On the way to the Vets Hall, an ornamental cabbage. I’ve always wondered if they are edible and ornamental, or if they are only distant cousins of the cabbage my grandmother used to boil. The answer turns out to be yes and no. Yes, they are edible, but no, you do not want to eat them. They were bred for looks, not taste. Be content to look and admire the beautiful color and the distinctive shape. They would make a wonderful, but not very tasty slaugh. I’m considering these for the patio garden in the next month or so. I think they would be very interesting with a backdrop of sweet peas. Something to hide the dirt and warm the heart.

The conclusion to the penultimate chapter “Feeling”, save for an anecdote about a Persian rug purchased in San Francisco.

Evolution designed the human brain not to accurately understand itself but to help us survive. We observe ourselves and the world and make enough sense of things to get along. Some of us, interested in knowing ourselves more deeply—seek to get past our intuitive ideas of us. We can. We can use our conscious minds to study to identify and to pierce our cognitive illusions. By broadening our perspective to take into account how our minds operate, we can achieve a more enlightened view of who we are. But even as we grow to better understand ourselves, we should maintain our appreciation of the fact that if our mind’s natural view of the world is skewed it is skewed for a reason.

Evolution is mentioned numerous times in the course of the book, always in a sort of lighthearted, nontechnical way. As Mlodinow approaches the end of the book, however, he lets his guard down, I think, and allows certain unmistakable notions to creep into the text. One such notion is that evolution is in some way an entity capable of thought and design. Whereas evolution is a process. From the Life Science website:

The theory of evolution by natural selection, first formulated in Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, is the process by which organisms change over time as a result of changes in heritable physical or behavioral traits. Changes that allow an organism to better adapt to its environment will help it survive and have more offspring.

Evolution did not design the human brain. But in terms compatible with evolution, over an extended period of time tiny changes accrued that were passed on to offspring that ultimately resulted in the human brain. Nor did evolution design anything that helped in survival. Survival itself is what perpetuated the brain and all other evolutionary characteristics.

The word “design” is important here because a movement exists called Intelligent Design that seeks to build on the notion that certain systems are too complex to have evolved on their own. The eye is one such system. But remember, no criticism of science is so powerful that it cannot be rejected with a knowing look and a chuckle. There are probably ten articles or videos maintaining with straight faces that the eye is not very extraordinary for every one maintaining that the eye is too complex to have been formed by shaking a box with a hundred billion billiard balls inside. The problem is that the eye consists of numerous subsystems whose sole function is to be part of an eye. Highly complex subsystems. There is no reason for them to exist beyond servicing an eye. So in order to evolve an eye, you need to evolve all sorts of things that seemingly have no purpose until suddenly an eye exists. Only then does it all make sense. If you lack any one of the ingredients, or have one too many, you have no eye.

Of course, Mlodinow’s subject is the brain, not the eye, though he has a great deal to say about the eye and the brain working together in unexpected ways. I would be tempted to say that the human brain is not merely a question of a bit more tissue in the frontal lobe, something that could easily be produced by evolution, but something vastly more complex even than eyes. The fact that we function simultaneously on conscious and subconscious levels should tell us, the moment we come to terms with it, that more is at work in the universe than mere rationality.

So, saying that evolution “designed the human brain” and concluding that “our mind’s natural view of the world is skewed” for a reason is to fall off the Science train and succumb to a kind of religion of evolution. In another era he might have said God designed the human brain and gave us certain propensities of thought to help us survive. And I don’t think anyone would have thought twice about it. But God has not designed, Science has not designed, evolution has designed. And why? To help us survive. Thank God for evolution.

We associate the sudden spurt of green with springtime, at least I always have. But winter is in full bloom. It rained about two weeks ago and again last night, or the night before I took this picture. Things are brown until they get wet, and things get wet in winter, not in spring, unless you’re talking about watering the garden. The hills around here have a light hint of green about them. It will last until the water is used up and the brown returns. And it will be brown for so long that we forget the green, or only vaguely remember. Broken weeds and dirt will return… and stay. This is not green country. Beautiful, but not green.

Had the subject matter been subatomic particles, rather than football, I’m sure Mlodinow would have paid closer attention. As it it, I think he embarrassed himself on this one, though no one seems to have noticed. “Biased interpretations of ambiguous events are at the heart of some of our most heated arguments,” he says on p. 204. Nothing to argue with there. But he goes on at length to say:

In the 1950s a pair of psychology professors, one from Princeton, the other from Dartmouth decided to see if even a year after the event Princeton and Dartmouth students would be capable of objectivity about an important football game. The game in question was a brutal match in which Dartmouth played especially rough but Princeton came out on top. The scientists showed showed a group of students from each school a film of the match and asked them to take note of every infraction they spotted specifying which were “flagrant” or “mild.” Princeton students saw the Dartmouth team commit more than twice as many infractions as their own team, while Dartmouth students contend about an equal number on both sides. Princeton viewers rated most of the Dartmouth fouls as flagrant but few of their own as such, whereas the Dartmouth viewers rated only a few of their own infractions as flagrant but half of Princeton’s. And when asked if Dartmouth was playing intentionally rough or dirty, the vast majority of the Princeton fans said “yes” while the vast majority of the Dartmouth fans who had a definite opinion said “no.” The researchers wrote, “The same sensory experiences emanating from the football field transmitted through the visual mechanism to the brain … gave rise to different experiences in different people … There is no such ‘thing’ as a game existing ‘out there’ in its own right which people merely ‘observe.’”

He then adds, “I like that last quote because although it was written about football, it seems to be true about the game of life in general.” “The same sensory experiences emanating from the football field transmitted through the visual mechanism to the brain…” This is pseudoscientific bullshit for they watched a replay of the game. Had they watched the game without eyes or brains the results would have been very different. Fortunately, they had both. But the conclusion is the thing. “There is no such ‘thing’ as a game existing ‘out there’ in its own right which people merely ‘observe.’” But there was never an effort on the part of the testers to find a neutral place or a neutral group to evaluate the game. They chose students from the opposing schools, young people with vested interests in the results. And they did this only one season after the infamous game. The Freshmen were now Sophomores. How much more maturity and impartiality should they expect? Not only were they students at the opposing schools, but as the paragraph goes on to say, they were Princeton and Dartmouth fans. They were anything but neutral.

And life is indeed a lot like that. People with vested interests tend to support those interests. When a jury is selected the attorneys asks the potential jurors if they know the defendant, if they have heard about him in the newspapers or other media, if they have formed an opinion about innocence or guilt. This is a normal attempt to eliminate jurors with vested interests. If that becomes a problem, the attorneys may ask for a change of venue. In other words, they can request that the trial be moved to a place where neutral jurors are more likely to be found.

If you want a valid evaluation of a game, whether the game is football or life, you need people removed from the actualities of the game, the school, the fans, to make that evaluation. Laplanders taught the rules of American Football could have done that. But that wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted to show that students of a particular school would support their school, and they wanted to suggest that that had something to do with their brains malfunctioning. They also wanted to dress it up in bullshit and publish it in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, which they did in issue 49 (1954), because that’s what academic psychologists do.

Mlodinov, a physicist, took it hook, line and sinker.

Geranium leaves toward the bottom and dirt toward the top. On the way to town this morning just after a light rain. A single bloom with another on the way and a drop here and there of last night’s rain. Things one does not expect. A precarious beauty. Observed because I was avoiding the wind on the wrong side of the street. The wrong side. Left and right. Right and wrong. And then… this.

I remember a beautiful young blond I went to school with who insisted on having the last word on everything from Genghis Kahn to Lenin, on the grounds that she was, after all, a History major. Later that year she discovered that History majors had to read piles of books, not to learn more about Genghis Kahn, but to figure out how historians used the material at their disposal to create History. She filled out a form and changed her major to English, after which she became an authority on grammar, syntax and all things literary. She was still taking Civics 101, a class now considered politically incorrect, and had yet to take even one class on grammar, syntax or anything literary. She was, after all, a Freshman.

I remember meeting the grandmother of my girlfriend in a beautiful apartment in Copenhagen around that time. We had tea and very slow conversation because her grandmother and I lacked a common language. She asked what I intended to study at University. I said, “English.” There was a moment of silence, followed by a long and rather subdued discussion between the grandmother and granddaughter. Finally, my girlfriend, with a smile on her face, said, “She thought you already spoke English.”

The names we give things can sometimes be confusing. There is a big difference, for example, between being a student of History and being a student who studies History. Just as there is a difference between wanting to study English and wanting to learn English. Having the word “English” stamped on a folder in the Registrars Office does not confer even the slightest amount of knowledge or language ability. It’s merely the title of the area one intends to study.

What came of the beautiful young blond I have no idea. It was the 60s, so maybe she got arrested for possession of marijuana, got pregnant and dropped out of school, found yet another major, or pushed through and became a professor of something. My personal hope is that when she writes her biography she will thank that nameless young man — Will she remember him as handsome? — who first explained to her that in order to be a student of something you first have to study it.

This is just a tree on the side of a house I normally walk past on the way to the store. It’s interesting to me that it seems almost invisible as I approach the soccer field. I should say trees rather than tree. It seems to be a collection of them, though I suspect they have a common root structure. It was almost sunset as I passed this time, the light shining directly on the trunk. It became something more than just a tree. It became monstrously large and anything but invisible. It’s a eucalyptus, and some eucalyptus trees have a way of growing absolutely for ever unless a stop is put to them. As a boy I remember climbing in a friend’s eucalyptus tree — I was not half so brave as my friend who climbed almost out of sight — but I also remember when the city came by with large trucks and cut it down to almost nothing. It was considered dangerous, or dangerously large. But I also remember it growing back. And remember it growing stubbornly back again and again. A few years ago I drove past that same tree and it seemed almost as large as it seemed when they first cut it back. I remember thinking that its roots must go all the way to China. Nothing could hold it back for long. But had they done nothing, it may well have turned into this magnificent and ominous tree on the side of a house lending shade to the soccer field and frightening no one.

I’m going to post a series of things prompted by the reading of a book, both interesting and somewhat upsetting. They fit together in a poetic way, which is the best I can come up with. They are not a review of the book. It’s in its 23rd paperback printing — not a record, but still impressive — so chances are that if you were going to read it you already have. The book in question is Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow, pronounced (p. 27) “Ma-lah-DI-nov”. I found the first three quarters of it completely engrossing but the last quarter, or maybe only the last fifth rather irksome. I’ll squeeze most of that into what follows over the next week or so.

Mlodinow is a professor of Physics at CalTech, which means the chances of him being right in the things I accuse him of being wrong in are enormous. He’s also a very likable person, or so it seems, with a fine sense of humor. So I place myself clearly in the inferior position as I express my views. I should also say, as Michael Shermer of Scientific American says on the cover, “I urge you you read the book.” It’s filled almost to the brim with interesting facts and ideas. You should then think it over and complain as I am about to do.

I started to lose interest after the two hundredth psychological test was reviewed. Clearly an exaggeration. Academic psychologists tend to test students. I think that’s a very true statement. So a lot of what teaches us about life comes from people who are just starting to learn about it themselves. But, if you work on a college campus, you work with students. Also, one of the amazing things about the studies reported is that they seem to be significant largely because they contradict the assumptions of the testers. Or, that the tested said one thing but seemed to believe another. I have some politically incorrect interpretations of this which I hope to share.

They will be posted between flower posts and will not have pictures. Like that, you can easily skip them, if you like.

This flower was in a ramshackle garden off the beaten path. Plants growing up in a pile of junk and and one solitary flower. But what a flower. To the right, on a leaf, you’ll see an interesting bug. We don’t have many bugs here, except the ants that perpetually wander around my kitchen. When it rains they pursue the kitchen, when the sun’s out I never see them. As for all the other bugs, maybe it’s the weather. Maybe bugs like a bit more heat and sunshine. I’m grasping at straws here, but the truth is, we have very few bugs. I think this is the only one I’ve caught in a photograph. But the flower. It seems to go with the pointy leaves, which I associate with geraniums, and a good botanist, I suppose, would be able to identify it off the top of his head. But no bother. This garden is one flower and one bug away from total obscurity.

On my way to the Vets Hall for Monday night dinner, where if past experience holds true, I will talk to a dozen or more different people, say and hear nothing of any value, and then walk slowly home again. But it’s nice to be with people. It’s nice to have a hot meal I did not prepare myself or eat by myself in front of the computer. It’s always nice not knowing what’s for dinner. So, it’s as close to a mixed blessing as I can come up with. When I don’t go I miss it. When I do go I wonder if, perhaps, I should have stayed home. But tonight I’m on my way to dinner.

Ornamental cabbages getting their start in life, with some random nasturtiums having a different idea. The nasturtiums in this case are weeds and will soon be removed. There was a corner lot on my daily walk that had one plant growing in the front and side yard. One infinitely replicating, but nonetheless beautiful, nasturtium. Today it is entirely dirt, but with tiny nasturtiums peeping through. They don’t give up just because you pull them from the ground. They have landlines to other gardens. They are extremely tenacious. And yet rounded and… I let them grow until the moment I really must pull them up.

Off the sidewalk just behind where I live is a strip of dirt a few feet wide in front of an old wooden fence. In late summer the gardener or handyman for the building cleared all the weeds that had cluttered the space. All but three or four bumps of thick foliage near the top of the strip. Maybe he liked them. They were lush and green and rounded. Four months later they are four or five feet tall and just as lush except for the tallest one. It towers over a six foot fence and has begun at last to decay. It has a trunk, if weeds have trunks, that would require two hands to reach around. I theorize, with no evidence whatsoever, that it found a leak in a water main, possibly a sewer pipe, allowing it to grow to this enormous size. Only yesterday did I notice the browning of these leaves. Has it reached its limits? Will the man who takes care of this strip of land now hack it down? Does he have equipment for anything this large? Or are we all going to die of radiation poisoning? I see the size and I see the browning and I worry. Something seems very wrong.

What might be called a mess of Alstroemeria. They were on sale last week, so I bought white and what appears to be pink. It was all guess work, because the blooms were still closed. I bought two bunches because they were smaller than usual — in fact, they were almost the only flowers on sale, because the nurseries, I think, take this month off — and two was the perfect number. They waited a day and a half before opening, and this was the surprise I woke up to. “Good morning,” they said.

A block off my normal walk is a stretch of carefully maintained things I hesitate to call bushes. They are in all sorts of shapes and stand in sharp contrast to sidewalk, trees and cars. I always thought topiary was the art of shaping plants into elephants or reindeer or one’s favorite pet. But apparently that is only a subset of topiary. According to Wikipedia, “Topiary is the horticultural practice of training perennial plants by clipping the foliage and twigs of trees, shrubs and subshrubs to develop and maintain clearly defined shapes, whether geometric or fanciful.” I suppose “fanciful” includes Rex and Fluffy. This display stretches to the corner and then down the side street. It has all sorts of geometric shapes that one struggles to find words for. There’s hardly a leaf out of place. Without the trees growing upward into the sky, one might think this is how bushes and shrubs and so forth are meant to grow, that the owner simply maintains their proclivity for angular shape. But we know that’s not true. It’s interesting, but also a tiny bit disturbing. Interesting because the plants so willingly allow this. Disturbing because someone wanted them to be something other than they naturally are. In the end, I find myself walking quickly past, looking for flowers and succulents and trees and other things.

It’s a drab, overcast day today, but nonetheless an historic one. After months of waiting, the very first sweet pea of the season. In a few more months there will be no fence, no string, only a wall of sweet peas flowering in a rainbow of colors. But we held our breath. Watered and waited. It’s a day for the soothsayer, if we only had one. Somewhere between pink and red. What does it say for the coming year?

My father, who was an accomplished landscape designer in his spare time, frequently found places for birds of paradise. They don’t work everywhere, but when they do, there’s nothing quite like them. Their bloom is absolutely spectacular, and if you’re patient, you can watch them stretch themselves upward, swell and then slowly open like the last chapter of a very good book. When the plant is young it is quite attractive, its leaves are long and arch in all directions above the lesser plants. But my father would not have tolerated such a plant as this. It has overgrown. It has become a chaotic jungle with damaged, competing leaves. He would literally have dug it up and replaced it. Or given instructions to the gardener who inherited his design to do so. It was supposed to be delicate and surprising in all ways. It was never supposed to age or overrun anything. I used to lie in the grass and keep track of the blooms, those that had opened and those that were about to open. I was always amazed.

On the table I see plates of taquitos, tacos, and tamales, a large bowl of guacamole with chips, two peppers, and half an avocado. The gray-haired man on the left doing the cooking is the founder of the restaurant where this mural and many more may be found painted on an outside wall. It’s a family portrait, I think, celebrating twenty-five years in business. But the family seems to include JFK in the upper right eating a burrito. Always a good sign. The burritos are really good there. Who JFK has his arm around I’m not sure. But next is Frida Kahlo, with some of her Calla Lilies in the lower left, and what seems to be a painting of Abraham Lincoln, or a Mexican equivalent, and then Elvis Presley, or an Elvis impersonator, or maybe El Vez the great and wonderful. At the table, within reach of the guacamole, is St. Mother Teresa. How could the food not be good if Mother Teresa eats there? The dogs, I suspect, are family dogs. If I could add the smell that wafts into the parking lot, and show you twenty people outside waiting to get in, you might understand why everyone, or almost everyone, in this picture looks so well fed and happy.

Something dramatic for the new year. A bush in the garden has been nothing but a bush for quite some time. One that I water around to catch the flowering things we planted two months ago. Then, without warning, possibly because it rained last week, the bush transformed itself into a magnificent hibiscus. In one flowering moment it went from drab green to extraordinary. Red flowers bloomed all over it, seemingly at once. Yesterday there was nothing. Today it dominates the garden. Even the Calla Lilies are finding it difficult to compete. Perhaps in tropical zones this is an ordinary flower — imagine that — but here it is absolutely breathtaking.

When my mother died the typewriter was in a closet downstairs, unused for a very long time. It belonged to her older sister, whom I suspect was already dead, who loaned it to her when she was going to school. My mother was an unusual student. She entered UCLA at age fourteen, came down with scarlet fever, and then recovered for a number of years. Today they just give you antibiotics and send you back to work. She ended up at La Verne College, down the road from where her family lived. She became a teacher in a private school teaching, for what it’s worth, Walt Disney’s children.

My mother’s father, my maternal grandfather, was a Southern Democrat who believed there were basically two kinds of people: good Democrats and bad Republicans. I would call him today a rabid Democrat. He called me at UCSB from what was assumed to be his deathbed in the hospital to ask if I was going to vote. Nixon, who had lost a very close election to John F. Kennedy, had decided to hold up as California Governor while waiting for his revenge. He ran against incumbent Pat Brown, father of the current governor, and my grandfather said there would be a ticket waiting for me to fly home and vote against “that bastard.” Nixon lost, though not because of my vote specifically.

I tell this story to introduce the fact that my mother’s older sister, the one who loaned her the typewriter, married a man named Herbert Hoover. Not the Herbert Hoover, but Herbert Hoover nonetheless. A Republican. An odd man who had account books showing every penny he ever spent. His wife became a Republican.

Now my grandfather should have disowned her, not that people don’t have the right to vote whichever way they choose. But he wasn’t just a Democrat. He was, as I said, a rabid Democrat. From what I gather, my aunt wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, but my grandfather favored her. My mother, of course, would have preferred a public burning, a revenge killing, a final emphatic ending that allowed no reprieve. But my grandfather pretended that everything was just as it should be. He never mentioned politics around the only Republican anyone could remember in his family. So my mother did the next best thing. She never spoke to her again, and never returned the typewriter.

My mother had some very special abilities, but also some rather pronounced deficiencies. She could pull the typewriter out of the closet when needed and type without warming up or looking at the keys at roughly 50 words a minute. She just typed or didn’t type. And she did this on a clunky manual typewriter that in its day was state of the art. In college I labored over a ten page paper and asked her if she would read it before I turned it in. She poured herself a cup of tea, grabbed a pencil, circled the misspelled words, changed the punctuation, underlined and drew arrows to change the syntax, straight through the ten pages and handed them back to me. When I asked what she thought she replied, “Did you want me to read it?”

She could see everything on the page that needed to be changed without having the slightest idea what was said.

She could also see things that were too small to be seen. My father played games with her in the car. He’d ask what that white building was. She’d lean forward a bit and say, “It’s the Franklin Building.” “Oh good. I have to turn right at the Franklin Building.” But what my father and I saw was a grayish blog on the horizon. He was making up the right turn. No one could see the sign over the doorway. But my mother, who leaned forward for a moment, read the sign that was invisible to us, and as we got closer, it was indeed the Franklin Building. She did such things on a regular basis.

And she could hear things that were too small or too faint to be heard. One New Year’s Eve they were having a party at the house. The guests were scheduled to go to one or two houses before ours and then celebrate the new year with us. It was a split level house and we were having dinner in the far middle level, but my mother was very uneasy about something. “Do you hear that?” she said. There was silence at the table. Finally, my father said, “Hear what?” She threw her fork down and and said, “Listen.” More silence. She got up from the table, walked downstairs, stood in front of a wall between my bedroom and the den, and pointed. She was so agitated that my father called a friend who was a contractor who showed up in a suit and tie with a small tool chest. He pulled some furniture out of my closet and found a discoloration on the drywall about the size of a dime. He cut a six inch hole in the wall to reveal a tiny spray from a damaged copper pipe. The spray had just begun. He used a small c-clamp and a piece of rubber to stop the tiny leak and said he’d send someone the next afternoon to fix it. The leak made no humanly audible sound, but it was loud enough that my mother couldn’t eat.

There were many things like this. But there were also bizarre things. One year it rained and rained. I remember a similar time when I was four or five. The result was that the level in the backyard pool began to rise. When it reached the coping my mother became hysterical. Not upset, hysterical. If the water reached the top it would begin to overflow, and when it overflowed it would wash out all the houses beneath us and the roadway beyond. People would die.

I tried to explain to her that the only water that would go downhill would be the total rain water that fell. The pool would add no water itself. But what she saw was that when the water reached the top, and she expressed this with grandiose gestures, the pool water would surge in the air and continue surging until everything down the hill was gone. I hesitate to call this delusional, because I think it’s something well beyond that.

I walked to the side of the house, turned a valve, sent the water through a pipe to the gutter in the front, and after an hour or so of sheer panic and screaming, the pool level was once again normal. Even if I’d done nothing, the overflow would have followed an engineered walkway out to the same gutter, because the pool people thought this out in advance. My mother’s version was that she saved everyone’s life by panicking.

I told some of these stories to a spiritualist, if I may call her that, many years ago to see what she would say. She said, “Sometimes they told your mother what she understood, and sometimes they didn’t.” It was her opinion that my mother wasn’t the one who saw, heard or thought those things. She merely responded to the messages.

Never once did my mother think there was anything unusual about her life, except, of course, that one of her sisters was a Republican.

There’s a pattern to these clusters of buds that before they begin to bloom seems quite purposeful. But they don’t burst forth all at once, their blooming seems almost random. One goes up, another to the side, and still others go toward the ground, but in no particular order. They seem to bloom when they are ready to bloom, but not together. The result is a seeming absence of pattern, though the pattern is obviously there. But step back a few feet or approach the blooming plant from a distance and the disorder seems primary. As if children were taping the blooms to fresh leaves, as children might, wherever they seem necessary.

When I designed this blog, rounded corners were a Netscape proposal. If you used Netscape (or later on Firefox) you could round corners, but no one else supported the proposal. It was round here and square there. In those days people proudly announced at the top of their websites Maximized for Firefox. Of course, you don’t publish books to be read only by left-handers. You publish for the largest possible group. So, that was a kind of idiocy akin to preferring Coke to Pepsi, even though without the label Pepsi wins the taste test about 90% of the time.

There were articles written about how warm and friendly rounded corners were, compared to right-angled corners. One of the big companies added instruction boxes with rounded corners and everyone jumped aboard to say how absolutely wonderful it was. It was roomy and friendly. But the rounded corners were done with graphics. You could make one square graphic with a rounded corner and then rotate it 90º, 90º, 90º, and have four graphics, one for each corner. Then it was just a matter of directing each graphic to the right corner. Using four graphics, the box could expand or contract and still have warm, friendly corners.

Of course, it was more complicated than that.

I didn’t want boxes that got big and small, just blog boxes that got long and short. So, I designed one graphic for the top and one for the bottom of each post, for the title and for the archive, and things were enormously simplified. And so it sat for many years.

Sunday I did what I almost never do. It’s been years, really. I gave out the address of my blog to someone on my daily walk. When I got home, just in case, I checked to make sure everything was working. And it wasn’t. It was a mess. All the top graphics were missing. They were listed as no longer available. I was in shock.

The code, written years ago, though neat and orderly, was Greek to me. It took a full day for it to turn back into English. In the Army I could forget how to type on a three day leave. I’d sit down at the typewriter Monday morning and relearn the keys. That sounds silly, but there are some things you really must remember and other things you just can’t wait to forget. If it weren’t for computers, I wouldn’t know how to type today. I Googled “rounded corners” and found the following.

border-radius: 25px;

A little snippet that is now supported by everyone. So I threw away all the graphics and added one line to the CSS, et voilà. Of course, it took a few more hours to correct all the spacing and pull everything back together.

If you read this on a smart phone, you won’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about. The plan for small screens is to pull the text and add a thumbnail for the photo. It works well enough, but it leaves the artistry behind. The date was one thing I was really proud of. It was a stroke of such genius that no one, and I mean absolutely no one, noticed. It was one of the first JavaScripts I wrote. It took the date from Blogger, deconstructed it, reversed the order, added periods and double digits, and then called up the graphics for the numbers and periods in reverse order, top to bottom, so it rested sideways on the page. So simple, and yet so complicated. I think I like it as much today as I did then.

I’m also happy with the brown and with the logo, and the archive that came in many shapes until I settled on this one. It was fun to design. But enough. It’s no longer broken. It’s better proportioned, still rounded and happier than ever. Enjoy.

I pass an electrician's storefront or headquarters on the edge of a residential area. It has an interesting logo and a handmade sign that changes colors. It also has this. Next to the door in a small planter is what might be called a water feature. It’s a large bowl which seems to be ceramic buried in rocks, surrounded by this and that of a mildly colorful nature, with bicycle derailleur gears and brake disk turned into a small fountain inside. It runs day and night because, as the electrician explained to me, it runs on a small solar cell out of sight on the roof connected to a car battery — you can see a wire going over the edge at the upper right — that runs a pump at the bottom. It gives the sound of trickling water that echoes upward, and makes the entrance a very happy place. I’m only sorry I have no electrical work to offer him. He also has a beautifully restored and mildly hot rodded 50s pickup on the side with his logo on it and, I suspect, when the waves are up and business is down, he’s at the beach. You can tell a lot about people by such details. He has a bright smile and is happy to explain things. These are not the traits of electricians in general, they are the wonderful traits of a happy person. On every walk I rest in front of the fountain to build up strength before continuing.

Sometimes the most delightful things are where you least expect them. This wonderful flower was found in a planter with its friends in the alley between the fire department and the market. Not exactly prime real estate, but all it needed. Could it possibly be more complicated or more beautiful? I doubt that anyone sees it as they drive by, or that anyone walking pauses to admire it. It is simply there. Like so much of the world, it goes unnoticed.

To my knowledge there are no flowers associated with ivy. Of course, I could be wrong. I think ivy reproduces by aggressively continuing on its path. I know that it takes forever to get rid of ivy, because there’s always some of it left somewhere and before long, like ants in the kitchen, the ivy’s back. Here are some new leaves pushing out beyond older ones. The older leaves will darken and die when they have no light, but the ivy will continue. It looks nice when carefully maintained, but left to its own it can engulf an entire house. It should come with a warning notice and a delete button. I’m going deeply into my childhood to say these things. I remember filling up trash cans with pulled out ivy. And then, over weeks and months, watching it grow back. It’s a bit like bamboo which sends out shoots under sidewalks if necessary to grow where it wasn’t planted. We sometimes thought that unchecked bamboo could threaten the foundation of the house. A little of it here and there looked so elegant, until it was coming up in the middle of the lawn and pushing through the air vents. Bamboo and ivy are both, I think, beautiful weeds. I really enjoy them in a garden that isn’t mine.

Last week in a post titled The Great American Dream I wrote about a new shopping center in San Luis Obispo that I thought was one too many, hurtful to other businesses and otherwise unnecessary. But I just found some pictures I took on the way to the Palm to see The Shape of Water. Once you start taking pictures of flowers on your daily walk it becomes in no time at all an ingrained habit. I didn’t mean to suggest that there was something wrong with the architecture of the buildings, the architecture is actually quite nice. It’s the need for them that I question. But the flowers were on the verge of spectacular.

The landscape architect, if they had one, had eight or ten large pots — I’ll have to count them on my next trip — to fill with something interesting. He (or she) chose to make each one a separate piece of art. Some are showing signs of shock, but they are new and will work that out in the coming months. Here are two examples that I took on my way to the movie without really thinking about it. Lots of color, lots of blooms, pots that seemed almost magnetic.

On the way home one night… That’s as much of the story as I know so far. We walk through the day seeing almost nothing, but at night, when there is precious little to see, we strain to see anything at all. Here is a tree of sorts looking ferocious, or simply dramatic, illuminated by a single street light. I think the photograph is more dramatic, more ferocious than the reality. The sidewalk, the street, the houses were all quite ordinary. Just as expected. The blackness of night wasn’t quite so black, so final as the photograph makes it look. In fact, I was on my way home one night when I stopped to see if I could capture this. It was winter and cold. I got more than I bargained for. I look now and feel slightly uncomfortable.

This blob of color is from a neglected geranium. It's from the same house that pulled up the poppies but replanted the seeds. Geraniums grow anywhere, and almost thrive on neglect, but they require a great deal of attention and skill to be properly maintained. Poppies, on the other hand, just grow and grow.

When I was a boy we lived in Torrance. It was still covered here and there with disused oil derricks. In those days, profit was profit, and there was no profit in dismantling disused oil derricks. Today, I doubt there is a single vacant lot in all of Torrance. Hawthorn Blvd., the largest street in Torrance simply stopped around Torrance Blvd., an east west street that now takes people to the beach. And Torrance Blvd. also stopped in almost the same place, but continued in good weather as a dirt trail to Redondo Beach and then started up again. We lived on the edge of nothing.

Above this mess was Palos Verdes, a hill with significant plantings on top — bean fields mainly — but with a section to the west filled with expensive homes. Today there is hardly a vacant lot there either. The style was Mediterranean. CC&Rs required tile roofs and an art jury to make sure everything was meticulously fake. In other words, to look like it came from somewhere on the Mediterranean. My father, who worked nine months a year, supplemented his income in the summers by doing landscaping. He could look at empty yards and see the final product. He could landscape completely in his head.

So his favorite pastime, other than golf, was driving around on Sunday looking at houses. I probably drove past every house from Newport Beach to Santa Monica. I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but we saw lots and lots of houses, and picked lots and lots of leaves off plants and trees to discuss with nurserymen. Today I think the style of these houses would drive me crazy, but a characteristic of many of the imposing structures in Palos Verdes was large clay pots of flowers on pedestals next to the front door. Beautiful tufts of white, pink, red, and sometimes mixed. An even profusion of perfect blooms. They were geraniums. Perfect geraniums that I now believe were grown in small greenhouses and rotated to the front porch. Not by the owners, of course, but by the gardeners.

So while the houses and the fake antiques would drive me crazy, I think I could live all day long with perfect tufts of geranium blooms. I believe this because even this forlorn, neglected geranium gives me a tinge of happiness that is truly difficult to explain.

I really like this picture. The flower is obviously from a bush of some sort, a hedge perhaps. I really don’t remember it. Maybe I took a different walk that day. Maybe it’s been there all the time but I just haven’t noticed it. It’s so delicately white with an airbrushed or watercolored center bleeding into the outer white. And many more about to bloom. Maybe I stopped for the pain in my legs to dissipate. Maybe I was just tired and stopped. Or maybe I stopped because of the delicate coloration and the fragility of the white. The bush seems of no interest whatsoever, except for this almost miraculous bloom. Is there a message here? Am I supposed to see or think something? Flowers speak to insects. They draw them in to fertilize the next generation. Perhaps when we see flowers, like this one, we see every love we have ever had without quite remembering, or understanding. Perhaps flowers speak also to us.

New sidewalks ripped through my walk this year. But for everything gained, inevitably, something is lost. After a while the loss becomes regularized, the memory less intense and the status quo more defensible. However, nothing is free. Change, whether good or bad, comes at a cost. This twenty year old path to the street now leads to a concrete slab. Which is progress, of a sort, but also a step toward uniformity, predictability and the very ordinary. This, in the late afternoon sun, is the detritus of a long, uniform sidewalk leading to nowhere new. May your New Year be happy, and may the destruction it brings be light.