Possibly because I am a Gemini, over the last 35 years my longtime companions have alternated between kind, light, gentle souls and their complete opposites. This has been true both for human lovers and individual cats, and it's been a rare moment when the same personality types were living together with me at the same time.
So it's time for celebration, because I am finally living with two of the nice ones, pictured above.
Two weeks ago, seemingly out of nowhere, I blurted, "We need a cat," after a few years of living without one. "But you said a cat has to find us, not the other way around," Tony replied. "Whoops. I did say that, didn't I?" Two days later we were having dinner at The Blue Muse on Grove Street where Michelle the bartendress asked within minutes of our arrival, "Would you guys happen to be looking for a cat? One of the regulars here lives in Oakland and rescued a whole litter of feral kittens, and there's one left."
After a week's exchange of emails, Monte delivered the coolest orange tabby boy kitten I've ever met: friendly, happy and a purring machine.
We named him Monte after the modern-day St. Francis who had rescued him but the name didn't stick. It was while watching the final day of the PGA Championship golf tournament that we noticed the kitten would jump at the screen every time Tiger Woods was pictured, and he'd try to grab his golf ball from the TV.
So Tiger is the name, which is perfectly appropriate since he looks like one. If you're at all interested in cute cat videos, click here and here for some serious Tiger bonding.
The Civic Center Plaza on Friday evening and all day Saturday was filled by a revival meeting for Latin American Pentecostals listening to music and tales of salvation and damnation in Spanish...
...so it was something of a relief when they were succeeded on Sunday by thousands of Muslims celebrating Pakistan's 62nd Independence Day, which was on August 14.
The day was very much a family affair...
...with lots of eating...
...and encountering old friends.
Unfortunately, poor Pakistan is a "strategic ally" of the United States which isn't exactly helping the political stability of the new nation. As David Rothkopf writes in "The World's 10 Most Dangerous Nations," a blog post at Foreign Policy:
"Pakistan is just barely a functioning state in the pieces of the country where the government has some control. As for the rest of the place? There are pieces that never bought into the idea of the Pakistani nation. So take that, add nukes, add the impact on India and Afghanistan, add al Qaeda and the Taliban, add the country as a petri dish and a symbol for radical Islam and it's still the place with the biggest potential to blow up into something very messy for the world in the next several years."
To give Rothkopf, a Henry Kissinger protege, some credit, he does name the United States as the most dangerous country in the world right now:
"I generally believe the U.S. is a force for good in the world and I am inclined to believe that is the objective of the current administration. But there is no denying that the one country who has most aggressively reached out to touch the world militarily in the past decade is the United States. Further, and more importantly, following the logic in the EU and China mentions above...no one has more power than the United States. That means no one can do more damage with a mistake or even with inaction. Also: as in the case of China and the EU, our economic missteps punish the planet and there is very little evidence to suggest we've taken the steps we need to avoid another meltdown of the 2008-2009 variety. Ask yourself: What has harmed more people on the planet, terrorist brutality or Wall Street venality?"
All I know is that this is a culture that is unafraid of color.
After 35 years living in San Francisco, it's still a treat stumbling into brand new neighborhoods. Last Saturday, it was an area called Miraloma in a hillside valley between Twin Peaks and Glen Park.
The occasion was an annual pig roast hosted by John Burke (above) and his wife Peggy for a large galaxy of their friends, all of whom turned out to be interesting people.
Before this afternoon, I'd never met John, but felt like I knew him since he's been one of the smartest, sanest commenters on this blog for years under the nom de plume "rootlesscosmo." When he confessed that he had also been a fan of "FotoTales," my public access show from five years ago, I just about kissed him.
His old friend Harry Noller, a professor at UC Santa Cruz, was helping John with the Turning of the Pig inside of La Caja China Roasting Box...
...which our host maintains is the crucial element.
I asked Harry how he'd met John, and he said the two were at UC Berkeley in the late 1950s when they were both teenage jazz musicians. John had put up a card on a campus bulletin board offering the services of "an incredibly hip New York pianist," and they ended up playing together for a number of years.
John maintains that the "incredibly hip" part of the story is apocryphal. "I mean, it went without saying that I was incredibly hip if I was a young New York pianist."
A couple of hours into the lovely party, everyone started getting tipsy and hungry...
...and they gathered around La Caja China in anticipation of their pork.
They were not disappointed.
The San Francisco Arts Commission received a request from "Sculpture" magazine for photos of the Patrick Dougherty sculptures in Civic Center, and a young woman who works there who's a fan of this site asked if I could send her my favorite photos of the sculpture.
The obstacle was that I take low resolution photos for the internet and magazines want as many pixels as they can get, so I offered to take new photos of the sculptures at a higher resolution.
The only problem was that the sycamores had fully bloomed and I didn't have a ladder high enough to take a good shot of the sapling nests sprouting out of the trees.
After a number of attempts on the plaza, I asked if we could somehow take a shot from the Mayor's Balcony at City Hall which struck me as the only unimpeded view of the sculptures, without lots of flagpoles in the way.
This request required protocol gestures, a multitude of emails, and a ridiculous amount of time, but finally my favorite person in Mayor Gavin Newsom's administration, Mike Farrah, gave me the number of a receptionist who would literally open the doors for the shot above.
Still, my favorite photo turned out to be from the fifth floor of the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library, flagpoles and all.
