Picnic in the park, part 2

I’m thinking that the Whisman School park isn’t the only place in the Silicon Valley where people hog the picnic tables by putting out tablecloths at the crack of dawn & then going off to yoga or the bodega for a few hours.

I went over to Vasona County Park in Los Gatos the other morning, around 0600 (there’s not a lot of shade around here & I don’t fancy getting sunburn, so I go early). & looky what I saw at the entrance:

They make it difficult to stake claims in absentia because they also block vehicular access until 0800, which means you’d have to schlep in all your tablecloths some considerable distance from the road if you tried.

Sunnyvale safe surrender

I live about half a block from Sunnyvale Fire Station No. 4—it’s where I voted in the June primary election, & I hear the engines several times a day.

Walking past one day, I noticed that it’s a “safe surrender” place:

I didn’t know there were such places, but it turns out that a number of states have designated such locations—usually fire stations, police stations or hospitals—where parents of newborns can surrender the baby for any reason without criminal charges being filed.

I had never thought about there being a need for such, uh, refuges, much less on a systematic level. But thinking about the battleground that control over a woman’s body has become in this country, I guess it seems inevitable.

Two thoughts:

I’m as surprised as surprised can be that Texas has such a program.

What happens to the babies once they’ve been safely surrendered? Because the political organizations that are most vocally anti-birth control are also the ones that would rather give corporations tax breaks than ensure healthcare & education for the nation’s children.

We hold these truths

In between the picnics and the fireworks today, give some thought to the basis of the holiday: the Continental Congress approving the Declaration of Independence presented by Mr. Jefferson of Virginia.

NPR has printed it for you, but you can also listen to several of their reporters, newscasters and commentators reading it, and it's a document that cries out to be heard.

A beautifully-reasoned and eloquently-stated list of the reasons why--with reluctance--the British colonies along the Atlantic coast feel they need to take the grave step of breaking away from Mother England.

We recognize how serious a move this is, it says; but, given the pattern of abuse by the British monarch, we don't see any way out of it. We know it will cost us, but it's costing us more if we don't do it.

Here are a couple of clauses that really strike to the heart:

"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

"We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States."

And--my favorite of all:

"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Imagine, if you will, the current denizens of the US Capitol pledging their lives, their fortunes or their honor to anything.

No, I didn't think so.

So go back to the original and really listen. This is where we came from.

Picnic in the park

This being Independence Day, there will be a lot of picnics in a lot of parks. So perhaps today’s the day to post these pictures from a couple of Saturdays ago at Whisman School Park in Mountain View.

These are picnic tables that have been covered in tablecloths.

&, in case you don’t get the point, there are “reserved” signs taped to them. In misspelled Spanish.

Now, of course, nothing particularly wrong with marking your territory.

Except that I took these pix at 0645. & most of the tables in the park had been poached (as you can see in the background of the first shot), so it must have been a hell of a party.

Kind of tough toenails on anyone who showed up at 1100 with their coolers and Frisbees, though.

Sunnyvale sights, Part 2

Another interesting Silicon Valley sight: I was out & about & came across this truck making an early-morning delivery to the Sunnyvale Five Guys.

I got rather a charge out of the tagline. But then I realized that Daylight Foods hasn’t quite grasped the whole URL thing.

Bus stop memorial

Last week I was driving down California Street in Mountain View, when I noticed this ad hoc memorial site at a bus stop:

There were a lot of memorial candles—I mean, a lot.

From the stuffed animals I thought it might be a memorial to a child, but it turned out to be the site of a fatal traffic accident—a developmentally disabled 50-year-old man was hit on 21 June while waiting for the bus by a car going 70 MPH.

Bill Ware, who was a fixture at the Mountain View Public Library, and who appeared at city council meetings, was well known in the community, and will evidently be sorely missed by the people he met regularly. I was there around the 26^th, and the tributes were undisturbed, candles still burning. Which tells me that people in the neighborhood think it’s more important to mark Ware’s life and passing than to sit to wait for the bus.

You see these sorts of memorials around the country, of course, at traffic fatality sites. But the votives with brilliant colors and Our Lady of Guadalupe themes are quite distinctive to this area and I thought it worthy of sharing.

Quackers in California

Closing out the week on food and drink, all the news here in California is about the End of Life as We Know It.

That is, if you’re a gourmand with a jones for foie gras. Back in 2004 the Lege passed a law banning the production and sale of this particular type of goose or duck liver. That is, the extra-fatty sort that requires the animal be force-fed with a tube for some time before it’s slaughtered.

The ban goes into effect on Sunday.

As you might imagine, the foie gras lovers are not waddling gentle into that good night. In fact, there’s been quite a run on the delicacy in both restaurants and specialty shops. Also—this being California—a lot of protests.

One thing I find interesting is that although the foie fans have had a whole lot of time to prepare for—or try to overturn—the law, they only appear to have started marshaling their forces in the last couple of months. There was a spate of hoo-ha around here in May, with chefs holding fight-the-ban” (or, in one chef’s term, “FU Foie Gras Revolution”) foie gras fundraising banquets that were picketed by the PETA set. As though they suddenly woke up and realized they were going to have to start serving regular poultry livers. I don’t know what they’ve been doing for the past eight years.

I expect people to start smuggling the stuff across the state’s borders in luggage. Will they have paté sniffer-beagles in the airports? Well, no—that would be silly, since the ban is on producing or selling the product in-state, not possessing it or eating it.

So we may see the practice of “foie-kage”, or maybe BYOF—restaurant patrons toting a brown paper bag (uh, well, no—that would be a crime against recycling, as would plastic; maybe it’ll be wrapped in a banana leaf) of foie gras into their favorite eatery and; paying a fee for the chef to serve it.

Or perhaps the restaurants will have $75 bagels on the menu, with the option of a schmear of foie gras instead of the usual, pedestrian, chopped liver.

If this ban follows the pattern set by the 18^th Amendment to the US Constitution, we’ll probably see high-end restaurateurs turn into scoff-laws, offering bootlegged foie gras on verbal menus; you’ll have to give a password and a secret handshake to get the “special” meal.

They’ll call the establishments "quackeasies”.

Foaming at the sushi bar

Back on the food and drink theme de la semaine: NPR reports that Kirin, the Japanese beer company, has developed a “soft-serve yogurt-like” dispensing machine that’ll freeze the foam on your glass of beer.

They claim it’ll keep the beer cold for 30 minutes, though I can’t imagine it taking half an hour to drink a glass of beer.

Anyhow, if you’re anywhere but Japan, you’re going to have to drink it the old-fashioned way. The machine is only available there.

Farewell to Nora

I’m interrupting my weekly theme about food and taste trends to reflect upon the death, at 71, of Nora Ephron. Ephron was a well-known screenwriter, director, produced and writer of novels and essays.

She gets most press over such romcoms as Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail. No one’s going to forget the deli scene from WHMS or the whole Empire State Building thing from SIS.

(You’ve Got Mail didn’t click with me perhaps because I so clearly had The Shop Around the Corner in my mind and heart. Although I did get a real kick out of the love of Jean Stapleton’s life being Francisco Franco. “He ran Spain,” as a throwaway line—that’s class.)

No—my favorite of Ephron’s films is My Blue Heaven—an entirely different view of the federal witness protection program than you saw in In Plain Sight. In this classic fish-out-of-water WitSec world, mob informant Vinnie Antonelli (Steve Martin) is relocated to San Diego, given the name of Todd Wilkenson and left to fend for himself.

“Fending” includes hooking up with a posse of Mafia informants (including William Hickey as a strip mall pet shop owner), engaging in various scams and writing his autobiography. In the process he opens up the world for his nebbishy FBI minder (Rick Moranis) and sparks a romance between the latter and a DA (Joan Cusack) whose baseball-player husband just dumped her for his psychotherapist.

Only a woman writing for her own sensibilities would pair Moranis and Cusack—or their characters, Barney Coopersmith and Hannah Stubbs—as a romantic duo. Only a woman with Ephron’s sensibilities would make that work for the audience.

There’s a lot to love about MBH—the baseball sequence where, during the playing of the national anthem, Vinnie teaches one of the DA’s boys how to guard against getting his pocket picked; the scene where Hannah buys a turtle from Hickey to replace the one she accidentally ran through the garbage disposer; or Vinnie’s matter-of-fact testimony about a mob murderer, “Richie loved to use .22s because the bullets are small and they don’t come out the other end like a .45. See, a 45 will blow a barn door out the back of your head and there’s a lot of dry cleaning involved; but a .22 will just rattle around like Pac-Man until you’re dead.”

Two of my favorite bits involve the transformation of Barney Coopersmith through…dance. In the first one, Vinney teaches Barney how to merengue:

And in the second, under the influence of Vinnie’s confidence-boosting emoluments, Barney applies this knowledge to sweeping Hannah off her feet:

(The music also affects Barney’s partner.)

The whole thing is a delight. and you don’t find movie writing or setups like that anymore. I’ll really miss Ephron.

Will you have wine with your chocs?

Hmm, I’m seeing a theme developing this week, a theme around food, studies, taste and tastes.

Hot on the trail of the Israeli study supporting the practice of eating cake for breakfast, and the University of Michigan study on how the last chocolate you eat tastes best, here’s a study on wine. Specifically on how consumers are inclined to rate the taste of a wine higher in inverse proportion to how unpronounceable its name is.

So—the more you struggle with the name in the wine list, the better you’re going to think it tastes. Also—you’ll be willing to pay more for it.

Especially if you’re a “wine geek”.

Those of us with less sophisticated palates are not neglected, though. “low knowledge consumers” tend towards wineries with cutesy names—Fat Bastard, Toad Hollow, Cupcake—because they connote comfort with a dash of difference. Wine from a toad’s abode? I’ll drink to that.