I'm a lasagna boy!

It takes a village.

Do transit villages have any foundation in reality?

Fruitvale has built one; a multimodal station was recently completed in Millbrae;

Nevertheless, the Embarcadero of San Francisco has a shameful sight every Saturday: in the middle of a homegrown transit village (MUNI's F-Market, the Golden Gate Ferry, BART, and Amtrak), car-driving patrons receive discounted parking.

Strip-mining the city.

The photography of Edward Burtynsky grabbed my eye when an announcement of an upcoming (well, 2005) retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art appeared in the New York Times.
His photography explores the displacement of nature through the works of man: highway interchanges, landfills, cargo commerce.

Those who cannot remember the past ...

The phoenix rising from the ashes of San Francisco's venerated Emporium will feature franchise stores, a $410MM shopping center, a department store, and a multiplex movie theatre. Within eyeshot (or spitting distance, which might be more appropriate to this neighbourhood) is the Metreon, Sony's failed experiment at an urban vertical mall.

Will the new shopping centre create synergy with its physical neighbours, as the Metreon failed to do? Will the centre entice people to spend a day in various errands and past-times, not only in the centre itself but in the neighbourhood?

Trendytransit is in the house.

Not if, when, according to the California High-Speed Rail Authority.
On the front page of today's Examiner, and scattered through other news sources, many reports about the proposed 700-mile (and 220 mph) bullet train linking San Francisco (representing Northern Cal) and Los Angeles (So. Cal) noted that our Governator has voiced strong opposition to the $37 billion project.

As an alternative, the state could build 3,000 miles of new freeway (according to the 2,300-page draft environmental report) and build at least five new airport runways. Given the debacle over the proposed expansion (and bay infill) of San Francisco International's runways, that seems unlikely. (The runways would probably need to be in places like SFO, LAX, SAN, and SAC, where population is growing most rapidly; the study says, "intrastate demand will grow 63 percent and population will grow 31 percent, mostly in the Central Valley, they found bullet trains were the best option".) Co-incident to this, the Federal Aviation Administration has announced plans to triple air-control capacity in the next 20 years -- the same time-frame as the high-speed rail plan.

Presidential dreams, Nr.2

If highways weren't freeways, and if the Federal and State governments held them to financing standards similar to other public transit ...
Toll roads everywhere: automatic, electronic metering for cars and trucks. Discounts given to pre-purchase, bulk travel (interstate hauling? regular commuters? carpoolers, or those who can demonstrate that they carry three or more people from ~1 mi of origin to ~1 mi of destination?).
This would create disincentives for ad-hoc trips, perhaps, and certainly not encourage people to commute long distances for work. Exemptions for those who make under a certain amount per household? This might reduce charges of economic unfairness. Discounts for drivers with more fuel-efficient cars? This could be deeply tied to state automotive registration. Of course, data would need to be anonymized at some level, so that the government could not track movement in a scary way. Perhaps the data could be put in escrow with a trusted independent auditor or bank, in the same (shudder!) way that Verisign holds the domain registry?
Perhaps two banks or auditors.

Permutation for a taxi.

From Joe Rogers' Metropolitan Diary column in The New York Times:

Dear Diary:
It was one of those super-frigid evenings recently. I left work about 8 p.m., desperate to find a taxi to get home and out of the cold. There were plenty of taxis heading uptown, but all were occupied. Suddenly, one pulled up to the curb about a half-block away, the medallion light went on and I dashed over to grab it.
Just as I arrived at the taxi from the downtown side, another fellow arrived from the uptown side. The following exchange then took place between two seasoned New Yorkers:
Him: "Gee, we arrived at the same time."
Me (hoping we can just share the cab): "We sure did. Are you heading uptown ?"
Him: "No, downtown."
Me: "Let's choose for it. Odds and evens?"
Him: "No. Rock paper."
Me: "O.K."
Him: "O.K., on the count of three."
Both: "Once. Twice. Three. Shoot."
At which point he held out two fingers (scissors) and I held out my hand, palm-side down (paper). Scissors beating paper, he jumped into the taxi with nary a word, and off he went. I ended up taking the subway home.

This on the heels of a recent piece in The New Yorker about an obsessive taxi driver who cruises midtown in a vintage Chcker. I like to remember how I wanted to pay for graduate school by being a hackie, aka Fountain of Wisdom.

Would I? Would I?

This afternoon, saw a man energetically applying himself to a recently-decapitated tree on Haight St.

This Wood Carving Fearlessly Resuscitates Faith Into Tree Medicine For The Purpose of Cherishing Indigenous Teachings and Life In The Fillmore

Stationary transit.

The City of Berkeley once again faces parking-meter vandals, surly Reinos, and cascading lost revenue, all due to its technological approach to parking enforcement.
Although this doesn't immediately fall under the rubric of "transit," the concept of spending $3.3MM to maintain $1.9MM in revenue seems ridiculous. Could the money be better applied towards incentives for the use of public transit, and towards more effective bus and BART schedules?

All my troubles seemed so far() away ...

Trying to algorithmically determine when "yesterday" was.

A movie not yet made.

Published in Planet Online comes this tit-bit:

"It would have been more likely that the two blond-haired, blue-eyed
surfers who got off a plane in Sana, the capital of Yemen, about eight
months ago had their flight to Bali rerouted. But Californians Charlie
Smith and Jay Winters, both in their mid-20s, were actually in Yemen to
catch some waves. Far from a surf destination, Yemen is on the U.S. State
Department list of terrorist nations and is fraught with warring tribes
and radical Islamic fundamentalism. So Smith and Winters, both with
degrees in Middle Eastern studies and fluent in Arabic, were either
diplomats on surfboards or just out of their minds. Traveling with a
bodyguard, a photographer, loaded guns, food, medical supplies, and
surfboards, they spent two months tracing the coast of the Indian Ocean.
Sometimes an entire village formed on the shores or cliffs to watch the
first surfers ever seen. Out of the water, they explored a culture whose
architecture, dress and cuisine blend Indian, African and Indonesian
influences.

"They encountered people who spoke openly about American policy without
disdaining Americans. Trouble at frequent armed checkpoints and
machine-gun toting tribesmen . there are more guns per capita in Yemen
than anywhere else in the world . were often quelled by the Americans'
ability to speak Arabic. Whatever metaphors on diplomacy and peace can be
drawn from their surfing, Smith and Winters did trigger a dialogue in
Yemen and now back at home on how misunderstood cultures can communicate
with one another. This month, the pair is surfing the winter swells in
Southern Lebanon with Hezbollah, considered by the US to be one of the
most dangerous anti-Israeli terrorist groups. "It's about taking one more
off-limits or unknown place and making it real and available," says
Winters. "Danger is only a matter of perception." "

They all look homogenous.

Sitting on the 8.37 train: a row of four young men, three listening to iPods, three working diligently on 15" PowerBooks, three with goatees and shaved-bald heads. Behind us are full racks of bicycles, including four fixed-gear (two back-to-front with pursuit bars) and one single-speed.

Do I notice because these are my traits and I'm amused that others share them?

So exquisitely grand.

Listening to Palace{Brothers, Music}. Last week Sara(h) was playing The Fall at the Edinburgh Castle, this week she was listening to Bonny Prince Billy.

These are the people that you meet.

This morning stopped for the usual at Coopers, where Jeremy was working solo. He knew my favourite mug already (!!) but asked whether I like the espresso "short" or "medium." I paused; I've never confronted that question, as the cheery baristas behind the counter have always pulled the coffee just right. "Medium?" I hazarded, remembering that the mug looks right when it's about 2/3 full of foamy espresso.
And indeed medium was the ticket.
Missed the 8.07, so I lingered in the chilly air and read the newspaper (singular: the Chronicle hasn't been appearing regularly on my doorstep the past week.
I arrived at the Caltrain station just as the 8.07 was pulling out -- fifteen minutes late?! and sat on a bench to read the Examiner, the funny pages of which become shorter each week (at least they still carry Luann). Alas for the two-newspaper town!
An elderly woman on the bench next to me was ringing someone, trying to find a phone number. The voice on the other end started dispensing the digits, but the woman scrambled for a pen and paper. Handy with the Sharpie, I handed her the pen and the newspaper, and she shakily wrote down the numbers. She said into the phone: "If I miss the train, there's a nice young man with a bicycle who will give me a ride." (She got off in Palo Alto.)

The last laff?

The Chronicle reports that several suitors are in line to acquire Laughing Sal, a twin to the manic mannekin who welcomes visitors to the Musée Mecanique and, once upon a time, to Playland.

Slang King Nr. 2

SPAM filters are failing against the latest round of randomly-generated Subject: headers.

Some recent favourites:

"cyclades manic repairman motherland"
"portage operating ineducable magnitude"
it's like poetry.
"imprompty amnesia falcon"
"explicable bullet scold"
AND:
radian frescoes bobcat
alsatian expositor (sounds like a Fall song)
fascinate pontiff antipasto ineradicable coalition

but "magneto snoshage links" was from aram :-)

February 5, 2004 UPDATE:
The New York Times has a nice article on this phenomenon in today's Circuits section

Yours Not So Truly, J. Goodspam
By LISA NAPOLI

PURPOSES L. XYLOPHONIST sounds like my kind of man. Unique. Creative. Focused, with a hint of formality.

There is no way to be certain that Mr. Xylophonist is, in fact, a mister. Actually, it is a pretty safe bet he is not a person at all. The fact that his name appeared in the return line of a piece of unsolicited e-mail almost assures that he is not.

Mr. Xylophonist wrote trying to sell some pamphlet about maximizing profits on eBay. Or maybe that was what Beiderbecke P. Sawhorse was pitching. It was definitely not the one from Marylou Bowling; she wrote to tell about "Government Free Cash Grant Programs." Then again, that might have been from Elfrieda Billman. As for Usefully T. Medicaids and Boggs Darrin, they both wrote about cheap drug sales, no prescription needed. (Of course.)

Alongside those missives from friends and that drudgery from the office is a cast of e-mail characters with fantastic names promising all manner of stuff for sale. Frequently the promises are bogus; virtually all of the names are, too.

Though it seems impossible to imagine the unwanted e-mail known as spam as anything but a nuisance, there is something creative about these return addresses - even if they are being used for untoward purposes. On Web bulletin boards, they are sometimes draw admiring observations.

"I like a lot of the names I see on spam e-mails because they're completely abstract, with little conception of culture or traditional sounds," said a posting by someone using the name Oissubke, a self-described fiction writer. "They jump out. They're memorable. They may not work for Grisham or Shakespeare, but they're ideal for my own writing style."

When it comes to making names up, August Kleimo, whose name is just unusual enough that it might have been invented, knows that the best source material is reality.

Mr. Kleimo, a Web designer in the Venice section of Los Angeles, said he was trolling at the Census Bureau's Web site a few years ago and found "tons of free data," including all the last names from the census of 1990. There was also information on which of those names were most popular.

This inspired Mr. Kleimo in a way only a computer aficionado could be inspired: he wrote a random-name generator that spits out pairings (www.kleimo.com /random/name.cfm). Site visitors can adjust the obscurity factor depending on how bizarre they would like the names served up to be (Alberta Trotman being one of the common sort, and Buck Charbonnel and Erasmo Pehowich exemplifying the "totally obscure" category).

Now in its third year, the site attracts about 3,000 visitors a day, Mr. Kleimo said. Some are just people looking to amuse themselves, but others have a more directed purpose.

"I noticed a lot of people were linking to the page who ran fantasy games, linking to it for their character names," Mr. Kleimo said.

But not everyone who visits uses his invention for harmless fun. "I've always suspected that people use it for spam," he said.

That he may unwittingly be contributing to one of the great modern scourges does not disturb Mr. Kleimo, whose business creates companion Web sites for television infomercials, among other things. "If people want to use it that way," he said, "it doesn't really bother me."

To be sure, many of the common software programs for spammers include random-name generation in any case.

And Mr. Kleimo's is not the only random-name generator on the Web: dozens can be sampled there. Mike Campbell, for example, an amateur etymologist and software developer in Victoria, British Columbia, built Behind the Name (www .behindthename.com/random.html), which allows visitors to generate names in various languages, from Icelandic to classical Greek.

Chris Pound, who works in the information technology department at Rice University in Houston, has written more than 40 random generators, including what he calls an "amazing verbal kung-fu" generator, as well as one that merges names from the worlds of Harry Potter and of Dickens (www.ruf.rice.edu/~pound).

"As a kid, I was a fan of the novels of M. A. R. Barker, who is a linguistic anthropologist," said Mr. Pound, whose Web site offers the code he uses to create his generators. "He, like J. R. R. Tolkien, had invented languages for all of the empires in his fantasy novels. It becomes a hobby after a while when you notice things you can turn into a name generator."

But for spammers, name generators can be the bones of the business.

Wildly unusual invented proper names are designed to attract your attention. Less inventive names are chosen to lead you to think the mail might just be real, and to open it. But aside from seizing the recipient's attention, spammers use random names because they are more likely to trick the anti-spammers, including Internet service providers.

"Spammers use software to randomly generate lots of unique names because they know it reduces the chance of their spam being filtered by I.S.P.'s or blocked by users," said Jason Catlett, founder of the Junkbusters Corporation, a company dedicated to the elimination of unwanted solicitations. "Thousands of people a day must hit 'refuse mail from this sender' when they get e-mail claiming to be from Mrs. Marriam Abacha, a favorite of Nigerian scammers. So she has become less common, and spammers know that if they choose any one fixed name they will be similarly treated."

Instead, Mr. Catlett says, they now choose random combinations of first and last names, "the software equivalent of putting a Chinese lunch menu on a dartboard."

Several years ago, spam filters began to catch on to the trend of using sender names that are a combination of letters and numbers, said Ray Everett-Church, chief privacy officer of the ePrivacy Group, which makes a filter called SpamSquelcher.

Randomly generated names are more likely to squeeze through so-called Bayesian filters, which keep track of common words used in spam, like Viagra, and weed them out. A human may detect a randomly generated name as a fake, Mr. Everett-Church said, but "a filter can't really see the irony of Tupperware J. Smithington."

During our phone conversation, he received an e-mail message from one Kentucky V. Clockwise, who was promoting low-cost Viagra. (The words "Saddam Hussein" were in the subject line.) A few hours later Mr. Everett-Church forwarded a missive from Offense C. Teats promising an electronic greeting card - although the crux of that message, too, concerned performance-enhancing drugs. Despite the use of various filters on his various accounts, Mr. Everett-Church said, spam still ekes through.

Everyone who fights spam concedes the difficulty of outsmarting the generators. "There is essentially a war going on between the spammers and the anti-spammers, and the spammers are always one step ahead," said Stu Sjouwerman, chief operating officer of Sunbelt Software, creator of the spam filter iHateSpam. Random-name generators are just "one of the weapons they use in this battle to get their e-mail first through the filters and then opened up," Mr. Sjouwerman said.

During a telephone interview, an e-mail from an Elly Havewinkel landed in his in-box, asking "if I would please call because I've been the lucky man - I've won a million euros, congratulations."
"It seems to be a genuine business letter," said Mr. Sjouwerman, who clearly knew it was not.

Which is why human users ultimately have the leg up on random name generators, said David J. Farber, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and an Internet pioneer. And also why, he said, e-mail is clearly a fallible technology on which people may need to become less reliant.

"I strongly suggest to people right now if they want to get hold of me, here's my cellphone," Mr. Farber said. "Myself and others have found getting your phone book back up to date is getting more important." Of course, what action he will take if he starts receiving voice mail from Purposes L. Xylophonist is an entirely different issue.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top

No transit left behind.

What we lose while California's debt mounts.

The revolution will not be magnetised.

China will open its first maglev train line next week. This opening co-incides with the Chinese New Year. It's the Year of the Monkey.

There's an extensive blog on this topic.

Read on for do-it-yourself Maglev instructions!

This is very similar to something my dad and I built when I was 8 or 9. Somewhere we still have the notebook with the design and notes!

From The Guardian:
How to make a maglev at home

1 Take a roll of double-backed sticky tape, a piece of cardboard, 20 to 30 small magnets (square ones work best) and ideally one sheet of Perspex.

2 Cut two strips of the tape no more than 1m long. Take 20 magnets (setting aside five for later use) and stick them to the tape. Try to space them as equally as you can, all facing the same polarity. To check this, run a spare magnet over each row. It should either be attracted or repelled by all the magnets in the strip. Now tape the magnets to the cardboard base of the box in parallel lines close to the sides of edge of the base. This is the guideway.

3 To prevent the maglev from leaving the guideway, build two walls. Cardboard will do, but Perpex is best because the point of this experiment is to see magnetic levitation in action. You should now have a makeshift open-top box with the Perspex constituting the longest sides.

4 Now you need a train. Cut a rectangular piece of cardboard that fits inside the guide walls. Attach four magnets to the corners of the train. Be sure that all four magnets are placed so that they are repelled by the magnets on the track. Place the train gently above the track inside the guide walls and watch it float. Hey presto! Magnetic levitation.

5 A gentle push will move the train along the track, but if you want to be really posh, use another magnet. With the lack of friction and wind resistance the maglev should float to the other end.

Take a memo.

Arrived home this evening to find a memo from the The Mayor's Disability Council of San Francisco, soliciting public comment on the recently-installed traffic circles. The meeting is set for a day and a half after the memo was delivered; I can't make it, but I'm going to send my comments via email.
A few weeks ago, the city distributed a questionnaire about the impact of the roundabouts. The online version doesn't work as a webapp, but one can print it out and send it via fax or post.

"Surely nothing on earth ..."

Francis X. Clines has a meditative editorial on cycling Manhattan in yesterday's New York Times.

Happily, Clines points out one of the most enjoyable aspects of urban cycling: "... storefront bars can be found for cold beer or hot coffee."

January 12, 2004
THE CITY LIFE

Rounding the Island, on Wheels
By FRANCIS X. CLINES

Urban biker's appropriately abrupt diary: begin tour by checking out familiar landmarks. The wild turkey dubbed Giuliani is still pecking around unharmed in the bushes up from the bike path on Riverside Drive. (Bird seems overfed by West Side liberals, and badly named — more resembling Ed Koch, as mayoral stares and prancings go.) Back on the bike, and zipping past the Amiable Child Memorial (5-year-old lad fell to his death in 1797, when New York was more rural than urban-wild). Soon shifting gears to curl down and around onto one of the modern wonders of Manhattan: the Waterfront Greenway bike path that circumvents the island by shoreline. Splendid. Most shocking, it is perfectly sign-marked; no way to miss a turn. Whoever heard of such consideration in New York? Must be a new and cunning biker's lobbyist at City Hall.

You don't need one of those Spider-Man designer costumes or racks of water bottles, as if traversing the Gobi. Scruffy is fine enough on a New York winter morning. "Watch it," works better as a caution to a pedestrian than the imperious "On your right!" that is standard elsewhere. The Hudson, Harlem and East Rivers ripple past, dark waters fiercely defining terra firma. The path unfolds north, east, south, the biker with a sense of pedaling upward into a simple, exhilarating city escape. "Surely nothing on earth of its kind can go beyond this show," Whitman said of his own Manhattan tour, and his summary works as well by bike as by boat.

Wheeling up to and under the George Washington Bridge, so high its traffic hum does not overwhelm the slapping sound of the river. Temptations abound: the Cloisters for a medieval detour? The great brownstone side streets of still another Harlem renaissance? The Bronx looms, salt of the city earth, half-finished as ever. The few forced veerings from the shore — down St. Nicholas Avenue, later dodging the United Nations — are a perfect respite: storefront bars can be found for cold beer or hot coffee. Studying passing faces on the sidewalk fuels the race back to more sights on the river.

Just across the water, there is beloved, beleaguered Queens, packed as ever with strivers. Green and stony Brooklyn glistens, its spirit arching like its bridge. Sea winds whirl round the jutting Battery, making the bike feel mortal-heavy; but then transcendent light at the sudden sight of distant pedestrians, small and still as architects' pin-people. They stare down on the island's trade center scars. The Hudson mercifully rushes on like time, escaping city history as much as explaining it to the laboring biker. Sights clash in review: the aircraft carrier ludicrously displaced at the peaceful midtown shore. The buckled and rusted skeletons of old terminals leaning wanly toward the river. They dodge extinction uptown, as dedicatedly as the biker.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

What time is it?

While German police are investigating for fraud a man who sold potatoes as computers, even more enterprising youth are installing sound systems run by russets and building a tuber-powered web server, which feature a 220uF capacitor which " ... can power the server for about 10 seconds, long enough to swap in a new potato or simply stab one of the nails or copper wires into a fresh, juicy area."

So much for my gags about a potato clock.

UPDATE: Down at the pub, Aram set up a full-scale potato clock while we quaffed whiskey and ate tiramisu with a bar spoon.

BERLIN (Reuters) - German police are investigating after an
angry man returned a computer he had just bought saying it was
packed with small potatoes instead of computer parts.

The store replaced the computer free of charge but became
suspicious when he returned a short time later with another
potato-filled computer casing, police in the western city of
Kaiserslautern said Monday.

"The second time he said he didn't need a computer any more
and asked for his money back in cash," a police spokesman said.

Police are now investigating the man for fraud.

Autumn suéter.

This morning experienced, perhaps for the first time in years, the dilemma of "what to wear." I was stuck on wearing blue-grey trousers, and don't have a suitable flannel shirt that matches. The solution presented itself as I opened a package sent by my mother: it contained an assortment of study woolens, including a cosy-looking grey cardigan. Perfect!

The feral donuts of Santa Cruz.

Aram, Mary, Anna, and I trekked down early (although not too early that we weren't able to enjoy a Coopers coffee and Aram&Mary's famous granola on the benches at the corner of Duboce and Sanchez) to Año Nuevo State Park. At this park, northern elephant seals come to calve and mate once each year.

Much to our delight, the new management of Ferrell's Donuts on Mission St. have merged operations with Marianne's Ice Cream. The cones were a little stale and the ice-cream delivery slightly underwhelming (although we got two huge scoops when we asked for one), but this was a tasty end to a nice trip to the area. An end, because as we were heading from our Marianne's stop to the Mushroom festival, we were recalled to San Francisco with an urgent invitation to dinner at a freshly-remodeled La Mooné (now Bistro ditto).

Clang clang clang goes the trolley.

Several people drew my attention to a New York Times story on Bob Diamond, who maintains the shortest trolley line in Brooklyn.
I've seen these tracks several times at the Van Brunt end of Red Hook, and now I know the sad story behind them.

January 10, 2004
ABOUT NEW YORK

The Trolley Guy's Last Ride (All 12 Feet of It)
By DAN BARRY

IN a darkened bay at Red Hook's watery edge, the trolley guy of Brooklyn steps over the bits and pieces of his grand vision to board his magnificent vessel. Come on, he says, in that weary-whiny voice of his. "I'll take you on the world's shortest trolley ride."

He turns on the lights, rings the bell — ding, ding — and an 1897 trolley of mahogany and oak lurches six feet and stops. He walks to the rear, rings the bell — ding, ding — and the trolley lurches six feet back. That's it; 12 feet. Ride over.

The last stop returns Bob Diamond, the trolley guy, to his cluttered world. In this cold and cavernous bay, from which he is about to be evicted, you will find old trolley fare boxes; books about electromechanical devices of the 1930's; pneumatically powered door engines; a BB gun to scare away pigeons and rats; heavy-duty machine tools; and ever-accumulating piles of spare trolley parts.

Rising from this mess are two meticulously restored, but stranded, trolleys: the brown 1897 model, once used by the king of Norway, and a green-and-silver 1951 Pullman that once cruised along Boston's green line. And beside them always, Mr. Diamond: a rumpled shrug of a man who was married once for two days; whose dinner most nights is three hot dogs, cheese fries and an iced tea at Nathan's; and who is now the only person in New York with 16 trolleys and nowhere to put them.

Mr. Diamond, 44, wheezes out the approximation of a laugh. "I'm laughing but I should be crying," he says. "It must be post-traumatic stress."

This man was once the adopted darling of city officials, proponents of Red Hook revitalization, and anyone else who nursed an ache for the way things used to be in Brooklyn. More than just an electrical engineer, he was a Flatbush visionary — an asset of the city.

He earned his place as a bona fide Brooklyn character more than two decades ago by discovering a forgotten railroad tunnel beneath Atlantic Avenue. He created the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association and enlisted a band of volunteers to restore the tunnel and lead tours. Soon they were launched on the odd but honorable mission of returning trolleys to Brooklyn for the first time since the mid-50's.

Piece by piece, they built their fleet. The Norwegian trolley, on permanent loan from a Staten Island man. Three Pullman cars from Boston that Mr. Diamond managed to buy for $9 — plus $10,000 shipping. A switching locomotive that he recovered from a New Jersey soybean field for $8,000. A dozen more trolley cars from Ohio that cost $10,000 to buy and $50,000 to ship from Buffalo.

In 1994, Mr. Diamond and his group moved their operation to this bay in a 19th century warehouse at the end of Van Brunt Street. Their efforts attracted the attention of local and federal officials who saw the charm and the need for light-rail service that would link isolated Red Hook to the rest of the borough.

With the help of the city's Department of Transportation, Mr. Diamond's group received $286,000 in federal money to lay a few hundred feet of trolley line in Red Hook. Who knew? Maybe it would someday lead to the development of light-rail service all the way to downtown Brooklyn.

The volunteers lovingly laid the track, polished the trolleys and worked out the intricate electrical system needed to activate service. Mr. Diamond estimates that he spent more than $100,000 of his own money — earned in part by managing a New Jersey apartment complex — on sundry items, including several thousand dollars for jackhammer rentals. "It's still on my credit card," he says.

Everything seemed to be on track. In 1999, that glorious Norwegian trolley glided out of its darkened bay, looped around the warehouse, and went a few hundred feet down a track; soon, tourists were paying to take the short waterfront ride. Then city transportation officials gave permission to Mr. Diamond's group to lay track on Conover Street, the hope being that a trolley would one day lead to a bus stop a half-mile away.

Mr. Diamond may have been a visionary, but his single-mindedness caused problems. City officials grumble that he wasn't doing any fund-raising; he counters that his contribution came in sweat equity. As for allegations that he did not want to share responsibility for the trolleys, Mr. Diamond says that he was worried about a "takeover group" within his core of volunteers.

"When I didn't like them trying to take it over, they said I didn't want to share responsibility," he says. "I wasn't going to turn it over, especially after I sunk in 20 years of my own time and money."

In August 2001, the bulkhead along the pier outside his trolley bay gave way, damaging the track and auguring a larger collapse.

The two trolleys inside had nowhere to go. Volunteers left to create their own trolley group. And the disagreements with city officials became so contentious that in early 2002 they announced that they would no longer support the spending of federal money on Mr. Diamond's dream project.

Mr. Diamond now had five stranded trolleys in Red Hook, including the two in the bay; 11 stranded trolleys and a locomotive at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; a half-built track on a city street — and an ever-diminishing number of supporters.

He accused a former volunteer of breaking into the bay one night and downloading his plans from a computer; nonsense, the former volunteer says. He charged that a city transportation official was related to one of his competitors; not true, a spokesman for the city agency says. He also accused the Department of Transportation of having him tailed and even arrested; ridiculous, the spokesman says.

A few weeks ago, Greg O'Connell — the owner of the warehouse who describes himself as a believer in Mr. Diamond's vision — sent an eviction notice to Mr. Diamond and his organization. The group had been using the warehouse space, rent-free, for nearly a decade.

"We've been left with no other choice," Mr. O'Connell says. "There are other nonprofits. We get many calls to use that space from people who could make a real contribution to the neighborhood."

"Bob's difficult sometimes to work with," Mr. O'Connell adds. "He's unique."

Then, a couple of weeks ago, as Mr. Diamond watched, the city ripped up the tracks that had been laid by volunteers along Conover Street; his dream had become a hazard. Tom Cocola, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation, says that Mr. Diamond had been notified several times that the tracks had to be removed.

"We were excited to jumpstart the trolley initiative," Mr. Cocola said in an e-mail message. "But promises made by Mr. Diamond were not met, so we decided that — in a time where the city has experienced budget difficulties — it would not be prudent to waste any more taxpayers' money on this project, no matter how noble it appeared on paper."

Mr. Diamond says that he has no idea what to do, and no more money to spend on his vision. He continues to level charges that all his former supporters have betrayed him and may be conspiring to take his trolleys from him.

"What a huge waste of time and money," he says. "It's sort of like being dressed up with no place to go."

For now, there is just him, and a young volunteer named Donald. They sit in the back of this Red Hook bay, hunched around a portable heater, watching a black-and-white television, while all about them lay pieces of trolley.

After taking the 1897 trolley for its 12-foot ride, Mr. Diamond climbs aboard the sleek Pullman to point out the attention given to its restoration, down to the row of incandescent bull's-eye lights. He turns on the air compressors, and begins to open and close the door. For a little while, at least, this stranded trolley sounds as though it is breathing.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Baby elephant.

From the Most Emailed list at Yahoo!, this.

Rubber-necking.

This morning hitched a ride in to the office park, but our speedy progress was thwarted first at Grand Ave, by a crashed big rig and then near Millbrae, where a single car was resting quietly in a bed of succulent ground cover. We came to an almost-complete stop to gaze upon the wreckage, prompting an angry honk from the driver behind us.

Invitation to a public forum.

Caltrain are inviting public comment on revised time-tables for the upcoming Bullet Train service.

Donut deception.

Subject: eats doughnuts and leaves

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/books/05GRAM.html

Despite Best Efforts,
Doughnut Makers
Must Fry, Fry Again

Low-Fat Version of the Treat
Proves Hard to Roll Out;
Mr. Ligon Lands in Hole

BySHIRLEY LEUNG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Robert Ligon, a 68-year-old health-food executive, is scheduled to
begin serving 15 months in a federal prison Tuesday. His crime:
willfully mislabeling doughnuts as low-fat.

Exhibit A: The label on his company's "carob coated" doughnut said it
had three grams of fat and 135 calories. But an analysis by the Food
and Drug Administration showed that the doughnut, glazed with
chocolate, contained a sinfully indulgent 18 grams of fat and 530
calories.

=A0

Mr. Ligon's three-year-long nationwide doughnut caper -- which involved
selling mislabeled doughnuts, cinnamon rolls and cookies to diet
centers -- began to crumble when customers complained to the FDA about
how tasty his products were.

"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is," says Jim Dahl,
assistant director of the Office of Criminal Investigation for the FDA.
The skinny on low-fat doughnuts, he says: "Science can do a lot of
things, but we're not quite there yet."

The low-fat doughnut is the Holy Grail of the food industry. Food
companies have been able to take most of the fat out of everything from
cheese to Twinkies. But no one has succeeded in designing a marketable
doughnut that dips below the federal low-fat threshold of three grams
per serving. Doughnuts typically range from eight grams of fat for a
glazed French cruller to more than double that for a cake-like
doughnut.

Perhaps no other bakery good is so dependent on fat. After the batter
is shaped into rings and dropped into hot oil, the deep-frying process
preserves the shape, gives the doughnut a crust and pushes out
moisture, allowing for the absorption of fat. The fat itself is
responsible for most of its flavor. A doughnut contains as much as 25%
fat; the bulk of that is the oil absorbed during frying, according to
the American Institute of Baking, a research and teaching outfit funded
by the baking industry.

The low-fat doughnut, declares Len Heflich, an industry executive at
the American Bakers Association, is "not possible."

That hasn't stopped almost everyone in the approximately $3 billion
doughnut industry from trying. In the late 1980s, Dunkin' Donuts
briefly offered a cholesterol-free doughnut that contained no eggs and
no milk. It went nowhere. During the 1990s, Entenmann's Bakery offered
a doughnut with 25% less fat but poor sales forced the company to
shelve it. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Inc. has explored low-fat or
low-calorie options but has yet to roll one out. Some bakeries sell
"baked doughnuts" that are low in fat, but doughnut-makers say that's
cheating: If it's baked, it's a cake.

Scientists are also trying to put the doughnut on a diet. U.S. Patent
No. 6,001,399 claims that replacing sugar with polydextrose -- a
low-calorie synthetic sweetener commonly found in ice cream and frozen
foods -- can reduce the doughnut's absorption of frying fats by 25% to
30%. U.S. Patent No. 4,937,086 says that injecting polyvinylpyrrolidone
-- which normally keeps pills in packed form -- into the doughnut=20
batter reduces fat by 30% without a "pasty or greasy taste."

In an article entitled "Development of Low Oil-Uptake Donuts" published
in 2001 in the Journal of Food Science, scientists at the USDA
Agricultural Research Service wrote that adding rice flour to the
traditional wheat-flour-base doughnut mix lowered fat by 64%. Fred
Shih, a chemist who helped author the study, says the doughnut that
resulted was tasty, but he doesn't expect to see it on grocer shelves
anytime soon.

"It worked in a lab," he says, but "it may not be so easily converted
into commercial operation." (One kink: short shelf life.)

Despite its no-cholesterol-doughnut flop, Dunkin' Donuts, the nation's
largest doughnut chain, continues to push ahead in the quest for a
low-fat doughnut. The company's doughnut technologists have all but
ruled out tinkering with its closely held, 26-ingredient batter, which
contains little fat. The chain, a unit of London-based Allied Domecq
PLC, has tried frying dough in a fat substitute but feared its
digestive side effects would leave a bad taste.

At its product laboratory in Braintree, Mass., on a recent morning,
researchers in white lab coats tasted and prodded their latest
prototype: a chewier-than-average doughnut that is not fried, but made
on a machine that resembles a waffle maker. The result weighs in at 150
calories -- half the amount of its full-fat cousin -- and fewer than
three grams of fat. Still, this doughnut fails to meet Dunkin's
standards of texture, taste and something called "mouth feel."

"We would love to be able to offer a great-tasting doughnut that is
low-fat," says Joe Scafido, chief menu and concept officer for Allied
Domecq's quick-service restaurants, "but I'm not sure we're going to
get there."

The criminal files on doughnut-related fraud thickened in the 1990s
after new federal laws required more-detailed labeling of food. The
FDA's Office of Criminal Investigation says that about a quarter of its
cases involve food, most related to tampering. About 20% of those food
cases are related to "misbranding" of food, such as false labels or
misstated country of origin.

Mr. Ligon, who is scheduled to begin his sentence Tuesday, was not the
first doughnut derelict. In 2000, Vernon Patterson, president of
Genesis II Foods Inc., an Illinois bakery, pleaded guilty to one count
of mail fraud for passing off three varieties of doughnuts as low-fat.
According to federal court records, customers helped build the case
against Mr. Patterson by raising questions about his suspiciously tasty
low-fat treats. Mr. Patterson served one year and one day in a federal
prison.

The doughnut ring of Mr. Ligon, a former weight-loss-center franchisee,
began in 1995, the FDA says. That's when he started a weight-loss
product company, Nutrisource Inc., to sell protein shakes, nutritional
bars and baked goods to diet centers. According to Rudy Hejny, the FDA
agent in charge of the investigation, Mr. Ligon bought full-fat
doughnuts from Cloverhill Bakery, a Chicago company, and repackaged
them as diet doughnuts. It was a lucrative operation: Mr. Ligon would
buy doughnuts for 25 cents to 33 cents each and then resell the
mislabeled versions for a dollar each.

Customer complaints to the FDA started rolling in, questioning whether
these were in fact low-fat doughnuts. So did one from a packaging
company Mr. Ligon hired to label and distribute the doughnuts. Key
evidence: One of its employees gained weight after eating Mr. Ligon's
doughnuts.

The FDA launched an investigation in 1997, tracking down Mr. Ligon's
customers and former business partners in a previous
weight-loss-product company. Investigators learned that this wasn't Mr.
Ligon's first brush with improperly labeled doughnuts. One of his
former customers, the owner of a weight-loss center, had grown
suspicious after briefly placing one of his doughnuts on a napkin to
answer the phone.

"She saw a grease ring," says Mr. Hejny. The customer had the doughnut
independently tested and discovered it was not low-fat. No legal action
was taken.

In the summer of 1997, the FDA, armed with search warrants, raided Mr.
Ligon's office and packaging facilities in Kentucky and Illinois,
seizing 18,720 doughnuts, along with cinnamon rolls and labels. Mr.
Ligon shut down the business, but the FDA pursued a criminal case.

In 2001, a U.S. District Court grand jury in Chicago indicted Mr. Ligon
on mail fraud for his role in carrying out a scheme that involved
shipping falsely labeled goods. In September, Mr. Ligon pleaded guilty
to one count of mail fraud. At the time of sentencing, the government
calculated he attempted to sell several hundred thousand dollars' worth
of mislabeled doughnuts and cinnamon rolls.

"Mr. Ligon abused the trust people put on these labels," says Stuart
Fullerton, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case. "It's
kind of cruel on his part to do this."

Reached on his mobile phone, Mr. Ligon says he didn't intentionally
break the law and never heard a single complaint about his doughnuts.
"Everybody wanted the product and were very upset they couldn't get the
product," he says. Asked if he felt the punishment fit the crime, he
says: "I feel like I've been singled out."

For all his troubles, Mr. Ligon says he doesn't even eat doughnuts.
That works out fine. Most federal prisons, says a spokeswoman, don't
serve doughnuts.

Write toShirley Leung atshirley.leung@wsj.com

The year of the monkey.

Toddler triumphs in National Monkey Face Championship

A 2-year-old boy has won the National Monkey Face Championship held at the Yomiuriland amusement park in suburban Tokyo to commemorate 2004 as the Year of the Monkey.

The boy, whose parents did not want to be identified, won for the face he pulled as he screeched, "I love bananas. I eat five bananas a day."

He was awarded with one month's supply of bananas for his victory and appeared delighted to have won the prize.

Competitors ranged from infants to high school students.

Why do I scream?

This is mos defbaadasss. (So is all of this.) Tip o' the brain bucket to Aram.

Compare to the sport played summer (or, dry) months in Golden Gate Park: Bike Polo.

Lost in transition?

A piece on Pittsburgh's fiscal crisis, from the New York Times.

Letter From Pittsburgh: Decade After Big Steel's Demise, a City Lost in Transition

January 2, 2004
By JAMES DAO

PITTSBURGH

At the Carnegie Museum of Art, a series of paintings by
Aaron H. Gorson capture what many people still consider the
quintessential images of this city that industry built. A
coal barge plies murky waters. A blast furnace scorches the
dark heavens like a supernova. Smoke-belching stacks shroud
the horizon in brown haze.

But the paintings are a century old and the Pittsburgh they
depict no longer exists. The big steel mills along the
Monongahela River, save one, gasped their last breaths a
decade ago. Shopping malls, gleaming office parks and
upscale town houses have replaced some. Others lie vacant,
the hulking skeletons of a dying species.

Call Pittsburgh Steel City these days, and many residents
will take offense. Pittsburgh, they say, is now home to
"clean industries" like bioengineering and robotics. The
bleak Dickensian tableau of big steel is virtually gone.

But so are most of the hand-dirtying, high-paying union
jobs that once made steel the fiscal marrow in Pittsburgh's
bones. And now the city is broke, relegated to junk-bond
status. Despite layoffs and service cuts, Pittsburgh will
face an $80 million budget gap in 2004 and needs to raise
taxes, officials contend.

For residents, the crisis is a reminder that despite the
city's efforts to remake itself in a postindustrial world,
it has not quite replaced all those manufacturing jobs.
This is a city lost in transition, rooted in steel but
struggling to be reborn as something higher tech and less
gritty.

"We're a tale of two cities," Mayor Tom Murphy said. "We've
had over the last nine years an unprecedented level of
development. On the other hand, the underlying financial
structure reflects a city that doesn't exist anymore."

During those years, the city underwent a striking face
lift, building new football and baseball stadiums along the
Allegheny River and a new convention center downtown. And
shoppers now browse upscale shops at the Waterfront Mall on
the site of the former Homestead steel plant, where union
workers battled Pinkerton guards a century ago.

Yet in a striking indication that Pittsburgh is striving to
move beyond its past without completely forgetting it, the
developers left 12 towering smokestacks that are
brilliantly lighted at night adjacent to the mall's movie
complex.

"Schizophrenia might be the right word for what we are
going through," said Frank Giarratani, director of the
Center for Industry Studies at the University of
Pittsburgh. "We are a steel city. But people don't know why
they think that anymore, except for the history."

The immediate causes of Pittsburgh's fiscal crisis are
hotly debated here and in Harrisburg, the state capital.
Mr. Murphy points to what he calls an archaic tax structure
and weak national economy. His critics say excessive
borrowing and overly generous labor contracts are to blame.

To relieve the budget crunch, Mayor Murphy has closed
recreation centers and public pools and reduced street
cleaning, rodent control, police patrols and bus service.
And, next year's marathon has been canceled.

Mr. Murphy, a Democrat, has asked the state to designate
Pittsburgh "distressed" under a law that would give the
city expanded taxing powers, including on commuters. Gov.
Edward G. Rendell, also a Democrat, seems inclined to
support the request, but many legislators, including some
Democrats, contend that the designation would only
stigmatize Pittsburgh.

"It's frustrating to many of us, because Pittsburgh has
become a dynamic region," said State Representative Jeffrey
E. Habay, a Republican from Allegheny County. "We've come
through the era of big seel, and it's been difficult, but
we've stabilized our job base. We're not fiscally
distressed, we're fiscally mismanaged."

Experts say that while a mixture of outdated taxes and poor
management precipitated the current crisis the region's
long-term economic health has been shaky for some time,
largely because of those silent mills. From 1974, a peak
year for steel employment, to 2002, the industry
hemorrhaged more than 75,000 jobs in the Pittsburgh region,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the same
period, the city shrank to 334,000 residents, from 520,000,
leaving it with roughly the same population as a century
ago.

Shrinking population has meant a shrinking tax base. Today,
40 percent of the city's real estate is tax exempt, owned
by nonprofit churches, universities and hospitals.
Two-thirds of its 300,000 workers live in the suburbs,
subject to a small $10 annual commuter tax that was set
more than 30 years ago. And half of its corporations are
exempt from the local business tax.

"The city puffed itself up in the 1990's and said, `We're
not a steel town, we're an education town, a health-care
town, a high-tech town,' " said James D. English, the
international secretary-treasurer of the United
Steelworkers of America, which has its headquarters here.
"But from my perspective, the city's problems today are
related to the absence of those good-paying manufacturing
jobs."

Muhammad Hafiz, 34, says he has been hurt by the passing of
those mill jobs. His father worked in steel, and Mr. Hafiz
assumed he would as well. But a union job never
materialized, and today he hawks newspapers on the street.

"We used to call Cleveland the Mistake by the Lake," Mr.
Hafiz said wistfully. "But no more. I'm thinking of going
there myself."

Still, some people are coming back, drawn by the growing
number of high-tech start-up companies and a rich pool of
technological expertise centered on the University of
Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Aldo Zini is
one. A Pittsburgh native, Mr. Zini returned from California
three years ago to help create a company, Aethon Inc., that
makes robots that transport supplies from hospital storage
rooms to nursing stations. It has only 16 employees but
expects to expand.

"I was drawn back to this area because of the talent, the
things going on here," Mr. Zini said.

He is emblematic of a generational divide that cuts through
southwestern Pennsylvania, splitting residents who worked
in the mills from those who grew up believing there was no
future in steel.

That divide was underscored in the contrasting reactions to
President Bush's decision this fall to lift tariffs on
imported steel. The tens of thousands of retired
steelworkers in the region who have mortgages, pensions and
health insurance paid for by steel responded with outrage,
vowing political retaliation. But many of the city's newer
industries said they might benefit from the lower cost of
imported steel. And younger people did not seem to care.

Indeed, for younger residents, there have been real
benefits to steel's demise. They worry about the weak job
market, which has contributed to what the Census Bureau
recently called a brain drain of college graduates from the
region. But many prefer the gleaming new Pittsburgh to the
polluted industrial landscape of old. They note that when
the mills closed and the coal-fired haze dissipated, people
began to appreciate Pittsburgh's charms: its San
Francisco-like hills, its necklace of muscularly elegant
bridges and its fine skyline. They point out that the city
produced Andy Warhol..

"Pittsburgh has really suffered under its image as an old
steel town," said Matthew Burger, president of the
Pittsburgh Urban Magnet Project, an organization of young
professionals. "I still find it stunning when I hear people
say: `Pittsburgh is an old community, a mill town, it's all
about steel, pollution and dirty water and skies.' It
couldn't be more false."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/02/national/02LETT.html