I'm a lasagna boy!

Continuing Haight St closure

From the Octavia Boulevard project:

Haight Street to remain closed through Friday, February 4th.

Due to rain delays, this block of Haight Street will remain closed at Octavia an additional four days.

During the closure, local traffic will access this block of Haight from Laguna St.  This block of Haight will be a temporary “dead end” street.

For further information, please call the project hotline at 554-5440.

The project web site has lots more information, but still can't account for why the hell I voted for this monstrosity (debacle? boondoggle? absurdity? pork barrel? auto-centric-foolishness?).
Yes, the boulevard does end, abruptly, in front of Flippers on Hayes St. Don't believe me? Look at artist's rendering.

lagniappe

This San Francisco Chronicle story on the 30th birthday of casual carpool uses a bit of creole vernacular, lagniappe, the origin of which I couldn't discern. According to this etymology , the word originates in Quechua (!!):

      n. Chiefly Southern Louisiana & Mississippi.
A small gift presented by a storeowner to a customer with the customer's purchase.
An extra or unexpected gift or benefit. Also called boot. See Regional Note at beignet.

[Louisiana French, from American Spanish la ñapa, the gift : la, the (from Latin illa, feminine of ille, that, the) + ñapa (variant of yapa, gift, from Quechua, from yapay, to give more).]

REGIONAL NOTE   Lagniappe derives from New World Spanish la ñapa, “the gift,” and ultimately from Quechua yapay, “to give more.” The word came into the rich Creole dialect mixture of New Orleans and there acquired a French spelling. It is still used in the Gulf states, especially southern Louisiana, to denote a little bonus that a friendly shopkeeper might add to a purchase. By extension, it may mean “an extra or unexpected gift or benefit.”

I would have written boon or perhaps convenience. But lagniappe is one of those rare words in American English that has a deeply regional flavour.

The note for beignet reads:

      REGIONAL NOTE   New Orleans, Louisiana, has been a rich contributor of French loan words and local expressions to American English. Many New Orleans words, such as beignet, café au lait, faubourg, lagniappe, and krewe, reflect the New World French cuisine and culture characterizing this region. Other words reflect distinctive physical characteristics of the city: banquette, a raised sidewalk, and camelback and shotgun, distinctive architectural styles found among New Orleans houses.

Another adventure for Sprout

Sprout had an exciting weekend.

Regular is as regular does

I spent a lot of time during high school at the formica tables and long counter of a certain Dunkin Donuts . One of the more fascinating minutiae of the operation was the mechanism used to make regular coffee: somehow, in the few seconds between dispensing the drip coffee into a styrofoam cup (or massive plastic mug) and passing it across the counter to me, the person working the counter would swing it under a cream dispenser and a sugar-adder.

For me, regular coffee means different things. If I'm in the 212, it's a Greek paper cup with the legend "We Are Happy to Serve You", two sugars and a half-inch of cream. Invert once or twice, with finger covering the steam vent, and it's delicious. In the 415, regular is a small mug of espresso with a little hot water on top.

The donut shop itself was a treat: open 24 hours, far enough away from home that I needed to drive (and once locked myself out of the car while parked there, middle of the night, my parents out of town). The clientele were esoteric in an urban way, despite the suburban location: Manny, the card-trickster and math genius (who later showed up at the late lamented Greenhouse in Shadyside); Bob, the sometime employee and occasional lunatic; others may come to mind, eventually ...

Halfway house to hell

As I was walking between Anna's apartment and mine, two blocks along Haight St., I passed a 40-ish man wearing a fleece jacket. He looked around nervously and then walked up to a woman looking in the window of Doe. He said, "This place is like a halfway house. Come on, I don't want you walking here alone."

yo fixie!

Lance is going at the Hour.

January 24, 2005

So Many Miles to Cover and So Little Time to Do It
By JOHN MARKOFF

SOLVANG, Calif., Jan. 20 - On a sunny Southern California afternoon, a crowd gathered in a hotel parking lot here to watch Lance Armstrong and his team complete its daily six-hour training ride.

Though it appears to be a solo effort, bicycle racing is clearly a team sport. In Armstrong's case that team effort extends to an informal group known as F-One, an array of sports physiologists, computer engineers, aerodynamicists, as well as bicycle, helmet and clothing designers, which met for the first time this year on Thursday.

Indisputably the world's best cyclist, Armstrong, the six-time winner of the Tour de France, has been hinting broadly that he might take a year hiatus from the event he has dominated since 1999. He has also speculated that his next goal may be a sporting challenge virtually unknown in the United States until now.

For the rest of the world, however, the Hour Record, as it is known, holds as much magnetism as ascending Mount Everest. The object is for a solo rider to ride as far as possible in 60 minutes on a banked velodrome.

The record was first set in 1893 by the Tour de France founder, Henri Desgrange, with a mark of 21.95 miles. Since then, many of the world's cycling greats have taken turns assaulting the standard. Chris Boardman of Britain, a time-trial specialist, most recently set a mark of 30.721 miles in Manchester, England, in May 2000.

The event is attractive to Mr. Armstrong because it plays to many of his strengths: he is domineering in time trials, a category he has defined by his ability to produce extraordinary amounts of pedaling power over long periods.

"I think it would be an amazing spectacle," said Morris Denton, an executive for Advanced Micro Devices, one of Mr. Armstrong's sponsors. "If you look at the crowds Lance draws in the United States and you think about what would happen if you put some kind of marketing effort behind this event, it would be immense."

Mr. Armstrong has said he will not announce his intentions until April at the earliest. However, the plotting began here last week in a windowless hotel conference room for an attack on the Hour Record.

Johan Bruyneel, who is the coach of Mr. Armstrong's team, and Bart Knaggs, the president of his sports management company, Capital Sports and Entertainment of Austin, Tex., assembled the group to begin discussing the complex strategy and design issues that need to be solved.

Mr. Knaggs made clear to the group in his opening comments that no decision had yet been reached on which races Mr. Armstrong would attempt this year.

"Right now it's an idea," he said. "It's a four-minute-mile kind of thing, but we don't have it on the calendar yet."

The colorful history of the event is divided between an "athlete's record" originally set at 30.71 miles on a traditional track bike by the Belgium cycling legend Eddie Merckx in Mexico City in October 1972, and another record set using the most advanced technology.

The Merckx record went unchallenged until Francesco Moser broke it in January of 1984 at 31.57 miles, using a technologically advanced bicycle and a radical aerodynamic position.

Mr. Boardman then set the record of 35.029 miles in September 1996 in Manchester, only to have the Union Cycliste Internationale, the bicycle racing sports organization, set new rules in an effort to rein in the pace of technology.

Now, Mr. Armstrong must decide which record he wants to break.

"You have a philosophical decision to make," said Jay T. Kearney, a sports physiologist who is a vice president at Carmichael Training Systems, a company in Colorado Springs that oversees Mr. Armstrong's training regimen each year.

That is not the only decision the F-One group is faced with. In a presentation before the group last week, Mr. Kearney laid out a matrix of variables, each of which could have a drastic impact on Mr. Armstrong's chances.

For example, while Mr. Boardman set his records at sea level, Merckx rode at a velodrome at high altitude in Mexico City. In detailed charts, Mr. Kearney showed the group how moving the challenge to higher altitude significantly cuts air resistance, making it easier for a rider to go faster. The benefit of lowered air resistance is balanced by the decline in maximum oxygen uptake, which declines at altitude, even for elite athletes like Mr. Armstrong.

Air pollution, or even a cheering audience exhaling carbon dioxide in an enclosed stadium can have a measurable effect on rider performance, Mr. Kearney told the group.

In Las Vegas during a recent appearance at a media event, Mr. Armstrong showed a keen interest in the Hour Record. He rattled off the distance that Boardman had gone in his 2000 "athletic" attempt to the one-hundredth of a kilometer. He suggested that one exciting way to try to capture the record would be to make a first attempt at sea level in Madison Square Garden. Two weeks later, he would tackle the event at a higher altitude, perhaps in Salt Lake City in a sporting center that is a favorite of speed skaters and has produced many records for that sport.

At the meeting here on Thursday, the F-One design effort was just beginning.

"You need to tell me whether you need 60 days, 120 days or 500 days to be ready," Mr. Knaggs told the group.

In addition to thinking about the possibility of the Hour Record, each representative made progress reports on preparations for the new Discovery Communications Pro Cycling team, which replaces Mr. Armstrong's United States Postal Service sponsor this year.

The F-One group is made up of Carmichael Training Systems; Giro, the helmet maker; Nike; Trek bicycles; the wheel builder Hed Cycling Products; the computer chip maker Advanced Micro Devices; and the aerodynamicist Len Brownlie.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

!(Take the A Train)

I'm still bewildered by the sudden disappearance from our lives of the MTA's longest subway line, the A. Will the A and C lines be out of service for five years? or nine months? Did a transient take down the daily commute for more than half a million New Yorkers? Or did ageing antiquated electronics do them in?

It's the Einstein Flip

      The International Year of Physics, as the United Nations has officially designated 2005, has already had its zany moments of physics fun, with more to come. This month, Ben Wallace, 18, a professional stunt cyclist, flew off a ramp in the London Science Museum and did a back flip 12 feet in the air while folding his bicycle sideways - a maneuver designed by a Cambridge physicist who said she was inspired by a tale that the 26-year-old Einstein had invented his theory of relativity while riding a bicycle.

Of swahili lessons and Nyquil doughnuts

A reminder to plan your doughnut heists more carefully. For crying out loud! What hare-brained thief would think to rob a doughnut shop? Didn't they learn anything from that song*?

*

If you want to find all the cops

They're hanging out in the donut shop

Snowflake jamz

This record-playing hippie bus is scooting around an image of Floquet de Neu -- wonder which record it is?!

Graf ain't got no home in the city

Gothamist's Jen Chung writes about the latest graffiti arrest in New York City, which is tough on "seedy culture". I love graffiti, and, judging from the tag's popularity on flickr it looks like all the hipsters do. Downtown San Francisco boasts murals and large works by graf artists from Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, and London (although we don't have any appearance yet by Banksy; we do have our own Twist, ditto). Back to fixed-gear bikes, trucker hats, and down vests, I suppose (Note to self: can I get a Coach chain wallet?).

Strike one, strike two, ...

As the 60-day cooling-off period for striking San Francisco hotel workers draws to a close, the unstable, Wal-Mart-induced predicament of Northern California grocery works comes to a head.

Attention All Grocery Workers & Supporters!!!
Tuesday
January 25th
Bay Area Wide Day of Action
for Grocery Workers!
Support Grocery Workers
No Justice No Groceries!
No Justice No Peace
Defend Healthcare!

The grocery negotiations have reached a crisis point. The grocery companies are continuing to insist
on deep and damaging cuts in healthcrare for grocery workers and their families. In order to put
pressure on the companies, the UFCW has given a deadline of Monday January 24 th for them to move
at the table. Please Join us on Tuesday January 25 th at the location below to send a strong message to the companies:

HANDS OFF OUR HEALTHCARE!!!
OAKLAND
Fruitvale & MacArthur Store
3550 Fruitvale Avenue

BERKELEY
Rose & Shattuck Store
(This store is a special focus of Labor Cmte. for Peace & Justice)
1444 Shattuck Avenue

HAYWARD
Foothill Blvd. Store
22280 Foothill Blvd. (Civic Center)
DEFEND HEALTHCARE
For more information about the grocery worker negotiations go to www.bayareacoalition.org
Central Labor Council of Alameda County, AFL-CIO
www.alamedalabor.org 510/632-4242 robert@alamedalabor.org opeiu:3/afl-cio

Contagious media

Joshua Kinberg's case was dismissed (technical details). Kinberg, a student a Parsons, built a bicycle that uses a biodegradable, water-soluble chalk to print political messages on the sidewalk. He was arrested during the protests against the Republican National Convention.

A redress of grievances

I'm furious because MUNI wasn't running today. Buses are stopped on Market Street, where the police have cordoned off the section between 5th and the Embcardero; this stretch of Market St. is arguably the cornerstone of the surface transit in the city, where the 38 Geary, the 21 Hayes, the 5 Fulton, and all of the Haight/Page St buses (6, 66, 7, 71), as well as the tourist-friendly F Market all run.
To add insult to injury, after walking down Market to the Ferry Building to catch a Wharf-bound F, I found that the obstruction had moved with me, and that the F was stuck as well.
The city decided to shut down all of the downtown transit area as part of the Walk for Life, an anti-abortion fundraising event, and the accompanying pro-choice rally (question for later research: how can men advocate against abortion?). The choice not only disrupted transit for merrymakers and shoppers alike, but curtailed many cross-town routes and left buses in the lurch just north of Market St. No signs were posted ahead of time, warning of the disruption. Aside from the inconvenience, I think it was poor judgement on the city's part to allow a march (or parade) licence to the various groups, and to allow a few thousand to disrupt the activities of many.
... On the other hand, were our lives not disrupted, we may not be aware of the 32^nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade (aside: polish dancing shoes, as Chief Justice Rehnquist looks poorly), nor would we understand the importance that people attach to this issue. Of all the places to hold an antiabortion rally, why San Francisco? (Antiabortion marchers were bused in; pro-choice activists cycled along the protest route.)

What is the role of the city in allowing a single group to take over a public thoroughfare? This was an important issue during the Republican National Convention in New York City this past August, when protestors were denied the right to assemble where they wished. I understand the "right to peaceably assemble" means not just that you're law-abiding and whatnot, but that you're not inciting others, not driving them to frustration through inconsiderate civil disobedience. Doesn't make sense to corral all protestors et al. into Civic Center, though.

Man, I'm mad at the city and MUNI for not handling this better.

The San Francisco government's web site has some information on protests in the city:

      ... the appropriate ratio of police officers to protesters does not have a straightforward answer, and neither Seattle nor New York uses any type of formula. In this regard it does not appear that either of these cities has a superior policy than that in San Francisco. Third, with respect to crowd control, the SFPD may want to investigate New York's use of "pens" to contain demonstrators and Seattle's use of "force multipliers" (trained volunteers used to multiply the police force) to determine if they are appropriate for San Francisco.

The page continues to describe prosecution tactics for the city. Although the document makes quite clear the impact that mass protests have on retail traffic, and cites the burden of overtime police pay, no reference is made to the diminished efficacy of public transit, or of short-term damage to transit infrastructure as a result of street closure (intentional or no).

It's Just a Plant

Children's literature hits a new high.

Is that possible?

Will Toni finally ditch Dirk, her abusive, controlling boyfriend? I'm on tenter hooks! (Really!)

Dancing with the goat

Alleluia, I drank coffee today. After five days (!!) of not, not because I didn't want to (boy oh boy did I), but because my stommick hurt too damn much to permit it. And it tasted good. The early-morning shift at the café made a nice watery espresso ("americano", everyone pointed out) for me, and it went down wonderfully.

You can't get there from here

In order to travel 5km in San Francisco, when time is a premium, do you

a) hail a cab
b) walk
c) hop a bus
d) take light rail
e) drive a private car

Well, the answer is (b): walk. Not only are (a) cabs in short supply (and expensive), private cars expensive to own and operate, but I had a trick answer in there: (d). There's no light rail. I hardly call four southern routes and one rustic 9mph shuttle "light rail". To get from my place in the Lower Haight to a soon-to-close cinema in the Richmond, I spent 75 minutes on two buses, during which time I could easily have walked from Point A to Point B.

wish that I could push a button

I'm re-reading Michael Frayn's Headlong, a mischevious and enjoyable story about a man who becomes obsessed with his land-rich neighbour's art collection. Is is a Brue(h)el?, he wonders. And the book is richly in the present tense, even as the action shifts from the present to the recent past to the more-distant past: Frayn artfully uses simple language to build his story. By contrast, Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent is another problem altogether, a confusingly-written legal thriller which takes place in an uncomfortable present tense. The verbs switch sometimes into the perfect, but overall the narrative has little sense of its place in the time of the book. And the story, too, is disappointing: the vocabulary feels stilted, overly-researched, pretentious. Not the legal jargon, but the characters' language. The author's attempts at vernacular amount to little more than stereotypical jive-talkin' (without the ultimate apostrophe, even: jive talkin he would have written).

Compare and Contrast

Bleagh, I lost this entry because of kerberos. Specifically, because the backend server for this blog engine couldn't talk to the frontend: their clocks had skewed. For kerberos, which depends on a 5-minute window (which in itself is kind of hokey, if you ask me), this didn't hold water. The webserver refused to coöperate, and I had to manually reset the clock yesterday. In the mean-time, the POST had expired from my machine's cache. Grumble.

The post was about the relative cost of traffic infrastructure in Seattle, Phoenix, and San Francisco. Per mile, the 2km Caltrain extension weighs in at an order of magnitude more ($1.5 bln) than the $180 mln/mi Seattle light-rail; Phoenix is developing a multimodal approach, which includes long-term traffic planning, highways, and a possible light rail.

... a cup each of mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, relish

        ... nobody had finished the big burger in the three-hour time limit since it was introduced on Super Bowl Sunday 1998 - not even competitive eater Eric "Badlands" Booker. The 420-pound Booker - who has eaten such things as 49 glazed doughnuts in eight minutes and two pounds of chocolate bars in six minutes - tried three times to eat the burger and finally did on his third effort. But it took Booker 7 1/2 hours.

The burger takes 45 minutes to cook, and those who try to meet the three-hour limit must use no utensils and eat all of these fixins: one large onion, two whole tomatoes, one half head of lettuce, 1 1/4 pounds of cheese, top and bottom buns, and a cup each of mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, relish, banana peppers and some pickles.

I thought I had written about this earlier, because the pub's web site had a great photo of the now-vanquished burger. But a cursory examination of the archives turned up nothing.

Your message here

St Claire's online Sign Builder application produces OSHA- and ANSI-compliant signs in several languages. Endless fun, and practical too.

World City Photos

The World City Photos project has a beautiful photograph of Lisbon's rooftops (copy here. Many stunning user-contributed photographs of landmarks around the world. Add to this the amazing public-domain repository of the US Geological Survey and you're in photo heaven.

Get your freak(bike) on.

Chicagofreakbike has an amazing collection of chopper, tallbike, trashbike, and et cetera photographs. Hotcha! (and thanks, jimg, for the pointer).

This led me to thinking about the Blackstone Bicycle Coöp near my old stamping grounds in Chicago, and a link on that site led me to the Bike Furniture shop. And that reminded me of another link jimg sent: the Oklahoma Bicycle Society.

Masonic and Fell

At the Board of Supervisors' Land Use Committee meeting, the Fell St. bike lane became a fixture, and the Board now moves on to consider the long-overdue improvements to the Masonic intersection

      At the Board of Supervisors' Land Use Committee on Monday, the much-loved Fell St. bike lane between Scott and Baker Streets was made permanent, a final victory for a campaign that has lasted more than 10 years. In addition, on Tuesday, the Board approved the removal of three parking spaces on Fell St. at Masonic to improve visibility between cars and bikes. This approval will allow for implementation of other Phase I improvements for the Fell/ Masonic intersection, such as ladder crosswalk striping, advanced phase for bikes/ peds, and advanced stop line, all expected in February. Stay tuned for news on our push for additional improvements down the road. If you are interested in volunteering with the SFBC's Panhandle Xing Guard effort, send an e-mail to xing-guard@sfbike.org

Make-over, ess-eff stylee

Will Sirron Norris' work be the new face of BART?

On the right track

Thieves steal underground track

    Czech police are investigating after more than 1,000 feet of railway track was stolen from the Prague underground.

Police say they suspect a group of homeless people were behind the theft of the track in the Czech capital's Prague 10 district.

They said the 12 tons of track would have been worth about £1,500 on the scrap metal market, local media reported.

Not quite reminiscent of A J Deutsch's outstanding (and under-anthologised) story "A Subway Named Möbius", but still quite an interesting problem of logistics.

A matter of public health?

An epidemic has manifested in the Lower Haight: glaucoma. I see many young men going in to noisome nearby clinics, sometimes several times each week, to receive treatment. When will our public-health officials take notice of the matter? Am I putting myself at risk to have my sight stolen?

Double my pleasure

Kalevala and you

Cori Ellison started off his piece on the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra's Northern Lights Festival with this appetizing paragraph:

You may not think you know a thing about the "Kalevala," but if you're acquainted with Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, the heavy-metal band Amorphis, or Don Rosa's Donald Duck cartoon books, you've got a running start.

January 7, 2005

An Epic Gave Finns a Lot to Sing About
By CORI ELLISON

You may not think you know a thing about the "Kalevala," but if you're acquainted with Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, the heavy-metal band Amorphis, or Don Rosa's Donald Duck cartoon books, you've got a running start.

And if you want to dig deeper, check out the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra's Northern Lights Festival, featuring several works by Sibelius and running through Jan. 23, or any of the several other Finnish musical events taking place around New York this month. If you do, you'll also learn a lot about why Finland's artistic clout so far exceeds its size.

The "Kalevala" is Finland's national epic, a hefty volume full of voyages, battles and magic, very much like the Scandinavian "Edda," the Anglo-Saxon "Beowulf," the German "Nibelungenlied" or the Indian "Mahabharata." But unlike those tomes, it is basically a reworking by a single individual - and a modern one - rather than a rough-and-ready collection of unvarnished folk poetry.

It was Elias Lonnrot (1802-84), a country doctor and folklore scholar who, by sheer force of will, created the "Kalevala." Beginning in 1828, he made 11 expeditions, ranging as far south as Estonia, as far north as Finnish Lapland, as far west as the Tampere area (100 miles northwest of Helsinki) and as far east as Russian Karelia, in search of the ancient sung poetry, or "runo," tradition then alive in the Eastern Orthodox regions of Finland, though long banned in the Lutheran areas.

Lonnrot sought out accomplished runo singers, the best of whom could remember thousands of lines. He could not read or write music, but notated the runos he heard by numbering the strings of his kantele, the five-stringed zither that is the national musical instrument of Finland.

Lonnrot then organized the material into a unified body of poetry, as Homer had with the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey." Lonnrot selected the best variants of each story and assembled them into a coherent whole, writing his own connective passages where necessary and imposing his own timeline to create a logically flowing chain of events.

He conflated characters to streamline the action and transformed dialect passages into newly minted literary Finnish. On Feb. 28, 1835, Lonnrot completed the first phase of his work on the "Kalevala," and ever since, Feb. 28 has been celebrated as Kalevala Day, the birthday of Finnish culture.

Such a freakishly wonderful event could have happened only at that precise split second of history. The German poet Johann Gottfried von Herder was urging Europeans to seek their cultural identity in their ancient folklore, which he termed "the mirror of the soul of the people." Finland, a province of Sweden since 1155, had been annexed as an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire in 1809 and was beginning to hatch dreams of nationhood.

But Finland in 1809 was a far cry from the sleekly sophisticated, Nokia-obsessed nation we know today. The country's educated elite then spoke Swedish, while Finnish was the tongue of servants and peasants.

Longfellow's Source

During the first millennium A.D. the animistic tribes living near the Gulf of Finland, and speaking an exotic, non-Indo-European language nothing like that of their Scandinavian and Slavic neighbors, laid the foundation of "Kalevala" poetry. This poetry, sung in a narrow, five-note melodic range, lacked both rhyme and stanza structure, but it hewed to a single, all-purpose metric formula that served as a memory aid, so that the unlettered Finns could easily remember old poems and improvise new ones.

This "Kalevala meter" is trochaic tetrameter, or four two-syllable feet, in a long-short pattern, similar to Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha":

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,

By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

Stood the wigwam of Nokomis.

Longfellow, a contemporary of Lonnrot, had co-opted the Finnish epic's meter, alliteration and even some plot points, trying, as he wrote, "to do for the old Indian legends what the unknown Finnish poets had done for theirs."

The "Kalevala," the epic of the people of Kaleva, is dominated by the character of Vainamoinen, a shaman and sorcerer who can charm wild beasts with his kantele and use words as weapons. He is the Gandalf-like "eternal sage" who establishes the land of Kaleva and leads and teaches its people.

Promise of Prosperity

The "Lord of the Rings" parallels don't end there. Tolkien fashioned Quenya, the lyrical lingo of Middle Earth's elves, after the click and lilt of spoken Finnish. Both the "Kalevala" and Tolkien's saga, modeled after it, outline a hero's journey in pursuit of a powerful sacred object, replete with shape-shifting, demons and magical plants and animals.

The "Kalevala" depicts the continuing struggle between the good Kaleva (read the Finns), from whose perspective the story is told, and the bad Pohjola from the foggy north (perhaps the Sami people of Lapland). On a deeper, more esoteric level, the "Kalevala" may be read as a contest between light and darkness, good and evil.

The central myth of the "Kalevala" is the story of the Sampo, a mysterious object forged by Vainamoinen's brother, the blacksmith Ilmarinen. We are never told what the Sampo actually is, but it has often been imagined as a sort of magic mill that churns out salt, grain and gold. The Sampo's metaphorical meaning is clear enough: it is the source of prosperity and good fortune.

The "Kalevala" swiftly became the de facto collective memory of the Finns, a boost to their national self-esteem, a rallying point for Finnish independence and, eventually, a wellspring of artistic inspiration. It brought a small, obscure nation to the world's attention, raising the Finns to a historical status alongside other old European peoples, while highlighting their uniqueness.

Creating an Identity

Lonnrot published an expanded "New Kalevala" in 1849, but it would be years before any of it was set to music. Finland was then a political and economic backwater, and Finnish classical music was in its infancy. It slavishly imitated the music of central Europe, the only model it knew. So even the first "Kalevala"-based concert works, like the "Kullervo Overture" (1860) by Filip von Schantz, merely stuffed the epic's sprawling subject matter into a tidy Western musical matrix.

Enter the Karelianists, a group of young Finnish artists who revered the "Kalevala" as the cornerstone of Finnish culture.

The Karelianist movement peaked in the 1890's and continued until shortly after Finland achieved its independence, in 1917. Its ranks included the poet Eino Leino, the architect Eliel Saarinen and the painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, whose vivid images of "Kalevala" scenes are still the ones etched in most Finns' minds.

These Karelianists also gave the world Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), who, through his embrace of the "Kalevala," would become as great a national symbol and source of pride as the epic itself. His music, the composer Erkki Salmenhaara said, "was stylistically influenced to a great extent by the modality, endless repetition and narrow compass of ancient Finnish folk music and the rhythm of 'Kalevala' poetry - much like primitive Russian folk music was later to influence the music of Stravinsky."

A National Music

Sibelius was a Swedish speaker by birth, unable to speak a word of Finnish until he was about 8. His mother enrolled him in one of the first schools in Finland to use Finnish as the teaching language, which opened up to him the world of the "Kalevala."

Like many Finnish composers before and since, Sibelius felt humbled at the thought of setting the "Kalevala" to music. But he tamed his fears enough to write the symphonic poem "Kullervo" (1892), which put him on the international musical map and, more important, planted the seeds of a national musical language. Rather than idealizing the subject matter, Sibelius took an archaic-flavored, musically radical approach that embraced both the tale's ancient nature and its modern guise.

After "Kullervo" Sibelius planned a "Kalevala" opera, "Building of the Boat," with Vainamoinen as the main character. When this project was scuttled, its musical materials were absorbed into the "Lemminkainen Suite" (1896), four tone poems on the exploits of the epic's Don Juan figure.

Sibelius had gone on a poetry-collecting jaunt to eastern Karelia in 1892, but he rarely used direct quotes from folk songs or runo tunes, and disparaged their significance in his works, probably for fear of being branded provincial.

Though digging for traces of runo tunes in Sibelius's works has been frowned upon in Finland, the folk song scholar A. O. Vaisanen found numerous runo tunes in his work. In the first tableau of "Karelia" (1893), the composer used direct folk music quotes and brought actual runo singers on stage to perform them.

More significant than Sibelius's quotations of folk songs is the way that the musical heritage of the "Kalevala" merged seamlessly with his personal musical voice. The narrow melodic range of the runo themes gave birth to his distinctive brand of symphonic motifs, and the endless repetition of "Kalevala" tunes sparked his new ornamental variation technique.

The modality of "Kalevala" music helped Sibelius distance himself from the constricting major-minor tonality of Western music. In 1896, Sibelius wrote: "I had to yield to the tonality stemming from ancient folk songs. Now it is apparent that our present system of tonality is crumbling."

As the 20th century wore on, enthusiasm for the "Kalevala" waxed and waned, and Karelianism was sometimes stereotyped as conservative jingoism or a retreat from reality. Modernists saw the "Kalevala" culture as a hindrance to the universal aspirations of their art. When the "Kalevala" did influence 20th-century music, it tended to do so more generally, as an emphasis on ancient, mythical sensibilities.

The youngest generation of Finnish classical composers has taken scant interest in the "Kalevala," but the epic seems to intrigue young musicians of a more popular stripe. In the 1980's, the folk music band Vrttina began with pure runo singing but more recently has raised hackles among purists for its fusion work.

Edward Vesala, a powerful, shamanlike jazz musician, recorded two "Kalevala"-flavored discs, "Snow" (1987) and "Ode to the Death of Jazz" (1990), before his death in 1999. The progressive rock band Kalevala recently released a triple CD, "Kalevala - A Finnish Progressive Rock Epic," on which 30 international bands explore themes and tunes inspired by the "Kalevala."

Made for Heavy Metal

Of all popular musical styles, heavy metal would seem perfectly matched to the moody Goth fantasy of the "Kalevala." In 1994, Amorphis, Finland's best-known metal band, began exploring the "Kalevala" in its album "Tales From the Thousand Lakes."

Clearly, the impact of the "Kalevala" has been extraordinary, both within and outside Finland. Beyond the realm of high art, Finland's streets, businesses and merchandise (including Kalevala-Koru's imposing replicas of Iron Age jewelry) bear names drawn from the epic, and "Kalevala" tarot decks, video games and comic books abound, including Don Rosa's "Tale of the Sampo," featuring Donald Duck.

The epic has been translated into 51 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Esperanto, Greek, Hindi, Swahili - and even Yiddish.

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the "Kalevala," however, is the fact that the heroism it celebrates is accomplished not through physical strength or violence, but through magical songs. If that's not the key to Finland's success story, what is?

Cori Ellison is the dramaturge at the New York City Opera.

Fell and Divisadero

Dino had his first opening in ess-eff tonight, as part of a show called Monster at Madrone Lounge. Now, this is a storied space: at the corner of Fell and Divisadero, a decaying Victorian with an old pharmacy space on the ground floor. When I moved to the Lower Haight in 1997, a deli called Mr Falafel occupied the space. It closed shortly after I moved, and the developer famous for opening a Burger King in the Inner Sunset bought an interest in the space. Sure enough, he was planning another 900-square foot fast-food joint in this neighbourhood. Local civic leaders and business people raised a ruckus, and the fight went to City Hall and back. And forth. And back and forth for three or four years, during which the space was covered with graffiti, taken down to the joists, and had all its windows broken. With the space still unoccupied, the building became an emblem of the neighbourhood's lack of development focus (cf. the next corner, which has been vacant for 2+ years). After another year, another developer (also from the Sunset, if word on the street is to be believed) secured a liquor licence and proposed to open art bar. Tempers on Divisadero flared: why can't we have a full liquor licence, wondered the other bar owners who have meagre beer-and-wine licences. Eventually (2 October 2004), Madrone opened. I'd stuck my head in once, but never had a drink there before tonight. They stock second-rate gin for their $8 Martini.

This is the city of angels, and you don't have any wings

On the heels of Charlie LeDuff's story on the re-naming of baseball's Angels, the New York Times ran a pointed editorial:

January 6, 2005
EDITORIAL

City of Angels

ometimes an idea comes along that is so stupid, all you can do is stand back, give it some room, and stare:

THE LOS ANGELES ANGELS OF ANAHEIM

That is the new official name of a major league baseball team in Southern California that (1) does not play in Los Angeles, (2) is not moving to Los Angeles and (3) has no plans to put "Los Angeles" on its uniforms.

So what, exactly, is the team doing? It's trying to make more money. It wants to convince advertisers that its market extends far beyond Anaheim, a city in Orange County about 35 miles from Los Angeles, so it can charge them more. The team would just as soon drop "Anaheim" from its name altogether, but it can't. Its landlord is the City of Anaheim, which spent $20 million on stadium renovations as part of a deal in 1996 with the Walt Disney Company, which used to own the team. The contract includes this clause:

"Tenant will change the name of the Team to include the name 'Anaheim' therein."

Therein lies the problem.

But the Angels are not letting it stop them. If it requires a bit of geographic Dadaism - changing their name but not moving, and adding not one but two bilingual redundancies - then so be it. They are sticking to their marketing strategy.

Anaheim city officials are hurt. They say they will go to court to stop what they call a breach of good faith and fair dealing. The Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles are upset, too. So are many Orange County residents of Southern California. We're not sure what the New York Jets of East Rutherford or the Detroit Pistons of Auburn Hills think.

We have to ask, though, what team name in Southern California isn't nuts? The names "Lakers" and "Dodgers" once made sense in Minnesota, land of lakes, and in Brooklyn, land of trolleys, but not in the land of Mickey and Goofy. Don't get us started on the Mighty Ducks.

Into heaven he goes

H. David Dalquist, creator of the aluminum Bundt pan, the top-selling cake pan in the world, has died at 86.

January 5, 2005

Creator of Popular Bundt Pan Dies at 86
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 2:05 p.m. ET

EDINA, Minn. (AP) -- H. David Dalquist, creator of the aluminum Bundt pan, the top-selling cake pan in the world, has died at 86.
Dalquist, who died at his home Sunday of heart failure, founded St. Louis Park-based Nordic Ware, which has sold more than 50 million Bundt pans.
Dalquist designed the pan in 1950 at the request of members of the Minneapolis Chapter of the Hadassah Society. They had old ceramic cake pans of somewhat similar designs but wanted an aluminum pan. Dalquist created a new shape and added regular folds to make it easier to cut the cake.
The women from the society called the pans ``bund pans'' because ``bund'' is German for a gathering of people. Dalquist added a ``t'' to the end of ``bund'' and trademarked the name. So all Bundt pans and Bundt cakes stem from Dalquist.
For years, the company sold few such pans. Then in 1966, a Texas woman won second place in the Pillsbury Bake-Off for her Tunnel of Fudge Cake made in a Bundt pan. Suddenly, bakers across America wanted their own Tunnel of Fudge cakes.
The Bundt pan is the biggest product line for Nordic Ware, which sells a variety of pots and pans and other kitchen equipment. More than 1 million Bundt pans are sold each year.
Dalquist founded Nordic Ware after returning from duty with the Navy during World War II. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in chemical engineering.
He is survived by his wife, Dorothy Margerite Staugaard Dalquist, four children and 12 grandchildren.

I want to know whose name is on the handle!

What better way to understand how a professional works? I'm watching Reservoir Dogs to pick up tips on team-work. It was raining in the Lower Haight, so I took a bus to work.

Fell St. Bicycle Lanes Hearing Next Monday

From the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.

      MAKE THE FELL ST. BIKE LANES PERMANENT! - HEARING MONDAY: If you're wild about the Fell St. bike lanes between Scott & Baker Streets (and what urban bicyclist isn't?!), we could use your help next week to make sure they stay put. You may remember that when the Fell St. bike lanes passed, (after years of SFBC members' pushing and prodding), they were only approved as a trial measure. Well, we think they work just great, and so does the City, who is recommending that they be made permanent. We need a few supporters to help make that case this Monday, January 10th at 1pm at the Board of Supervisors' Land Use Committee hearing at City Hall, Room 263

Neither fish nor fowl

Picked up a marked-up and well-beaten copy of the Norton Critical Edition of Shakespeare's Henry the IVth, Part I. Perhaps now I can get to the bottom of Act II, Scene I.

The much-beloved Seminary Co-op Bookstore, Chicago's labyrinthine repository of all that is printed for the social sciences and humanities, has a special section for the Norton Critical Editions, and their distinctive spines leap out from bookshelves wherever I look. After leaving Chicago, I was distressed to discover that other bookshops don't keep their Nortons all together in a special section, and spent two frustrating weeks looking for a NCE of Moby-Dick before uncovering one at Dutton's Brentwood Books.

I read it with some fava beans and a nice Chianti

After sorting through some of my more recently-shelved books, I was happy to see a copy (first printing, uncut, no less) of Thomas Harris' third instalment concerning Hannibal Lecter. I devoured the book, with its sporadic and unnerving lapses into the present tense, much as its protagonist might devour a seasonal white truffle. Hilarious horror, mocking macabre, and silly suspense. I wonder if the movie is any good: apparently the author went through several revisions, pre-publication, with the director and stars of the previous film incarnation, Silence of the Lambs (which had a pivotal scene filmed down the road from where I grew up in Pittsburgh!).
A tender side-story involves a curious character who wants to see all the extant paintings by Jan Vermeer. I half-assedly tried ditto several years ago, only to find myself staring at nothing at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I did see some beautiful works in DC, NYC, and London, but have yet to see any of the Dutch or German holdings.

This is the dawning of the year of the languages

The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages has hopefully designated this year
The Year of Languages. From what I see, hear, and read, American's ain't not too good with our own language (cheap shot): we read less, read material of "lesser quality", and rely more on our single language to communicate rather than learn the languages of others.