News of the Bay Area Weird

Hey, we made the papers!

In November, the new Kaiser Medical Center hospital in Fremont, Calif., staged a special ceremony, by the hospital’s chaplain, using symbols and inspirational words on rocks, to battle “spirits” that some nurses believed were responsible for beds moving and doors slamming on their own.

Tragically Apropos

September 1, 1939

W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analysed all in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air

Where blind skyscrapers use

Their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man,

Each language pours its vain

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

In an euphoric dream;

Out of the mirror they stare,

Imperialism’s face

And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash

Important Persons shout

Is not so crude as our wish:

What mad Nijinsky wrote

About Diaghilev

Is true of the normal heart;

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love

But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark

Into the ethical life

The dense commuters come,

Repeating their morning vow;

‘I will be true to the wife,

I’ll concentrate more on my work,’

And helpless governors wake

To resume their compulsory game:

Who can release them now,

Who can reach the dead,

Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

A Note for My Friends Back East

It’s warmer today in Binghamton than it is in Silicon Valley.

Do feel free to gloat.

Which A-Team member are you???

Pasta Ramblings

Homemade pasta really is a world of difference from store-bought, but it needs to be made and treated right.

Ingredients matter. Use the freshest possible eggs — straight from the farm, if you can. I like to use a mixture of semolina and all-purpose flour. Recipes that include oil, water, or salt result in pasta with an undesirable slick texture. Adding herbs and other goodies (tomato powder, chipotle powder) can make fabulous pasta.

Also, the homemade pasta made by an Atlas-style machine (with little rollers) is far superior to the extruded kind (which always reminds me of a Play-Doh toy I had when I was about 3). That’s because extruded pastas (spaghetti, elbows, sometimes angel-hair) must be made with 100% semolina and dried to get their full rich flavor. The home machines just don’t have the power. If those shapes are what you want, buy a good brand of dried pasta — the Italian ones are best, and not expensive, usually.

If you’re using the machine with the little rollers, you have to set them at the widest possible opening first, then progressively thin the pasta. That’s what develops the gluten and gives fresh pasta its lovely resilience. If you force the dough through on the narrowest setting without stretching it first, it shatters. I don’t mean it ends up in shards on the floor, but the internal protein bonds break, and your pasta loses all its bounce and savor. It also tends to cook into an unholy slimy mess.

After each strip emerges, lay it in a single layer on a linen dishtowel. (Cotton is OK, terrycloth is a bad idea.) The woven surface marks the pasta, and you get lovely slight irregularities of surface. The sauce clings to these — mmm, yes. If you’re short on room, you can add a layer of dishtowels on top of the first, then add more pasta. Stacking the pasta itself is counterproductive.

Cook it al dente. No point in making it mushy. The pasta should have the texture and allure of a woman’s breast — springy, resilient, alive under your teeth.

Angel-hair pasta really demands a very light sauce — tomato-cream, say, or broth. A thicker but still mainly smooth sauce for spaghetti or linguini or fettuccini, a chunky sauce for shells or penne.

I was thinking of making homemade pasta yesterday, but ended up spending the afternoon with H&R Block. (Who at least had good news for me — whee, a tax refund!) After D&D was over, though, I cooked tricolor rotini, pureed some roasted red peppers, and made a sauce with half-and-half and a smattering of herbs. Steamed some asparagus, heated artichoke hearts, et voila. A good dinner on the fly.

Ya Gotta Believe

Tug McGraw is in intensive care with two malignant brain tumors. This is the man who pitched the spectacular final out of the 1980 World Series.

Baseball is designed to break your heart. Yes. Because those lovely boys die young, or they get older, they get sick, they die. Athletes flower so fast. Wise lad, to slip betimes away.

No. Damn it, don’t slip away. I’d rather have athletes (and poets, and musicians, and soldiers, and everybody) grow into cranky old codgers than die young and pretty. Why is this hitting me so hard? Because too many people in my life have died young and pretty. I want us all to get old together. I want to die at 95 or so, scandalizing the staff at the nursing home right up to the end.

Tug, be well. We love you.

Quotes from Tug

“I dunno. I never smoked any Astroturf.” – Asked for a preference of grass or Astroturf

“I have no trouble with the twelve inches between my elbow and my palm. It’s the seven inches between my ears that’s bent.”

“Kids should practice autographing baseballs. This is a skill that’s often overlooked in Little League.”

“Ninety percent I’ll spend on good times, women and Irish Whiskey. The other ten percent I’ll probably waste.”

“Ten million years from now, when then sun burns out and the Earth is just a frozen iceball hurtling through space, nobody’s going to care whether or not I got this guy out.”

Ghost Towns

A few weekends ago, I went off to a sale on a bright Saturday morning. A restaurant in Palo Alto was closing, and I was hoping to buy some dining-room chairs. (I got them, too, nice comfortable ones for $5 each.) The directions from Mapquest were flawed, unfortunately, and I spent an hour cruising around the wrong Charleston Road until I gave up, stopped for lunch, then found the place by accident.

But it’s not the getting lost that matters. It’s what I drove through, looking for the place.

Miles upon miles of industrial parks, fine buildings, vast parking lots, elegantly landscaped grounds decorated with monumental statuary. I know some of those companies. I passed outposts of IBM and Loral and Lockheed Martin and NASA. This is where Billy used to come when he flew west to Silicon Valley: to the defense contractors clustered against Moffett Field like piglets rooting at a sow.

In that hour, I passed dozens of familiar companies, hundreds of unknown ones, but I never saw another car, not parked, not driving. This is Silicon Valley; people work on Saturday morning. When they have jobs. Nine buildings out of ten were placarded with the names of realtors. For Rent or Lease.

I drove out along Bayshore Road, with eight screaming lanes of 101 on the west, the quiet marshes of the bird sanctuary on the east. I saw apartment buildings, office buildings, with boards crying out: Move-in special! First four months free!

This is Palo Alto, where a cramped 3-bedroom, 1-bath house will easily run you more than a million. Two million will get you something with 1500 square feet. The nice houses go for three times that and up. And these are houses in town, with small yards. Palo Alto, home of Stanford, an absolutely lovely small town, one of the most desirable places to live and work in the whole country. The real estate prices I’ve quoted here are from today’s ads, and they’re lower than they used to be.

The empty industrial parks of Palo Alto aren’t alone. I’ve seen them in every high-tech outpost of San Jose, Santa Clara, Milpitas, Hayward, San Francisco. The stores are closing, too, and the restaurants: the secondary businesses that rely on workers with money in their pockets. All up and down the coast there are workers wondering where their jobs went and how that $230 a week is going to keep them going until they find another job. And those benefits are before taxes. (Yes, they tax unemployment here.)

Almost every week, one of the South Bay NaNoWriters has layoffs to report. A number of us have lost jobs since November. Even more have had layoffs in their companies. When you’re the only one left from your department, you tend to feel like you dodged a bullet. Everybody is scared.

from the San Jose Mercury-News:

California’s latest revised employment figures showed Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County alone lost 191,500 jobs — or nearly one in five positions — between the employment market peak of December 2000 and January 2003. [snip]

Boom-and-bust cycles are certainly nothing new to the greater San Francisco Bay area. But the damage wrought by the dot-com implosion has been broadly felt since so many area companies fed from the New Economy trough.

“This one is the worst …. This time it’s everybody,” said Jeff Hellman, an out-of-work software tester who is hoping to make a living by playing guitar outside Silicon Valley-area coffee shops and selling his own recordings.

[snip]

Santa Clara County includes such tech-heavy cities as San Jose, Sunnyvale and Palo Alto. It absorbed about half of the state’s post-boom job losses and had a January unemployment rate of 8.6 percent — above California’s 6.5 percent and the national average of 5.7 percent.