Where Do You Live, Exactly?

I don't normally respond to telephone surveys, but in an election year, I get kind of curious about what they're asking, so yesterday I agreed to participate in one. Unfortunately, it wasn't about whether I preferred Clinton or Edwards or Obama, but a survey of Mountain View residents about the development of a shopping center near us.

I did my duty, however, and stayed on the line answering questions that were clearly aimed at finding out whether we wanted a Home Depot to replace the failing Sears store in the center, and what it would take to persuade us that we do. I have no opinion one way or the other -- I don't shop at either. But one question broke me up: Do I agree or disagree with the statement "Mountain View should be more like Palo Alto"? The questioner even asked, "Why do people always laugh when I ask them that?"

Well, the truth is that I've lived in both Palo Alto and Mountain View, and the quality of life in both is about the same. To the outsider, Silicon Valley is one long indistinguishable suburban smear from Redwood City to San Jose. My brother-in-law, who visited us for the holidays, even asked me, "Does Mountain View have a government?" As if we depended on a volunteer fire department and neighborhood watch. I pointed out that we got our water through pipes and that we weren't reduced to kerosene lanterns, but he was still surprised that the population of Mountain View is something over 70,000.

But I knew exactly what the questioner meant. No one would have asked, "Should Mountain View be more like Los Altos (or Sunnyvale or Menlo Park)?"

The usual line about Mountain View is that it's Palo Alto without the attitude. It's also Palo Alto without the bureaucracy and the intense NIMBYism that has turned at least two potentially lucrative commercial sites into ghost shopping centers -- empty stores, awaiting replacement tenants who can jump all the approval hurdles.

I know this means nothing to the outside world. People who visit here are also surprised that Mountain View is a pancake-flat town -- not the Swiss village clinging to the mountainside that the name suggests. (There are mountains -- little ones -- that can be viewed from here.) The best you can get from outsiders is, "Oh yeah, isn't that where Apple has its headquarters?" To which the response is, "No, that's Cupertino. We've got Google."

It is, as I've always said, a nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit here. Unless you like to take naps.

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas

Well, it's the twelfth day of Christmas, and as soon as I can get the twelve drummers drumming out of the house, the holiday season is officially over. Actually, for us it ended on New Year's Day, when we took down the decorations and put the tree -- I bought a little potted fir this year -- outside. And yesterday, I drove my brother-in-law to the airport in a driving rainstorm. So it's all back to normal.

Well, as normal as anything is in an election year. I have to admit that the enthusiasm for Obama in Iowa is contagious. And now I read that he's leading Hillary by twelve points in the New Hampshire polls. I still think Hillary's experience would make her the more effective president, but I've got nothing against Obama. The symbolism alone makes me happy -- that of a black man as the leader of the United States, a country that was conceived in liberty for everyone who was a white man, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, except for black slaves, who were counted as only three-fifths equal and then only for purposes of apportioning representatives.

What Year Is It?

Amid the calls to ban wood-burning fireplaces and to neuter dogs and cats, the anti-immigration and anti-tax diatribes, the denunciation of global warming as “baloney,” and the sternly worded opinion on Pakistani elections, I found this rather charming comment in the letters to the editor in today’s Mercury News:

I am mildly irritated by those who pronounce the year as “two thousand eight.” I’ll bet not one of those people said “one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine.” So, why the grammatical schism? What did they say at the turn of the last millennium?

Ed Jacklitch

San Jose

Well, each to his own, Mr. Jacklitch. I happen to find that “two thousand eight” comes out more smoothly than “twenty-oh-eight.” And I submit that this schism, if that’s what it is, is a matter more of diction than of grammar. It’s too bad that we don’t have YouTube videos of Ethelred the Unready giving the royal New Year’s proclamation for 1008 so we can check up on the way the date was handled in the King’s English. (Though it would have been in Anglo-Saxon or Latin anyway.)

I imagine we’ll waffle between “two thousand something” and “twenty something” for a few years longer. Probably until 2020, when saying “twenty twenty” will be irresistible.

Which reminds me that it’s been a long time since there was a lot of discussion about what we’re going to call this decade. People were arguing for “the naughts,” “the aughts,” “the nulls,” “the zeroes,” “the zips” and “the ohs.” It made me wonder when we started naming decades. I’ve read a lot of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, and I don’t recall anyone ever saying something like “back in the forties” in them.

The habit of singling out a decade and putting a label on it seems to have begun with “the Gay Nineties,” a phrase that the not-always-to-be-trusted Wikipedia claims wasn’t coined until 1926. (It also notes that the phrase had to do with “merriment and frivolity,” not the current meaning of “gay,” even though it was the decade of Oscar Wilde’s triumph and tragedy.) But we seem to have skipped over the 1900s and 1910s when it comes to labeling. We don’t start treating decades as cultural units until the Roaring Twenties.

It’s a lazy habit anyway. What we call “the sixties” – protest, youth rebellion, sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll and all that – really began in 1964 with Beatles coming to New York and LBJ escalating the Vietnam War with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and didn’t end till … oh, maybe the rise of disco and the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a decade of merriment and frivolity again?

Afterthought: I wonder if Mr. Jacklitch referred to 2000 as "twenty-hundred"?

You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

For the news media, the Christmas Day tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo is the gift that keeps on giving. Especially since celebrattorney Mark Geragos heard the sirens and signed on to represent the Dhaliwal brothers, survivors of the attack.

One thing that the story I read in the Mercury News doesn’t explain, however, is why Geragos, best known as a defense attorney for the likes of Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson and Winona Ryder, is on the case. Seems like the Dhaliwals need a plaintiff’s attorney. Who’s suing whom?

But what really caught my interest was something that the Merc quoted Geragos as saying about the security guard who allegedly failed to respond to the brothers’ pleas for help: “She was completely diffident.”

I think I’d be diffident – i.e., timid and shy – if someone told me a tiger was on the loose. Although on the other hand, diffidence is not something you want in a security guard, so maybe Geragos has a point.

Or perhaps he meant to say “indifferent”? I hope he wasn’t trying for “disinterested,” which too many people use to mean “uninterested,” when what it really means is “impartial.” But that’s a gripe for another day.

Anyway, see what I mean? This is a story with something for everyone: zoo-lovers, zoo-haters, lawyers, lawyer-lovers, lawyer-haters, the morbidly curious, and even wordfreaks.

A Matter of Time

Happy New Year from

Willie Nelson

Dooley Wilson

Cyndi Lauper

and me.

Better Fed Than Dead

This review ran today in the San Francisco Chronicle.

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: An Eater’s Manifesto
By Michael Pollan
Penguin Press, 244 pp., $21.95

These days, it seems as if almost any statement about the relationship between food and health needs to be taken with a grain of … Mrs. Dash? We have all become victims of what might be called the “Sleeper” syndrome, after the 1973 movie in which Woody Allen wakes up in the future and discovers that everything he thought he knew about food was wrong. In the film, the physicians of the future confer:

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or … hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy … precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.

All too credible, to Michael Pollan’s way of thinking. “Today in America,” he writes in “In Defense of Food,” “the culture of food is changing more than once a generation, which is historically unprecedented – and dizzying.” We are the victims of what Pollan sees as the media-industrial-political complex: “journalism by uncritically reporting the latest dietary studies on its front page; the food industry by marketing dubious foodlike products on the basis of tenuous health claims; and the government by taking it upon itself to issue official dietary advice based on sketchy science in the first place and corrupted by political pressure in the second.”

Most of all, Pollan says, we are victims of the ideology called “nutritionism,” which is based on several “unexamined assumptions,” among them that “Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts” and “that the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health.” Moreover, nutritionism has foisted on us a view of a kind of eternal food fight going on in our bodies: “protein against carbs; carbs against proteins; … fats against carbs” as well as “smaller civil wars … within the sprawling empires of the big three: refined carbohydrates versus fiber; animal protein versus plant protein; saturated fats versus polyunsaturated fats; … omega-3 fatty acids versus omega-6s.” No wonder the pharmaceutical industry makes so much money off of drugs to combat heartburn.

And now we seem to be entering the “Sleeper” future, in which deep fat may make a comeback. “What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism,” Pollan observes, “the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism: -- its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure.” More and more scientists are questioning whether there really is a connection between dietary fat and heart disease. Not only that, Pollan quotes an article from the Journal of the American College of Nutrition: “It is now increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health consequences.” In other words, the low-fat, low-cholesterol campaign not only hasn’t helped stem such problems as obesity, heart disease and diabetes, but it may have in fact made them worse.

Readers of his engagingly written earlier books on food, “The Botany of Desire” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” know that Pollan is not just another Berkeley food crank. Moreover, his is not the only new book proclaiming the hazards of nutritionism. Pollan himself cites science writer Gary Taubes’ recently published “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, $27.95) as an “important” book “blowing the whistle on the science behind the low-fat campaign.” Taubes’ book is weightier than Pollan’s, thickly documented and heavy on the science. Pollan faults it for not being skeptical enough about the current identification of carbohydrates as the enemy that fats were once thought to be: “As its title suggests, ‘Good Calories, Bad Calories,’ valuable as it is, does not escape the confines of nutritionism.”

Pollan urges us to relax, and not worry so much about food. At the very beginning of the book he provides a mantra: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” After spending much of the book explaining why almost all nutritional advice in the past 30 or 40 years has been misleading, unsubstantiated, bogus and even counterproductive, he unpacks his mantra for us concisely and amusingly. “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” he advises. This needs a bit more explanation. After all, many of our great-grandmothers weren’t exposed to the great multicultural bounty we find in stores and restaurants, so a lot of them wouldn’t recognize some perfectly wholesome stuff as edible. Calamari, for example, or tofu. One imagines Great-Grandma’s reaction to such now-commonplace fare as artichokes (“You want me to cook a thistle?”) or yogurt (“That milk is sour!”) . To paraphrase Jonathan Swift, it was a brave great-grandmother who ate the first oyster.

But Pollan’s point is this: Great-grandmother never cooked with guar gum, carrageenan, mono- and diglycerides, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, modified food starch, soy lecithin and any number of other ingredients found in processed food. Great-Grandma may have picked cotton, but she never ate it. Yet cottonseed oil is commonplace in all sorts of the “edible foodlike substances” found in supermarkets today.

Pollan’s advice is sensible and even inspiring. It can, however, be faulted as a little elitist. It’s not that hard if, like Pollan, you live in Berkeley, where Alice Waters is guide and guru, to shop carefully at farmers’ markets and specialty stores, to spend more to get fresher and better stuff, to cook your meals, and to eat them slowly and at a table with good company. But god help you if you’re a single parent working long hours and living in a poorer neighborhood where there aren’t even any supermarkets. A bag of Whoppers or a bucket of KFC is probably your inevitable choice.

And in the end, this thoughtful, entertaining and helpful book does wind up being a little more alarmist than Pollan pretends it is. The very thought that a book needs to be written “In Defense of Food” is unsettling. It might instead have been called “Fear of Feeding.”

Unhealthy

I fell into a coverage gap. The prescription coverage I had from my former employer ended on November 30, and I couldn't pick up Medicare prescription coverage until January 1. But I ran out of my meds -- a generic anti-anxiety drug -- last week and had to pay full price. One hundred seventy-seven dollars. For sixty little pills.

I look at these small white pills and think: Each one of you costs $2.95.

Somebody is making out like a bandit on this deal.

A Momentary Lapse of Reason

I watched a football game tonight. That Patriots-Giants thing? It was fun, too. I mention it only because it's not something I normally do. Sports, that is.

I sometimes tell people that I'm just not interested in sports, but the truth is, I'm afraid I might get too interested in them. I know that I have a tendency to get addicted to things, obsessed by them, preoccupied with their minutiae. I mean, for god's sake, I wrote a whole book about the Academy Awards. And I can see myself becoming one of those guys who comb the agate type in the sports section for statistics.

So for now, I treat sports as an occasional thing, being careful not to show too much interest in them, lest I get drawn into another pastime (like surfing the Internet) that will occupy my attention.

A Little Night Music

k.d. lang

Unsolicited Advice

A friend who lives in Palo Alto goes out for a daily walk. He was striding along happily one day when he was stopped by a woman, a complete stranger, riding a bicycle. She informed him that walking wasn’t a sufficient cardiovascular workout. Pointing toward the bleachers at a nearby playing field, she instructed him to start climbing them as part of his exercise. Which he now dutifully does.

Perfectly Palo Alto, which is the kind of place where you can mind other people’s business for their own good. I guess that’s what people hate about us liberals, too.