Dear friends,
Concert coming up. We're singing with the Yale Glee Club at Grace Cathedral. How could it get any better than that?
Trevor.

 

San Francisco's own
International Orange Chorale

in concert with

Yale University's world-renowned
Yale Glee Club

featuring works by
Thompson, Stitt, Finzi,Grieg, Rachmaninoff, Pärt, Ades, Distler, Barber,
and others.

Wednesday, January 7th, 7:30pm

in the acoustic and aesthetic perfection of

Grace Cathedral

1110 California Street
San Francisco, CA  94108

$10 General Admission
$8 Students and Seniors
Tickets:  http://www.cityboxoffice.com
(415) 392-4400
and at the door

http://www.iocsf.org
http://gleeclub.research.yale.edu
http://iocsf.org/concerts.php

Rules:
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the sixth sentence.
* Post that sentence below in comments.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in your blog.


So, here is my sentence...

"It seemed to him that they know they all share in the life of the universe, as suggested in the following:

Toward the sun's path
Hollyhock flowers turning
In the rains of summer."

From "Matsuo Basho: The master haiku poet," by Makoto Ueda, 1982.

There's a gentleman who walks around my neighborhood cleaning up the streets. I guess he works for the city. He wears work gloves and an orange vest, carries a broom and dustpan. I think he also takes care of the trash cans. I like seeing him around b/c he works with such diligence and energy; he does a good job, and it seems like he takes pride in his work. He's cheerful. Folks know him; I've seen people give him cigarettes, and baristas often run out and give him a cup of coffee. I've small-talked with him a few times. It wouldn't surprise me if he's developmentally disabled in some way; he seems a little "off." He's not threatening or aggressive or anything like that - just a little off. Sometimes it's hard to say hi to him, though, b/c he smells so badly. The man has a powerful, powerful smell about him. I mean, it is really something else. It's painful for me to note how I can withdraw from him, this man who cleans up my neighborhood. In some ways, my relationship with him is a microcosm of class difference in SF and the country.

The final paragraph of today's NYTimes article about Obama's visit to the Whitehouse...

"A sense of anticipation extended beyond 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As the Obamas' limousine made its way to the White House, hundreds of people lined the streets, craning their necks to see. When the door opened and the couple stepped out to greet the Bushes, there was an unfamiliar sound: cheering outside the White House gates."

I edited the previous entry, in accordance with my father's wishes, to more accurately represent the interaction between my father and his father forty years ago.

My grandfather was a hero. He and my grandmother defeated the fascists, loved each other for over fifty years, raised seven children, and trucked the whole family all over the country in a big converted schoolbus.

Hello, my friends!

As many of you know, I've been volunteering with the Obama campaign for about the past eight weeks. It all started when McCain made the rather odd selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, and I knew then that not only did Obama need to be the president, but McCain needed to lose. So, I gave $20 to the campaign, and decided I better put in some hours if I was going to get my money's worth.

So several times a week I went to the Obama office here in downtown SF and made phone calls to voters in swing states. Sometimes we called just to find out who they were voting for, so that the door-to-door canvassers had information about where they should go. Sometimes we caled Obama supporters and registered Democrats to make sure that they knew where, when, and how they could take advantage of early voting opportunities, and how they could get involved in the campaign in their neighborhoods. I also worked every Sunday for four hours, answering the office phone, taking folks' questions, and just generally keeping the office working smoothly. And I took care of the office gmail account.

These last few days we did our "Get Out The Vote" calls, urging folks to vote, get their friends and family to the polls, et cetera. We were doing GOTV calls until just a few minutes before polls closed. I called one guy in NV fifteen minutes before his polls closed. He and his buddy didn't get around to voting, and they didn't know the polls were still open! They took the address of the polling place, and said they would head over immediately. That happened a few times last night. Exhilerating, to say the least.

My sister and her husband were the second and third folks to vote at their polling place in the Morningside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA. Apparently, that polling location usually sees forty to sixty voters on election day, but by mid-day there had been 300! My friend Bethany stood in a long line of young people and cast her vote in Pittsburgh, too. And of course I am so proud of my friend Eric Russell, an organizer with Steelworkers, a true hero of the working classes, a PA-man through and through, who has been working non-stop to make sure that Obama will be the next president.

I got a lot of people to volunteer for the Obama campaign, too. Through my Obama office gmail stewardship, I got to go to a fundraising party in SF's Noe Valley neighborhood. They wanted someone to come by and tell the folks about volunteer opportunities, why I got involved, why they should get involved, et cetera. A few people from that party actually dug what I said enough to start volunteering regularly. Oh - that party also raised about $3000 for the campaign. Another party I went to raised $600.

In September, the Obama campaign raised $150million, including a good chunk of cash from 650,000 new donors. The average individual donation was $86. Yep. Joe Six Packs like you and me thought to themselves... Well, maybe I can afford to give $50... or $100... or $20...

Halloween Night was a light night at the Obama office; we had maybe thirty people doing phonebanking, about half as much as normal. A lot of folks left early to go to parties and whatnot. I went to the Critical Mass ride and showed up a little later. A local TV reporter was there, asking questions, taking footage. Before he left, he told me and the office manager that he had visited the Contra Costa County Republican HQ a few days before, and there were three people on the phones.

Two words: Pa. Thetic.

Interestingly enough, fivethirtyeight.com had this post up on 10/31: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/big-empty.html

I think that is why we won. More folks were more fired up about Obama than they were about McCain. The pundits are saying that this campaign has changed the face of national campaigning strategies. And as you can PROBABLY tell, I'm sort of proud to have been a part of this awesome, national effort.

 

From civicyouth.org (as quoted on dailykos.com, Wed Nov 05, 2008 at 10:30:04 AM PST)

"Young voters diverged sharply from the population as a whole, preferring Obama/Biden over McCain/Palin by 66% to 32% in the NEP. This is by far the highest share of the youth vote obtained by any candidate since exit polls began reporting results by age categories in 1976. In past elections from 1976 through 2004, young voters diverged by an average of only 1.8 percentage points from the popular vote as a whole. 2004 had set the previous record for an age gap."

That's the one thing I was worried about with this election. We were depending on young voters to show up in insane numbers. Same goes for people of color and first-time voters. Historically, I'm told that these groups aren't the most reliable when it comes to ACTUALLY GOING to the polls on November 5 (or before). But, this time it worked! Woo hoo!

When we found out that we had won, the Obama office exploded into a party. Everyone was cheering, crying, hugging. I knew that the same thing was happening all over the country, even all over the world.

My father called me a few minutes after we found out. I'm pretty sure my Pop voted for McCain, but I don't know for certain. He congratulated me on my part in this historic moment. He seemed genuinely thrilled to witness Obama get elected, and genuinely proud of me.

 

He told me that only 40 years ago, in 1968, he was accompanying my grandmom while she picked up her Air Force husband at the DC airport – on his return from serving a year in Thailand during the Vietnam war. "Hey Dad," he said, "Can we drive by that big civil rights rally with MLKJr? I want to check it out." My grandpa said something like, "No, I want to go home." But my dad came that close to the big encampment on the DC Mall, and it was just 40 years ago. So as I'm talking to my Dad and folks are cheering, he says, "And now I get to see this happen! How awesome is that?!" I was moved to say the least.

Like cities all over the world, the streets in SF exploded in celebration. Spontaneous crowds formed in several neighborhoods. Everyone was smiling, high fiving each other, hootin' and hollerin', chanting YES WE CAN, and SI SE PUEDE, and FIRED UP READY TO GO, and OBAMA OBAMA OBAMA.

I went to the big SF Democrat shindig at this ballroom in a fancy-ish hotel and watched Obama's speech on a big screen in a packed room full of cheering folks. Great speech, of course. An inspiring call to a new era of community responsibility. Real "Greatest Generation" stuff. This man is a uniter, not a divider, and I think he can do it.

After the SF Dem party, I went to this club called Mezanine for the SFObama party, where I drank beer and danced.

Volunteering for the campaign has shown me how much free time I have, so the gears are in motion for me to volunteer at this place in my neighborhood. It's a transitional housing place for women and their kids who are escaping abusive men. A lot of the women are working on their high school diplomas, and they need tutors to help them with their homework.

I think that's enough for now. There's more for me to say, of course.

In conclusion,

USA!

The New Yorker has an excellent piece endorsing Barack Obama as president. It clearly explains why the Bush presidency has been a domestic and foreign nightmare, how McCain does not really present much of an alternative, and how Obama has a clear, precise, and inclusive vision for our country.

 

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/10/13/081013taco_talk_editors

 

Here are the last two paragraphs:

 

The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama's intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer's craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain's imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of "mere" words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama's "mere" speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

 

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country's image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader's name is Barack Obama.

New York Times, op ed, October 3, 2008 Dick Cheney, Role Model In all the talk about the vice-presidential debate, there was an issue that did not get much attention but kept nagging at us: Sarah Palin's description of the role and the responsibilities of the office for which she is running, vice president of the United States. In Thursday night's debate, Ms. Palin was asked about the vice president's role in government. She said she agreed with Dick Cheney that "we have a lot of flexibility in there" under the Constitution. And she declared that she was "thankful that the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also, if that vice president so chose to exert it." It is hard to tell from Ms. Palin's remarks whether she understands how profoundly Dick Cheney has reshaped the vice presidency — as part of a larger drive to free the executive branch from all checks and balances. Nor did she seem to understand how much damage that has done to American democracy. Mr. Cheney has shown what can happen when a vice president — a position that is easy to lampoon and overlook — is given free rein by the president and does not care about trampling on the Constitution. Mr. Cheney has long taken the bizarre view that the lesson of Watergate was that Congress was too powerful and the president not powerful enough. He dedicated himself to expanding President Bush's authority and arrogating to himself executive, legislative and legal powers that are nowhere in the Constitution. This isn't the first time that Ms. Palin was confronted with the issue. In an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News, the Alaska governor was asked what she thought was the best and worst about the Cheney vice presidency. Ms. Palin tried to dodge: laughing and joking about the hunting accident in which Mr. Cheney accidentally shot a friend. The only thing she had to add was that Mr. Cheney showed support for the troops in Iraq. There was not a word about Mr. Cheney's role in starting the war with Iraq, in misleading Americans about weapons of mass destruction, in leading the charge to create illegal prison camps where detainees are tortured, in illegally wiretapping Americans, in creating an energy policy that favored the oil industry that made him very rich before the administration began. Ms. Couric asked Joseph Biden, Ms. Palin's rival, the same question in a separate interview. He had it exactly right when he told her that Mr. Cheney's theory of the "unitary executive" held that "Congress and the people have no power in a time of war." And he had it right in the debate when he called Mr. Cheney "the most dangerous vice president we've had in American history." The Constitution does not state or imply any flexibility in the office of vice president. It gives the vice president no legislative responsibilities other than casting a tie-breaking vote in the Senate when needed and no executive powers at all. The vice president's constitutional role is to be ready to serve if the president dies or becomes incapacitated. Any president deserves a vice president who will be a sound adviser and trustworthy supporter. But the American people also deserve and need a vice president who understands and respects the balance of power — and the limits of his or her own power. That is fundamental to our democracy. So far, Ms. Palin has it exactly, frighteningly wrong.

A friend sent this to me... While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75-year old Texas rancher whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Sarah Palin and her bid to be a heartbeat away from being President. The old rancher said, 'Well, ya know, Palin is a post turtle.' Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was. The old rancher said, 'When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle.' The old rancher saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued to explain. 'You know she didn't get up there by herself, she doesn't belong up there, she doesn't know what to do while she is up there, and you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put her up there to begin with.'