What lies in store for you, For any of us, in these uncertain times When the world that we knew is falling away.
We’re all taking leave from routine Retiring from our usual pursuits Adapting ourselves, our behaviors, our thinking, to a stricken world unseen in a century.
On this turbulent tide of change Your little boat slips out of the workaday world bobbing along with a motley fleet of vessels As we navigate through the chop and fog To a new world across the sea.
As part of Sue’s upcoming virtual retirement party, she is hosting a hat making contest and asking people to submit a photo of their entry. While I’m usually not keen on costumes and dress up, I decided to go for the gold in submitting my Carmen Miranda inspired entry.
Arrrg!is intended to serve as an occasional outlet for your communal frustration and ranting. Today’s futile kvetching is about the state of toilet seats, particularly in our shared communal space, the Common House.
Unlike the doors on most public restrooms, ours lack a Vacant / Occupied indicator and are not equipped with automatic door closers. So, the state of the door is either ajar or often wide open, and usually with the toilet hatch in salute for inspection position.
The science of whether tis better to leave the hatch up or down is hardly definitive as the academic article Lifting the lid on toilet plume aerosol and the Brit Lab short below demonstrate.
In Feng Shui, wet spaces like bathrooms and laundry rooms are inherently problematic. Think mold, fungus, bacteria, and the like. As for toilet seats, Feng Shui practitioners generally recommend putting the hatch down, something about being a prosperity sink, where leaving it open is akin to flushing your wealth down the drain. I’m skeptical of this claim and think a simple poll or study of millionaires would likely show that they are no more or less inclined than the hoi polloi to leave the hatch down.
As for leaving the toilet seat up after enjoying the masculine privilege of peeing while standing, cohabitation with the fairer sex has firmly ingrained in me the moral rightness of always putting the seat down when I’m done. The lid, however, is another matter. When one considers the excess energy expended lifting the lid up and putting it back down over the course of a lifetime, for what seems little more than a matter of opinion or “energetic sensitivity”, a reasonable argument can be made to spare the next person from lifting what may be an unhygienic lid.
Despite the obvious convenience of leaving the hatch up at all times, I’ve become a firm believer in closing the lid when I’m finished with my business. To my eye it’s less unsightly and just “feels right”. When I see the lid up a voice in me says: “There be barbarians in these parts.”
This is not an upper case ARRRG! it’s more a hopeless sigh of an arrrg. Just one of those little things like our mismatched silverware and coffee cups. It rankles and ruffles like a slight disturbance of the force.
As a teenager, my first experience in photography was shooting black and white film with my father’s medium format Hasselblad camera. These were, and are, great cameras, beloved by professionals, used by astronauts on the moon. Way too nice a camera for a duffer like me shooting morbid pictures of twisted trees and gravestones in the Lone Fir Cemetery. Later in youth I sprung for a Konica 35mm camera, with a decided preference for Fujichrome slide film. I regret that I was a lousy chronicler of life in my twenties, shooting artsy pictures of flowers and vegetables rather than the much more interesting subjects of my fellows living communally at the Still Meadow spiritual center for Emissaries of Divine Light in Oregon. Hey, it was the 70’s, so cut me some slack!
My best ever camera is a Nikon D90. When I really need to do a serious shoot, this is the camera that I pull out. It’s the camera I use in tricky indoor light situations, when a bounce flash comes in handy. And, it doesn’t hurt to have a telephoto zoom lens at the ready. It’s a big boy camera.
But the camera that I use nearly all of the time now is the one on whatever my current iPhone is. Smartphone cameras are so good these days, particularly when shooting outdoors, that they are more than just good enough. They are less obtrusive, and can do a remarkably good job.
iPhone Xs with wide and telephoto cameras
The beach photo at the head of this post is from my iPhone Xs. I don’t think my Nikon could balance the glare of the sun in the clouds with the dimmer light of people on the beach. The iPhone camera performs this high def resolution magic by shooting a series of frames, some underexposed, some over, and some “properly” exposed, and then instantly blends them together into a single image that captures the scene as I saw it at the time. Previously, you would do this with a tripod mount and manually set each exposure. Then, back at your computer you would use HDR software to make the final image. Much more work, much less fun. The other feature in play is “Panorama” mode, where you pan across the scene while the software stitches the separate frames into a single image. It’s pretty awesome.
I also shoot lots of brief video segments and use the IOS Photos app “Memories” feature to make those short video montages that I periodically post. I love how you can say so much in 60 seconds. The bottom line, it’s a really fun camera to use.
Death, the taboo conversation stopper, has been peeking out of the closet in recent years. Death Café’s have become increasingly popular and Portland has a particularly vibrant Death Café culture. The purpose of the Death Café movement is succinctly stated as ‘to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives’.
For now, I leave you with the short video below, but I hope to have Death Café become a regularly feature where meditations on death take place from time to time.
Google my name and the first three links are an obituary, a moribund Flickr account of mine and a Facebook page of my namesake dressing up as Captain Kirk. Clearly, I need a consult with an SEO strategist to enhance my online presence. Item six of the search results on my name link to this archive page, listing articles that I’ve posted to The Cascadian in the past few weeks. Which brings me to the point of this article. What we say here on The Cascadian is now rattling around in the bowels of The Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, and the legion of other search engines crawling the web.
There are good reasons why you may not wish your name and likeness to be exposed to search engines on the web. We want to honor your privacy, while making The Cascadian available to a wider audience than the handfuls of residents who might read it regularly. To this end, I’ve asked for time at our next HOA meeting for you to let us know of your concerns so that we can address our editorial policy accordingly.
The following is from the July 5th, 2020 edition of the SF Chronicle. Jane Morrison was Camilla’s aunt.
John King July 5, 2020 | Updated: July 5, 2020 11:08 p.m.
Photo: Chronicle archives 1960
In 1960, Jane Morrison toured Northern California to organize Democratic female voters for presidential candidate John F. Kennedy.
Jane Morrison, a beatific and diligent figure in San Francisco politics for a half-century, died Saturday at her home on the east slope of Mount Sutro. She was 100.
The onetime radio executive held countless fundraisers for progressive candidates and causes at her home near Golden Gate Park, as well as serving on numerous advisory committees related to social justice and the environment. But in a city where the political scene can be needlessly pugnacious, the Oklahoma native had a knack for making friends, not enemies.
“Jane had a wide network of people who knew her, and they would relax in her presence,” recalled Sue Hestor, an attorney and frequent development critic whose friendship with Morrison dated to 1969. “She would talk about issues, but not in a catty way about people.”
As early as 1960, Morrison socialized with then-presidential candidate John Kennedy at a campaign function in her role as women’s chair of the California Democratic Party. She later hosted events for such emerging local candidates as Nancy Pelosi, Willie Brown and Barbara Boxer, and spent more than a decade on the city’s Human Services Commission.
Morrison also appeared on local ballots herself, several times winning a seat on the Democratic County Central Committee. The breadth of her connections can be seen in the list of endorsers from her run in 2002 — everyone from such establishment bastions as Dianne Feinstein and Pelosi to the most left-leaning members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
Former San Francisco supervisor and state Sen. Mark Leno (left) poses with Jane Morrison in 2017, as he confirmed his intent to run for mayor.
Democratic politicians of all generations knocked on Jane “Everyone wanted her on their (political) slate, because she was so well-liked,” said Jennifer Clary, president of the environmental group San Francisco Tomorrow. She and Morrison joined the group’s board in 1992 and remained close from then on.
Political people also liked Morrison because she knew the basics of organizing — how to find people to spend a day licking stamps and stapling election fliers, or making sure that gatherings went smoothly with good food and drink close at hand.
“She would tell me at first that when she hit 80, she was going to retire and just go to lunch. That never happened,” Clary laughed. “She had a stable of volunteers and the most amazing energy. It wasn’t unusual for me to get six to 10 messages in a day when she was putting something together.”
When The Chronicle profiled Morrison in 2011, then-Sen. Barbara Boxer hailed her as a “grande dame of San Francisco politics,” low- profile but essential. Morrison herself attributed her longevity to habits learned on the Oklahoma farm where she grew up in the 1920s: no alcohol, no tobacco, but three glasses of milk every day and “lots of vegetables. That’s all we had back then.” Born Jane Schneider, and one of four children, she was only 3 when her father left the family. Her mother raised the children on her own, determined to steer them toward a better life, and the youngest daughter responded by heading to Oklahoma A&M College, now Oklahoma State University, where she earned a journalism degree. During World War II she became a reporter for the Associated Press. After five years at the AP bureau in Kansas City, the fledgling reporter met and soon married Jack Morrison, a Navy officer. The couple moved to San Francisco in 1952.
Jack worked for The Chronicle as a reporter before running in 1961 for the Board of Supervisors, where he served two terms emphasizing neighborhood and environmental issues such as preventing high-rise buildings from spreading to Telegraph Hill and the waterfront. Jane became the public affairs director at radio station KNBR, where she defined her job to include mentoring young women and encouraging them to push forward in broadcasting.
Her other, unpaid job — or crusade — was the advocacy of Democratic candidates and liberal local political causes. This is how she crossed paths with Kennedy in a suite at the Fairmont Hotel, part of a fundraiser that included drinks with Frank Sinatra and the chance for guests to mingle with the candidate’s brothers, Robert and Ted. The political events that Jane Morrison would host after her husband Jack’s death in 1991 weren’t as lavish as the Fairmont soiree. But they attracted an ever-shifting collection of progressive activists and political aspirants — modestly priced affairs that were ideal for getting people excited about whatever campaign might lie ahead.
“I went to so many fundraisers at her house, for so many candidates and so many ballot measures,” said Tim Redmond, longtime reporter for the now-defunct Bay Guardian alternative weekly who now edits the nonprofit journalism website 48 Hills. “People could call her bossy, but she was never mean-spirited and she would never say anything nasty in public.”
Morrison had dementia in the final years, but remained in her home. There was around-the-clock care arranged by Gimmy Park Li, whom the childless Morrisons looked on as their daughter, as well as visits from her friends and neighbors.
For her 100th birthday in April, friends assembled an hour-long video tribute to Morrison. It included affectionate testimonies from family members still in Oklahoma as well as local political luminaries up to and including Pelosi, now Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
“Equality for all, that’s what you’ve been about,” Pelosi said in the video. “We’ve all learned so much from you.”
John King is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnKingSFChron
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