Commuted

The guy who commutes 372 miles daily from Mariposa to San Jose and back was one of those “sheesh, what a nut!” stories that turn up as the final stories on news broadcasts. Of course I should have known better that these kinds of stories are merely the harbinger of things to come. The phrase “extreme commuter” will be coined in T minus 10, 9, 8, 7…

At least 65% of the 1,700 members of the San Francisco fire department live outside the city limits, and some dwell as far away as Los Angeles and San Clemente, spokeswoman Mindy Talmadge said.

Five of them give out-of-state home addresses, including one in Maryland, and others list local addresses or post office boxes but live elsewhere.

Capt. Michael Whooley, 47, said he would prefer to stay in San Francisco but couldn’t persuade his wife to trade in their 4,200-square-foot house in Apple Valley, Minn. — bought in 2003 for $350,000 — for a “shack” in California.

Whooley said he wouldn’t recommend his schedule for most people, given the strain on his family. “I fall asleep on the plane in Minnesota and wake up in San Francisco,” he said. “There’s definitely a disconnect on both ends.”

And in a colossal case of “WELL DUH,” the LA Times discovers…

That’s typical of sleepover commuters, University of West Florida sociologist Ray Oldenburg said, and many of them are getting more stress than they bargained for.

“It’s disruptive of family life,” he said. “In social science, if you go back far enough, everyone was heralding the infinite adaptability of the human being. And I never bought that.”

Ugh. I’m ready to shout “live where you work you inconsiderate energy-sink jackass!” at the whole lot of them.

The Times doesn’t ask the real questions though…

  • Is owning a house really worth that hassle (especially if you’re not around to enjoy it and/or dead from stress)?
  • Do wealthy residents who can afford these areas have any right to complain when local services are understaffed?
  • Are they willing to pay the property taxes necessary to fund the service staff to live locally?
  • What about the resources used up to commute this distance? (setting aside the issue of the resources used maintain a large house in an exurb area)

Assuming that these questions even matter when the economy takes a dump in 2007.

Apocalypse

Leave it to Rolling Stone to put a banner ad for the military in a Kurt Vonnegut interview where he concludes that the world is about to end and there’s nothing anyone can do.

Later, remembering his hyperagitation about global warming, I telephoned him at his Long Island summer cottage, curious about whether he saw Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. “I know what it’s all about,” he scoffed. “I don’t need any more persuasion.” Not satisfied with his answer, I pressed him to expand, wondering if he had any advice for young people who want to join the increasingly vocal environmental movement. “There is nothing they can do,” he bleakly answered. “It’s over, my friend. The game is lost.”

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Orion

Everyone in Blogistan is talking about the next-gen NASA spacecraft Orion and the freshly inked contract with Lockheed Martin. Yeah, the Raumpatrouille Orion is way marvy, and the 50s-era “Project Orion” nuke ship is a fun Bad Idea, but I’m shocked that none of the pop-sci-cult watchers out there (and yes Boing Boing, I’m looking at you) namechecked the most notable Orion of all.

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These mock-up pictures of what the 2001 Orion operation would have looked like are pretty cool too.

Radio Birdman

Radio Birdman - Wiltern(I’ll spare you the obvious “Radios Reappear” title, since I’m sure the LA Weekly will fall for it)

You never know what to expect with these sorts of things. Near-legendary, ahead-of-its-time band from the fog of misplaced history gets a quorum of members back together and lets fly. Cognitive dissonance is a funny thing: at best you know you’re ultimately going to be disappointed yet you still find yourself making the most dubious justifications. Really, how bad could it be having Evan Dando fronting the MC5?

About the best you can expect is a lot of haze and a brief clearing where everything lines up and you hear what all the fuss was about, but that’s extraordinarily rare. I can think of only one exception and not surprisingly at all, it goes by the first name of Iggy and the last name of Stooge.

The advantage to Radio Birdman is that they’re the most shadowy of cult bands. Last night at the Wiltern was their first US show ever – no expectations to live up to, no disaffected Amoeba-denizen in the back crossing his arms and harumphing about how so much better they were back in the day. And really, no time to think about any of that because they simply tore through their set at 200mph, pausing only to replace a cranky guitar amp. Rob Younger’s (himself an odd mix of Julian Cope and Riff-Raff from Rocky Horror) vocals aren’t quite up there yet, but the rest of the band packed a tremendous wallop. The star of course is Deniz Tek: bona fide Guitar Hero and Buckaroo Banzai incarnate (no joke – after Birdman broke up the first time he became a jet fighter pilot and a surgeon). I wish LA was the last show of the tour, I can only imagine what they would be like un-jet lagged.

(Blurry photo courtesy my new camera phone, there’s a significantly better set of recent Birdman photos on Karena Hoyer’s Flickr stream)

Life’s great! How can I mess it up?

drawme_planner.jpg By applying to grad school of course…

Hell, in these days who doesn’t think about running away to grad school? It’s the A#1 double-plus-good refuge for intelligent social misfits and the self-ostracized. As a grad student you have full social permission to be one of those “oh, never mind him – he’s a grad student” guy.

To qualify, I only signed up to take the GRE. Call it an “exploratory foray” if you will, though I believe that the only people who use that phrase now are drug users, political candidates and the US Military. Helll, I’m not entirely sure that I even want to pursue it past the GRE stage as my dozen or so plus years as an IT Garbage Collector hasn’t yet made me want to stab myself. So far.

The object of all this hand-wringing is an urban planning degree. I love the field and it pays better than rock-and-roll.

The down side? Crushing amounts of anxiety, debt, and an uncertain future. A complete reverse-course for how I am now (in good spirits, debt free, and able to do my thing).

Since I can’t help but be Mr. Perversity, I scheduled myself to take the test on Friday the 13th (of October that is)

100 years of housing prices

Sometimes a picture has more than a thousand words, though only three are coming to mind right now…

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The Yale economist Robert J. Shiller created an index of American housing prices going back to 1890. It is based on sale prices of standard existing houses, not new construction, to track the value of housing as an investment over time. It presents housing values in consistent terms over 116 years, factoring out the effects of inflation.

HFS indeed. That last bar covers the past ten years. Suddenly, I don’t feel bad at all about not owning a house, being in the market for a house, or worrying about a mortgage. That economic hard landing that economists are kicking around looks more and more like a mid-air explosion followed by a smoking crater in the ground.

Welcome to 2007, hope you survive.

California’s Giant Relief Map

Much of the web has been wringing their hands over the giant relief map in China that someone stumbled across on Google Earth. It’s a cool map and yeah, there’s an element of mysteriousness to it but calling it “The Riddle of China’s Area 51” is pretty overblown, even for the web.

Believe it or not, there’s a similar relief map sitting out in the desert just east of Joshua Tree. The concrete map was built in 1942 as a training aid for Patton’s army who were preparing for the invasion of North Africa and covered the entire training area from Indio out to the Arizona border. The training center was built pretty ad hoc and not much was left out there except for tank tracks and foundations, but the map endured for a while.

I’m not sure when this picture was taken (I got it from Larry Digera who put together a sky trail route for visiting pilots), but it should give you an idea of what it used to look like.

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I was first there in 1983 and armed with an old copy of Desert magazine I was able to find the map, but the intervening forty years of exposure had weathered the old map into an unrecognizable series of funny-looking hummocks. It’s still there now – it’s inside the fenced-off area in the middle of this photo.

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