Point Lookout
Musings from the hillside

In a Freakonomics Blog entry in the NY Times, we get a collection of interesting pundit/expert quotes. Most of them have germs of ideas we can learn from. The bulk of the message is that they, the experts, are smart and the rest of us are dumb.

They are probably right but that’s not as helpful as you’d like. I suppose, in the fullness of time, one takes the critiques as guideposts but only after filtering out the unhelpful noise like criticisms of populations that live in danger areas.

This is very much stuff that talks to the foundation concepts that have woken me up to the need for action here on the local level. I resonate to some of the ideas but find the grandiosity and pomposity a bit nonproductive and annoying. However, since it’s in the Gray Lady, we all must realize that these are corporate-sponsored mouthpieces and therefore, the next step is probably to figure out whose axes they’re grinding and decide if we feel like either trusting or supporting them as voices.

Sorry to be cynical. Not very sorry but mebbe a little sorry.

The NY York Times apparently did a splashy bit on tiny houses today. The blogosphere took it up (Treehugger gives you a taste of the gush).

I always loved tiny houses. There was a book years ago about tiny and handbuilt houses. I always fantasized about building one. If I did, it would need to be 1/2 house and 1/2 closet (private joke). That all figures heavily in the current draft of my 23rd unwritten novel. I’ll probably get it published right after the NY Philharmonic finishes the series playing my eleven unwritten symphonies.

Anyway, this is all buzz for another tiny house book and a paid commercial announcement for some builders. But it’s a good thought. Maybe I’ll buy a copy of the book if I can find a reviewer’s copy on Alibris.

From Clusterfuck Nation (Jim Kunstler). An agenda. Not a bad start at an agenda. At least he has one and he puts it out there.

It’s the 24th of December. At around 4:20PM on the 21st here in Orinda (see the picture in the banner), it was exactly the winter solstice, the moment at which the sun was exactly at its lowest point in the Northern Horizon or however you want to think about it.

Actually, at 4:20PM on the 21st, we had Christmas, the christianized pagan festival marking the shortest day, the darkest day, the beginning of the new cycle. For convenience, we’ve decided that the 25th is a satisfactory approximation (which isn’t very close, but who actually cares any more) and now celebrate our pagan day of darkness with artificial light and even more artificial jollity.

Mind you, I like a good holiday as much as the next person. I find the celebration of the solstice (and it’s near miss fellow travellers) to be a very satisfactory punctuation to the year. I’m definitely a descendant of hundreds of generations of humans who are sensitive to the light to dark ratio of our days. And it is truly good to know that the 21st was as bad as it was going to get.

Happy beginning to the new cycle of light in the Northern Hemisphere and the beginning of a new cycle of darkness in the Southern! I wish you all a happy new day, new cycle, new year … whatever happiness you can find and enjoy! Now and every other day the coming year(s).

When in San Francisco at a convention at the Moscone and hungry … go south a block on 4th to Folsom, turn right, and drop into Lulu’s. Rapt had their holiday party there the other night and could not have picked a better place.

Want to do a wine tasting and don’t want to drive all the way out to Napa or Sonoma? There are plenty of wineries dotting the hills south of San Francisco, but one surprising find is the Rosenblum tasting room at their facility in Alameda (that not so little Island just off Oakland). Rosenblum specializes in Zinfandels and has a number of lovely big red Zins. Also a terrific and friendly staff (and a water bowl on the floor for the dog). Nice tasting room upstairs in their warehouse building. It’s been there longer than Hangar One (St. George’s distillers) which is just down the road. Both are great fun and real convenient to the city and East Bay. Don’t forget Viano up in Martinez, also a Zinfandel producer at much lower price points but well worth consideration.

Finally, few sports complexes are as easy to get to as the Oakland Coliseum (ignoring the brand names for the moment) complex. A Warriors game is a BART ride, tickets are relatively inexpensive, and, this year, the team is fun to watch.

That’s the last three days .