musical artists such as Chico Buarque, Dorival Caymmi and Gal Costa. It introduced me to the concept of anthropophagia that was a large part of the Tropicália musical movement.

Books I Read 2024

Romney A Reckoning
Coppins, McKay
First Scribner
see review

My Bike & Other Friends Volume II of Book of Friends
Miller, Henry
Capra Press

Baumgartner A Novel
Auster, Paul
Grove Press

Tropical Truth a Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil
Veloso, Caetano
Alfred A. Knopf

The Free World – Art and Thought in the Cold War
Menand, Louis Farrar, Straus and Giroux
This is a great read of essays. A bit like reading and endless New Yorker issue.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X
Ballantine Books
One of those classic civil rights era books that is great to read to the very last word.

What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection
Nunn, Dorsey
Heyday
see review

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
The Mark Twain Library
Every time I read this masterpiece I find a different angle. I read the original version, some while camping and bike packing along the Mississippi River.

The Origins of Totalitarianism
Arendt, Hannah
Schocken Books
I read most of this book. It was interesting that the first 100 pages is about anti-Semitism. It was written a few years after the Second World War and it is easy to see how racism is always a prime component of totalitarianism.

The Last Night of the Earth Poem
Buckowski, Charles
This is a very fun book to read if you do not like poetry. Buckowski writes in a very accessible fashion and it is pretty hilarious at times.

Invisible Man
Elison, Ralph
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1995
One of those books that you think you read but when a few chapters in you realize it is your first past.

Hillbilly Elegy A Memoir of A Family and Culture in Crisis
Vance, J. D.
Harper
I read this before the elections. Strange to think that the author is going to be the next vice president. He grew up in a poor broken family with his foul-mouthed grandmother matriarch often the hero. He benefited much from the safety nets created by the New Deal, all things that he now wants to tear down. His main point is that hillbilly instincts are rarely wrong and a sort of untouchable source of wisdom.

We Are What We Pretend to Be
The First and Last Works
Vonnegut, Kurt Vanguard Press, c2012.
Short read of Vonnegut. The first novella is a formally unpublished work when he was a young man and before he developed his style and wit.

Seneca – Fifty Letters of A Roman Stoic
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus
Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2021

Something That Will Surprise the World
The Essential Writings of the Founding Fathers
Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, Madison
Basic Books, c2006.
The amazing thing that you realize when reading this book is that the Founding Fathers had respect for the intellectual.  Many were amazing writers and often wished only to retreat to their farms to read and study. I always like to read the original documents, not interpretations of the works.

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The Quarterly Report – News From San Francisco – December 2024

The Quarterly Report: A brief synopsis of the news in San Francisco over the last three months. You are now reading “Slow News That Doesn’t Break” – the exotic internet.

Local and National Politics

On November 5th, 2024 Daniel Lurie was elected mayor of San Francisco and Donald Trump is now the president-elect of the United States. Two billionaire white guys defeated two Bay Area Black women. In the case of the presidency it will have have grave consequences. And so it goes.

Look like nothing’s gonna change
Everything still remains the same
I can’t do what ten people tell me to do
So I guess I’ll remain the same, yes
(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay
– Otis Redding

In San Francisco, Proposition K passed. This means that The Great Highway will be closed seven days a week. Of course many people who live out in the Sunset District are not too happy about this result as they use the highway as an inner-city freeway of sorts. For those who ride bicycles, run and surf, love the sound of the ocean, having The Great Highway closed is amazing.

The Great Highway. Where kids learn how to ride a bikes.

Sporting News

The San Francisco 49ers football team, who but a year ago played a losing game in the Super Bowl are not playing very well as the season drags on and key players get injured. It is such a violent sport. Best wishes on speedy recoveries.

Weather

Fortunately, we started getting some rain in early November, then a full week of rain and good storm. Now the Sierra, at 7000 feet, are covered with about 60 inches of snow. The ski resorts have opened.  See https://cssl.berkeley.edu/.

Now in early December 2024 we are experiencing glorious San Francisco weather with clear skies, light east winds and solid long-period surf.  The light has been golden.  For a week the ocean swell has been around 5 feet and 15 seconds. This means waves are around 8 feet tall. Grab your board and head to the beach!

Ocean Beach

Road Repairs, Parking Tickets, Do Not Parks Signs and Other Treacherous Endeavors

Statewide ‘Daylighting Law’ Warnings Begin Nov. 11, 2024 and perhaps one thousand parking spots in this seven-by-seven mile plot of land called San Francisco have vanished. While safety is an important concern, I am not a fan of this law. People need to park somewhere. Perhaps there needs to be more education about how to be a pedestrian in the city. People walking around, looking at their cellphones, oblivious to their surroundings, bumping into telephone poles – walking out into crosswalks without even looking to see if there are cars or other moving objects about.  Common sense is not so common anymore.

Furthermore, this law discriminates against people would work third shifts and get home late at night only to discover there are absolutely no places to park.

That is The Quarterly Report – December 2024

Photo Gallery of SF

The Quarterly Report – December 2024

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Golden Gate Park Bison Paddock

Bison Paddock
1237 John F Kennedy Drive
San Francisco, CA 94121

https://sfrecpark.org/facilities/facility/details/Bison-Paddock-224

If you want to really slow down, there is nothing like hanging out with the buffalo in Golden Gate Park. It is a bit like looking at dairy cows as they usually do not move around much but graze. Slow down. Maybe bring a chair, hang out and chill on a nice day. It’s the least we could do after what you have done to this amazing animal. They may even look up at you and shake their heads. It’s odd. You never hear them “moo” or have much to say about anything.  According to the last census in 2000 (really, that is the latest data) there are  360,000 buffalo in the west. .

TIP: The buffalo will often herd together in the back. You can take the path along the fence and get closer if you do not see them at first.

COOL LINKS:
The American Buffalo by Ken Burns.
American Bison Wikipedia page.

BUFFALO NICKEL:

The Buffalo nickel or Indian Head nickel is a copper–nickel five-cent piece that was struck by the United States Mint from 1913 to 1938. It was designed by sculptor James Earle Fraser.
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_nickel

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Dear George Washington – The Faction Has Won

George Washington
Former President of the United States
The White House
Washington, D.C.Dear Honorable George Washington,November 25, 2024

It is with utmost respect and gratitude that I humbly write you this letter, sent into the abyss of time, and with the knowledge that you are enjoying your eternal rest with our Maker. So much has changed since you left us, but your name lives on into perpetuity. There are schools and Universities, bridges and roads and even a state named after you. It is the most northern state on the west coast of the continent, not far from where Lewis and Clark, Jefferson’s mission west, after a toilsome march finished their journey. They ran out of whisky early on and if it were not for a group of kindly Indians, who saved their feeble asses, they would have starved and froze to death in the snowy mountains. In this region there are vast mountains, once abundant rivers and fertile lands for farming. It is one of the now fifty states that make up The United States of America. Hitherto, your face adorns the currency of the one dollar bill. You look a bit grim as always but all the American currency looks a bit serious. Franklin, that vegetarian prude is on the hundred. I am not sure how he got that honor as I personally think you deserve that celebration (they do call them Benjamins by the way).   Forgive me honorable icon of virtue of this Republic. I once again easily digress. So many things have changed since your passing into eternity. With the utmost admiration, I hope you are doing well and that your afterlife is one of happiness and tranquility.

The United States of America, is now almost two hundred and fifty years old. It has survived a civil war, two World Wars, countless wars (most of which were imperial  in nature and tragic), many incompetent and corrupt leaders, a few good ones, earthquakes and storms, droughts and floods. Presently, as I write things seem to be getting worse and all is not well with the once fledging Republic. The factions and “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” that you warned about in your Farewell Address are now captains of the ship. Indeed, they have taken the White House and both houses of government.

This president elect is a man of dubious character. While formally in the office of the presidency, and hitherto losing an election, he rallied a mob of deplorable lunatics to charge the Senate with spears and clubs while the senate counted the electoral votes, as outlined in The Constitution for the certification of the Presidency. It became a violent scene with many members of the security at hand losing their lives. This cunning and ambitious man, the president at the time, called for the hanging of his own vice president! It was a murderous and unsightly day. After breeching the capital building, the angry mob went on to various offices of the senate, had instant portraits made of themselves with something called a camera. They then turned over furniture and vandalized the rooms. This now president-elect, a man of vile and scandalous character, to this day, has not been held to account for his attempted coup d’état.

Four years ago, eventually the new president, a man who has lived a life of grave family tragedies and a steadfast servant of the Republic was voted into the office of Presidency. His vice president is a woman of fine character who has dedicated her life to the ordinary citizens. It was not until one hundred and fifty years after the founding of this great country that an amendment (the 19th Amendment) enabled women the right to vote. Do let Martha know about this update as I think it will put a glorious smile on her face. By the way, how is she doing these days?

Unfortunately, the cunning and ambitious man four years later was voted back into the Presidency. He is a man who came from a family of wealth, but who many times squandered his money in scandalous business ventures only to be saved by faulty laws of bankruptcy protection. He is a man who never picks up a book to improve himself, knows very little about history, religion, The Bible, philosophy or agriculture, but spends many hours a day colouring his face an odd sort of orange colour and then gazes adoringly at himself in the mirror –  sometimes hours each day. He does not wear a wig but had a surgical  operation whereby hair from the back of his head was relocated to the front of his scalp. This he dies an odd yellow colour and combs from one side to the other to cover the skin. With the addition of a modern shellac it takes on a sort of impermeable helmet appearance. For years on end he has made his way into the hearts and pliable minds of the people with odd rants and entertaining falsities too numerous to expound upon.  He attacks and makes villains out of the very people who tend to the fields, clean the castles and build the houses and roads.

Upon winning the Presidency for the second time he did not retreat to his farm to study, meditate and pray for the Republic but went to a gruesome gladiator match where two hulking men battled on a stage in a deplorable fashion without any rules of engagement. It does appear now that The Enlightenment has devolved into an Age of Delusion, where Reason and truth matter not and science takes a back seat to gossip and hearsay. Notwithstanding, tribal factions and cunning politics rule the day. Unfortunately, few people take the time to read your works or the works of the ancients or even modern great thinkers but instead get preoccupied and distracted with one entertaining scandal after another. This president elect is truly a man of sordid character and your warnings were correct. May God shine down upon our Republic but I have grave doubts the country will last his term in power.

Notwithstanding, lose not sleep over this letter as these are conditions, as Seneca advised, whereby mortals and especially the dead have no power. However, if you are a ghost or if there are any in the White House that you know of, please give this sordid and cunning character a few scares to humble him and bring him but an ounce of humility. Unexpectedly, on windless nights, slam some doors or blow out some candles. Make strange walking sounds in the attic. Anything, to make this cunning, revengeful man gain an ounce of humility.

I am humbled to have this unique channel of communication, and I extend my deepest thanks for your service and sacrifice.

With the highest esteem and respect,

Yours,

Paul Lyons
Private citizen of the State of California

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Dear George Washington – On Healthcare – Part 1


George Washington
Former President of the United States
The White House
Washington, D.C.

Dear Honorable George Washington,

November 22, 2024

It is with utmost respect and gratitude that I humbly write you this letter, sent into the abyss of time, and with the knowledge that you are enjoying your eternal rest with our Maker. The postal service, as outlined in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, is still functioning adequately save for towns on the edge of the continent, such as Bolinas, California, where the post, for reasons not made public, has been suspended.  Though it may shock you, the entire western coast of America is part of the United States, of which there are now fifty. There are millions of souls and even woman and Black people can vote, though there are forces present to revert to prior voting regulations and rules. Forgive me honorable icon of virtue of this Republic.  I easily digress. With the utmost admiration, I hope you are doing well and that your afterlife is one of tranquility.

You probably wonder what has happened with the United States of America, the country that you lead into battle in Harlem Heights long before the existence of even the first bodega grocery store. The country of which you were the first President though you would rather have been recluse with Martha on the farm at Mount Vernon. The Republic that you founded on the modern, fashionable French philosophy of liberty and equality, (save for the slaves and women and others we deem unworthy). My friend: all is not well with the Republic, but that is another matter. This letter is to begin our conversation and update you on advances in the area of medicine and dentistry.

The letting of blood that you carried out with the advice of your doctor, and that which hitherto was common practice was later deemed to be a therapy of little use and perilous for the patient. Voltaire was mostly correct in stating that  the “the art of medicine consists in amusing the patient, while nature cures the disease.” Indeed, blood-letting has accounted for the deaths of thousand and thousand of souls.  That’s the bad news. The good news is that many years after your death, a potion called an antibiotic was developed. These potions, often taken as pills, would have rid the disease that had invaded your body and you would have experienced relief in a matter of hours.  Science does move forward from time to time. The age of reason proceeds sporadically. You apparently came to the festivities a few hundred years too early.

Another piece of good news is that field of dentistry has advanced beyond your wildest dreams. Today, while many in the field of dentistry appear to be charlatans, with twice yearly visits, ordinary citizens can keep their teeth healthy for their entire lives. Additionally, the manufacturing of false teeth and what are now called dentures has advanced to the point were these false teeth look even better than the teeth God provided! Additionally, held in place with a modern sort of adhesive, they are surprisingly comfortable.  I know not the dental programmes in heaven so this may be old news. I do hope that dental pain is not part of you daily life. It is extremely difficult to pursue tranquility and virtue when you have a raging toothache and your only remedy is to bite down on a strand of hemp.

I am humbled to have this unique channel of communication, and I extend my deepest thanks for your service and sacrifice.

With the highest esteem and respect,

Yours,

Paul Lyons

 

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San Francisco Photos – October

In the beautiful city of San Francisco, the tourists are back, mostly walking around Fisherman’s Wharf. The days are now mostly clear with some much-needed rain in the forecast. It is the season to head out to Ocean Beach, get some fresh air away from all the madness and enjoy the views.

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George Washington’s Farewell Address – Warnings For Our Times

From Washington’s Farewell Address – To The People Of The United States, written in 1796 with help from Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, around halfway in you read:

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force—to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party; often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common councils and modified by mutual interests. However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
Washington’s Farewell Address – To The People Of The United States

Presidential farewell addresses are the exit interview, whereby the employee can be candid. Calling out systems that do not work. Noting people who are problematic. Reminiscing on administration successes. Ignoring failures and scandals. Predicting future problems. Eisenhower warned us of the “Military Industrial Complex.” Reagan embraced all sorts of immigrants and the “shining city on a hill” but warned that Americans would begin to take for granted their freedoms.  A book about presidential farewell addresses is overdue. It would be a great way to teach United States history.

It is eerie how George Washington in 1796 could have predicted the character of a man hundreds of years into the future – “…by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people” explains precisely the method of Donald Trump. And to think that Washington probably wrote the address with a quill pen and inkwell.

Download Washington’s Farewell Address. Print it out and read it. It is slow news that does not break. It is only twenty-six pages.

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On Tranquility of the Mind – Seneca Quote

We ought to take outdoor walks, to refresh and raise our spirits by deep breathing in the open air. Sometimes energy will be refreshed by a carriage drive, a journey, a change of scene, good company and a more generous wine. Upon occasion we should go as far as intoxication, half-seas over, not total immersion. Drink washes cares away, stirs the mind from its lowest depths, and is a specific for sadness as for certain maladies.
From The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca – On Tranquility of the Mind

Deep breathing, travel, company, half-seas over quantity of wine. Sounds like stoicism to me.

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Traffic Lights, Artificial Intelligence and Driverless Cars Stopped at Red Lights

Driverless Car is San Francisco

You see them everywhere is San Francisco these days – driverless cars. Waymo uses a Jaguar with cameras all over the place. George Orwell is probably mumbling “I told you so!” from his grave. Driverless cars are found on slow streets, going up and down hills in neighborhoods, in downtown during rush hour, on crowded streets by Golden Gate Park – sometimes two, one after another.  No one in the driver’s seat. Rarely a passenger in the backseat. They creep me out.

I was thinking about these cars that often clog up our busy streets, endlessly mapping the terrain, when at an intersection where everyone was going nowhere -everyone was waiting at a  red light. I thought: how hard would it be to put a little artificial intelligence (AI) into urban traffic signals? It seems now the traffic signals all are all on egg timers.

Like most things in large organizations, like cities and counties,  large companies and corporations, things move slowly when adopting new ideas and technology. This is both good and bad..

Half of San Francisco’s traffic signals were built more than 30 years ago.
– Traffic Signals Program

Half of San Francisco’s traffic signals were built more than 30 years ago. This means that they were built to last but the actual technology in the signals is from the 1990s or older.

The failure of many of the technological transformations of our society is that they are done without a very holistic mindset. The larger consequences are rarely considered. Economics and a quick buck seem to be the driving forces.

What if just 10% of the technology of the fancy driverless cars went into more responsive and “smarter” traffic lights? A traffic signal could sense that even though there is a left turn signal there are no cars there, and by the way, the through traffic is backed up due to a sporting event just ending. There are many more scenarios like this, and I would think that the actual programming would be pretty simple if/else statements.

I did inquire with the City or San Francisco and got a quick response. This is what they said:

“To your inquiry about traffic signals and AI, the majority of signals in San Francisco are pretimed, or the timing is predetermined based on minimum requirements and estimated demand.  Some locations have sensors that change traffic signals based on actual demand or presence of certain vehicles like buses.  But no set of signals operated based on algorithms that optimize based on artificial intelligence.”  – sfgov,org

In other words, almost all traffic lights are are on egg timers, or “pretimed.” If any of our readers know of any companies or municipalities developing more modern traffic signals, feel free to comment below.