Heat

At 5 p.m., it is 83 degrees in Seattle. Nice. Two days ago, it was 104 degrees at 7 p.m. A new record high for Seattle. My cats were fur puddles, splayed out on the kitchen floor, and I found my body dissolving in its own sweat. Not so nice.

Before you dark brown, hard-eyed, leather-skinned desert rats begin taunting us Northwesterners as a bunch of wilting begonias, let's get just a few things straight. In Seattle, we don't air-condition our houses, ok? Very few of us have swimming pools in our back yard. (Water tends to pool naturally around here, without our helping it out.) Lots of us -- believe it or not -- air-condition our cars by simply rolling down the windows. Nor are we Mediterraneans, with a culture of taking afternoon siestas, then staying up until after midnight so we can dine in the cool of the night. If the Good Lord meant us to eat our meals after 8 p.m., he'd never have given us late night TV and Midwestern accents.

Bad July weather around these parts has always meant rain -- not heat stroke.

So, as July limps to its scorched conclusion, it's a relief to see our temperatures drop back into the normal range. Now our only worry is that we've had virtually no rain since April, and our forests are dry as tinder.

Ooops, a slip. Did I say no rain since April? My apologies to the good xenophobic folks at Lesser Seattle, Ltd. Let me rephrase that: "Dang, it just rains all summer long up here -- you Californians are soooooo lucky you get to spend your summers down there in Paradise."

Golden shadows of things past

Elio passes the long, languid days of a Mediterranean summer with his family at their large vacation home on the Italian Riviera. As the days go by, Elio sits beside the pool, transcribing Haydn sonatas. He plays tennis. He swims in the ocean, bikes to the nearest village where he haunts his favorite bookstore, lies in the Mediterranean sun. He carries on a desultory summer affair with a nice local girl.

Elio is 17. He is Italian, secularly Jewish, son of a respected professor, precociously well-read, musically talented, entirely fluent in both English and Italian and conversant in French, German and ancient Greek. He loves his family. His summer days pass like a dream, a golden idyll.

Each year, his father invites a graduate student to live with the family for six weeks. The professor helps the student with his writing and in exchange, the student provides some assistance to his host in his own research. Oliver thus drops into the family's life from Columbia University -- a 24-year-old philosophy student who is editing for publication his study of the philosophy of Heraclitus. Oliver is brilliant, intellectually accomplished, charismatic, funny, also Jewish -- and very American. The entire family is charmed by his personality, and by his American persona.

And Elio? From the first instant, Elio is in love.

Call Me by Your Name, by André Aciman, is on its surface a summer romance; a coming out story; a tale of a father and son, both highly intelligent, set in an Italian small town; a nostalgia for lost youth -- it is all of these, and all of these done superbly. Aciman writes beautifully, evoking the sights, sounds and smells of summer on the Italian coast. He brings to life the shyness, the hopes, the hopelessness, the misunderstandings, the misreading of signs, and -- ultimately -- the joy and passion of two young people strongly attracted to each other who struggle to understand their own feelings and those of each other.

Aciman, interestingly enough, has edited a collection of essays about the writings of Marcel Proust, so maybe it's not surprising that there's a Proustian atmosphere surrounding Call Me by Your Name -- a remembrance of times past in its own right. Elio leisurely, meticulously and in great physical and emotional detail tells us his story, painting a verbal picture of his six weeks of yearning and magic during the summer that he and Oliver lived in adjoining rooms, and of his devastation when summer ends and Oliver returns to his studies in New York.

More or less subtextually, moreover, Aciman seems to contemplate and mull over a dull sorrow that lies across most of our lives, the sense of early opportunities ignored or rejected or perhaps believed not realistically available. In the final chapter, Oliver and Elio meet twice as adults, 15 years and again 20 years following their summer together. Both are now highly successful in their respective fields. Oliver is happily married with two children; Elio has had reasonably successful relationships with a number of other men. But both look back on their Italian summer together as -- in its own way -- the defining and most intimate relationship of their lives. Not that there can now be any going back. As Elio says, after fifteen years, too much water has flowed under the bridge.

By the end of that summer, Elio's father had intuited the relationship between Oliver and his son. After Oliver had returned to New York, he saw his son suffering. He gently told Elio to let himself feel his suffering -- not to deaden it or harden himself against it.

"... if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. ... We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything -- what a waste!"

Both the joy and the loss were now part of Elio's life. Both should be remembered and valued.

When they last meet, as middle-aged men, Oliver suggests to Elio that we all live a number of parallel lives -- one of them a "real" life, and the others potential lives that would themselves have been "real" if different choices had been made. Oliver is happy with his own family. He also would have been happy -- perhaps happier? -- spending a lifetime with Elio, but that potential alternative life -- that life that never became "real," and that can never become "real" now -- still exists within him and still adds richness to his present life.

Only, perhaps, by incorporating these potential lives, and accepting them as part of our total being and personality, as a part of the story of our lives that we tell to ourselves to make sense of our own existence, can we escape the otherwise necessary sorrow that life often forces on us -- our constant need to make choices and, in so doing, to sacrifice many good alternatives in order to achieve others that we believe are better.

Seattle gets light rail

Persistent readers recall my enthusiasm for Seattle's first go at light rail. The first stretch opened one week ago, while I was down in California, cheering Denny on in his triathlon. Today, I eagerly took my first ride.

So far, the train runs only between downtown Seattle and Tukwila -- Tukwila station being located just outside the airport grounds. The final link with the airport should be finished by December. Construction of an underground extension, under Capitol Hill, from downtown north to the University is just getting underway, with completion scheduled in about five years.

Tickets ($2.50 each way) are purchased through vending machines. But they are not used to activate turnstiles, either entering or leaving the train. Nor, on my round trip to Tukwila, were they inspected on the train itself. Nevertheless, long lines of honest soccer fans, coming into the city to watch a game, stood waiting to buy tickets in Tukwila. I understand that random inspections of tickets will be made, with the occasional scofflaw undoubtedly taking a bullet on the spot as an object lesson to other riders.

The ride was quite smooth. You can go a bit faster from downtown to the airport by car when the freeway is clear, but will still face expensive airport parking. Also, smooth sailing on the freeway is not a given. When you're in a hurry to reach your flight, you're apt to encounter traffic jams -- sometimes predictable, often incomprehensible -- en route. The trains travel underground through downtown, above grade to Beacon Hill, by tunnel under Beacon Hill, at grade level to Rainier Beach station, within a few miles of Tukwila, and on elevated tracks the rest of the way. The trains, when traveling at grade level, have priority at all grade crossings. Traffic is not a problem.

It was fun and efficient. The Seattle Times continues to express the same ambiguity it has expressed from the outset: i.e., light rail is a real boon to the city but, gosh, it sure is expensive and takes a long time to build. In Seattle, all public works are expensive and always take a long time to build -- if they don't die while being talked to death, and end up never constructed at all. In Seattle, we pay a price for full democracy in local government, and for our insistence on open and transparent processes of decision-making. That price is a frequent inability to do anything at all, or to finally do it years later when the costs have ballooned.

But at least, for once, we did something, and we did it right. Cheers to Sound Transit!

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NOTE (7-31-09): See the New York Times's discussion of Seattle light rail, and the "Seattle Process"

This kid's an Ironman!

I naturally congratulate folks who run 10k races successfully. Simple mathematics require that the congratulations be doubled and quadrupled when half and full marathons are run. I'm left in awe for folks who complete a triathlon -- especially because I'm an abysmal swimmer myself -- and I announced with pride on this blog Denny's triumphal completion of the King's Trail Triathlon (on Maui) and the Santa Cruz Sentinal Triathlon, run during the summer and fall, respectively, of 2007.

But Denny's now moved up to the next level. Sunday, with me and the rest of his family cheering at the finish line, he completed the Vineman Ironman 70.3 Triathlon, beginning in Guerneville, north of Santa Rosa. He started off with a "refreshing" 1.2 mile swim in the Russian River, leaped out of the river and onto his bike for a 56 mile bike ride, and then "wound down" with a half-marathon (13.1 mile) run in 95 degree weather. The heat just about did me in, and I was just standing around as a spectator.

This was Denny's first try at the Ironman level of competition. He finished in 5 hours, 59 minutes, and 7.6 seconds -- placing 870th out of 2,286 competitors.

Fantastic job, Denny. Congratulations!

Opening soon at a theater near you.

Like a phoenix arising from the ashes, my house's dreams of film stardom have been revived. New financing has been received, filming is soon to begin, and I'm now involved in final contract negotiations.

If all goes as planned, I'll turn the house over to the film crew from August 10 to 24. They will repaint the interiors and the exterior trim -- think "pink" and "floral" -- and restore the house (so I'm assured) following the shoot. They will plant a vegetable garden in my backyard, and then rip it out and give me back my lawn. They will plant a huge cedar tree in a neighbor's yard, and then dig it up and haul it away. Designers and landscapers have just departed after cooing with delight at all the signs of shabbiness, dereliction and decay. "It's perfect!" they exclaimed

My house will be transformed -- temporarily -- from that of a quiet attorney of great probity, restrained good taste, and poor maintenance skills (that's me I'm talking about) to one owned by a slightly weird, middle aged woman of eccentric tastes.

Neighbors have been warned to expect chaos for a couple of weeks.

But I will say no more. See the movie. The Details. Starring Tobey Maguire, Elizabeth Banks, Laura Linney, Anna Friel, Ray Liotta, and Dennis Haysbert. Release projected for 2010.

Lost in translation

Dans nos perambulations par le Cyberspace, la plupart d'entre nous raison de trouvaille de temps en temps à la ressource à Babelfish (ou sites Web semblables) pour des traductions des expressions curieuses de langue étrangère que nous rencontrons.

In our perambulations through cyberspace, most of us find reason occasionally to resort to Babel Fish (or similar web sites) for translations of curious foreign language phrases that we encounter. The tool of automatic translation at first seems awesome, but after several uses we learn its limitations.

For example: The sentence in italics at the top of this post is Babel Fish's translation to French of my first sentence in English. Using Babel Fish again, this time to to re-translate from French back to English, gives us the following example of deathless English prose:

In our perambulations by the Cyberspace, the majority d' between us reason of lucky find from time to time to the resource with Babelfish (or similar Web sites) for translations of the expressions curious about foreign language which we meet.

If you squint your eyes and pretend you're listening to a polite Frenchman trying to speak our language, you can sort of get the gist of what's being said. But ze translation is not, how you say, absolument parfaite, n'est-ce pas?

Therefore, we have to sympathize with La Tribune, a French language business newspaper, in its recent efforts to publish a simultaneous English language, on-line edition, using automatic translation -- rather than relying on a competent human translator.

Ryanair loan to make travel

of the passengers upright

So read a recent headline, making even more absurd Ryanair's plans to sell "standing room only" space on its European flights. The story continues:

Ryanair plays the provocation once more. After the paying toilets, ones surtaxes for the largest passengers, Ryanair would plan to make travel part of its passengers upright!

La Tribune recognizes that its translations to date could be clearer, that they perhaps lack a certain je ne sais quoi. Therefore, the newspaper is hiring a human translator to review and "tweak" the computer-generated translations before they are published, to ensure greater clarity. The writer of the Agence France-Presse article who reported La Tribune's experiment found most of the translations to be -- "with a little effort" -- understandable, despite their "linguistic oddities."

It's easy to laugh at La Tribune's quirky translations, just as it was easy at one time to laugh at the English language instructions that came with Japanese consumer goods -- and we all know who ended up winning that battle. Automatic translation is still in its infancy, but -- as the publishers of La Tribune well know -- the technology even now produces a serviceable, if not elegant, translation at a fraction of the cost of hiring human translators. Computer memory is cheap, and bit by bit the various differences in word order between languages, their unique idioms, the multiple shades of meaning they assign to various words and phrases, and even the nuances of tone for various levels of formality in speech will be noted, remembered and applied.

Prediction: Automatic translations will be nearly indistinguishable from human translations within ten years. La Tribune will have been there first, and will have the last laugh.

Where no man has gone before

Faithful readers will recall my post last September, in which I discussed the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. I mentioned in passing the possibility that the particle collisions for which the collider is intended might result in creation of tiny black holes that would drop, one by one, like fish food in an aquarium, to the center of the earth where they would merge, forming an increasingly large black hole with ultimately unpleasant consequences for the property value of your beloved home and garden.

You've probably noticed that you and I are still walking around on terra firma, drinking beer and following the Mariners' disappointing season, just like we do every year, with little to suggest that our earth is being gutted out from within. Don't get cocky. There was a malfunction in the collider last fall that caused it to be shut down for repairs before any actual particles collided. October 2009 is the new projected start-up date. Don't renew your magazine subscriptions for more than one year.

But these pleasantries are but preface to my real news. Good news. Involving space travel. In fact, involving interstellar space travel.

While NASA pokes around trying to decide -- after nearly 40 years -- whether it wants to land men on the moon again, some of us are getting impatient. We're watching our lives trickle away with no progress being made in reaching out not merely to the moon, or to Mars and other planets, but to the stars themselves. One big problem facing us fans of interstellar travel is the distance. Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighbor, is 4.1 light years away. That's an 8.2 year round trip just for a light beam, and a somewhat longer journey for current spaceships that use rocket fuel and take several days just to blast themselve to our own moon.

In the absence of "warp speed, Mr. Sulu," or other attempts to defeat Einstein's theories by bending space and/or time, that 8.2 years is an absolute minimum for a round trip to the nearest star (or for a one way trip with a confirmation message back to earth). But even to approach that minimum duration, we'd need to approach the speed of light. How to do it?

Researchers (as reported by Daniel H. Wilson, MSNBC) suggest that the techniques used to achieve the very high speeds reached by protons in the LHC could be used to propel a small (perhaps eleven pounds), unmanned "spaceship" to speeds close to that of light. The "engine" would be a silicon chip with thousands of nanoparticle accelerators etched upon it -- the entire "engine," including fuel source, would be about a centimeter in thickness, with a surface area of about the size of a postage stamp. The engine would be a tiny version of the LHC, which itself is a circular tunnel about 17 miles in circumference.

The particles, once accelerated, would be propelled from the spaceship at very high velocities. Each particle expelled would thrust the spaceship in the opposite direction. Because the spaceship would experience no frictional resistance in space, its velocity would gradually approach the speed of light. (Never quite reaching that speed, however. Relativity equations show that the mass of the spaceship would approach infinity as its speed approaches light, requiring greater and greater thrust -- ultimately infinite thrust -- to increase its speed further.)

As you will agree -- those of you have stuck with me this far -- this is a very cool concept. The concept is akin, I suppose, to ion propulsion, which has been discussed for years as a means of approaching the speed of light. But because of the miniaturization now possible, we could launch a tiny unmanned spaceship with extremely small fuel requirements.

I suspect, however, that none of us reading this post will see such a launch in our lifetime -- for budgetary reasons as much as for technical obstacles. But it's nice to know that we are developing the technology that will one day give our descendents some interesting opportunities for exploration outside our already too crowded solar system.

This entire discussion assumes, of course, -- and assumes optimistically, I suppose -- that our earth doesn't collapse in upon itself as a result of the LHC start-up in October.

Live long and prosper.

Bombs bursting in air

Seattle might seem too cool -- both literally and idiomatically -- to join in an enthusiastic, flag-waving celebration of the Fourth of July, but events yesterday proved otherwise. A hot sun, temperatures that reached 87°, and, perhaps, a renewed, Obama-era pride in country led an estimated 50,000 spectators to mass together in Gasworks Park, overlooking Lake Union, for the annual fireworks display.

The fireworks -- these days, computer-coordinated with well-amplified recorded music -- were spectacular, one of the most impressive displays I've ever seen. The music gravitated toward various genres of rock, but with at least one 1950's pop hit thrown in. The show wrapped up with Disney's When You Wish Upon a Star, and -- for the finale -- an audience-participation rendition of God Bless America. Both the audience and the pyrotechnics went wild.

The park is a short walk from the UW, and I was surrounded by persons of all nationalities, speaking every conceivable language, including a surprising number of groups speaking Russian -- all of whom enthusiastically joined in the fun, helping their host country celebrate its national birthday.

Best of all -- and most surprising, for us Seattleites -- it was completely comfortable walking home in shorts and t-shirts as the clock approached midnight. A Fourth memorable for that fact alone, if nothing else!

Anchorage ... sayonara!

Sarah Palin, bless her sweet li'l heart, has stunned the known universe by announcing her resignation as governor of Alaska -- an arduous and prestigious position she has held for all of 2½ years. The poor lady must be exhausted.

Some political naïfs may feel that jumping ship in mid-voyage signals the end of her remarkable political career. (And it has been remarkable. Let's not forget that she was also mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (pop. 6,300), from 1996 to 2002. She also won the "Miss Congeniality" award in the 1984 Wasilla beauty pageant, a contest perhaps strewn with more political landmines that her admirably conducted run for the vice presidency itself.)

Yes, some folks may feel she'll now be returning home to fight the zoning and school bond battles of Wasilla, but many Republicans beg to differ. Fox News's lead headline, on today's webpage, trumpets: "FUTURE WIDE OPEN. Options Abound, Whether She Runs In 2012 or Not." The consensus of Fox readers, judging from their comments to the article, appears to be that Sarah now has Obama right where she wants him -- dead center in her gunsight. Liberals are "scared, scared, scared," according to these amateur pundits.

I guess they're right. I'm sure as hell scared, anyway. If Republicans are smart enough to nominate her for president in 2012, I'm afraid President Obama's goose is cooked for sure. Please, please, please don't do it -- we're going to need a full eight years to complete our work of establishing socialism and dismantling the American way of life! Don't let Sarah Palin ruin our one big chance!

And, while you're at it, fer de Lord’s sake, Brer Fox, don’t fling me in dat dere brier-patch.