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1. On Sunday, I went north and my friends J. and A. came south, and we met for lunch at Sears Fine Foods (not a department store, but the place with the Swedish pancakes) in the City. Had a typically riotous time.
2. On the walk to and fro, saw a typical sight for the Union Square area at this time of year, tourists. People standing in the middle of the street right on the cable car tracks taking photos are likely to be tourists. People walking directly towards the main Chinatown gate who ask you where Chinatown is are also likely to be tourists. (To be fair, you can't see the gate from up Nob Hill on Bush St.)
3. Afterwards, to Berkeley for a Mythopoeic Society discussion of Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. Although this is epic poetry, it's grippingly told and I think might be attractive to more readers than The Children of Húrin was. It's Tolkien's adaptation of the same story from the medieval Völsunga Saga that was Wagner's source for Der Ring des Nibelungen, and maybe reading this will finally cure people of the delusion that Tolkien got his familiar-looking motifs from Wagner. Maybe.
4. More recently, my Shakespeare group tackled Hamlet, the first half. I got to read the Prince during the scene, not in which he says "the play's the thing / wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king," but the scene in which he actually does it. (Hamlet actually doing anything that he says he's going to do is an event worthy of note.) As we went around the circle choosing parts for this scene, we got all the way around the circle before running out, and the woman next to me was stuck with the last remaining part, Lucianus. She looked blank, not recalling anybody in Hamlet by that name. "He's a character in the play," I explained. She looked blanker: of course he's a character in the play. "The play within the play," I elaborated.
I also got to read Polonius in the scene where he forgets his own lines (while instructing Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in Paris - the original helicopter parent, as someone pointed out). Lots of fun with that.
5. Follow-up articles on the San Bruno natural-gas pipeline explosion appear to show officials being fairly quick and efficient about letting residents move back to their houses where they're undamaged, and letting them in to gather vital belongings where they are not. I hope the officials have learned lessons from the aftermaths of earlier disasters. Nobody can do anything about the damage caused by the disaster itself, but how the officials treat people afterwards and whether you let them get on with their lives and retrieve their undamaged possessions - that's wholly and entirely up to them.
6. I was stunned by a casual reference in a newspaper article: this is not the deadliest natural-gas pipeline explosion in recent U.S. history. Ten years ago, one outside of Carlsbad, N.M., killed 12 campers.
7. I have to give some award for disingenuity to Newsweek for its cover a week ago, which announces an article titled "The Making of a Terrorist-Codding, Warmongering, Wall Street-Loving, Socialistic, Godless, Muslim President," and below that, in tiny hard-to-read type (red on black) is a footnote: "who isn't actually any of those things." Actually he is one of them. He's the President.
2. On the walk to and fro, saw a typical sight for the Union Square area at this time of year, tourists. People standing in the middle of the street right on the cable car tracks taking photos are likely to be tourists. People walking directly towards the main Chinatown gate who ask you where Chinatown is are also likely to be tourists. (To be fair, you can't see the gate from up Nob Hill on Bush St.)
3. Afterwards, to Berkeley for a Mythopoeic Society discussion of Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. Although this is epic poetry, it's grippingly told and I think might be attractive to more readers than The Children of Húrin was. It's Tolkien's adaptation of the same story from the medieval Völsunga Saga that was Wagner's source for Der Ring des Nibelungen, and maybe reading this will finally cure people of the delusion that Tolkien got his familiar-looking motifs from Wagner. Maybe.
4. More recently, my Shakespeare group tackled Hamlet, the first half. I got to read the Prince during the scene, not in which he says "the play's the thing / wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king," but the scene in which he actually does it. (Hamlet actually doing anything that he says he's going to do is an event worthy of note.) As we went around the circle choosing parts for this scene, we got all the way around the circle before running out, and the woman next to me was stuck with the last remaining part, Lucianus. She looked blank, not recalling anybody in Hamlet by that name. "He's a character in the play," I explained. She looked blanker: of course he's a character in the play. "The play within the play," I elaborated.
I also got to read Polonius in the scene where he forgets his own lines (while instructing Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in Paris - the original helicopter parent, as someone pointed out). Lots of fun with that.
5. Follow-up articles on the San Bruno natural-gas pipeline explosion appear to show officials being fairly quick and efficient about letting residents move back to their houses where they're undamaged, and letting them in to gather vital belongings where they are not. I hope the officials have learned lessons from the aftermaths of earlier disasters. Nobody can do anything about the damage caused by the disaster itself, but how the officials treat people afterwards and whether you let them get on with their lives and retrieve their undamaged possessions - that's wholly and entirely up to them.
6. I was stunned by a casual reference in a newspaper article: this is not the deadliest natural-gas pipeline explosion in recent U.S. history. Ten years ago, one outside of Carlsbad, N.M., killed 12 campers.
7. I have to give some award for disingenuity to Newsweek for its cover a week ago, which announces an article titled "The Making of a Terrorist-Codding, Warmongering, Wall Street-Loving, Socialistic, Godless, Muslim President," and below that, in tiny hard-to-read type (red on black) is a footnote: "who isn't actually any of those things." Actually he is one of them. He's the President.
