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unbuilt roads: the Ashby Freeway
San Francisco is famous for having had a huge and destructive network of freeways planned for it in the 1950s, most of which were never built. Not so well known is another never-built freeway across the bay, in Berkeley.

Ashby Avenue became an important route in 1937 as the link between the Bay Bridge and the Caldecott Tunnel. Ten years later, in the flurry of post-World War II infrastructure planning, it was proposed for conversion into a freeway. The problem, of course, was that Ashby was not just a route for traffic; it was and is the center of several neighborhoods it passes through. Nevertheless the Berkeley Department of Public Works and Planning Commission continued to study how an Ashby Freeway might be built and proposed the following route possibilities for it in 1952:

The proposal was met with 5000 signatures on a petition opposing it, but the Planning Commission carried forward and included the route in the 1955 Berkeley Master Plan. A 1957 public hearing drew 100 protesters, and perhaps with that in mind Wilbur Smith and Associates' 1959 transportation plan for Alameda County included the Ashby Freeway but proposed to relocate it to the Oakland-Berkeley border.

But Oakland was no more receptive, and the Oakland City Planning Commision rejected the "new and very destructive right-of-way." In 1961, with neither city willing to host the freeway, the Berkeley City Council finally voted to stop planning it, over the protests of the Oakland City Planning Commission, whose already-planned Grove-Shafter Freeway (Highway 24) would have to carry all the tunnel traffic.

The 70s
I have created a new, temporary blog for this ridiculous blogging class I'm taking. It's about the 1970s:

http://the-seventies.blogspot.com.

So far I'm struggling, but standards are pretty low in Blogging 101. Feel free to comment; I'm being graded on "community."

Coincie-dincie

At Readercon (as in other venues) I was caught up in a conversation about Coincidence, and divination, prophetic dream, and all that class of experience, which it was generally agreed is only a function of noting or selecting from out of the vast and pelting river of experience those few items that are of interest to us, which stand out only because we note them. I say it was agreed, but (as usual) somewhat dutifully, and even sadly.

Anyway today I was reading the Advance Reading Copy of Nicholson Baker's new book, which I'm to review, which is about a poet who is devoted to rhyme, and on an early page he quotes from Edward Lear, "The Pelican Chorus":

"Plumpskin, Ploshkin, pelican jill.
We think so then, we thought so still."

Then later in the day I open the new TLS and there in the "NB" snippets section, there's the same, quoted at slightly greater length, and differently punctuated:

Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee!
We think no birds as happy as we!
Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill!
We think so then, and we thought so still!"

So if any of you have recently been reading, or remembering, or thinking about, or opening an old childhood book (Nonsense Songs and Stories) and your eye falling on just that exact poem then we will have one of those astonishing, amazing coincidences, that wow must mean something, but what?

Nabokov called coincidence "A piece of pattern for which there is no use" -- or something -- can anyone correct that for me?

Charles Brown RIP
Since it is now known almost everywhere, I reveal nothing in an untimely fashion by noting the passing of Charles Brown, eternal editor of Locus magazine, tireless chronicler of the SF/F world. He was on his way home on the plane to California and died without fuss in his seat.

Charles interviewed me at Readercon: I was his last Locus interview, oddly. So much about death is odd. Yet I can say that Charles Brown had what we in the Catholic Church called a good death: having just visited and spent time among many he loved and admired, who returned his admiration, and who he knew were indebted to him for his long toiling in the vineyard, which I think did not seem like toil to him, and vanishing away on his return home again. My own last image of him is stretched out, after a fine and lengthy dinner, on his bed in his hotel room, where I was being interviewed -- actually interviewing myself; he contributed remarks rather than questions -- with Peter Straub and the faithful Amelia. I'd hope Locus might publish the whole of that recording, more conversation than interview; a last remembrance.

Movie

_wind_spirit_ and I just watched Casablanca for the first time. Impressive!

Current Mood: contemplative

While I'm about... here is a shirt that

northofvoontah and I found amusing in Hawaii.

Peek at more ( sun-bathing_beauties. )

You know, I've written many LJ posts in the last several weeks. In my head.

Anyway, the excitement of the moment is that we discovered this morning that our lay-down freezer in the garage has broken. We now have a very unpleasant freezer full of meat/etc., that has been stewing for possibly a week in 80+ weather. And garbage day isn't until Thursday. Not sure what we're going to do about this in the short-term. I guess we'll see what the garbage company says tomorrow.

On the plus side, we've now got some lovely freshly-frozen raspberries to enjoy later in the year.

Totally outrageous!
Sharon Nichols is back at work as an emergency services operator in Detroit. Before she was fired last time around, she messed up so badly that she was actually convicted by a jury on a criminal charge of willful neglect, after Sherrill Turner died of heart failure while Sharon told Sherrill's five-year-old son to quit playing with the telephone. She might have even got away with that, but the second time the boy called, Sharon sent the police over to scold him in person, and they found Sherrill's body. Anyway, like the song says, "Go back, Jack, do it again."

personal geographies: some airplanes I've been on
I knew for a while that there were web sites that would show you the current locations of planes in flight, but I only recently found out that some of them also have archives going back several years where you can look up the routes of old flights if you can dig up the flight number and date. So, thanks to fboweb, here is where some of the planes that I've been on went:

I had no idea I had flown between northern and southern California so many times. Apparently I used to be a lot more comfortable with flying than I am now.

Marie is doing better
Last night Marie got into a tussle with a lamp cord, and we thought she might have broken her tail. This morning she seems much better, but we took her to the vet to make sure. We got sent home with an anti-inflammatory medicine to squirt into her mouth once a day.

Vera and I are a little rattled, but ok. Marie is lounging on the windowsill. More info on Vera's LJ

Oh, Soglow
Does this photo remind other folks as aged as me of The Little King, the comic strip of the cartoonist who signed himself O. Soglow?

Here is a Little King moment:

the grocery store with the best computers
One of the reasons I'm such a packrat is that every one in a while, something that I read a long time ago will percolate to the top of my mind, and it's nice to be able to be able to grab whatever it was off the shelf and read it again. But that doesn't help me if what I read was in somebody's blog somewhere and I can't find it any more.

What I'm thinking about right now was somebody's blog entry about how the UK has regulations about what hours grocery stores can be open that are intended to help little mom-and-pop stores at the expense of big chain supermarkets. But since you can't write a law that says exactly that, what they have instead is one saying that stores under 2500 square feet can stay open late and stores larger than that have to close early. Actually it used metric units instead of square feet, but you get the idea.

The blog entry went on to say that the unintended consequence of the law is that it does not actually cause mom-and-pop stores to automatically do better than big chain supermarkets; instead it causes the chains to try to operate stores smaller than 2500 square feet so they can stay open late too. And, says the blog, it is very difficult to run a full-service supermarket in a space of this size (even a smallish normal supermarket is about ten times as big), so inventory management is very important, so the chain that does the best is the one with the best computers. Naturally I can't remember which chain it is that has the best computers.

Does this ring a bell with anybody else?

Passions

"All have won, and all muist have prizes," as (I think) the Dodo proclaims after the Caucus Race. Very clever, all of you. This is the best I could come up with:

Oysters delight to bark and bite

Though we all say them nay,

And clocks proceed from day to night

Implore them as we may!

But let the bears eat little boys

As is their ancient right;
And let their pretty passions rise

To give us all delight!

The Case of the Impossible Author

A link in Rhe Dizzies homepage opposite led me to this:

site.xavier.edu/polt/keeler/story.html

Can this really be possible? Is it the sort of elaborate hoax that the Net invites and obsessed over-stimulated and highly intelligent college students create? It has to be real; follow the links and you get an actual novel, published by McSweeneys -- but then again McSweeneys is a doubtful enterprise and seems itself somehow impossible even when yhou hold its products in your hands.

Why I am reading about Buddhism again.
I won't deny that during my last week of work I settled some scores.
( Read more... )

dragowicz in response to the previous entry, or rather in response to a responder, offers a parody of an old cautionary verse, one s/he may have encountered in a book of mine, but which isn't mine; my mother used to quote it , not quite seriously, but somehow hoping it would actually stop a quarrel among her five children -- and maybe it did. But who wrote it? Is there more of it? The following is a clip out of a Google book of sermons for children by a certain William Wilberforce Newton, but he gives no author, and neither do any of the other references I found. It sounds like something Lewis Carroll would have parodied, but he didn't. Prizes for the authentic information (and the best Carrollian version):