Up in the northeast corner of Golden Gate Park, off Stanyan, there are, apparently, horseshoe pitching grounds.  There's a wall that runs south down the street for a few blocks, so you can't really see what's on the other side, but it's been an overgrown "wild" part of the park, inasmuch as a very-designed-by-humans park that was originally built, mostly, on sand dunes can be wild ("feral" perhaps?).

Ted Bartlett, member of the Guardsmen, retrieves a horseshoe he
had thrown on the horseshoe courts in Golden Gate Park
on Tuesday August 11, 2009 in San Francisco, Calif.
Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

Turns out, the pitching grounds were part of a WPA project during the depression era.  Check out the horse sculpture back there in the above photo.  There's apparently one of a pitcher too.  I pass by the corner somewhat frequently and had no idea about the pitching area.

Golden Gate Park is, by far, one of my favorite parks anywhere.  It's full of surprises like this.  I remember coming across the fly fishing pools, a couple-acre area with still water pools dotted with concrete rings anchored to the bottom of the shallow pools.  The rings are of different diameters, so anglers can practice their aim by casting a line into large or small rings.  The Park really is a great resource for leisure activities, and I'm glad this little corner of it is being dusted off.

In conclusion. here's a completely unrelated quote from Wintersmith that I liked the first time I read it, and still like very much today.

You had to deal every day with people who were foolish and lazy and untruthful and downright unpleasant, and you could certainly end up thinking that the world would be considerably improved if you gave them a slap.  But you didn't, because, as Miss Tick had once explained: a) it would make the world a better place for only a very short time; b) it would then make the world a slightly worse place; and c) you're not supposed to be as stupid as they are.

I'll dedicate that quote to, oh, let's say the numbnuts encouraging people to take or themselves taking guns to various political rallies.  Just because you can doesn't mean you should.  Like, just because I could pass wind loudly in work meetings doesn't mean that it's a polite thing to do, and it comes across as me being something of a puerile putz.  But why some people revel in their putziness, I'll never know.

Shei Pei Pu, the opera singer who inspired M Butterfly, passed away.  You may have seen or heard the story, or think you know the story.

Shi Pei Pu, a Beijing opera singer and spy whose sexually convoluted love affair with a French Embassy worker created one of the strangest cases in international espionage and was the inspiration for the Broadway show "M. Butterfly," died in Paris on Tuesday.

Shi (pronounced Shuh), who was convicted of espionage in France in 1986 along with his lover Bernard Boursicot, was believed to be 70. He also had been believed for years to be a woman, at least by Boursicot, who served time in prison after the affair and became a laughingstock in France.

But the story is more complicated than even fiction could keep up with:

In the 1988 Broadway play and the 1993 film "M. Butterfly," Boursicot was depicted as a high-ranking diplomat and Shi Pei Pu as a beautiful female opera singer who met in 1964. In fact, Boursicot was a 20-year-old high-school dropout who had finagled a job as an accountant at the newly opened French Embassy in Beijing. His few sexual experiences had been with male schoolmates, and he was determined to fall in love with a woman, he wrote in his diary.

Shi Pei Pu was 26 when they met, delicate and charming. He lived as a man and taught Chinese to the diplomatic wives. He told Boursicot he had been a singer and a librettist in the Beijing Opera. One night in the Forbidden City, Shi told Boursicot a story no romantic could resist: Shi said he was a woman who had been forced to go through life as a man because her father required a son. A short time later, the men became lovers, although the sex, Boursicot would later say, was fast and furtive, always carried out in the dark.

When the affair was discovered by Chinese authorities, Boursicot — through Shi — passed them French documents, first from the embassy in Beijing and later from the consulate in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

Boursicot spent most of his life outside China and was romantically involved with men and women. On one of his rare visits to Shi Pei Pu, Shi presented Boursicot with a 4-year-old boy, Shi Du Du, who Shi said was their son.

In 1982, Boursicot — then living openly with a male companion, Thierry Toulet — arranged for Shi Pei Pu and Shi Du Du to live with him in Paris. Shortly thereafter, Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu were arrested. Shi first told the police he was a woman, but he admitted the truth to prison doctors.

Shi Du Du explained the mystery of where he came from in his statement to the police: He was from China's Uighur minority, he said, and had been sold by his mother. "It was not that my mother did not love me," he said. "We were starving."

Boursicot, hearing that Shi Pei Pu was a man and always had been, sliced his throat with a razor blade in prison.

He lived, though, and is still alive.

I can't even really comment on the story -- I mean, where would you even start? -- but it's one of those things of the heart that mystify and blind and confuse and confound everyone inside or outside the tale.  We are such peculiar creatures, and the knots we tie ourselves into to conform to this or that worldview, however uncomfortable or even impossible it may prove, is staggering and tragic and amazing.

No longer being served: Mrs. Slocombe and her pussy.

You're five years old today! Or possibly six!

Farrah Fawcett, however, will not be getting any older.  She passed away from cancer today.  I can't say I was any kind of a fan of hers, although, in recent years, one of her appearances at a Comedy Central celebrity roast was amusing, but she's kind of a 70's icon for America.  And The Burning Bed is still remembered by many of my peers who had televisions in the 1980s, in which Fawcett played a battered woman who finally snaps.  Primarily known for her appearance, the makeup job they did on her to make her look like she had been abused was really quite good, and it sort of drove the point home.

She also managed to have a long-standing marriage to another celebrity, which defied the odds both of her age group as well as the usual difficulty big- and little-screen stars seem to have keeping it together.  Ryan O'Neil stuck by her in her final days through her illness as well, proving that not all famous, successful men end up being assholes.  Just mostly the "Family Values" Republican politicians.

R.I.P., angel.

Edit:  Okay, just got an email from Z-Man that said Michael Jackson died today as well.  WTF?

Hah, good cartoon from the Dutch. 

Via Sullivan.  Original link here

From the AP.

The ones in plainclothes beating up on the man are the Basij.  You can read about what they are at that Wikipedia link, but of more interest to me are the angry people apparently coming to this guy's aid.

There's a reason this has been going through my head a lot lately:

Why is the world in love again?
Why are we marching hand in hand?
Why are the ocean levels rising up?
It's a brand new record
For 1990
They Might Be Giants'
Brand new album
Flood!

Last Saturday, a water supply line in our upstairs' neighbor's unit broke and spewed water at high pressure for 15-20 minutes.  Michael woke up that morning to a gentle rain of (what I've come to designate as) Ceiling Coffee.  Michael was afraid it was a waste water line that had broken, and certainly the color was dark brown and the smell was rank (although not poopy), but we learned, to our slight relief, that it was just what happens to water when it passes through plaster, insulation, and one-hundred-fifty-year-old crawl space.

The neighbor's bathroom is, perhaps unwisely in retrospect, over our computer room and our pantry.  Fortunately, there is a loft-esque storage space above the pantry that got the brunt of the water, sparing our food.  Unfortunately, various musical cases, a couple of intstruments, and various boxes in said space were not spared.

The computer room was scarier, however, since the room is very, very live with electricity.  Some servers, our firewall, and our wirless hub are all in there, and I went and cut main power to the house immediately until we could sort out which breaker belonged to what room.

There was a bit of leakage in our dining room closet, where we store lots of infrequently-used glassware and rather more-frequently-used cookbooks.  It was minor, though.

Sad to say, Michael got the brunt of the impact.  Since I got that computer hutch, I've kept my computer upstairs.  I had a couple of items in the computer room, but the bulk of the water fell on the network rack.  We emergency-evacuated everything in the direct path of the falling water, tossed out and junked tons of cardboard and foam packaging, and ripped out the carpet cut-outs that are on the floor of our pantry and our glass closet, as they got soaked.  (Whereupon I learned that the floor underneath the carpets are gnarly).

Oh, we discovered one more leak through too:  some of the water went straight down our parlor fireplace.  It seeped under the hearth.  Again, it somehow managed to stop just short of both my keyboards and speakers as well as my crushed red velvet comfy chair, and headed straight for still more boxes Michael was keeping in the living room.

(He's been building an analog-to-digital turntable from parts that he orders online.  He's been ordering multiple versions of the same part, testing each part, keeping the ones he likes best, and then reselling the leftovers.  Well, I say "reselling," but it's more like "plans on reselling."  We haven't gotten to the actual reselling part yet.  It's gotten a little out of hand, and we have -- well, pre-flooding had -- nearly two rooms filled with empty boxes.  However, his thrift has spared me from having to acquire a shipping box I needed in order to mail back a wine fridge that gave up the ghost under warranty.  To be fair, it's not simply thrift:  some boxes fit the devices perfectly, and some are original packaging, and, people being what they are, people will pay more money for goods in their original packaging.  So we were sort of caught between the point at which he was going to resell items, and the point where the boxes landslide in our dining room.  This little episode took a toll on a lot of cardboard.  It's amazing how much water a flat piece of cardboard can actually hold.)

So, our computer room, pantry, and closet have blowers blowing, dehumidifiers dehumidifying, and heaters heating.  We've also got some complicated mats with tubing on the floor drawing up moisture out of the wood.  it's noisy and warm and surely jacking up our power bills.  Really, it's like some kind of Star-Wars-droid factory-meets-Brazil-steampunk gathering, only it'll dry your eyeballs out if you stay around them too long.  The cats are in terror of the assorted loud droids, so I suppose that's one amusing bright spot.  (Hey, I love my cat, but it's good to remind them once in a while that they don't get it all their own way.  Other cat owners will know what I mean.)

Fortune also had it that I had arranged for house cleaners to come this past Tuesday, freshening our house that was seriously sliding into "gross" with a wonderful assortment of citrus, pine, rosemary, and neroli-scented products.  Alas, I had done this only partly for my own benefit, as my dear friend, Otter, is visiting from Boston and I wanted her able to walk around the living room without getting knocked over by cat-hair-tumbleweeds or sticking her bare foot in cat yak.  The water cleanup devices, sadly, I can't do anything about, but at least she's an old friend with large stores of forgiveness.  She even said, "Hey, it's me," when I apologized for the disarray.  She was my roommate for a few years in Gainesville, so I let it go at that, since "yes, it's her." Heh.  So the house is in lovely shape.

Except for the cat-terrorizing water droids.

This is my last day here in New Orleans -- yes, yes, I left the blog without so much as a by-your-leave.  Sorry, blog.  But I needed to let my hair down, boy howdy.  And I hadn't visited New Orleans in forever, and still think fondly of the city.  Z-man had never been at all, so I decided to carve out a little getaway, and I'm glad I did. 

We really had a wonderful time.  He's heading back to SF today, and I'm continuing on to G'ville to see my family.  I had a few goals for this trip to New Orleans, all of which I managed to check off.   These included:

1. Actually visiting one of the cemeteries.  Check!
2. Walking around a bit in Audubon Park.  Check!
3. Café du Monde and beignets.  Check!
4. Trying Oysters Rockefeller at Antoine's, where they were created. Check!*
5. Riding the street car through the Garden District.  Check!

We did all that and more, including sampling some absinthe in a few of the local venues.  That probably would have been a goal by itself, had I not had some actually at home.

A few pictures, and then I have to skeedaddle.

* The oysters were the least shellfishy shellfish I've ever had.  Much more like chicken. The baked sauce served on it was tasty.  The first one went down a little hard after I stabbed it with the shellfish fork, just cause I'm not used to eating whole creatures that ooze liquid.  I couldn't pretend it was, like, a brussel sprout or anything.  Because I just knew.  But once I popped half of it in my mouth, it was okay, especially with the "Rockefeller" part.

I'm not making a habit of it though.

Bea:  R.I.P. Bea Arthur. A lady who did funny very, very well.  One of the best deadpan line-deliverers ever on television.

Bee: Well, happily, no bees in the lovely flowers Jennconspiracy gave me.  I photographed them in my shower stall for the light and white background, and Bella helped.  Note to self:  clean shower stall ASAP.

Be:  Calistoga picture, finally uploaded.  I didn't take all that many.  It was overcast and rainy, and we really went to be lazy more than sightsee.  Nonetheless, a few highlights below.

Flowers for Algernon Matthew

.

Calistoga

(My new desktop wallpaper)

Hello, blog! Sorry, I've been so distant.  It's not you, it's me.

Plenty has been happening, and I've been trying to save it up, so as to keep the video below active for folks to view without having to dig through the archives. But then some other things came up that drove me away from posting any more for a while.

My friend, Marcis, passed away.  Actually, he passed away right before his birthday in February.  I didn't find out about it until a couple of weeks later for his birthday, when I called and never got a response.  I sort of figured something was up.  And I got a call back from some friends of his who had just recovered his cell phone, and who kindly listened to my message and returned my call, letting me have the bad news.  His funeral service had passed by without my knowledge, and the extra dollop of misfortune here is that he'd asked me -- prior to having his kidneys removed and knowing he had, at best, six months to live after the procedure -- to come to his funeral and say something in case anything happened.  Sadly, that opportunity has now passed me by.  I'm sorry, Marcis. 

I've met him from around the time I started my life here in SF.  He's one of those people who, personally, seems very even-keeled, even a little happy-go-lucky and with-it when you know him passingly, but in whose life extremes played themselves out with alarming frequency.  Some of these situations were of his own doing.  His substance abuse and HIV satus were ostensibly products of his own decision-making -- but so was the way he kicked his bad habits and got his life straightened out in the time he had, and was lucky to have a wonderful, caring partner up to the day he died.  Others, like random comas, renal failure, and robbery at gunpoint, were completely out of his control.  But equally out of his control was the support of his loving family and, despite his passing, his resilience.

His own personal grace and determination and attitude were all his own doing, however.  Goodbye, Marcis.  Rest, now.  It was too soon, but . . . rest yourself.

In addition to Marcis, my "uncle" passed away as well.  I use the scare quotes because he and my aunt were divorced many years ago, and he was unrelated to my immediate family by blood (my aunt in question is my mom's sister).  So, technically not "uncle."  But, really, I've never been able to call him anything but that, even in my own head. 

Not that it mattered much, because I saw him with vanishing frequency from my adolescene and into adulthood, and so rarely had to address him as anything.  My parents and aunt left kind thoughts and words on his digital "guest book," and since I knew him only briefly, and my memories of him are sufficiently removed from the present as to be those of a child and tween, there's not much I can say.  But many people said really nice things about him, and their memories are fresher, and so I'll let their recollections stand uncommented.  With the added note that my uncle had many more people sign his book than Marcis', which isn't either of their faults, and my observation doesn't stem from some sort of morbid contest, and Uncle Lenny lived to his 80s and Marcis to his 30s, but . . . well, as Z-Man said, on reading their obituaries, it's rather shocking and humbling to see someone's whole life reduced to a paragraph on the page. 

So to that end I've decided to write a book before I die.  A paragraph? Screw that for a lark.  I'm going to make a graphic novel.  And I'll probably lie like hell about everything I've done, so only those who actually know me will be able to separate the truth from fiction, which is both their reward and their punishment, and no one else will know, which is theirs.

Take that, stupid mortality.

So, apart from padding my chapters, I'm actually, you know, doing stuff.  I had March "off" with regard to my other pursuits, which is actually a good thing, since March and April-so-far have not been so great at work.  You know it's obviously bad when even your Astrologer who's never met you or anything says in no uncertain terms:  Oo, wow, sorry about the work sitch.  Yeah, the cosmic suckitude is that bad that even a much-ridiculed divination system is picking up on it.

But I'm back in improv class this month, and have another performance coming up in May, when I'm also starting up yet another class.  This class is on a format called The Harold, and is very different from what the Triptych was.  Basically, we get an idea from the audience, and riff on it for a while, sharing thoughts, experiences, sayings, emotions, senses, whatever about the word, and directly with the audience (and each other), and then we begin a bunch of short scenes, one after another, in no order, with no planning, in which we return to some of the ideas that came up at the beginning, and which we flesh out as a small scene.  It's wide open, very random, with no planning or arrangements, or genres, or anything.  The scenes don't have a planned beginning or ending, and can go anywhere.  To me, it feels like an incredibly pure expression of improvisation, boundless, but for the inspiration from your fellow performers.

I think I'm going to enjoy the freedom.

P.S. This bit from Wikipedia about the "psychology of improvisational theater" describes improvisation and acting as an altered state of consciousness.  Which is awesome.

P.P.S. I finished Rome and Jerusalem, a book I'd been reading about the conflict in 67-70 CE that led to the destruction of the second temple.  It was fascinating.  Really amazing.  The author took his time to really depict, as best he could, what life was like around that era, and what pressures and situations led up to it, and what happened afterward.  I learned so much.