tst

testing

Help Me De-Clutter

On a San Francisco Vistas blog, I should really be posting pictures of yesterday's excursion, taking Javier and me on the #28 Fort Mason bus to Fulton and Park Presidio to look for statuary represented in the paintings by Robert Minervini at bus shelters on Market.  This is what we found--one easily and accidentally, the other with some effort because no one we talked to knew about Lloyd lake, and there's no map at the deYoung that shows where all statues are.  (I've sent for a book, recommended by Lesley Stahls, a friend who knows the park very well and gives tours of the Botanical Garden:  San Francisco's Golden Gate Park: A Thousand and Seventeen Acres of Stories.)

But I need help dealing with the clutter on my desk and am once again asking for your support.  (You are the world that never writes to me.  I see that after four years I have zero followers.)  

I'll keep Walgreen's free Diabetes Magazine not just for its catchy name but for its recipe for Smoky Mediterranean Beet Burgers.  That will go in a little pile to be taken to the kitchen along with Whole Foods Catering pamphlet, and both will go on my recipe books bookshelves or in my recipe bottom drawer.  

The Tours of the Strand with Friday, May 15 circled, will go up on the refrigerator, so same pile.

The ACT 4x7" postcard for A Little Night Music should go in my to-do pile.  

Should I keep the op-ed piece by Matt Haber "S.F. Works Its Magic on a New Yorker" to put in Jonathan's Christmas stocking or just send him the link?  I think I'll put it in a file that I have, for some reason, labeled "Jonathan's Typing."   (I've put it in, but I did catch a glimpse of a note card I made of an early cassette recording on which Jonathan was chanting "The people united will never be defeated," singing "Chazu Bao" and reciting "Gung Hay Fat Choi." )

Earthweek:  a diary of the planet" was especially interesting the week ending April 24, so I kept that.  It has the usual record heat persisting and eruptions (Chile's Calbuco volcano), the primitive diversity of bacteria in indigenous people in Venezuela's Amazon who were isolated for a long time,  Especially interesting was the worm rain in Norway and New Zealand's program to eradicate rates, possums and stoats (?) by placing poison traps.  

I have something on a 1936 Buick from April 17, 2015!  I tore it out of the newspaper to share with a former boyfriend who used to take me out in his family's Buick of about that vintage, which was already special in 1962 and 1963!

The handouts on "CCSF Pacific Islanders Club"  "Critical Pacific Islands Studies" brochure that were given out the day I met a friend on campus for another reason (Project Survive) and notices the big San Francisco Day at the Wellness Center.  I'll put these in my CCSF collection along with "Build Your Future/Study English" from the ESL Department and VIDA's "Undocumented & Educated."  Also a page-long flyer on "Super Student Club"  

A Fidelity statement giving my ending balance as $0.00.    Oh, but I had made dividends & interest of $50.23.  Should I have reported that?  

The United Cerebral Palsy has a pickup for Clothing & Household Items + e-waste on Thursday, May 7.  

Some old hour-by-hour accounts I use to show how I use time.  Recycling bin. 

A mailing for Coral Zanin, my tenant back in the days when I upped the rent from $500 to $550.

Hurwitt's review of Beautiful Chaos:  A Life in the Theatre  Since I'm reading that now, I think I'll put the clipping in the book itself.  

A Senior Citizen Exemption Application Form from the Quality Teacher & Education Act.  Gee!  I'm eligible.  But this is the 2008 act that provides money to the SF School District.  

A solicitation from Habitat for Humanity.  When did I last donate to that?

Nevius' report on his sewer plant field trip "Go with the flow:  a smelly sojourn" & a report on the closing of Heald College--like the closing of 750 Eddy, with no prior warning.  

VIDA's invitation to their "Third Annual Dream Graduation"  I should probably send them the photos I took.  

Various solicitations and a CREDO bill of only $4.64. 

At the Library for May 2015

A notice from Pacific Gas and Electric that work on a natural gas pipeline is beginning in my neighborhood.  14-18 Avenues between Ulloa and Vicente.  

To be continued. 

Home and Hearth and Books that Speak Volumes, Josh Green's at Contemporary Jewish Museum--Really!

The two-hour book buffet I have each morning around three o'clock (before my 5:00 wimp-out at the Stonestown Y) helps my neuro-diverse brain in gear, not exactly functioning normally, but focused and happy, nourished and ready for life.  I prepare a six-cup pot of tea and light the vertical log (a giant candle) in the fireplace.  Then I lean back into my recliner and read in a room with a tackiness I love.

My beautiful oak floor doesn't quite match the oak cabinet I had custom-built, so I put up a strip of tapa cloth to bring the shades of brown and tan and yellow/white together and then to use the space between the tapa cloth and cabinet, I put up a framed photo (surrounded by Tongan stamps) of the hut I lived in there in 1970 and 1971.  Then I thought of home and heart--all my past homes and the one I live in right now--and kept going, increasing my pleasure with every bit of tackiness.  I already had photos of my family, going back to my father's baby-hood, but I decided to mount these items of ancestor worship by putting them on pedestals of books--books that they loved or that, for some other reason, I associate with them.  More on that another day.

Getting back to the north wall, where my dark-oak cabinet stands, these are the books I have for Tonga:  a reprint of Mariner's description of Tonga from 1837, the Intensive Course in Tongan by Eric B. Shumway that came out in 1971 but whose lessons we used on Molokai in 1969 Peace Corps training, and the Tonga Pictorial by Donna Gerstle and Helen Rait published by the Tofua Press in San Diego but giving no date.  (I do remember meeting Donna Gersle and hearing that her parents had lamented that she had "traveled around the world to fall in love with a colored man."  She later dedicated a book to her parents for their love and understanding.)

To the left of the Tongan books I have Madrid as photographed in a National Geographics Magazine and represented in books Madrid as described by Lorenzo Lopez Sancho in 1970, the Prado Museum in 1970, with my address as Reyes Magos 4, and the Las Meninas, a play copyright 1972 from the Casa del libros 29, Madrid 13, but online listed as written in 1960 by Antonio Buero Vallejo

Whoops!  Better turn Madrid over right side up!  (Done!)

To the right of the Tonga books Algeria is shown through a photo of me at my home in Medea and my boyfriend's dog meeting a camel in Tamanrasset, and the books are L'Algerie Aujourd'hui (Today being around 1974, when Jean Hureau descirbed it for the series Jeune Afrique), a National Geographics article from 1973, the year before I left for two years in Algeria, and the Algerian novels Jours de Kabylie and Le Fils du pauvre by Mouloud Ferkoun and  Un ete africain by Mohammed Dib.

So you can see what I mean by tacky--even seeing only this little among so much more.  But I LOVE this room, and I need it to settle my sometimes windy neuro-diverse brain.

More photo and books tackiness coming soon!

Home and Hearth and Books that Speak Volumes, Josh Green's at Contemporary Jewish Museum

The San Francisco Chronicle's article on an artist's collection of books got me thinking and writing about my own home-and-hearth book display this morning.

I'd already gotten my brain in gear, this morning with a buffet of newspaper articles instead of the books that are stacked on the table on the left of my recliner.  (The tea tray is on the right.)

  I'd read about Freddie Grey, whose spine was inexplicably broken when he was arrested by the police...the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe coming to the US and to Silicon Valley (also part of the U.S. though a very special planet)...Israel's launching an air strike on its border with Syria...James Holmes going on trial for the movie theatre murders...Jason Saolu's pit bulls with eye glasses...Nepal's 3,300 dead after the earthquake and the Mt. Everest avalanche that was triggered by the earthquake, killing a Silicon Valley CEO...parking permits..Finland's charging a millionaire $58,000 for speeding, a fine in proportion to his income...the model for Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter, Saturday Evening Post 1943 (which I confused with the one "We can do it" done by a Pittsburgh artist),...Patreus's getting 2 years probation and a $100,000 fine for his revealing top-secret information (not having to join Snowden),...the strip teases offered in China to get people to funerals in rural areas so that the deceased can be properly honored in number,..the Bad Reporter's view that Bonds was protected by the personal belief exemption because he believed steroids prevented autism and the revelation that most service gods are not registered.  In addition to those captivating reports, I read Nanette Asimov's latest piece on CCSF, this one "College's battle prompts bills to curb accrediting panel" and two articles on San Francisco--our tourist attractions, one of the ongoing once-a-week section by Peter Hartlaub (who never bothered to respond to my mailing)  and a piece by a New Yorker returning to San Francisco "S.F. works its magic on a New Yorker"  (Matt Haber.)
But now that I've logged in what this blog is not about, I need to create a new blog focusing on Home and Hearth and books that speak volumes.

FBI and Terrorism-related cases

From The Brothers:  The Road to an American Tragedy by Masha Gessen

page 245 and part of 246:  (I'm not using quotation marks for what she's written, just for those she's quoting.

Since September 2001, U.S. courts have taken up an average of forty terrorism-related cases a year.  More than five hundred people have been charged, and virtually all of them have been convicted and sentenced.  Dozens of bombing plots have been revealed.  In 2014, Human Rights Watch released a report that analyzed many of those cases.  The researchers concluded that "all of the high-profile domestic terrorism plots of the last decade, with four exceptions, were actually FBI sting operations--plots conducted with the direct involvement of law enforcement informants or agents, including plots that were proposed or led by informants."

Since 9/11, the bulk of the FBI's efforts have centered on fighting terrorism, which becme its top institutional priority and consumes forty percent of the agency's operating budget.  Between 2001 and 2013, the number of terrorist attacks carried out on American soil by people connected to Islamic organizations numbered zero, but trumped-up terrorist plots numbered in the dozens, and Human Righs Watch report describes teh work of the FBI (initially quoting from a former FBI agent, Michael German):

"Today's terrorism sting operations reflect a significant departure from past practice.  When the FBI undercover agent or informant is the only purported link to a real terrorist group, supplies the motive, designs the plot and provides all the weapons, one has to question whether they are combatting terrorism or creating it..."  In many of the sting operations we examined, informants and undercover agents carefully laid out an ideological basis for a proposed terrorist attack, and then provided investigative targets with a range of options and the weapons necessary to carry out the attack.

Stan Freberg, Jerry Nachman, Leah Garchik on punctuation, Sam Whting and Robert Minervini on Market Street art, and More!

I almost didn't get dressed today because the Chronicle, so boring yesterday, was so fascinating today!  Sam Whiting's Datebook feature on Robert Minervini's art made me want to go to Market Street, a place that isn't usually magnetic.  Minervini, a thirty-three year old artist from Oakland, is bringing the statues out of Golden Gate Park in paintings he's created that make them more meaningful.  (Nobody reads this blog, but just let me note that he isn't really taking the statues out; he's just bringing them to life..)   I'm going to keep this article (yes, I get it in paper) in my binder labeled "Some of What Makes San Francisco So Wonderful."

Leah Garchik's column on favorite punctuation is full of really great comments--by her and by her readers.  Readers also quote the famous.  F. Scott Fitzgerald observed that using an exclamation point "is like laughing at your own job," but the reader quoting him says he like it becuase it's so often used in songs like "Stop!  In the Name of Love." Someone named John Sylvester says he likes the exlamation makr "becuase it emphsizes teh critical importance of whatever it is that I have written...This might otherwise have been missed."    Ann Packer, who started the whole conversation in Leah Garchik's column, says she likes the commas because "it leads to eleaboration."  I learned a new word, too:  interrobang, which combines the question mark and the exclamation point, one written on top of the other.  (Is that different from this?!)  Leah Garchik described Wikipedia as being "pretty hoity-toity" in their explanation calling the word "an example of a pormanteau which incorporates an onomatopeia."  Huh?