Fred Sandsmark's Blog

Where would the Web be without newspapers?

2009-11-03T21:18:00.001-08:00

I won't attempt to answer the question that's the subject of this post, but I will point out that the Web PLUS local newspapers can yield some cool stuff. Such as this amazing tidbit, which turned up in my Google news alert for "Sandsmark."

From the International Falls, Minnesota Daily Journal:

50 YEARS AGO
Fairland’s last remaining dwelling will be moved by the owner, Ed Sandsmark, to Birchdale. Friends and relatives of Mr. and Mrs. Sandsmark, Fairland, gathered at their home Saturday evening for an informal farewell party. Mrs. Sandsmark will operate the telephone switchboard there.

Google Breaks its own Gadget

2009-11-03T16:04:00.001-08:00

I've had an iGoogle page for a long time, but am just about ready to give up on it and return to the wide-open spaces of the "Classic Home." The main reason is that it takes a long time to load (not always Google's fault, I realize). And today I got this message.

Check me if I'm wrong here, but is this saying I can't display secure content in an iGoogle gadget? That's not good.

Advertising your Embarrassment

2009-10-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

Websites go down. It goes with the territory. Fasthosts says that 34 percent of companies it surveyed have had outages in the past year. (Sorry, no link.) So, what do you do when it happens?

Advertising Age blushes, and then makes readers smile. This seems as good a strategy as any. (The screen capture was taken earlier today.)

Time Travel is Real!

2009-10-29T07:35:00.000-07:00

You see the news stories every once in a while: a letter, mailed dozens of years ago and presumed lost, appears miraculously at the home of someone. The long-lost letter trope is also used in movies.

Well, it happened to me. How else can you explain this?

That's right: I got an AOL CD in the mail the other day. It has all the hallmarks of AOL mailings of 15 years ago: Unlimited dial-up access! One free month! No credit card required! Even the 10-digit registration number and two-word password that AOL used back in the 1990s.

Pew Internet now finds that 63 percent of US households now have broadband. The target market for this sort of offer must be miniscule. (How many computers even have dial-up modems anymore?) I wonder what the response rate for this kind of offer is, and what the economics of it are.

Define "Detailed"

2009-10-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

I saw this chart in a piece of marketing literature and had to laugh.

Looks like about 85% of stuff falls into the "Other" category. It reminds me of my paper filing system: one big bin labeled "Miscellaneous."

OneShare Still Doing Its Thing

2009-10-26T17:59:00.001-07:00

Back in June 2000 I wrote an article for California Computer News about OneShare.com I had met the CEO, Lance Lee, at a White Lotus retreat; I was doing a package of stories on online investing, and OneShare made a fun sidebar, I thought.

Not long ago, I saw an article by Mike Cassidy in the San Jose Mercury News. OneShare is still going strong, and Lance is still running it. So much has changed in the last nine years; this continuity made me happy.

Here's my original article. I'm pretty happy with it, almost a decade later.

ONESHARE.COM SELLS BIG-NAME STOCKS A SHARE AT A TIME

By Fred Sandsmark

One of the numbers you often see in stock reports is volume — the number of individual shares of stock that change hands in a single day. With today's huge institutional investors and speedy electronic trading, it's not unusual for the volume to reach a billion — yes, billion — shares a day.

In that context, it seems unusual to sell just one share of stock. But that's exactly what OneShare.com does: it sells single shares of about 100 different stocks, ranging from AT&T to the World Wrestling Federation.

Lance Lee, a former broker, founded San Francisco-based OneShare.com in 1996 and remains the company's CEO. "I noticed that people were trying to transact single shares," Lee recalled. "My brokerage, like most brokerages, really discouraged it. It's actually very costly for the company."

So Lee started a company specifically to sell single shares. Oneshare.com began as a direct-mail business, but has grown into a busy online operation, with two-thirds of its business done over the Web. The company has sold 35,000 shares since it was founded.

Lee estimates that 30 percent of the stocks he's sold are bought for children, by their parents or grandparents, to mark special events or to teach kids about investing. His company serves this market with a colorful "My First Stock" frame and tutorial brochure. Oneshare.com provides its service for about $30 a share (plus the cost of the stock and optional framing). That may sound steep, but when compared with a broker, it's not bad. "If you go to a deep-discount broker, their com-
mission might be just $8," explained Lee. "But their certificate fee might be $25. It can add up."

And in spite of those fees, a broker might not treat the expensive piece of paper with care. For example, many brokerages fold certificates for mailing. OneShare.com ships them flat, since many customers display the certificates like works of art. A prime example is Disney stock (OneShare.corn's best-seller), which features a image of Walt with Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy and other characters.

But stock certificates are more than pretty pictures. Each share of stock comes with rights and privileges. For example, every shareholder receives the company's annual report, and can attend — and vote at — the company's annual shareholders' meeting. (In darker days at Apple Computer in 1986, Steve Jobs sold all but one of his shares of Apple stock. He unloaded the shares to protest John Scully's management, but he still wanted to attend Apple's annual meeting.)

Some companies even send gifts to their shareholders — for example, McDonalds has sent coupons for food, and Wrigley has sent chewing gum. Companies that pay dividends mail checks (sometimes for just pennies per share) to shareholders.

And in select cases, a single share can confer the right to invest in the company without using a broker. This is called a Direct Reinvestment Plan (DRP). Shareholders in companies with DRPs (some examples are Campbell's Soup and General Electric) can invest as little as $10 per month, while some DRPs allow monthly purchases of up to $10,000.

But OneShare.com doesn't oversell these programs; its goal remains educational. "Our aim is to teach people about the fundamentals of stock investing," says Lee. "And not to make day traders," he adds with a chuckle.

Long Time No Blog

2009-10-26T17:44:00.000-07:00

I guess the immediacy of Facebook has drawn me away from the ol' Blog. Sorry about that.

I had my first piece published by the CSUEB alumni magazine recently. It's about Assistant Professor Nidhi Mahendra's work with Alzheimer's Disease patients. Hope you like it.

Source From 2001 Resurfaces

2009-07-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

Some days the Internet delivers wonderful treasure. Today's one of those days, when I got an email from a guy I'd interviewed eight years ago. With his permission, I've posted the email here. The article in which he's quoted - published in 2001 - is below his note. (Remember, this was before WiFi or iPhones or Facebook.)

Hi Fred,

I stumbled over this article on your website while I was searching google for myself haha. It's Friday and I was bored at work...

Emailing just to say hi, as requested in the Afterword of the piece. I remember answering your questions (I must have droned on and on), but wasn't sure of which magazine it was for. In the end I figured it never got published, which I thought was a shame as I never got to read it. Anyway, glad it did get published and I enjoyed your article (even the stuff not about me!), I'd forgotten about using the internet in the Indian chap's little house.

Anyway, thanks for putting it online. I was happy to read it.

Best wishes for your future publishing undertakings.

Graeme
Glasgow, Scotland
(currently in London, England)

World Wide Wandering

Online travelogues are informative and easy to create, even while you’re traveling

By Fred Sandsmark

Most of us create a packing list - at least a mental one - when we prepare for a trip. It has basics like changes of clothes, credit cards, prescriptions, and maps, as well as other helpful things like guidebooks, beach towels, and binoculars. But these days, many travelers are also packing digital cameras and laptop computers to document their trips - and they're posting their adventures on the Web, sometimes right from the road.

Take Brice Wong of Vancouver, British Columbia. Last fall, before embarking on a 10-day road trip with two friends to go mountain biking in Moab, Utah, Wong packed a "mobile office" - computer, digital camera, PDA, several mobile phones, and an inverter (to run 120-volt devices from the cigarette lighter) - in his Mazda B4000 4X4 pickup, along with the bikes. Wong and friends produced a travelogue, hilarious and occasionally profane (this was a pickup-full of twentysomethmg males, after all), and posted it at www.futurelooks.com. The journal's not just for laughs, though; the descriptions of Moab's mountain-bike trails are frequently as vivid as the famous red rocks themselves.

Why did Wong create the travelogue? "People are nosy," he says with a laugh, "so I figured, why not share our fun and adventures with the world? Plus, it gives people who have never been to Moab a true sense of what it's really like. Sometimes travel agents and magazines and promotional materials really don't give you the whole truth, but if you read someone's journal or diary you're going to get the real deal."

What’s my motivation?

Another good reason to keep an online travelogue: It's easier than ever. A handful of Web sites make travelogue creation a simple click-and-type operation that any technophobe can handle. But the motivation for individual traveloguers varies. For Graeme Renfrew - who quit a "subterranean desk job" in Glasgow, Scotland, cashed in his pension, and set out on a 14-monih trip around the world - a travelogue is an easy, inexpensive way to check in with the family (his travelogue can be found at www.travelpod.com). "It's cheaper than phoning home," says Renfrew. "The Web travelogue lets me tell them everything is OK from a distance. And if they aren't interested, it doesn't bother me."

Vanity drives a lot of traveloguing, too. "We refer to it as ego gratification," says J. R. Johnson, chief executive officer of VirtualTourist.com. "It's the same reason that your grandparents sat you down in front of the screen to see their slide show of Europe. There's some bragging involved in showing all the places you've been."

But Johnson thinks most traveloguers who use his service just want to share their knowledge. "For the most part, our members just really like helping other people," he says. "They had a good time, and they want other travelers to do the same." That often means posting specific restaurant and hotel recommendations, sightseeing suggestions, and hard-won "insider" advice.

Some people use a travelogue for capturing impressions, telling personal stories, and flexing creative wings. (Adjective alert: Amateur travelogues frequently contain prose as purple as the final fleeting flares of a simmering sunset over the tranquil waters of a steamy tropical South Pacific atoll.) Other travelers just post a skeleton of their travelogue as they go, recording events in real time, and then flesh out their account with photos, movies, sounds, and Web links when they get hack home.

Bring it on home

You don't need to carry a lot of equipment to create an online travelogue. Even Wong (of the mobile office) tries to be sensible: "I know there are lots of different sorts of gadgets and stuff on the market," he says, "but sometimes you have to really sit and think, 'How practical and reliable is this thing I'm going to be lugging around with me?' Because, man, I tell you, I hate carrying useless stuff."

People who choose to travel light can use public computers in libraries, copy shops, and hotels. There are also cyber-cafes - coffeehouses that sell Internet access by the minute. They're not hard to find in North America, or even abroad. "Last year while in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I saw five Internet cafes side by side," recalls Luc Levesque, who runs the TravelPod Web site. "Just about everyone, from restaurants to coffee shops to public libraries to laundromats, has a PC with a modem waiting for your five dollars."

Renfrew agrees - and says that these spots can often provide a window into the local culture. "There are Internet connections anywhere there are tourists with money to spend and friends to contact," he says. "One of the places I went into to check my E-mail [in India] was just some bloke's two-room house, with blue-washed walls and ceilings so low I had to crouch to get in. There was a shrine to Shiva in the same room as the clunky PC, and his mum and sister were doing each other’s hair and singing behind me. It wasn’t exactly high-tech - but it worked.”

How to create your own travelogue

Many Web sites can help you produce a travelogue. Here are a few of our favorites; all are free and none require technical expertise.

Blogger (www.blogger.com) creates Web logs or "blogs," which are just simple Web sites whose contents are organized chronologically. A blog can produce a serviceable travelogue, but you must provide the Web space to host it.

By Travelers (www.bytravelers.com) lets you link a map from its library with your travelogue. Otherwise, the site is bare-bones, so the focus is on storytelling rather than flashy features.

TravelPod (www.travelpod.com) can send E-mail to a preset group of people every time your travelogue is updated. It also gives the option of assigning a password to a travelogue, so only friends and family can see it. Photos and movies can be added, too.

VirtualTourist (www.virtualtourist.com) is an extensive travel community site that hosts travelogues. It asks specific questions about hotels, restaurants, nightlife, tourist traps, and such to elicit users’ opinions. One clever feature: You can use photos posted by other members (the site boasts more than 140,000 members) as electronic postcards.

AfterWords:

This article appeared in the short-lived Mazda Zoom-Zoom magazine in winter of 2001. It remains one of my favorites, mostly because I had the good fortune of locating wonderful interview subjects. Unfortunately, I've lost contact with them. Brice and Graeme, if you find this, please drop a line!

Copyright © 2001, 2006, 2009 / Fred Sandsmark / Marble Publishing

It was 40 years ago today ...

2009-07-20T08:42:00.000-07:00

Our family was driving to South Dakota when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon. I remember watching it on a snowy black-and-white TV, somewhere in the heartland. (Normally, we wouldn't spring for a motel - much less one with a TV - so this was a big deal.)

That summer, Gulf Oil gave away paper cutout models of the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) if you bought a tank of gas. Mike and I got several of these during the trip, and one survives to this day - it's been hanging in the attic for decades.

Another of the paper models was built with a Black Cat payload. That one never made it back.

P.S. Turns out you can download, print out, and build your own Gulf LEM, along with many other spacecraft. Now that's what the Internet was made for.

Hope for the Future

2009-07-08T10:56:00.000-07:00

I had the privilege of writing a profile of UC Berkeley law student Samika Boyd for the current issue of Boalt Hall Transcript, the alumni magazine of Berkeley Law. She's a remarkable woman; I hope you like the article. (There's a lot more to her story that was left out due to space considerations.)

I have several other pieces in the magazine: an article on global warming and the law of the sea in the arctic region; piece on hedge fund regulation; and a short profile of Jess Bravin, the Wall Street Journal's Supreme Court Correspondent. To read them you have to download a PDF of the entire Spring 2009 issue of Boalt Hall Transcript.

New Owners at Hayward's Book Shop

2009-07-01T15:32:00.001-07:00

I popped into The Book Shop today, the first day of its new ownership. I met Carl, and bugged Renée for a bit.

Haywardites and other East Bayers should (yes, should) support our local shop. There's plenty of other stuff you can buy from Amazon now -- I just bought two microphones, a toothbrush, and a TV antenna from Mr. Bezos -- so buy your books locally.

Bouncing emails?

2009-05-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

I've heard from several people that emails to fred (at) marblepub (dot) com have been bouncing back. I don't know why this has happened, and am sorry it's happened. The email address hasn't changed. If you need to contact me and encounter this problem, you have two other options: email me at fredsandsmark (at) gmail (dot) com, or call me at 510-582-3733 (landline) or 510-331-9734 (mobile). Thanks!

Writeup on Berkeley FTC Hearings

2009-05-21T16:30:00.000-07:00

I recently completed my first assignment for the Berkeley Law / Boalt Hall website: a report on FTC hearings held in Berkeley on the patent system and the intellectual property marketplace. A few other pieces are in the works.

Recent Brush With Fame

2009-05-18T23:26:00.001-07:00

I just discovered that, a couple of months ago, I was quoted in the comments section of Brad DeLong's blog. (And no, I didn't post the quote myself.)

My quote ain't about politics or economics, though -- it's about wild turkeys. And alas, there's no link. Still, one takes whatever brushes with fame one can get.

Lee Grabel's 90th Birthday

2009-05-18T17:37:00.001-07:00

I saw an article article in today's paper about the 90th birthday of magician Lee Grabel. The San Francisco Chronicle story, by Carolyn Jones, is terrific and illustrated with some wonderful photos.

I got to interview Grabel and write a profile (much shorter than Jones's, alas) for Diablo Magazine in 2006. My favorite bit from it:

Grabel retired in 1959 and went into real estate. The transition was initially rocky; he recalls an exasperated loan officer asking for a reference “who isn’t a magician, musician, or dancer.”

The entire profile I wrote is here, but the one by Jones is better.

End of the Line for Pontiac

2009-04-27T12:34:00.000-07:00

GM announced today that the Pontiac brand will be eliminated. This has been rumored for a while so it isn't a surprise, but it's a little sad personally. My Uncle Art sold Pontiacs, and so a number of them have come through my life. These are the four that I got to drive:

First was the Ventura that my had starting in the mid-1970s. It looked like this.

This image comes from here.

Our Ventura had a straight six and an automatic transmission. The car was surprisingly slow and heavy for its size, and not much fun to drive as I remember. It was also a horrifying putty color, like the one in the photo. I got in my first crash in this car, rear-ending a big old Lincoln on Second Street in Hayward. I was 17 or 18, and the crash was entirely my fault; how embarrassing. Fortunately we weren't going fast. The Lincoln sustained almost no damage, but the front of the Pontiac was creamed.

Second, my uncle (or maybe by that point my cousin Dale) loaned me a Trans Am for a week following high school graduation. Maybe he thought I was going to take my meager scholarship money and put it down on the car; fat chance. It was a black car with gold trim, looking exactly like this.

This image comes from here.

It was a fast and fun car, but I was not a fast or fun driver. What I remember most about the car, of all things, was the dashboard -- it was about a mile wide, smooth and flat, black. You could fry an egg on it on a sunny day. I was relieved to go back to my beat-up Toyota Corolla after the week was up.

Third was the T-1000 my dad handed down to me. I read somewhere that this was the worst American car ever made, but it actually served our family pretty well. It looked more like this than I care to admit. (Sorry, that's a Flikr link and I can't embed the photo -- but click over if you dare.)

It got to be quite a rattletrap over the years, but the engine kept running in spite of all sorts of problems. (I remember a mechanic telling me that the car had an unkillable "Iron Duke" engine, but I'm not so sure.) I was driving it 20 miles each way to Sunset in the late 1980s and I remember that eventually my carpoolmate insisted on driving his car all the time; unstated, that was because he didn't trust the Pontiac or feel safe riding in it. My dad traded it in on his next Pontiac -- the TranSport below -- and my cousin Tom drove the T-1000 back and forth to Tahoe for years more, even when two of the four gears (manual transmission) didn't work. (I don't think reverse worked either at the end; I remember vaguely helping Tom push it out of a driveway after a family gathering.)

Finally, there was the magnificent Dustbuster.

See the full-sized image here.
My dad thought the Pontac TranSport was about the best-looking car ever made. To me it looked like the Space Shuttle in a funhouse mirror. But it was practical; we could carry lots of folks and lots of stuff in it. It sat up high, so you had a good view. When I co-chaired the Speakers' Bureau at CSUEB (we brought speakers to the university for talks and debates) I borrowed the Dustbuster to pick up VIPs at the airport. And, of course, the vehicle was made famous as the "Cadillac of Minivans" in Get Shorty.

A Crabby Post

2009-04-09T10:05:00.000-07:00

I don't know Craig Crossman, but he claims to be host of "the No. 1 daily national computer radio talk show, Computer America." I came across one of his articles, syndicated by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services, on PhysOrg.com. This is the opening paragraph:

One of the really great computer applications is the ability to record audio and save it to a digital file. One of the more interesting recording applications these days are podcasts. Making a podcast is fairly straightforward. Besides the computer, all you basically need is the recording software and a microphone. As far as the recording software is concerned, deciding what program to use can be somewhat daunting in that there are so many titles available from which to choose.

Holy moly. This reads like a basic copyediting test: "How many mistakes can you find in this paragraph?"

Has McClatchy fired all of its editors?

Doctors and Patients

2009-04-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

An article in Monday's New York Times told about a radiologist who experimented with attaching a digital photograph of a patient (the outside of a patient, that is) to the patient's digital CT or MRI scans to see how doing so affected radiologists' interpretation of those scans. The abstract of his findings includes these results:

All radiologists felt more empathy to the patients after seeing the photograph. The photographs revealed medical information such as suffering or physical signs of disease. Out of the 30 cases which were presented twice, in 80% the incidental findings were not reported when the photograph was omitted from the file. All radiologists involved reported that the addition of the photograph did not lengthen the duration of the examination, however did render the interpretation more meticulous. All recommended adopting this idea to routine practice.

The Times article also implied that attaching a photo could have a similar effect on "pathologists and other doctors who rarely have contact with patients."

This reminded me of something that happened not long after Jane was first diagnosed with her brain tumor back in 1998. Our monthly support group at UC Davis Medical Center followed a format in which we'd alternate between open discussion one month (we called it "sharing") and a guest speaker the next. One month, the neuro-pathologist who had prepared Jane's initial pathology report -- a report that was quite dire in its prognosis -- was to be the speaker. (I'm embarrassed to admit I don't recall his name, but I remember that he looked like a guy who spent his days in a dark room performing experiments and looking through microscopes -- pale, rumpled, hunched.) We listened to his presentation, and learned a lot about how brain tumors were identified and classified. After the talk, Jane approached him, pathology report in hand.

Never a shrinking violet, she asked him to read and autograph the report. He was startled but polite; he looked at the report, looked at a very healthy and alert Jane, and said, "Clearly, I didn't know what the hell I was talking about." A huge smile broke across his face, and he autographed the report with a flourish.

We related this story a few times over the years, and the reaction was almost always the same. Our fellow travelers were happy that we had beaten the odds, proved the expert wrong, and got to tell him to his face. (One person was not amused, saying, "I would have sued his ass on the spot.")

I'm pretty certain that that pathologist learned as much that day as we did. By connecting a face, a personality, a person to that tiny "rat bite" of tissue on his microscope slide, he learned that his work exists in the context of real lives and that his words matter. This wouldn't mean that he should be overly optimistic in his reports, but it did mean that he had an obligation to be as precise, accurate, and honest as possible. It's a lesson that the radiologists in the above-mentioned study also seem to have learned.

Another reason to come to the SFBACC concert

2009-04-01T13:05:00.001-07:00

I've been baking Madeleines for the reception after the Saturday concert in Alameda. I dipped a bunch in chocolate today.

Full concert details are here.

Food Fun

2009-03-26T16:52:00.001-07:00

I have two bits of fun food news to share.

Sunset's One-Block Diet blog has been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award. My connection with this is tenuous at best; sweetheart Angela helps with some of the recipe testing (keen eyes can find her in some photos), and traveling companion Alan always seems often to be in photos partaking of the results. Still, I feel a sense of reflected pride. Congrats.

Also, Barbara and Kevin Brown, singing friends in SFBACC and proprietors of R&B Cellars, recently showed up on TV's Eye on the Bay along with their office manager Daphne Dahmen to prepare a lamb dish (made with R&B Swingsville Zinfandel) for Easter. Fun viewing, and Barbara says there's more on tap.

Check 'em out!

Musical Fun

2009-03-26T16:43:00.001-07:00

I have two upcoming concerts to announce:

1) The San Francisco Bay Area Chamber Choir will sing its spring concerts on Saturday and Sunday, April 4 and 5, in Alameda and Fremont, respectively. Concert time both nights is 7:00 p.m. We're singing a big range of music -- many, many short pieces -- ranging from Renaissance secular music to contemporary American madrigals. There's a reception after the Saturday concert with free snacks; I'll be baking Madeleines. Details, addresses, and etc. can be found here.

2) The Castro Valley Community Band has its spring concert on Wednesday evening, April 1, at 7:30 p.m. in the Castro Valley Center for the Arts. I bought a piece of music for the band from a publisher in France -- an arrangement of some of the music from the Umbrellas of Cherbourg -- that we'll play, along with our usual mix of showtunes, orchestral transcriptions, marches, and other fun stuff. And it's free!

Please consider yourselves invited.

Cisco Flips for Video

2009-03-20T06:50:00.000-07:00

The rumors were true: Cisco has purchased Pure Digital, the company that makes the Flip camcorder.

Cisco, of course, has been a beloved client of mine for years. And I'm a fan of Flip, and have done some mildly crazy things with mine (such as strapping it around my neck while skiing and making a hillbilly VCR out of it).

But what to make of the merger? Cisco historically has been very good at acquiring and integrating other business-focused technology companies into its corporate fold. Its acquisition of Linksys and its move into the home market has been generally well-handled, but that involved a networking company buying another networking company. The Pure/Flip company is a different beast, and I suspect it has a very different customer base. Dumber and cheaper, to be frank. (Remember, I'm a Flip devotee.)

My advice for Cisco (as if it wants my advice) is twofold: keep Pure's programmers, because I generally like the way FlipShare works (though not its appearance); and create a cheap, capacious battery-powered box that can offload videos from the Flip when I'm away from the computer. (For those of you who don't know: the Flip does not have removable memory, so once it's full, you can't record any more until you offload the videos.) If that box can be a network device too, fine; just keep it simple.

Last Night's "Wait, Wait" Taping

2009-02-20T09:38:00.001-08:00

I went with Angela and two friends to watch the taping of NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" last night (February 19, 2009) at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. Panelists were Mo Rocca, Paula Poundstone, and Tom Bodett, and Frederica von Stade served as the "Not My Job" celebrity. (We were seated a few rows behind and across the aisle from her.) The taping took a long time, and it will be fun to hear on Saturday what gets left behind -- lots of scatological humor, probably, and a lot of awkward dead air when a snowplow operator from Colorado named Al couldn't come up with answers on the Listener Limerick Challenge. (We in the audience were practically jumping out of our skins trying to help the poor fellow.) Peter Sagal was charming and funny (though I found his oversized suit distracting), Carl Kasell looked kinda bored, and the panelists were great: Rocca stammering but smart, Poundstone following threads one step beyond their logical conclusions, and Bodett delivering low-key but pitch-perfect half-liners.

The other radio shows I've seen -- A Prairie Home Companion and the Grand Ole Opry -- are done live. They go out, flubs and all (though the broadcasts I've seen have been pretty flub-free). Wait, Wait, on the other hand, is recorded and edited. This gives the producers a chance to fix things after the bulk of the show is completed -- questions that get garbled, limericks that are mis-read, contestants' names that are given as "Tom" rather than "Brandon." (Ahem.) The engineers (three at a table, unsure what each one did) must keep constant track of what doesn't work, because these pickups were recorded immediately after the show was completed. After that Carl and Peter prowled the audience for a couple of quick questions.

Jill Sobule's "California Years" arrives!

2009-02-19T15:21:00.000-08:00

The CD of Jill Sobule's fan-sponsored album, California Years, arrived in the mail today. I'm officially a Junior Executive Producer!

Its appearance is a little spot of joy in an otherwise terribly stressful day.

Unfortunately I won't be able to listen to it carefully until tomorrow night. For now, I'm happy just to look at it on my desk.

Birthday Wishes

2009-01-22T21:38:00.001-08:00

Today would have been Jane's 47th birthday.

She's on my mind every day, but moreso today. That's obvious, and intentional.

I spent the morning matting and framing three of her linoleum block prints. They're among my favorites of her artworks: one resembles redwood bark, one describes a redwood frond, and one shows a redwood tree. She loved redwoods, to the point of naming her company Studio Sempervirens. The prints, particularly the image of the full tree from below, are rich and evocative. I cut three windows in a single mat and mounted the prints vertically. The photo below is glary, but you get the idea; come by and see them up close sometime.

It was good to look carefully at something she had seen, handle something she had made, and enhance a beautiful piece of art she had created.

In the afternoon I headed for Jane's niche at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. (Visits were also paid to Piedmont Springs and Fenton's.) I freshened the flowers and ate a late lunch. My tradition has become to have sushi and beer when I visit. While I was there, a couple came through with a dog on a leash to visit a gravesite. My thoughts turned to Delta, who regularly accompanied me to Mountain View. Followers of the Castro Valley Boulevardier know that I had to let her go over the weekend when virulent abdominal cancer returned just six weeks after its initial appearance and resection.

It's been a big week. Between Martin Luther King Day, the inauguration, Jane's birthday, Delta's death, and more, I'm pretty well spent.