Streets of San Francisco

This blog has performed useful public service in the past by advising against recreating famous movie automotive moments. There are other websites that are less responsible. This site uses Google maps to provide you with the route through SF taken in the car chase in the Steve McQueen movie Bullitt. This is certainly enabling if not actively encouraging recreation. I doubt you would see so little traffic if you tried this today and I don’t that it would be good for your car’s suspension.

Not Qualified

I lived in the UK as an adult for over twenty years. In that time I did not receive one jury summons. I have not been in the US for two full years and have received a summons. The database that the court uses to determine who to call is obviously flawed, as only US citizens can serve. I filled in the relevant part of the form that described me as unqualified and returned it. I wonder if that will cause them to update their records or if I will continue to receive invites every year or so.

Look Back at June

June was my most active posting month on the blog. There are thirty-three posts, easily beating the twenty-one posted in my second month of blogging. I have also posted every day since the second of the month. I doubt that I will be able to keep up this level of posting.

Euro 2008 Wrap-up

Euro 2008 is over and despite every game being covered live on US TV, including several games on a major network; no one at work seems to have noticed apart from two others (One Brit and one guy of Portuguese extraction)

Portugal exited at the quarter final stage, but Spain are worthy winners. They played with positive football with a definite style. I would have supported anyone who was not Germany in the final, but it was a pleasure to cheer on Spain. Much was made of the fact that they had not won a major tournament since 1964, but that is only two years before the great English triumph. Now that Spain have so decisively thrown off the mantle of European underachievers, there can be no doubt who inherits that title. I feat it may be held by those who wear the three lions for a long while to come.

Winchester Pictures

The Winchester House from the front. Apparently the front doors were never used while the owner lived.

A fountain in front of the house

A stained glass window

A view from the fourth floor showing the somewhat haphazard layout of the building.

Winchester Mystery House

I have always thought of the architectural folly as a quintessentially English concept. Today we visited an American folly, perhaps predictably it was on a far larger scale than those in the UK. The Winchester House was built over a period of forty years by the widow of the Winchester of rifle fame. Apparently based on advice from a psychic she continued to add to the house in San Jose from purchasing it in 1884 until her death in 1922.

There was no overall plan so the house is a veritable maze with windows that look out in walls, doors that open into space, a staircase that leads to a ceiling, and a chimney that stops short of the roof. Aside from such oddities, there are some innovative features including a zinc floored conservatory on the second floor that drains to the garden below to reduce waste water. Mrs Winchester was also a collector of fine Tiffany glass and there are some beautiful stained glass windows; including one through which no sunlight falls as it faces north into a wall.

For a superstitious woman it is surprising that she seems to have liked the number thirteen. The number thirteen recurs throughout the house, a room has thirteen windows, the panels on the ceiling are split into thirteen sections, a closet has thirteen coat hooks.

It was a fascinating and enjoyable trip, well worth the drive to San Jose. The gift shop was the usual collection of tat, though one sign did make us think of Ilegirl; “She who dies with the most shoes wins.”

Six Word Memoir

Tagged by Amber

A transplanted and happy idiosyncratic geek

Enduring Legacy

In the US there is a tendency to name places after people. In California we have airports named after Bob Hope, John Wayne, and Charles Schulz. Assorted free way intersections and bridges get named after law enforcement officers, and plenty of parks bear the name of a local personality. Even so, I was surprised to learn that a group of San Francisco residents have enough signatures to put a measure on the November ballot to name part of that city in honour of the current president. California as a whole and San Francisco in particular is not known for being rabidly pro-Bush. One of the drawbacks to carrying out such an exercise in San Francisco is that the city is relatively small and well established; most of the obvious landmarks are already named. In fact it seems that there is only one place unnamed, how else could you explain that the public facility chosen to bear the name of the president is the George W Bush Sewage Plant.

A Few Words of Explanation

In answer to a couple of the questions that were posted in comments to my Ten Things You Did Not Know About Me.

I swam in industrial waste in the summer of 1997 while on holiday in Iceland. The salt-water in the blue lagoon is used to heat freshwater for central heating and electricity generation. Once used in this way, the water is used as a health spa. I know that the image of industrial waste is generally one of foul chemicals, but this is still the left-over by product of an industrial process.

My father was working on ghosting an auto-biography of Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, the daughter of Stalin, whilst she was living in Cambridge in the early 1980s and she came to stay for a couple of days.

Hills are Filled with Fire

The air here is hazy, as smoke from nearby fires pollutes the air. A series of dry lightning strikes over the weekend ignited over seven hundred fires across the state of California. Two are burning in the hills between us and Napa. My boss has had to evacuate his family form their home as the blaze reached within a mile of his home. We are under no threat from the fires. Fortunately, no one has died as a result of these assorted conflagrations