Posts by Paul Campbell
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Sadly it probably is ....
Just thought of another fun place to visit - if you happen to be down near 4th St the East bay Vivarium for all your reptilian needs - where the staff look a lot like the product
At the weekend take a kite and go out to the marina (and look at the really big kites)
-
The funny thing is that "sweltering hot" in Berkeley is pretty rare - there's a tongue of fog that sneaks across the bay in the evenings - a natural air conditioner which means that almost no one in the East Bay has actual air conditioning - the 2 nights a year it's actually hot, usually spring or Autumn before the summer fog kicks in in anger, people just sleep with the windows open.
It's why I used to live there, great weather during the day but seldom oppressive.
Of course you are taking Bob to Burning Man right, only a couple more weeks?
-
Again - if you're traveling up highway 1 up the coast bring your winter woollies the fog rolls in in summer - a few kilometers inland from the coast it may be wonderfully hot - go inland where you can to a state park on a river and take a dip
Make sure you also see some Monterey pines (pinus radiata) in their native habitat - they don't normally grow tall and straight clumped close together in lines. In the wild they live on wind swept foggy cliffs - they're tough scraggly things that defy the elements
-
Mark Twain said: "The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco"
The locals laugh at the tourists in their shorts and tee-shirts freezing on the streets - summer is fog season - take some warm clothes, don't expect to enjoy the water at the beach in Northern California there's a cold current - across the bay in Berkeley/Oakland or south in the Valley the temperature will be hot - but not the City
-
BTW moving to the US at age 25 and getting a green card I also avoided having to register for their draft by 6 months - a lot of those 'american' kids who died in Vietnam weren't even citizens of the US
-
Islander - I mostly agree - but I also think that looking after soldiers should be a function of government, not something they should be begging for on the street.
Of course as Dannielle says poppies don't glorify war but the horror of it
For me it's all just a very visceral thing, all mixed in with teenage angst and memories of high school bullying, fear of nuclear armageddon and the like - being terrified by Muldoon and his mob and what they might do to me as I came of age i.e. being drafted and sent to Vietnam to die (even though at that point you still had to volunteer to be sent everyone just knew it was only a matter of time before the draft was changed to force us to go) - it was something I laid awake and worried about for years
-
I must admit I'm of an age where I spent my teenage years staring Vietnam and the draft in the face - with the gung-ho pro-war mob from the then RSA staring back - poppies mean a whole different thing to me - yes I know things have changed but I can't wear one
-
BART's not for getting around SF though - it's really a wide area transit system - makes a single pass through a lot of cities - more like a train than a subway.
What ever you do don't take a car - in SF Muni is the way to go: buses, streetcars (trams) and cablecars (for the tourists) - get a bus map - take a 6/66/71 bus out to the Haight - walk down Haight St and into Golden Gate Park, visit the De Young art museum or the museum of natural history - downtown visit MOMA - take a 31 to Chinatown - get some dim sum (yum char), walk into North Beach and find a nice cafe - or continue on the bus (or take a cable car) to fisherman's wharf, don't go in there, it's a horrible tourist trap no local would be seen dead in, instead walk west along the bay towards the Golden Gate bridge - if you get that far visit Fort Point (civil war fort right under the bridge) then climb up and walk across - or stop in the Marina District and visit the Exploratorium (possibly the best, grubby, science museum you'll ever visit - where you can touch and play with everything)
-
Yeah I kind of agree too - but the whole purpose I think was to show how deeply conflicting this whole issue was for people who knew him
-
Apparently our private sector is performing so badly because the gummint pays its workers a few percent more.
Or perhaps because the private sector pays it's employees a few percent less - maybe the answer is for the government to fund unions .....