Catching Up #4 - February 29, 2008

Spring training games have started. The Giants have won some and lost some. Vizquel is out for the whole Cactus League season.

The new hotel at Fifth and Mission opened today.

Alain Robbe-Grillet died. I remember reading Le Voyeur in college. It was a hard slog. I saw Last Year at Marienbad about the same time.

William S Buckley also died. I didn't like most of his ideas, but I liked the way he expressed them.

TCM was showing Seven Samurai the other night. The subtitles looked new. They had black borders around the white letters and some of the swear words were translated correctly.

I took this photo at Pac Bell Park on 09-June-2007.

Catching Up #3 - January 13, 2008

1. A bunch of people died, including Oscar Peterson, Sir Edmund Hillary, and Vampira.

2. I joined two very interesting discussion sites, Nitrateville (http://www.nitrateville.com/) about classic films and SilentComedians.com (http://www.silentcomedians.com/) about, well, you can guess. From a posting on the latter I learned that one of my entries in last year's Slapstick Blog-a-Thon (http://filmyear.typepad.com/blog/2007/09/slapstick-blo-1.html) was wrong about the way that Billie Ritchie died (http://cablecarguy.blogspot.com/2007/09/killed-by-ostrich-september-9-2007.html). I've made an update.

3. I realized that I had never mentioned a wonderful bay cruise that we took on 30-December-2007. The photo, which I took that day, shows the view as we returned under the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a clear day and not particularly cold.

Catching Up #2 - November 14, 2007

- Norman Mailer died. I haven't read many of his books. The only thing that stuck in my memory from An American Dream was the description of vomiting.

- There were many delays in responding to the oil spill. Now they are closing beaches in Pacifica.

- I visited Oracle Open World briefly yesterday. There were lots of desparate vendors who wanted to scan my badge. The photo above, taken yesterday, shows Howard Street looking towards Third. Traffic on Howard leading up to Third hasn't been as bad as last year.

Catching Up #1 - September 12, 2007

I had a great time participating in the Slapstick Blog-a-Thon. Now I need to do a little catching-up.

1. Luciano Pavarotti passed on last week. He had a remarkable voice. My grandfather talked about Caruso; I'm sorry he didn't live to hear Pavarotti. Pavarotti's voice was not so dark, but he could do many things with it.

I went to see him in person once, at the Opera House, in a memorial to Mayor George Moscone. Unfortunately, Pavarotti did not show up. In his place, they had Frank Sinatra. That was all right ;0)

2. Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of 09/11/2001. I remembered a dream I had had the next night, of an airliner crashing into the Bank of America building.

3. Saturday, we went to the Cartoon Art Museum on Mission Street. The main exhibit was a show of political cartoons from around the world called "Why Do They Hate Us?" Many of them were not as harsh as what we do in this country. There was also a Peanuts exhibit, Edward Gorey's designs for Dracula, animation items, including two drawings by Winsor McKay, and a nice selection from the general collection. While the family visited the Gap store at Powell and Market, I watched two cable cars get towed away because the cable had stopped. I'll post videos on YouTube.

4. This may be the only time I ever mention football in this blog, but Monday I got off the SamTrans bus at the park and ride lot in Pacifica, and it was full of cars. And there were a bunch of people dressed in red. Then I realized that the Forty-Niners were playing Monday Night Football at Candlestick. I had never seen a Ballpark Express bus there on a weekday because Monday Night Football games usually start around 5pm. This game was starting at 7:15pm for some reason.

The bus, 118, an articulated, was signed for line 810.