Dedie aux Animaux - Animal Photos of Arturo Medina
I am not sure who sent these to us, and I can't track down anything in English about the photographer, but these are a joy.
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Wednesday, January 07, 2009
6:14 PM
Timber Cove Inn Reborn
Beniamano Bufano's Peace statue at the newly refurbished Timber Cove Inn, about a 2-hour drive up the Pacific Coast from San Francisco. The Timber Cove Inn was built in 1960 by Richard Clements, on a beautiful stretch of the Mendocino coast. ( In the early '60s I had an agreement with Clements to cut redwood shakes out of windfall trees on his property.) The Inn was a destination place, but over the years it got worn down and worn out. I'd heard that it had new owners and had been fixed up, so I stopped in for a beer (oat stout on tap) and hamburger last Sunday on my way home. The place sparkles. It's a wonderful (2-1/2 million $) renovation. Bufano's statue is out on the rocks to the south. There are 50 rooms, all with ocean view. Food seems great. Rooms seem to start at $180.
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1:21 PM
The Majesty of Redwood Trees
"Tree hugging" is kind of a lame phrase, right? Well I recommend you hug a redwood some time (old growth if possible). Face it and spread your arms out on its trunk and lay your face against it. If your mind is still you can feel the life, the presence, the power of this living creature. I found this in a grove in Mendocino County on Saturday.
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Tuesday, January 06, 2009
2:16 PM
Nice Architecture in the Napa Valley
This is an elegant design, but there are also a bunch of dreadful huge winery buildings that are tasteless and clueless in this beautiful valley.
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2:09 PM
Lloyd on Oprah's New Network?
Over the weekend I got an email from some independent film producers in L.A. "We are looking for interesting people, artists, activists, professors, etc. to interview about 'living your best life.'" They were producing a segment for Oprah's new network show, OWN, and the director was Jesse Dylan. I met the crew at Muir Woods and they did about a 10-minute interview with me standing under the redwoods, with Jesse doing the interviewing, and me blabbing as usual. When it was over we walked back to the production trailer through the light rain. I told Jesse I'd grown up in San Francisco, and he asked if I liked the Grateful Dead. By way of answering, I said, "Know what a Deadhead says when he runs out of pot? — This music sucks!" I went on to say that in those days I listened to the Stones, Beatles and Bob Dylan. "That's my dad." he said. I didn't know. When I got back I looked up his work, which happens to be very cool:
JESSEDYLAN.pdf
JESSEDYLAN.pdf
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1:22 PM
Coco's in L.A.
WELCOME TO COCO"S2427 Riverside Drive
Los Angeles, California 90039
Coco's Variety sells flyswatters, glass 5 gallon water bottles, headache remedies, oil cloth by the yard, used bicycles, California souvenir tablecloths, Kit-Cat Klocks, gum ball machines, Mexican Cokes in glass bottles, squirt guns, tote bags adorned with hula girls, Lodge cast iron frying pans, old American-made tools, baskets for your bicycle, wood matches, reverse osmosis purified drinking water by the gallon and fancy Jadeite cake plates for fancy cakes on fancy occasions.
We sell everything but parakeets.
http://www.cocosvariety.com/
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12:51 PM
SunRay Kelley's Natural Materials Temple
After a Friday morning of marketing brainstorming with my man Kevin Votel of Publishers Group West, I went to see my wheelchair-bound friend Sherman in Oakland. Even though Sherm pretty much can't move any of his limbs, he still manages to play jokes and practice mischief. From there I headed up to see my friend Louie on the Mendocino coast, with a diversion to Harbin Hot Springs to soak in the hot hot pool where the water comes in at about 110° straight out of the canyon. While there I shot this photo of the temple built by SunRay Kelley, a masterpiece of natural and sustainable materials and organic design. Right now I'm in Louie's studio looking out on a sunny meadow against a backdrop of redwoods and hooked up via a s-l-o-w modem. Such are the compromises of being in the beauty of the country.
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Saturday, January 03, 2009
12:07 PM
The Band & Muddy Waters - Mannish Boy(Live)
The real Muddy Waters, late in his life, performing with The Band in their Last Waltz concert in San Francisco in the '70s.
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Friday, January 02, 2009
9:45 AM
The International House of Cards is Collapsing
Our production-meister Rick Gordon sent me this on the recent financial collapse, his email was titled: (Happy New Year [anyhow] from Rick Gordon):
The bottom of this SF Chronicle article —
Market meltdown: Where did all the money go?
— has an interesting analysis of the the market crash. I've also quoted the pertinent portion below (my emphasis added):
Charles Biderman, chief executive of TrimTabs Investment Research in Sausalito, has a different explanation. He says that from the market's bottom in 2003 until its peak in 2007, the market value of all publicly traded stocks worldwide grew from about $20 trillion to $45 trillion.
During this period, only about $1.5 trillion in cash went into the market. Debt accounted for some of the remaining increase in market capitalization, but most of it existed only on paper. "Market capitalization and money aren't necessarily related," he says.
Suppose a company has 1 million shares of stock priced at $100 each, giving it a market value of $100 million. Over the next few days, someone buys $5 million worth of stock. Speculation drives the share price to $140, and suddenly, the company has a market value of $140 million. In this case, a $5 million investment has created a $40 million increase in market value.
Is the company really worth $140 million? Not if everyone tried to sell their stock at once. The first person might get $140, but everyone else would get less, probably much less. "It's not any different than a Ponzi scheme, a legal one," Biderman says.
The same thing happens in real estate. Suppose the house next door sells for $700,000. Suddenly, every family on the block thinks their house is worth $700,000. But if everyone on the block put their house on the market, everyone could not get $700,000.
Multiply that by just about every asset class in the world, and you'll get a sense of what happened last year. "The perceived value evaporated," says Ken Winans, president of Winans International, a research and money management firm in Novato. "Are there trillions of dollars that have simply evaporated? The answer is yes."
-----
An enlightening and entertaining analysis of how deep this process is — and why even if the stocks were only valued at their actual cash investment, it would only be a drop in the bucket — can be found in this 47-minute video:
Money As Debt
(Don't get discouraged by the 16 seconds of blank video at the beginning.) Check it out.
Happy New Year!
Rick
The bottom of this SF Chronicle article —
Market meltdown: Where did all the money go?
— has an interesting analysis of the the market crash. I've also quoted the pertinent portion below (my emphasis added):
Charles Biderman, chief executive of TrimTabs Investment Research in Sausalito, has a different explanation. He says that from the market's bottom in 2003 until its peak in 2007, the market value of all publicly traded stocks worldwide grew from about $20 trillion to $45 trillion.
During this period, only about $1.5 trillion in cash went into the market. Debt accounted for some of the remaining increase in market capitalization, but most of it existed only on paper. "Market capitalization and money aren't necessarily related," he says.
Suppose a company has 1 million shares of stock priced at $100 each, giving it a market value of $100 million. Over the next few days, someone buys $5 million worth of stock. Speculation drives the share price to $140, and suddenly, the company has a market value of $140 million. In this case, a $5 million investment has created a $40 million increase in market value.
Is the company really worth $140 million? Not if everyone tried to sell their stock at once. The first person might get $140, but everyone else would get less, probably much less. "It's not any different than a Ponzi scheme, a legal one," Biderman says.
The same thing happens in real estate. Suppose the house next door sells for $700,000. Suddenly, every family on the block thinks their house is worth $700,000. But if everyone on the block put their house on the market, everyone could not get $700,000.
Multiply that by just about every asset class in the world, and you'll get a sense of what happened last year. "The perceived value evaporated," says Ken Winans, president of Winans International, a research and money management firm in Novato. "Are there trillions of dollars that have simply evaporated? The answer is yes."
-----
An enlightening and entertaining analysis of how deep this process is — and why even if the stocks were only valued at their actual cash investment, it would only be a drop in the bucket — can be found in this 47-minute video:
Money As Debt
(Don't get discouraged by the 16 seconds of blank video at the beginning.) Check it out.
Happy New Year!
Rick
Posted at
9:03 AM
Shingled 2-Story Home in Berkeley
I left home about 6 this morning. It was driving rain. I came along the coast and thick fog slowed everything to a crawl. Mountain on the left, crashing ocean 500 feet down on the right. Finally out of wild country to the freeway, hooo! Civilized, mon. Into Berkeley, a fine charming, exciting city. There are 1000s of great homes in Berkeley and Oakland, like this one I passed an hour ago. Why can't architects design something this simple and elegant?
Posted at
8:28 AM
An Observer in Present-day Palestine
A house built on stilts in the Palestinian village Bruqin to avoid paying taxes (Palestinians pay according to square footage on the ground!). This is from http://www.annainthemiddleeast.com/,which I just ran across today: Anna Baltzer's observations in Palestine. The blog's subtitle: Anna's Eyewitness Reports from Palestine: Stories & photographs from a Jewish American's peacework documenting human rights abuses & supporting nonviolent direct action in the West Bank with the Int'l Women's Peace ServiceI got into blogging with mixed feelings a few years ago. I didn't want yet another electronic obligation, but I keep running across wonderful and/or interesting stuff in the world and want to pass it along. I started out doing long blogs, once or twice a month, and have evolved into every few days. I'm into it. So if you check me out once a week, you'll see what I'm running across in this new and changing year. In February I'm heading to Costa Rica to live in a surfer's shack on a beach near the Pacific Ocean border with Panama. for a few weeks, then to Panama City on a bus and then get a flight to Brazil, in part to visit Johan van Lengen and see his wonderful school for ecological building in the Atlantic rainforest, where he says there are "…no lack of birds and butterflies, not to mention monkeys and all kinds of snakes…" I'll be blogging when I can.
Posted at
Thursday, January 01, 2009
12:52 PM
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