Listics

Bill and Andy have abandoned their vintage Ford F150 back by the barn. How long should I leave it there before I have it towed to Ford burial grounds?

Thanks as always to Gretchen Pirillo who turns out to be a bit of a parmesan herself.

Here in the Town of Dunn Sandhill Road runs due south past the Town Burying Ground all the way to the Rutland Town Line Road. In Palo Alto Sandhill Road runs from 280 to the Stanford Med School. I think it’s on the line between Menlo Park and Palo Alto, but it could be entirely in the communicty to the north. Across the freeway I suspect it wanders into suburban Woodside, a fortunate community that saw the prices for average middle class houses go through the roof in the days the raw2 meat men descended on the valley.

Stanford owned a lot of the land around Sandhill Road, but in thhose days they were focusing their development efforts a few miles south on Page Mill where Hewlett Packard, Raytheon, EPRI, and a few other high tech companies built their headquarters . In a few years Linus Pauling would take his Nobel Prize money and build a nice facility up Sandhill toward the freeway, but even then, except for a few structures that accumulated around Pauling’s Institute, the road had a nice uncluttered feeling, brown hills, a few oaks, and the anonymous entrance to SLAC just down and across the road from Pauling’s place.

I’m thinking it was 1973. Moscone hadn’t been assassinated yet, I lived on Castro at 18th above the all night donut shop and parked my acid green Fiat in the parking lot behind the Castro Theater across the street. That color is making a comeback this year in women’s fashion. Every weekday, if I could get the car started, I’d tool down the 280 to Stanford and slave away at a consulting job I had in the Office of the Dean, and VP for Medical Affairs. I was a glorified file clerk, but I made good money. At night I’d write book and live music reviews for the San Francisco Phoenix under the pseudonym, “Phantom Flash.” Don’t even ask…. The editor assigned me that name and it was probably appropriate.

The Phoenix was a last gasp underground paper. The Oracle had come and gone, the Barb was collapsing into personals and massage parlor ads, and the Bay Guardian had yet to blossom into a mainstream alternative.

Lately I’ve been informed that Sandhill Road on the peninsula is where the venture capitalists hang out. Don’t mistake me for one of them.

I like Phil Windley’s motto… “Organizations get the IT they deserve.” Doc Searls cranked up the IT Garage site a few days ago to explore “demand side IT.” He’s providing a space for stories from those of us in the trenches, I think. It’s all very formative right now. I signed up and discovered that signing up perhaps gives me posting rights of some sort. I haven’t figured out if I’m right about that, or - if not - why I would want to sign up.

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… by the Accordion Guy. At least until link rot sets in.

The quiet and the fresh air — cranes on the marsh, a cock pheasant’s squawk… a car goes by then silence again except for bird song. Our daffodils and tulips haven’t bloomed yet. The forsythia has just flowered. Hepatica buds have pushed the leaves aside. The bloodroot is emerging. The diseased birch is dripping sap on the driveway. Fruit trees are budding up, but no blossoms yet.

Jake has finished re-roofing the granary and parked his tractor in the tobacco shed.

Brandy and Veneta are glad to be home from the kennel.

In New York the hotel lobby had a huge bouquet of cherry branches in blossom. Saw the same bouquet at the plaza and again at a restaurant. Forced cherry blossoms and 24 hour taxi horns were much the thing last week.

Yesterday in Princeton we drove past Fuld Hall. The IAS is more isolated than I would have thought. A log with a teacher at one end and a student at the other… updated with yellow ruled legal pads, some Ticonderoga number two pencils, daffodils in bloom…

Photographed a small marble Rodin Danaid at McCormick Hall. Traipsed around the campus oohing and ahhhing over the wonderful architecture.

Celebrated Beth’s birthday with her twin brother Walt and family, then up this morning for a flight home that was better than last week’s flight out.

Walking our feet off… occasional rest stops in places like the Hayden Planetarium and the AMNH Imax where I learned about hyperthermophiles. These things are tiny organisms, and I’m wondering if there isn’t a sub-class called microhyperthermophiles. There should be, for the sake of both precision and poetics. In the AMNH bookstore I was able to pass on a $55 volume by Randy Schuh on taxonomy, systematics, and cladistics. While I really needed this book, I was conscious of Golby’s gentle chiding about my book eating habits so I decided to give the consumer thing a rest.

Headed downtown today to meet up with Dean Landsman and learn about pastramiphiles.

I brought along Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis and Cockburn and St. Clair’s The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Received two new books at WTF, both interesting, both now stacked on the bedside table: McInery and White’s FutureWealth, and Art Kleiner’s Who Really Matters. Yesterday at the United Nations they gave me a copy of “The Question of Palestine and the United Nations.” The first one’s free doncha know… so like a junkie with his wake-up, I set about finding more books… went away with Clarke’s Against All Enemies, Krugman’s The Great Unraveling, Schulz’ Tainted Legacy, and Sen’s Development as Frreedom. Last night we ducked into Barnes and Noble on the way to dinner and I accidentally bought Shorto’s The Island in the Center of the World.

Did you hear that The Confusion, the second volume in Neal Stephenson’s trilogy (”The Baroque Cycle”) will be released on 4/13? So Amazon promises…