Pope 3, Pols nil

In case you’ve been in a state of catatonia for the past week, Pope Francis I has been visiting the US, starting with a couple of days in Washington, D.C. Right from the git-go, Francis took the Capital of the Free World on his own terms, leaving Joint Base Andrews in the stretch version of a Fiat:

So you knew this wasn’t going to be your father’s papal visitation.

But what I love about this Bishop of Rome is how he has continued to do his Francis Thing, failing completely to suck up to our congressmorons in the manner to which they have become accustomed. I mean, it’s not everyone who—while being undeniably Christian—can get the crypto-Christians squawking about like cooped hens under a coyote alert.

He totally ran them like a boss—just ignoring their hissy-fits and showing them how true leadership is done. (Okay, the guy does live and work at the Vatican, which, now that Stalin is dead, pretty much has a lock on major league intrigue. So he’s got that edge.)

Take for example his address yesterday to Congress, where he talked about things guaranteed to affront pols: calling on them to rise above polarization, to open our nation to refugees and immigrants, to protect human life (both pre- and post-birth), to act on climate change, and to build an economic environment where business service the common good.

Well, you can see why they’d be pissed off. He framed his remarks by referring to four great Americans: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. Every single one of those four people lived lives that should make the rich and entitled extremely uncomfortable.

Day, one of my all-time heroes, founded Catholic Worker, a group that refuses to take non-profit status because its followers believe that you should help others because it’s right, not because you get a tax deduction for it. Her entire life could be encapsulated in what she said in an interview: “If your brother is hungry, you feed him. You don’t meet him at the door and say, ‘Go be though filled,’ or ‘Wait for a few weeks, and you’ll get a welfare check.’ You sit him down and feed him. And so that’s how the soup kitchen started.”

Merton practiced a different kind of service, as a Cistercian monk. He was all about shutting up and thinking about the state of the world and of faith. In his autobiography he said, “I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God, and yet hating him; born to love him, living instead in fear of hopeless self-contradictory hungers.”

So, yeah—not very many of the men and women packed into the House in their $2000-per suits would like to spend any length of time thinking about Day or Merton, or the world they worked so steadfastly to build.

Just look at John Boehner’s face in this photo, if you doubt me.

(Pelosi only looks moderately pleasant because I think in her last round of "work" she had her facial muscles permanently set in a kind of rictus.) 

Following his address to Congress, Francis bagged the opportunity to break bread with the wheelers and the dealers, to share a meal at a D.C. soup kitchen. (This in itself is a huge change from the previous papal visit by Benedict XVI, which you’ll recall was marked by several slap-up dinners wherever he paused for longer than a few hours. Thank God.) I'm sure this sent all the security services into a tailspin, but I consider that to be a bit of a bonus.

(Also, if I were the pontiff, I'd feel safer eating with the masses than with a collection of self-appointed Defenders of the Faith who regularly spew both spittle and venom. Just sayin'.)

Okay, look—if you’re not Catholic, if you’re not tickled by watching pols get their feathers ruffled (although, I really don’t get who wouldn’t be tickled by this), if you don’t care about Italian cars or soup kitchens, or if you don't think Junípero Serra should have been beatified much less canonized, there’s still a huge reason for you to be grateful for the humanitarian service Pope Francis has given us for the past few days:

He’s knocked Donald Trump out of the headlines.

The corgi channel

A corgi named Finnegan occasionally crosses my path on my morning walks. He and his human meet some friends at the track of a local middle school. I first met them one day parked on the sidewalk—apparently there are other walkers who give him treats as they pass, so he was waiting for the ones who are packing (as I was not).

Well, my friend JQ is a big corgi fan, and she quite enjoys hearing about Finnegan. She now sends me all things corgi, including this link, which in my opinion is just stellar:

I mean—no one is going to top the Corgi Realtor.

The property itself is listed at $995,000, for 1250 sq ft, which is practically nothing for the San Francisco market. The floor plan is a little goofy, but to be honest, I’m just here because the corgi roped me in.

Valley of death

Right, as long as I’m whining about drivers in the Valley They Call Silicon, let me just quickly express gratitude that I’ve survived another day of them. Because I gotta say that sometimes I feel like I’m back in Seoul.

In particular, the other day I was coming off Lawrence Expressway to make a left onto Stevens Creek Boulevard. That exit ramp ends with your vision to the left blocked by the embankment holding up the expressway, so when the light changed to green, I kind of poked my way out to make sure no one was coming at me, taking perhaps ten or twelve seconds to get going.

Which meant that I was not in the middle of Stevens Creek when some yahoo in an Accord too focused on taking a slug from his metal insulated travel coffee mug to bother with anyone else on the road just blew through the intersection from the right at probably 35 to 40 MPH (even though he was about to make the left on the other side of the highway to take the ramp up to Lawrence—meaning, he was rushing to hit the brakes).

Guy never looked to either side of him—and, apparently, never looked at the light, either. Just everyone get out of his way.

If the Valley They Call Silicon had a motto, that would pretty much be it.

Traffic coneheads

Can we correlate the increase in the use of mobile devices/social media to drivers becoming more and more idiotic?

Specifically I’m talking the people who do not see the gigantic, flashing-lights signs that tell even the semi-observant that one or more traffic lanes are about to close and they need to merge into another lane. Seriously—these suckers are visible from at least half a mile back.

But I’ve noticed several times over the past couple of weeks that people ignore everyone else peeling off to one side or another and drive steadily up until they reach the light truck and have to come to a full stop.

I’m not talking the arrogant jerks who think they can queue-jump to the tune of ten cars by speeding up in the empty lane and then trying to barge into one of the active lanes, only hitting the brakes when they get in and have to slow down by at least 30 MPH.

No, these are people who just seem to think that that big flashing arrow under the “Lane Closed” sign will somehow relocate or disappear before they get there, and are therefore nonplussed when that doesn’t happen. They stop, put on their turn indicators and eventually poke into moving traffic.

This is kind of a new one on me, so I welcome all theories.

Gratitude Monday: Hummingbird chatter

My sister’s hearing impairment began at birth, when obstetricians used forceps to deal with an irregular delivery. Penny always knew how to make an entrance.

But it wasn’t discovered until she entered kindergarten, which is when kids were checked for things like that. Today I’m sure they’d probably catch it before the baby left the hospital, and be in touch with malpractice lawyers before s/he got home.

She struggled with regular classes, took lip-reading lessons and then starting in junior high was in a special-ed program. This did not stop her from getting both undergraduate and graduate degrees and building a long career teaching the hearing-impaired at Alhambra High School.

However, every cold and respiratory infection caused further loss, to the point that when she came out for my graduation from William & Mary, the plane was rerouted to somewhere in Tennessee because of fog where we were, and she had no idea where she was until they got on the ground, because she just couldn’t hear the announcements.

In recent years, it got worse—her fire-alarm telephone ring was augmented by flashing lights, so she’d know someone was calling, and I’m pretty sure she was guessing on what was being said around her at social occasions. The worst was phone-call-via-captioning service.

But earlier this year (and after a whole lot of investigation on her part), Penny had a cochlear implant. The first amazing thing was when she heard birds, which she hadn’t for decades, probably. Then being able to pick up on conversations going on around her, with some sorting out of what sound levels to focus on and which ones to filter out.

On Friday, the day before her birthday, we had a long call without need of intervening services. She told me about her party at a local cooking school (made me laugh about ten people being there and the chef having to accommodate just about ten different dietary requirements; apparently the gluten-free focaccia was a deal breaker, so one person didn’t show up). She described the amazing food and promised to send me recipes. And she talked about fine-tuning the device (and getting proper speakers for her Mac) to be able to hear John Denver sound like John Denver.

Also—she discovered that hummingbirds make a chattering sound, which brought tears to me.

So today I am profoundly grateful for the technology that has enabled my sister (and many others) to rediscover sounds around them and to break out of the isolation of silence.

Cats--they're in everything

Today being Friday of a very full week (for me), I’m giving you a double dose of Interwebz Catz. You might want to bookmark this for end-of quarter frenzies, or those terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days.

First, for the musically inclined I give you the kitty mute for your euphonium:

This second one I’m not sure of. I myself have never had a cat that would willingly go into a kitty carrier. And the only time they were insistent on remaining in them was when we got to the exam room at the vet. But still.

Neighborhood watch

I go the back way (i.e., not using I-280, like my sat-nav system expects) to get to my orthopod in Saratoga—an upscale community here in the Valley They Call Silicon.

Well, most of them are upscale, or at least ruinously expensive. But Saratoga, a mostly residential town, reminds me a lot of certain towns in The Valley (San Fernando—remember “Valley Girl”?). South of the Boulevard, of course.

There can’t be any property in Saratoga that sells for less than $2M (and that would be a scraper), and most of the homeowners don’t seem to care about the multi-year drought. You could play polo on some of the front yards, they’re that big and that green. I keep hearing echoes of Marie Antoinette as I drive through in third gear (because there are stop signs at every intersection). Or maybe it’s Madame de Pompadour. It’s certainly someone who doesn’t give a toss about conserving water.

However, I’m not here to discuss #droughtshaming, which is actually a thing here. No, as I was poking along the street I noticed this configuration of mail boxes. (Because obviously no letter carrier is going to drive up 200 yards to poke post through a letter slot.)

And I wondered what the story might be behind the mine’s-bigger-and-more-secure-than-yours schtick?

Apparently there's no HOA regulation regarding uniformity of mail boxes.

Geek style

I got a free ticket for a big data conference in San José on Monday—for which I am extremely grateful (thank you, Google). It was a bit of a surprise, because I’d forgotten all about it when suddenly late on Friday I got an email congratulating me on being the recipient.

The conference was geared primarily (well, at least 99.3%) towards developers, so I got limited value out of many of the presentations, although the woman from Pixar was really good, and the Facebook guy who gave the keynote really opened up my understanding of some of the challenges.

(Did you know that Facebook has live streaming for celebrities? I’m really hoping that if they open that up to us mere mortals, they’ll make it prohibitively expensive, because otherwise I’m going to have to block a whole bunch of people.)

Anyhoo, I had a few interesting conversations, and the people watching was excellent within the limited range of 4500 software engineers.

But there was one guy in the general session panel discussion that I just could not quite… So I thought I’d get your input.

Guys—what the hell is up with this?

Philosophy on the move

As I’ve said before, here in the Golden State, you are what you drive.

This being the Valley They Call Silicon, you also are what you post. On social media, mostly. But these days, your vehicle is the message, every bit as much as it is your ride.

So here’s another vanity plate that caught my eye:

And yes, so do I. Often.

Gratitude Monday: A lesson from the ruins

This weekend was full of the annual “Never Forget” reminders of the 9/11 attacks. You couldn’t escape them, and nor (I suppose) should you.

I personally try to distance myself from the nightmare images of continuous loops of the second plane flying into the World Trade Center, viewed on a bank of monitors across a full wall at the office in Maidenhead. Or of driving home to London on the M4 the next afternoon and seeing GSK’s headquarters flags flown at half-staff, which sent me into uncontrollable sobbing.

I do not compare my grief to anyone else’s—certainly not to that of people who woke up that morning with intact families and friendships, and went to bed with great gaping, multi-story, jet-fueled, ash-covered holes torn through them.

But here’s what I also will never forget: the friends and colleagues across Europe who called and texted me for days, to check on me, to cheer me and to show their concern for me.

A sheet of A-4 paper with a hand-lettered message taped to the elevator wall at a hotel in Florence expressing condolences to any Americans who might be staying there for the appalling wounds we’d suffered. And signatures in different inks periodically added in solidarity.

The people—familiar and unknown alike—who insisted that I (and we) did not stand alone. The ones who’ve been here all along, even when I didn’t notice them, or was sure they didn’t even exist.

It seems odd that it takes the worst possible thing to make you realize this truth, and sometimes even then it escapes you. (Well, maybe not you. But me.)

But I’m profoundly grateful for all of them who not only feel the caring but also express it. Doesn’t really matter how large or small the gesture, how eloquent or inarticulate the communication; it’s the act itself that makes all the difference. As I well know.