Grasping Reality with Both Hands

Only in Berkeley...

---

Posted via email from http://braddelong.posterous.com/only-in-berkeley at Brad DeLong's Scrapbook

More Fowl Pictures

---

Benjamin Franklin: "A rising, not a setting, sun..."

Posted via email from http://braddelong.posterous.com/939883 at Brad DeLong's Scrapbook<

Poults on Deck!

Our Chemists Are Hardcore Blogging

Yali's Cafe East in Stanley Hall. Home of the Redeye: a large coffee with an added double shot of espresso.

More Nature Liveblogging: A World Full of Turkeys

Three adult turkeys and twenty-one poults make their way up the hillside at dawn...

I am told that the California wild turkey was hunted to extinction in the 1920s--"Ma! Get a net!" These are Texas wild turkeys, and are animals that are neither "native" nor "non-native" but rather "near native."

I think that their edge over other ground-birds in American suburbia is that they do not fear cats much...

Real-Time Coyote Blogging via iPhone

Wile E. Coyote on the driveway at 7:00 AM Sunday morning...

Nerd Tourism

Leila Abu-Saba sends us to Alison Chaiken's Technical Tourist's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area:

Technical Tourist: Sick of netnews? Caught up on all your blogs? You could always exercise, floss, call your mom or perform a breast self-exam. Nah. Perhaps you need:

The Technical Tourist's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area

1. Tour the Geysers, Calpine's geothermal generation plant in Middletown, Lake County. See giant turbines and clouds of sulfuric acid steam! The link is, ahem, optimized for a non-Mozilla browser, so you can also call toll-free (866)-GEYSERS for more information.

2. Visit the GM-Toyota NUMMI auto manufacturing plant in southern Fremont. There are fascinating robot welders and giant metal stampers. The tour is quite suitable for children in my unexpert opinion.

3. Particle accelerators are big fun. Consider an outing to the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley or the Stanford Linear Accelerator. The LBNL tour may also visit other facilities such as the National Center for Electron Microscopy, the Environmental Energy Technologies Division and the Center for Beam Physics.

4. For more gigantic steel structures, check out the Port of Oakland tour. Enjoy giant cranes and a boat ride too. (Thanks to Meg.) To get an even closer look at the cranes (and a fine view of San Francisco as well), walk around and have a picnic at Middle Harbor Shoreline Park.

5. The Menlo Park branch of the USGS is a reliable source of entertainment. Every couple of years there's an Open House. In the meantime browse the quads, fault maps and satellite photos at the Earth Science Information Center, which is located in Building 3 at 345 Middlefield Road and is open Monday through Friday from 8 to 4.

6. Meditate on earthquakes while hiking the San Andreas Fault Trail in Palo Alto or seeing the Loma Prieta Epicenter in Forest of Nisene Marks. (I'll confess that the Nisene Marks hike is a bit dull: miles and miles of trail through dark second-growth redwood forest.) Many more earthquake-related outings are described in Geologic Trips: San Francisco and the Bay Area, which I highly recommend. Another book of interest is Geology Trails of Northern California, which I haven't yet had the chance to purchase. If you're really interested in local seismology field trips, send for the Field Trip Guidebooks from the Conferences on Earthquake Hazards in the Eastern San Francisco Bay Area that were sponsored by Cal State East Bay.

7. Take the ferry to Sausalito and view the San Francisco Bay Model. (Thanks to KML.)

8. While you're in Marin, visit the Nike Missile Base in the Headlands. (Thanks to KML.)

9. The Hiller Aviation Museum specializes in early helicopters which range from the admirable to the laughable. The annual Vertical Challenge should not be missed. (Thanks to KML.)

10. Speaking of aviation, the Moffett Field Museum is now open Weds-Sat from 10-2. Learn all about Moffett's history with lighter-than-air craft.

11. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View is full of treasures. Besides the Visible Storage there's an excellent speaker series. (Until the interpretive material at the exhibits is expanded, this one really is for nerds only.)

12. The San Jose Astronomical Association will invite you to a star party. Alternatively drive up Mount Hamilton and take in the Lick Observatory. In the summer Lick has astronomical lectures and public viewing plus concerts. And the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland has free public telescope viewing every Friday and Saturday night. (Thanks to Leila.)

13. Arthur Frommer rates the San Francisco Cable Car Museum as "one of the top ten free attractions in the world." (Thanks to Leila.)

14. Take the Hazel-Atlas silica mine tour at the Black Diamond Mines in Antioch. There's also a lot of old mining equipment at Almaden Quicksilver County Park in San Jose. (Thanks to KML.)

15. We still haven't gotten around to visiting the Intel Museum in Santa Clara or the Exploration Center at NASA Ames in Mountain View. South San Jose hosts the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center but there's no indication when it's open.

16. A bit further afield, the California State Railroad Museum looks appealing. Of course you could take the remarkably scenic and comfortable Amtrak Capitol Corridor line to get there. Closer to home you can ride the Niles Canyon Railway in Fremont or the Roaring Camp Railroad in Felton. If you still have railfanning on the brain, consider the Western Railway Museum on Highway 12 between Suisun and Rio Vista. (Thanks to Mark.)

17. No matter how you feel about our California water politics, the acqueducts and dams are certainly an engineering marvel. The Sunol water temple is open 9 AM to 3 PM Monday through Friday. The similar Pulgas Water Temple, adjacent to the Crystal Springs Reservoir, has more reasonable hours but no longer has any water. (Thanks to Mark and, come to think of it, KML.)

18. The American Society for Mechanical Engineering has a Northern California Landmarks in Mechanical Engineering web site. Some of the sites can be visited in person while others just have cool photos. (Thanks to LSK.)

19. Visit the California Academy of Science in their temporary home at 875 Howard Street in San Francisco and be amazed by the ant colonies. The museum is open every day from 10 to 5. (Thanks to LSK.)

20. In the recent past I've seen advertisements for tours of the Altamont windfarm and the Cargill salt processing facility in Newark, but I can no longer find information about these excursions. Anyone?

21. If you care about engineering history, check out the local chapter of the Society for Industry Archeology.

22. If all else fails, go to Central Computer and hang out. CC employs staff who have actually used computers before.

23. Know of any Bay Area technical highlights that I've omitted? Have a similar web page highlighting nerdly landmarks in another urban area? Please send email.

alchaiken@gmail.com

And Now the Poultry Have Moved in...

By the edge of the driveway, in the blackberries:

They Are Getting Bolder...

It's 40 yards from my kitchen six hours after dawn...

We Are Going to Need a Bigger Stimulus

Payroll -650,000. Unemployment rate from 7.6 to 8.1 percent.

Another $1T stimulus needs to be in the budget resolution.

And it is now one full year that I have Bern saying:

1. Swedish model for the banks.

2. Unleash the gses to borrow at the Treasury rate and by up--at current market--every mortgage in the country.

I really wish I weren't so smart and so clear-sighted.

Not Too Worried About a Drought Anymore...

This creek was bone dry a week ago. Now it's carrying a gallon/second--and it's not runoff.

The Four-Point Buck Has Moved in

That is all.

Down Little Grizzly Creek with iPhone and... iPhone

How much is that coyote on the hillside?

It was a big one: the size of a small adult German Shepherd...

A Once Every Five Years Event

Leila Abu-Saba requests some blogging about the visible snow on the top of Mount Diablo:

Ask the Internet: Berkeley High-End Lunch Restaurants

So at the start of the semester I took Jim Hines (visiting from U. Michigan as we try to persuade him and his family to leave his underfunded public university in a place with absurdly low house prices for another underfunded public university in a place with absurdly high house prices) out to lunch at Adagia.

At the end of the semester he has escalated by taking me out to lunch at Chez Panisse Cafe.

I now have to re-escalate next semester. But to what? I don't believe the French Laundry serves lunch--and it is a Berkeley restaurant only by pure legal fiction. What are my other options?

California Academy of Sciences New Museum Building Blogging

A Foucault Pendulum at the North Pole revolves clockwise with a period of 24 hours. A Foucault Pendulum at the South Pole revolves counterclockwise with a period of 24 hours.

By symmetry, a pendulum at the equator must not revolve at all.

By continuity, every pendulum away from the poles must revolve with a period greater than 24 hours.

Discuss.

Dawn Patrol

6:59 AM, looking southeast from the top of Burton Ridge:

Death to Acorn Woodpeckers

We too suffer from woodpeckers--just like the people at the retirement community just over the hill. But we have not yet applied for our Depredation Permit:

Dennis Cuff: A Walnut Creek retirement community where deer nibble on lawns and wild turkeys strut across the golf course is calling in a hit man to shoot woodpeckers that drill into homes to stash acorns. Two Rossmoor homeowner associations are bringing in a federal hunter soon after receiving U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permits to kill as many as 50 acorn woodpeckers... the homeowner groups contend that they have installed nets, hawk squawk boxes, owl decoys and battery-operated spiders, and yet homes are still getting drilled by the birds. "People here don't want to shoot them, but after spending eight years and $170,000 without success, the homeowner groups don't know what else to do," said Maureen O'Rourke, a Rossmoor spokeswoman. "The birds can do a lot of damage."... The shooting is expected to start within a week or two once the hunter, who works as a nuisance wildlife controller for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is available.

The license to kill — called a depredation permit — was granted in June and is good for one year under federal rules aimed at balancing the needs of wildlife and protecting human crops and property, said Al Donner, a spokesman for the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service. Acorn woodpeckers, which are highly communal creatures that will raise other acorn woodpeckers' young, depend heavily on acorns for food. The permit allows killing by a shotgun, pellet gun, or snap trap....

One option is to erect a decoy tree for the woodpeckers to drill into rather than into people's homes....

To protect [Duke] Robinson's house, his homeowners association installed sound-activated spiders, which scared away the birds, he said. But when the spider batteries went dead, the homeowners association did not replace them, Robinson added. Gary Beeman, a Lafayette biologist who hires himself out to control wildlife problems, said he has used the spiders to scare off woodpeckers with "90 percent" success at many homes...

Why are the woodpeckers scared of these battery-operated robot spiders? How large are they? That is what I want to know...

Birds-Away Attack Spider

A testimonial:

Birds-Away Attack Spider® - Woodpecker Deterrent Testimonials: These spiders work great.  They have other applications as well.  Thanks again for your prompt service and a wonderful product. Ray Reed. Coarsegold Ca

Seven Turkeys Beseige Our Neighbors and Summon Them to Surrender...

It looks like four adolescent males who think that if they make themselves look large and threatening enough they can scare off a blue four-door Acura. Accompanying them are three chicks... hens...

I feel a Nature Channel special coming on: Adolescent Turkey Gangs of the California Chapparel...

More Fauna!

There have been sightings two miles away. We have a spring--which means we have lots of grubs:

PipelineNews: Domestic hogs [sus scrofa] were introduced at the beginning of the 18th century by Spanish and Russian émigrés to the area, naturally, some of these escaped and made their way back into the wilds, where they thrived. In the early 20th century the European wild boar was brought to the area around Monterey which resulted in a substantial feral population in that vicinity. This hybrid hog which is... different in appearance than the commercial hog; they are generally leaner, have longer more pointed snouts and a longer, bristly coat. Their ears are somewhat smaller than the domesticated variety and can have formidable tusks, sometimes over 3 in length.

Our feral hogs are smart, have an acute sense of smell and do well in the state's coastal counties which feature rolling oak-studded hilly woodlands, lush grasslands and farms. Because of their ability to adapt, large litters and few natural predators they have become a nuisance even in some very upscale residential areas such as Blackhawk.... In these locales front lawns and expensive landscaping plants are rooted up by pigs searching for grubs...

Another Day of Stanford Weather

High 80s in Berkeley with no sign of fog, and a need for lots of sunscreen...

Changes...

We return from vacation to find ourselves with a yellow house.

A definite improvement, I think...

Ah: Finally: Where the Walter Costa Trail Starts

Aha! The Walter Costa Trail starts inside the EBMUD vehicle parking lot. Not, I must say, where one would tend to look first for the start of a hiking trail...

http://www.ci.lafayette.ca.us/vertical/Sites/{C1C49B72-3D02-4C7B-82A7-92186ABD75FF}/uploads/{7D02A776-148A-4B34-8278-3ED618D9A700}.PDF: The trail begins on th enorth side of Mt. Diablo Blvd. at the signed entrance to the EBMUD yard across from the reservoir. The trail is paved from this point through the EBMUD yard to Pine Lane... [emphasis added]

The Transparent Society...

Distributed global surveillance:

Berkeley Morning Coffeeshop Blogging

Sign in Brewed Awakening:

All Occupied Seats Must Be Justified by a Purchase

I have heard of justification by faith, and justification by works, but...

Wildfires...

Dawn Patrol...

Just back from Lake Tahoe and out with the dog on dawn patrol. The sun rises over the Diablo Valley at 5:52, blood-red, obscured by the smoke from the wildfires. The entire valley looks like... Beijing, and it smells as though the most enormous piece of toast in all the world has just met its maker.

Closer to home--in the thicket where the spring lies a fifth of a mile from home--there is quite a party going on this morning: four crows are harassing a red-tailed hawk up above, while six turkeys gobble in the trees. Two does with their fawns crash through the thicket wanting to put more distance between themselves and the dog. A small grey fox scurries across the road in the dawn, also anxious to put more distance between itself and the Labrador.

But the striped skunk does not. It waddles up the hill from the spring out of the blackberry thicket onto the road, and looks at us from twenty yards away. God! It's eyesight must be absolutely awful!

It raises its tail...

The 100 Best Bay Area Restaurants

While the notorious boulevardier Ogged takes his mother to the French Laundry, my wife and I go to Vik's Chaat House. We were very pleased. Some reactions:

• The food is really good.
• The food is really, really good.
• The food is so good and so cheap I feel guilty, and want to give them more money.
• The lack of atmosphere is utterly charming.
• Why haven't we been here before? Why don't we come here every time we go to Fourth Street? It's on Fourth Street! Yet nobody ever told us "if you're on Fourth Street you must duck under the bridge over to Vik's Chaat House." Why not?

Sunday Morning Upper San Leandro Reservoir Kings Canyon Cattle Drive Blogging

Sunday Morning Upper San Leandro Reservoir Kings Canyon Cattle Drive Blogging: We--that is, two monkeys and a Labrador Retriever--just drove 20 head of cattle 6 miles down one side of Kings Canyon and back along the Rocky Ridge trail. I am telling you: these aren't the ancient fearsome aurochs of the Eurasian forests. The only sticky point was when the cattle we were driving met head-on at a narrow place on the trail two quants from Barclay Global Investments and their ancient Golden Retriever coming the other way...

listen

---

Now is this a good job or a bad job of voice recognition we have here?:

Sunday morning, Upper Family(?) Reserver King Canyon cattle drive(?) logging. We, that is two monkeys and a Labrador Retriever just drove 20 head of cattle 6 miles down the one side of the King Canyon and back along the Rocky Ridge Trail. I am telling you these are no longer the ancient fearsome ora rasion(?) forest. The only sticky pipe was where the cattle we were driving met a head on a narrow pass in the trail to quants(?) from Barkley(?) global investors and agent golden retrieval coming the other way. listen

Powered by Jott

Tuesday Morning Fewmets Blogging...

This is alarming. Thirty yards from the house:

It's on a big rock--a rock four feet across and three feet tall. So it's not a dog. It's much too much to be a cat. It's a carnivore--there's fur in it.

Lazy Easter Sunday Blogging

The first of the three copies of Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm that I had loaned out comes back: from Tom Kalil, who wants a reputation as the kind of man who returns books...

Sunday Easter afternoon in Tom Kalil and Maryanne McCormack's backyard: 81F...

Meanwhile, in central Maine the judging of the Easter ice sculpture contest begins...

Easter Sunday Morning Nature Walk Blogging

Not shown are the steel posts surrounding the wooden enclosure...

Equinox

Sunrise this morning was not 7:12 but rather 7:22 --the sun spends an extra 10 minutes hidden behind the bulk of Mount Diablo after it has supposedly peeked its way over the horizon.

Hazards of Picnicking at the Valle Vista Staging Area

I am always amazed at the number of effectively wild places in Greater San Francisco: six million people live within sixty minutes of the EBMUD Valle Vista Staging Area and the Kings Canyon Loop Trail, and yet we see nobody...

Berkeley Sentence of the Day

Berkeley sentence of the day:

Let's go to Espresso Experience next to Musical Offering: Foucault always liked to go there...

What an Awful Day!

Usually October in Berkeley is high summer. Because it is no longer super-100 in the central valley, rising central valley air no longer pulls the cold sea air off the Pacific bringing the fog, so it is bright and sunny--in fact the summeriest of all months in Berkeley.

Not today: 50F and drizzling. The graduate students from the Mediterranean are all horrified.

One might as well be in Cambridge--either Cambridge.

King Lear Blogging

King Lear at the California Shakespeare Theater. Very well done.

There are, of course, the Berkeley moments: the announcement beforehand that there is a silver Prius in the parking lot with its interior lights on, and four men (including me) get up to check...

Were I Berkeley law professor John Yoo, I would never agree to take part in the production and come on stage to waterboard and then blind the Earl of Gloucester. And I would never agree to make Gloucester confess not just to conspiring with Cordelia and the French but also to being the twentieth highjacker...

Miniclimate iPhone Blogging

I am wearing long sleeves, a tie, a tweed jacket, and I am cold: it is 58F out here at 5 PM.

It is mid-September, for Jeebus' sake!

The Sun Rises Blood-Red

Auguring... nothing in particular. Except that the wildfire south of Lassen must be HUGE.

Around the Lafayette, CA Reservoir This Morning

The count on the Lakeside trail:

• 12 babies
• 59 dogs
• 73 men
• 151 women

Some of the missing men are fishing--there was a "catfish plant" a week or so ago. But where are the others? What are they doing?

Captain Blythers, First Street, Benicia

Capitain Blythers: "Do you want a table with a downstream view of Carquinez Strait and the bridge or a table with an upstream view of the Martinez refinery?"

"We have a dog with us..."

"You'll be wanting the upstream view, then..."

Both the cioppino and the mixed seafood grill were excellent. The dog appreciated scraps of Icelandic cod and broccoli.

Summer Solstice

The sun rises behind the lower north shoulder of the Diablo Ridge at 5:52 AM this morning...

Dogs Are Allowed

Today we learned that dogs are allowed on the King Canyon trail starting from the Valle Vista staging area...

http://www.ebmud.com/services/recreation/east_bay/trails/trail_maps/south.pdf

A Father's Day Tribute to an Akhilleus of the Theropods

On this Father's Day, let us pay tribute to one of our local fathers: the Tom Turkey in the blackberry patch 100 yards north. He is a successful father: five hens and forty hatched chicks this year. But the chicks are now down to twenty: snakes, hawks, raccoons, coyotes, cats, dogs, cougars, Acura RSs, Cadillac Escalades.

He is doing his best. He has his feathers fully fluffed out and his tail fanned 24/7, as he stands guard, trying to convince all the snakes, hawks, raccoons, coyotes, cats, dogs, cougars, Acura RSs, Cadillac Escalades that come by that he is a ferocious 40-pound beaked-and-taloned killing machine rather than a 10-pound bird with hollow bones. He bluffs manfully... fowlfully... whatever. But he cannot be everywhere. And when the wind comes whipping up the canyon the fact that most of his apparent volume is fluffed-up feathers means that he behaves less like a well-muscled carnivore and more like a parasail: to watch him display and threaten and then get blown helplessly across the road by a gust is very funny, in a sick way.

Nevertheless, he tries to bluff every snake, hawk, raccoon, coyote, cat, dog, cougar, Acura RS, Cadillac Escalade that comes by in order to keep them away from the chicks. Sooner or later, however, his bluff will fail, and he will become the dinee. This will give extra time for the chicks to escape.

He is a veritable Akhilleus of the theropods.

Shopping on Saturday Afternoon, with Cellphones

"I'm going to have to reconsider my attitude toward Costco now that I know you can get a cubic foot of pre-washed organic spring mix for under $4."

---

"Hello. This is Coyote 2 calling for Coyote Leader. I have found my way to Target. I am standing by a display of Spongebob Squarepants pinatas. I will search the store for you..."

"Hello. This is Coyote 2 calling for Coyote Leader. I heard someone calling your name. I followed the trail, but didn't find you. I am now standing by a display of "adult backpacks." I will continue to search..."

"Hello. This is Coyote 2 calling for Coyote Leader. There is no sign of you. I am standing by a display of motorized tie racks, each holding up to 54 ties with on-off lamp..."

Speaking of the Thunderdome...

On the downhill size of the one-lane driveway: One blue Acura Integra, 184" long, 3345 lbs., powered by a 205 hp four-cylinder engine.

On the uphill side of the one-lane driveway: One tom turkey, 32" long, 12 lbs. (its bulk is almost all feathers), powered by testosterone and a willingness to die to give its five hens and forty chicks a chance to escape from the monster into the blackberry bushes.

Dulce et decorum pro caterva mori.

September 1, 2007 Is the DAY OF THE LORD--for the Raccoons, that Is

Yes, the Basileia of the raccoons is arriving on September 1, 2007:

City of Lafayette -- CCCSWA Presentation on the Lamorinda Food Scrap Recycling Program: Staff from the Central Contra Costa Solid Waste Authority (CCCSWA) will make a presentation on the new food scrap recycling program scheduled to begin Sept 1, 2007. Information on participation and options for kitchen food waste collection will be discussed...

Five days a week, 1400 green carts each day, green carts formerly filled just with grass clippings and branches, now filled with a week's food waste, including tea bags and coffee grounds. Unlatched green carts. Green carts made from reasonably tough plastic, but not plastic strong enough to resist the teeth of a family of raccoons with a whole night to work in and... motivation...

Meanwhile, in Kassel, Federal Republic of Germany:

'Nazi raccoons' in Europe: Waschbaeren, or “wash bears,” are raccoons, which habitually wash their paws. In 1934, Nazi official Hermann Goering received a seemingly mundane request from the Reich Forestry Service. A fur farm wanted permission to release a batch of exotic bushy-tailed animals into the wild to “enrich the local fauna” and give hunters something new to shoot at. Goering approved the request and set off an ecological disaster that is spreading across Europe.... Raccoons... range from the Baltic Sea to the Alps....

No place in Germany has more of them than Kassel, a city of about 200,000 people in the central state of Hesse. It has plenty of leafy suburban backyards that border large tracts of public forests. The city lies less than 20 miles from the Nazi fur farm that is usually blamed for Germany’s raccoon explosion.... Five years ago, a family of raccoons got into a house belonging to Ingrid and Dieter Hoffmann of Kassel. They settled into the chimney and — despite efforts to smoke them out — ruined their roof, which cost tens of thousands of dollars to fix. The Hoffmanns also spent $1,300 to raccoon-proof their residence with electrified gutters and other measures.

“The little ones look cute and have a pretty face,” said Ingrid Hoffmann, 70. “But their mother can bite your finger off.” Dieter Hoffmann wagged a finger: “We like the United States of America, but we do not like your Waschbaeren!”

Another Sign of the Impending Apocalypse

At the Ferry Building at the bay end of Market Street, Peet's sells a "Scharffenberger mocha freddo" for $4.30. Can the fabric of the universe sustain the existence of the $5 coffee drinks that are clearly only a year or two away?

Being Omnivorous

We turn left coming out of the driveway, and we are immediately confronted with: quail, seventeen adult quail, and deer, two adult does. The quail do not quail at the car: instead, they run aimlessly in rapid circles as the car approaches, and then take wing with a whir. The deer stare at us, as if wondering whether or not to approach the car for food. And then they amble off toward the lawns. In the distance there is the gobbling of turkeys--refugees seeking sanctuary from the retirement community of Rossmoor, where sharpshooters are hunting them with silenced rifles. My wife tells of once being in the car and running into a male turkey on the driveway, which looked at her and spread its tail feathers in a testosterone-crazed dominance display--thinking that it could drive off a Subaru, and thus preserve his exclusive sexual access to the hens. Truly a bird of very little brain...

Ever since my wife learned that I was on a committee with Michael Pollan, author of the truly excellent if slightly Berkeley twee The Omnivore's Dilemma, she has been pressing me to invite him to dinner. I have resisted, being scared that she would greet him at the door with a net, and say: "We're having quail this evening. Would you please catch us a dozen? They're under the blackberry bushes" or "Here's the dried corn, the mortar, and the pestle: would you please make us some masa?" or even worse, "Would you please evolve us some maize via selective breeding from this teosinte plant?"

But do go read The Omnivore's Dilemma. It is truly excellent.

Berkeley vs. London

A high of 80F today in Berkeley. Strada at College and Bancroft didn't turn on its heat lamps until after dark. The first sunbathers of the year appeared.

I remember the... second time I ever went to London. It was the last weekend in May. We got there, and it was 65F or so at the high, with scattered clouds, and people were sunbathing in Russell Square. "Why are they doing this?" I wondered. "Don't they know the weather will be much better for sunbathing in a month?"

I was wrong. It wasn't. That was the best weekend of the summer.