Happy Eid al-Fitr (I hope ... )

NASA astronaut and geologist Harrison Schmidt (one of my heroes) during 1972's Apollo 17 mission to the (non-crescent) Moon.

I'm not a Muslim, but I'll be sitting with bated breath tonight to see if someone in the United States sees the new crescent moon, thus signaling the end of Ramadan and the beginning of Eid al-Fitr.

The non-religious reason I care is that my boss will be taking tomorrow off if Eid has begun and I get to come in on my off day and take his place. Normally -- like most people -- I wouldn't want to come in on my day off. But with my upcoming trip to Australia cutting severely into my work schedule, I want to take extra hours wherever I can.

Thanks to the fact that my boss follows the tradition where someone in the country actually has to see the Moon with his own eyes -- despite the fact that the phases and illumination of the Moon are predictable centuries in advance -- it's not known yet whether he will take Wednesday or Thursday off. Wednesday I can do, but on Thursday I have a doctor's appointment in the morning and have to pick Ian up from school in the afternoon. I want those hours, so I really hope someone sees the Moon tonight.

The most likely spot tonight for an American new moon (or hilal) sighting would be Miami, but the forecast shows that it will be rainy in south Florida this evening.

The end of Ramadan also means my boss can eat lunch with me again. We'd been alternating who buys and it's been stuck on his turn for a month!

Last day of the season, but do I care?

Appearances to the contrary, this man and I rarely agree.

It's the last day of the 2008 MLB season and there are still two playoff spots up for grabs. Minnesota and the Chicago White Sox are split by less than a game in the American League Central Division and Milwaukee and the New York Mets are tied for the National League Wild Card going into play this morning. Exciting stuff, with potential tiebreakers and makeup games in the mix tomorrow.

The scenarios are enticing, and it will be fun to watch the Twins and ChiSox (and possibly the Tigers if a makeup game proves necessary) battle it out. Less enticing to me is the possibility of the Milwaukee Brewers making the playoffs for the first time since Harvey's Wallbangers.

I just can't bring myself to root for the Brewers, despite them being the type of underdog I would normally support. I still think they belong in the American League, for one thing. But the biggest reason I can't support them is their long affiliation with the Selig family. Formerly owned -- in a huge conflict of interest -- by the commissioner but since sold, I still can't shake the affiliation.

Bud Selig has had hits and misses as commissioner, but I will never be able to forgive him for helping to push the Expos out the door in Montreal. It was a short-sighted move by someone who claimed he wanted to "internationalize" baseball, yet did nothing to help MLB's first international team. I was a strong supporter of the Expos in their final years and Selig's legacy will always be tainted by their failure.

So I can't root for the Brewers in any situation. Much like my irritation about the 2003 World Series, which pitted the Florida Marlins (owned by former [terrible] Expos owner Jeffrey Loria) and the New York Yankees (owned, of course, by George Steinbrenner), I can't separate a good team from their owner (or former owner).

Yet there's another problem. I used to attend as many as 10-15 MLB games per year (being in a two-team market made this easy). I cut my attendance back a bit when the Expos were shooed out of existence, but still made around five games or so per season. This year, however, I went to only two games (in San Francisco in April and in San Diego in June) -- I never even made it to Oakland this season (and I might never go again if they move form Oakland into a new, BART-unfriendly ballpark).

Major League Baseball hasn't quite lost its appeal to me, but with the steroid scandals, the movement of the Expos and other issues, it's going to have to try harder to keep me around.

Quick, send more coffee to London's Bush House!

Driving home from last night's football game, I had the BBC World Service on in the car, thanks to a simulcast on a local NPR station.

I think we need to up caffeine shipments to Britain, as the announcer stated, "It's 0420 GMT, and repeating this hour's top story, US presidential rivals John McCain and Barack* M'Gomba have faced off in their first televised debate."

Graveyard shifts are apparently tough no matter where in the world you are ...

* She pronounced if like an army "barrack."

Little stinkers

Stinker No. 1:


Ian at last week's Burlingame/Menlo-Atherton tennis match, which I covered for the San Mateo Times. The Burlingame tennis coach actually told me something along the lines of "I didn't discover watching girls playing tennis until I was in my twenties."

Stinker No. 2:
I finally had my first blowout tonight, as El Camino beat Jefferson, 30-8, on a foggy Daly City field. The fog was probably the only familiar thing, as the Jefferson field has been completely renovated. In a previous post I decried the new artifical turf at Terra Nova*, but this was a field that really needed it.

Jefferson High -- the closest thing to an inner city high school one will find in San Mateo County -- opened in 1922 and it seemed like it hadn't been tended to since. The old field was usually muddy, bare and poorly marked. The "press box" was a four-feet by six-feet shack and what passed for a track was a concrete-hard surface covered with blowing dust. But the new field -- the whole stadium, in fact -- looks great.

While it's still under construction, the renovated stadium has already brought a new energy to the school, new spirit to the fans and even the lights (donated by alumnus John Madden) seem a lot brighter than they once were. Kudos to the Jefferson High School District and school bond voters. While educational priorities will always be debated, this field and track will help keep thousands of Daly City youths healthy and greatly benefit the community as a whole.

* Four weeks into the season, I have yet to see a game on real grass this year and have another game on turf (Menlo School vs. Lowell at Woodside High) on Saturday night.

The Scotsman and the nun

I took Ian to Commodore Park in San Bruno after school yesterday in order to try and burn some of the sass out of him before I took him home. He was having a fine time climbing and jumping and didn't seem to need my interference, so I plopped down on a bench with an Australian travel book and began to read.

Along came an older man, probably early to late 70s, walking a small terrier (apparently the recent victim of an overzealous groomer). He stops when he gets to my bench, then asks -- in an initially hard to place accent -- "Didja hear the one about the priest and the nun in the desert?" I hadn't, so he elaborates (paraphrase follows):

This priest and nun were crossing the desert on a camel when the beastie suddenly dies. Reflecting upon their upcoming demise, the priest tells the nun he's never seen a woman's bare chest and asks the nun if he could look at hers. She reluctantly complies, then says she's never seen a man's genitals.

The priest happily unzips, only to have the nun ask "What's that?"

"This, sister," says the priest, "brings life."

"Well then stick it into the camel and let's get going."

Ah. This was followed by another "off-colour" such joke and some English-bashing and I'm finally able to determine this laddie's a Scot. We chat a couple minutes about his 20-plus years in Her Majesty's Navy and I grudgingly pat his dog. Ian by this point has climbed to the top of a small hill and is yelling in my direction, "Daddy, I'm ready to go now!" (No doubt wanting to visit the local Baskin-Robbins.)

I excuse myself, get thanked for "having a sense of humour, unlike some in these parts," and make my leave.

As I'm walking away, I make an assumption about his loyalties based on the Catholic jokes and exclaim, "Go Rangers!"

Le programme de l'espace de la Chine a lieu derrière les temps

Quand la Chine, en 2003, a lancé son premier «taikonaut» dans l'espace, j'ai écrit une lettre au journal local énonçant simplement la «Bienvenue à 1961.» La petite capsule, avec faire simple d'occupant de seules 14 orbites, a semblé underwhelming pour une grande nation comme la Chine.

Cinq ans après, probablement dès que cette semaine, le Chinois lancera une capsule de trois-homme dans l'espace - partie d'un programme qui peut voir un homme chinois sur la lune en 2017. Il semble à moi comme la Chine encore gaspille des ressources sur examiner la technologie déjà prouvée au lieu de la poussée pour de plus grands avantages - tous au nom d'un certain sens mal orienté «de fierté nationale.»

Je suis un partisan fort d'exploration de l'espace, mais les ressources scientifiques potentiellement grandes de la Chine mieux seraient dépensées joignant un projet continu tel que projet international de station spatiale ou le de «Constellation» des NASA, qui non seulement atteindra par la suite la lune mais également Mars. La Chine devrait aider à pousser les limites de ce que l'humanité peut faire dans l'espace, plutôt que réchauffé ce que les Etats-Unis et l'URSS ont fait dans les années 60.

(Photo courtesy AP/Cornell University)

So do I get paid any extra?

One of the interesting things about the growing consolidation of the newspaper industry -- which is great for cutting costs in the industry but not so good for preserving a diversity of opinions -- is that reporters often finding themselves writing for papers they never would have worked with otherwise.

For example, last night I covered the Monterey/Half Moon Bay football game for the San Mateo Times. And, it turns out, the Monterey Herald -- yet another of the all-encompassing Media News syndicate that basically now controls all non-Hearst papers in the San Francisco Bay Area (and surroundings).

Thanks to my Times affiliation, I've had stories run in (relatively) local sister papers such as the Oakland Tribune and Palo Alto Daily News, but never have been syndicated as far as Monterey.

(When I was with the Glendale News-Press, I often got into the local sections of the Los Angeles Times before the News-Press was outright sucked into the LA Times after I left. And I'm not counting one-off stories I've done straight for papers like the Santa Cruz Sentinel and the Visalia Times-Delta when their teams have come out here.)

The game itself was decent -- three weeks into the season and I haven't had a bad game yet. One thing of note was that in the San Mateo Times, my story -- heavily cut for space -- just led the weekly roundup of "minor" games. But in the Herald, my story ran complete as a stand alone.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when I submit my invoice to the paper, as stringers such as myself get one rate for "roundup" stories and another, slightly higher rate for "standalones." I will be charging the full standalone rate for last night's work and I'm hoping that they will honor the request, despite my officially being on assignment for the Times (where it ran in the shorter form).

Metrolink spokeswoman resigns -- was she pushed out for telling truth?

It was with great disappointment today that I read (in the LA Times transportation blog) that Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell resigned last night after being disavowed by the rail agency's board of directors.

Tyrrell was put on the spot by revealing that Friday's horrible head-on Metrolink/freight train collision that killed 26 people was likely caused by the Metrolink's engineer having not stopped at a red signal. While the reason the Metrolink didn't stop hasn't yet been determined (inattention, faulty signal, medical problem), there has been rampant speculation (including that the engineer may have been texting someone!).

Studying journalism in college, my classmates and I were warned about the moral dilemmas one might face in taking a public relations job. Trained year after year to get the truth out in an as unbiased manner as possible, many journalists who migrated to PR work (common enough as "real" media opportunities continue to dry up) were faced with the problem of putting their employer's best interests over their natural instinct to share information. God knows it was difficult for me to hold my tongue while I worked in law enforcement.

So did Tyrrell do the right thing? Terrell's words, as quoted in the LA Daily News, were:

"We believe it was our engineer who failed to stop at the signal," said Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell. "When two trains are in the same place at the same time, somebody's made a terrible mistake."

Obviously, Tyrrell opened Metrolink to a lot of liability when she said an engineer had missed the red signal. But she didn't say why the signal was missed and there would have been hundreds of millions of dollars worth of lawsuits anyway. Metrolink will be sued, Union Pacific will be sued, the state of California will be sued. All of this will -- and would have -- go through whether or not Tyrell made her rather non-committal statement.

I've had an interesting relationship with Metrolink over the years, despite having moved to Northern California 13 years ago. In 1992-93, I used to ride the line the short distance between the Burbank and Glendale stations to see a friend. In 1994, I wrote a post-earthquake story for the Glendale News-Press about how people were taking the train to avoid quake-damaged highways (sadly, that didn't last). And, of course, Metrolink's previous worst "accident" took place in Glendale in 2005 when a suicidal man placed his pickup truck on the tracks -- causing two trains to collide.

Five-car trains going as fast as 60 mph in urban areas is always going to come with some risk. The problem in last week's crash came across mainly because there is only a single track in the area where the collision occurred. Thankfully, that's not a problem here in the Bay Area with Caltrain, which has a minimum of two tracks all the way through (and I ride two days a week). But it certainly makes a case for some sort of automated control of the trains as Caltrain undergoes electrification come 2012 or so.

Samtrans fare increase likely in February

With the rising costs of fuel making it all-but inevitable, the SamTrans board of directors on Wednesday set an Oct. 15 date for a public hearing to take input on a proposed fare increase.

SamTrans staff is proposing a raise in the $1.50 base fare to $1.75 per trip. Monthly pass prices would rise from $48 to $56 and a pack of 10 tokens would increase $2 to $14.50. Senior, disabled and youth fares would stay at their current levels. If approved, the new fare structure would take effect on Feb. 1, 2009.

When the matter came up before the Citizen’s Advisory Committee (of which yours truly is a member) last week, I think we all understood the inevitability for it. The price of diesel fuel has increased by more than $2 per gallon since the last SamTrans fare increase in 2005. I think the CAC knows that we can't hold the line against raising fares forever.

But I brought up what seemed to be a strange proposed pricing structure -- $14.50 for a pack of 10 tokens, $56 for a monthly pass. What's with the off-kilter odd amounts for those items? It turns out staff simply multipled the prices for those items by the same amount they increased the base fare. The CAC asked that the proposed rates for those items be rounded down to $14 and $55.

Staff members seemed receptive to our suggestions. In addition, I noted that there was no pricing proposal related to the "day pass," that we have been discussing to come online next Fall when SamTrans installs new fareboxes on its buses. I noted that, according to plan, day passes would arrive less than nine months after the proposed fare increase and it was time to start figuring out how they would fit into the SamTrans fare structure. Staff agreed, but I got the impression they thought it was still a little early to think about such matters.

When our esteemed chair, Wayne Kingsford Smith, summarized our discussion to the Board of Directors Wednesday, he basically told them that the CAC had “decided to sleep on it” and return with our recommendations in October. True, for the most part, but I wish Wayne had given the Board a little more regarding the concerns with the pricing structure. Oh well, it’ll look better coming in as part of a comprehensive report in October.

In any case, the staff report to the Board of Directors mentioned our request to round off the costs of tokens and the Board approved the Oct. 15 public hearing date. I hate fare increases, but I haven't heard any better proposal to help make up the increasing structural deficit in the SamTrans finances.

Remembrances of Sept. 11, 2001

Yesterday marked seven years since the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and United Flight 93 (wow, the time went fast). The usual hemming and hawing came from all sides of the political spectrum ("We should never forget," "This shows how evil our enemies truly are," "This tragic event has been used to justify illegal wars," "9/11 was an excuse to take away our civil liberties," etc.).

There are some who say that Sept. 11, 2001, was the most traumatic event in American history -- bigger than Pearl Harbor, even. While I think there are certainly similarities to Pearl Harbor, I think enough time has passed for me to begin to put Sept. 11, 2001 (we really gotta come up with a better name than "9/11") into a proper historical perspective.

For anyone in their seventies or better, there will be nothing more traumatic than Pearl Harbor -- which is my nominee as well. I think a lot of the "9/11" hysteria is coming simply because of both the live nature of the event and the fact that it happened to their generation. Outside of new air travel difficulties and the fact there are no longer trash cans in subway stations, I don't think my life is much different than it would have been without "9/11." (People in New York or who've lost a loved one in combat, etc., might understandably feel different.) Pearl Harbor, however, changed the face of the world. It brought in a new global power scheme, massive economic upheavel and was one step on a road that cost 50 million lives. Now THAT's impact.

I'm not saying forget the lessons of "9/11," and certainly let's not let our liberties be eroded either by terrorists or the government in its wake. But let's try to get a little perspective.

My experiences on Sept. 11, 2001: I woke up to a phone call about 7:05 a.m. It was Michelle Gibson, one of my fellow San Mateo County Civil Grand jurors, telling me that our tour of the Sheriff's Honor Camp near La Honda had been cancelled because everyone was on high alert. I thought maybe there had been a fire or something and asked Michelle what was going on. "You haven't seen the news? Watch the news," she said. I flipped on the small bedroom TV to KTVU, which was simulcasting CNN.

I saw an image of smoke billowing from the Twin Towers, with a bug underneath stating there had been terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. There was a explosion (it turns out it was a replay of the second plane hitting) and I briefly thought that terrorists were using small rockets like the ones they periodically attack Israel with. A cut back to a live shot showed a huge amount of smoke and dust and I did not even register that a tower had fallen until the voice over said so. I quickly checked online, trying to get a WTC webcam I had bookmarked (obviously it was off-line), then returned to the bedroom and sat with Claire just in time to see the North Tower fall.

The rest of the day was a blur. I heard the incredulous news that all air travel was suspended and only then noticed the deathly silence outside -- we then, as now, lived by the flightpath of San Francisco International Airport. I took a shower thinking "We're at war," and watched news coverage the rest of the day. Of all the wall-to-wall coverage that day, one of the most surprising news sources was MTV, which was simulcasting CBS coverage. I immediately thought Osama bin Laden was the most likely suspect (I was probably one of the few Americans who knew who he was prior to "9/11") and even got out some frustrations by playing a Harpoon computer game, in which the scenario was to destroy terrorist bases (albeit in Libya in this case).

Claire went to work at the San Francisco State University bookstore, but was sent home around midday. We then went to the inlaws' house for dinner, where we ate pasta and watched the news.

Funny thing is, we didn't normally watch the morning news then and I was unemployed at the time. If not for the Honor Camp Tour (which I had completely forgotten about), I would have slept through history, not finding out until I turned on the television around 11 a.m. or noon, Pacific time.

Statement in support of California High-Speed Rail

At today's meeting of the SamTrans Board of Directors, the board expressed a resolution in support of Proposition 1A (the High-Speed Rail bond measure). A couple of NIMBY cities in the county, Menlo Park and Atherton, have joined a lawsuit seeking to dismiss the project's environmental impact report. No doubt they're concerned that a year of construction related to the project will lower their average home value from $2.7 million to $2.4 million. Sigh.

Before the vote, I gave the Board the following testimony:

"I hate pitting constituency against constituency, city against city. But I hope that this Board and the JPB (Caltrain Joint Powers Board) at some point find an appropriate time to decry the lawsuit joined by the cities of Menlo Park and Atherton opposing High Speed Rail.

"This is an extremely positive project for San Mateo County as a whole, with great benefits from proposed stops at San Francisco International Airport and a possible stop in the South County. In addition, this project can assist Caltrain with electrification and grade separation projects.

"I used to live in San Mateo on East 40th Avenue, one block from the tracks, so I understand their concerns. But there is a big picture and I hope that this Board can remind Atherton and Menlo Park of that big picture."

I had at least three Board members (to remain nameless because I can say things they can't) thank me for my support at the end of the meeting, as well as a couple SamTrans/JPB employees.