That’s all that may have stood between a small fire that wouldn’t even have made the news and 273,000 acres charred, hundreds of homes destroyed, wildlife ravaged, human lives lost, including a firefighter … but the Feds told a friggin’ helicopter with that bucket to return to base!

On the other hand, Tony Perry says that one helicopter doesn’t even exist.

Who’s telling the truth? You tell me. Either way, I’m one pissed-off former (and potentially future) San Diego resident. If the Cedar Fire was preventable, some heads should roll. Not that they will. But they should.

Mickey Kaus goes on at great length about why blogs shouldn’t have editors. Read it. If you can poke holes in his argument, I’d like to hear them.

The news on the home page of SignOn San Diego was grim this morning: “Julian Under Siege.”

I grew up charmed by Julian. We made nearly annual trips to the mountains. For a kid growing up in sun-drenched San Diego, a winter trip into the Laguna and Cuyamaca mountains was a Megellian adventure. There were big trees, interesting rocks and animals and funky old buildings scattered in the hills, and there was snow.

I grew up thinking Julian was a magical place. They once dug gold there. And it was the place to go to get apple pie that would make your tongue want to dance a jig. The old buildings clinging to that mountainside inspired dreams of how life was when there were no cars, only horses and a trip to San Diego took hours instead of minutes.

In the first year of our marriage, Billie and I stayed at a beautiful bed and breakfast called the Julian White House. There was snow on the ground, and our room was warm, cozy and an enclave against whatever troubles I left behind.

Not long after, we stayed at friends cabin on the other side of town. We had the place to ourselves. It was another weekend of romance and friendship, while we enjoyed the view over the tree tops into town. There is nothing like seeing the sun set over San Diego County from up in the mountains.

Both Billie and I covered what us East County reporters called the “backcountry.” The backcountry is filled with colorful people, as fiercely independent as they are devoted to the beauty around them. The backcountry is spotted with funky little restaurants and gift shops. I did a story for the Union-Tribune once about the backcountry eateries. The research for that story was one of the most entertaining jobs I’ve done.

I wonder how many of those restaurants have survived the fires?

There was Tom’s Chicken Shack. Best fried chicken in the county. And the building was haunted, too boot. Tom’s old partner, who survived World War II, was killed in a car accident around the time the restaurant opened (1945, I think). That’s one place I particular miss, and would hate to see destroyed.

Down the mountain a bit, and toward the border is a little place called Barrett Lake Junction, and there you’ll find the Barrett Lake Cafe. There isn’t (or wasn’t, maybe) a better fish fry in Southern California. The funky quonset hut, with it’s beer posters on every wall, and barrack-like seating, was a favorite of my grandfather’s. Me, too.

I know Cuyamaca is gone. Wiped off the map in a single night after more than a hundred years of ornery liberation from what urbanites might call civilization.

There was also a Boy Scout camp near Cuyamaca. I camped there twice. On another Boy Scout trip to Laguna, we rode the original snowboard — a surfboard with the tail removed. We were able to pack six pre-teens on that board. I’ve never slid down a mountain faster.

And there were also the school camping trips — sixth-grade camp, eighth-grade camp, and camping with the DeMolays.

It’s particularly bitter sweet to remember the DeMolay trip. Back then, I was sweet on a girl who was tender and gentle and as natural as the grass in the meadows. We spent a lot of time together on that trip. I let her wear my straw cowboy hat. We spent some time together after that trip, but never got past the phase of being sweet on each other. About 10 years ago, her estranged husband hunted her down at a Lucky Supermarket in Spring Valley and shot her dead. He killed her dad, as well. I didn’t even find out until my 20-year high school reunion. Her bother, who was in my class and in DeMolay also, told me.

So there’s a lot of memories wrapped up in San Diego’s backcountry.

I will go to bed tonight saddened by the loses in the backcountry, and I will pray for Julian, and the safety of all the people who call the backcountry home, and the people risking their lives to save what is left on San Diego’s backyard garden.

We needed some supplies tonight, so I stopped at the Von’s on Telephone Road after work.

As I walked the isles picking up a half dozen items or so, the striking workers shouted into the store, “Boycott Von’s. Don’t Shop Von’s.”

At the checkout stand, a youngish black woman said to the checker, “How irritating.”

“We just ignore it,” the checker said in obvious good cheer.

I shook my head and said, “Why should these people get better benefits than I get.”

The woman in line said, “Oh, I know.”

While the checker ran my soda pop through the laser scan (how hard is that to do?), she said, “They can stay out there as long as they want, because as long as they’re out there, I’m in here. I’ve got a job.”

I said, “Good for you.”

“They can call me scab all they want,” She said. “It doesn’t bother me. I was unemployed for six months and I’ve got two children to feed.”

As I told one of the baggers at my local Von’s once — do what you have to do. Strike, carry your picket signs, if that’s what you think you have to do, but don’t harrass people because they’re doing what they think is right for their families.

Here’s a little songwriting lesson, kiddies … never write a song that takes more talent to perform than you currently possess.

Just tonight, I wrote a new song, and the guitar part is over my head.  Oh, I can play it. Sometimes. But not consistently, and not with the sustained quality necessary to get me through all three and a half minutes of the song.

Sure, I’ll keep practicing it. It’s a good song and worth the effort, I think. But for me to record it now would be more effort than I can muster. So I’ll cipher on my household finances, instead.

I’ve never considered myself a math person. I’m a word person.

Sometimes, when I tell people this, they say, but you’re a PROGRAMMER!

It was the perception for most of my youth that programming and math were symbiotic disciplines. This misperception kept me from computers and programming for a long time. It was only the desire to eat that got me looking to the internet for my livelihood. And it was then that I discovered that programming isn’t all about numbers.

To a certain extent, programming is like math. There are formulas and rules of logic that must be learned and mastered. But programming is a lot like writing.

Both programming and writing are about solving problems. As any experienced writer knows, especially writers who deal in structured genres, such as news stories or essays, the exercise of writing often involves figuring out what you need to say within the confines of the tools the English language provides to you. There are rules to be followed, and audience expectations to be met.

Programming is like that. The creative side of programming involves finding the most elegant solution to any given problem.

Programming reminds me of writing news stories, and writing inverted pyramid news stories always reminded me of writing poems. So, you see, for me, writing code is no less creative than writing couplets.

But there is that math thing.

The more I get into programming, the more I regret all of the math classes I slept through, and all of the math solutions I assiduously worked to forget as soon as the term was over.

The other day, a book slipped into the newsroom for review called “The Math Explorer: A Journey Though the Beauty if Mathematics.”

The book purports to be a breezy, entertaining explanation of mathematics for the lay person.

I’m probably a step or two below “lay” when it comes to math, but I thought I would give it a try.

I’m only a few pages into it, but I found these thoughts interesting:

Mathematics is an intellectual endeavor governed by precise, unchanging rules. It is therefore far more predictable and, in a sense, more comforting, than almost any other discipline. You will either have the correct or incorrect answer to a problem. There is no such thing as a mathematical answer that is “sort of” correct. This state of affairs is somewhat different among the liberal arts where subjective interpretations of a literary work, for example, can cause an answer or a response to be viewed by the all-knowing instructor as being anything from “marvelous” to “partially correct” to “possible” to “absolutely dense.”

But that is precisely my problem with math. For most of my life I’ve had little interest in formulaic answers. How many times can you solve 2+2 and still find it interesting? How many times can you calculate the radius of a circle and still get excited about it. How much depth is there in finding the factorial square root of a subquadrant triangle multiplied by PI? (Ed: Did you just make that bullshit up? Yes? I have no idea what it means, if any thing).

A poem, on the other hand, can be read a thousand times and never be read the same way twice. Words when used to convey emotion and experience are never precise as numbers, no matter how well intentioned the author. And whether you are talking literature, history or politics, there is always something to learn, a new way of viewing any given object, of parsing any given sentiment, of layering on new perceptions or new experiences.

I can understand why, maybe, some people may find that sort of marsh-land existance unsettling. The instability of ideas can be daunting. But, to me at least, human existance is far too complex to reduce to formulas or pat answers. If we want to understand the human race, we need to delve into art and literature and history. We need to find as many pieces of the puzzle as possible, realizing it will never be complete.

Obviously, math is important. All of human scientific advancement and achievement is a credit to the mathematicians who worked out all of these great number crunching miracles. And I now see that I need to pay more attention to math and make up for some lost education, but I don’t think I’ll buy the idea that math is some how more profound and important than the liberal arts.

The best reason to prowl thrift stores, picking through dusty bins of old LPs is the chance that you might find a hidden treasure — a forgotten piece of music that remains obscure, but is still remarkable.

To this day, I think my best find was a single song — “Quien Sera,” performed by an unknown group of Porta Rican muscians on side two of an LP that surely began it’s life in the drugstore bargain bin. The LP is Cha Cha Anyone? and features, primarily, the work of Paquitin Lara. Lara’s work is good, but side two, which isn’t Lara at all, is truly a gem, capped by that moving performance of “Quein Sera.” (The LP is now available on CD as Latin Heat.)

But why take my word for it? Here’s what I’m talking about.

The melody, which is pure passion, will be familiar to fans of Dean Martin, who recorded the Anglosized “Sway With Me.”

This morning ash covers our patio furniture. The sky is brown. The sunlight falling on the deck is orange. Smoke lingers in the air. Fire is consuming our backcountry, and it’s grown big enough, and possibly close enough, that the evidence now reaches the beach. That wasn’t the case yesterday, even though my more inland friends said it was true where they lived.

Fires also ravages San Diego County.

In the ’70s, there was a huge fire on Mt. Laguna in San Diego. We lived many, many miles from the conflagration, but smoke and ash filled the air. My friend Steve and I procured two empty coffee cans and proceed with an energetic attempt to fill them up with ash falling from the sky. Some of the flakes of ash were as big as a quarter. We probably shouldn’t even have been outside. Who knew what damage we did to our lungs!

That night, we drove out to my grandparents’ little pink house in El Cajon and watched the fire, which was at least 30 miles away. You could see it moving across the mountain — up one ridge, then disappearing behind another.

The Mt. Laguna fire is still the most dramatic I remember. It’s the fire by which others are measured, in my mind. From what I’m reading, and seeing, today’s fires may be challengers to the crown.

The most clear-headed approach to the Easterbrook thing I’ve seen yet … from Jim Henley:

What the hell was Easterbrook trying to say? In outline: Movie violence causes terrorism. Jews disproportionately suffer from terrorism. Two Jewish executive responsible for a particular violent movie are acting against their (group) self-interest by releasing a violent movie for the sake of profit. I don’t want you to think I think they worship money because they are Jews - they are no worse than other Hollywood executives in that regard. BUT THEY SHOULD BE BETTER.

This is a really dumb argument, but it’s not written out of loathing for the Jews, and it does not ascribe loathsome qualities to Jews qua Jews. (It’s pretty hard on Muslim filmgoers, though.) It’s not hate speech, but it’s patronizing as hell, and as sloppily written as it has been sloppily read.

So, have you listened to my latest release yet?

It’s not like I’m asking you to pay for it.

P.S. I posted a link to my song on Blogcritics, and a commenter left a link to his music. Not exactly my style of stuff, but pretty damn good. Check it out.

Yeah, I noticed it, too. And what was cool? People seemed to get the joke.

This is the punk way to do it, right? … write, record, mix, master and release a new song in a single night! Here it is, Trouble and Turmoil.

P.S. There’s nothing political about it.

Armed Liberal and I attended the same party recently. AL writes about a discussion with a man he calls “The Journalist in the Hat.”

Here’s what I know about him: He worked for an alt-weekly in a large Western-state city (since he isn’t around, apparently, to defend himself, I won’t describe him further.).

His position, as near as I can tell, is that journalists are not biased and that what we get fed by the mainstream media isn’t biased. Journalists as a whole, I believe his position would be, try hard to be fair and honest.

I joined the conversation late, just as he was saying this. I said, “Bullshit.” He persisted. “Bullshit,” I said a second and a third time. At which point he walked away.

An hour or so later, I approached him and apologized for my harshness and rudeness. We then picked up the conversation again. He restated his opinion. I told him I disagreed, at which point he broke off the conversation again, not willing to listen to my side of it.

Keep in mind, he already knew by now that I wasn’t just some blogger with no experience in the media. He knew where I worked. He knew where I used to work. He knew I was speaking from experience.

One note — I find it ironic that a man who has spent his career at alt-weeklies, where bias is a badge of honor, would so vehemently deny bias in the media.

What I wanted to tell The Journalist in the Hat was, “Look, this isn’t even just me saying it.” At the time, I very much had in mind this quote from Mark Halerpin.

When I speak of media bias, I’m not suggesting, as some do, that there is a conspiracy to promote a particular agenda. Nor am I suggesting that any one reporter, or any cabel of reporters, is purposely destorting the truth. We all have our filters, and the filter — as Halerpin duely points out — is a filter of experiences, prejudices, worldviews that color how we shape what we report. Even reporters who struggle mightly against this (and I think they are few and far between) sometimes fall victim to such biases. What I wanted to tell The Journalist in the Hat was that not enough journalists, in my opinion, work to surpress their innate biases.

The beauty of blogs, I think, is this cacphony of voices — informed as they are by speciality backgrounds and educations, different viewpoints, differing agendas and politics — is a check against the institutional biases of the media (where it is beyond reasonable argument that most reporters and editors are liberal and/or Democrat).

That’s what I wanted to tell The Journalist in the Hat. But he didn’t want to listen. Too bad.

RiShawn Biddle has moved. Update your bookmarks.

At the beginning of every season, baseball fans and pundits play a little game — who will win and who will lose. You have about as much chance of meeting a space alien in your Jacuzzi as you do of guessing the season’s outcome on March 30. As hard as it is to predict the winners, it is even harder to actually win.

With the exception of the Atlanta Braves and the New York Yankees, and for the time being the Oakland Athletics, most teams and their fans know that chances at the ultimate prize, a World Championship are few and far between. The odds against all but the elite franchises who made the playoffs this year playing next October are slim, at best. Most teams watch decades pass between post-season appearances.

As the Florida Marlins celebrated their victory over the Chicago Cubs tonight, Fox focused its camera on one little old red-haired lady wiping tears from her eyes. At best, she was only a little girl the last time the Chicago Cubs played a World Series game. There is some chance, given the difficulty of the task and the vagaries of the game, that the Cubs will not make another post season appearance within the remainder of her lifetime. Harsh to say, but a possible reality. I hope I’m wrong, but if you look at the 2003 Cubs, you don’t see the seeds a potential dynasty. You see a team with flaws, aging stars and only a couple of young studs, who struggled to win 88 games this year and make the post season only by virtue residing in a weak division. The Cubs had the worst winning percentage of any team in the playoffs.

Baseball fans, true baseball fans, share in the disappointment of Cubs fans the nation over. It would have been special to see the Cubs finally make it to the World Series. It will be special, yet, to see the Boston Red Sox make it the World Series. But the Red Sox face a daunting task. Tomorrow, the Red Sox must beat the New York Yankees for the second straight day in Yankee Stadium. A daunting task. So while there will be no dream series between the Cubs and Red Sox, we may yet see the Sox in the big championship. It sure would beat the hell out of a Yankees vs. Marlins series.

Tony Pierce

I’m not much of a Cubs fan, so you tell me. Is this the worst moment in Cub history?

Moments in history are forks in time and space — subtle changes, slightly different choices can have profound, unpredictable results. Tonight, a Cubs fan snatched a crucial second out from the glove of left fielder Moises Alou. But if Alou had caught the ball, and Castillo had put some pine under his butt instead of first base under his feet (via a walk), would the Cubs have avoided a disastrous 8-run inning? If these blue-cap wearing fans along the left-field line had fought every ball-hungry instinct in their body and recoiled rather than reached for that little white orb of cowhide and yarn, would Cub fans the world over be celebrating a trip to the World Series tonight? If the people in those nice box seats were not also souvenir hounds by breeding, would more than a half-century of frustration been erased?

We have no way of knowing.

The pragmatists will argue that Mark Prior had every opportunity to get Luis Castillo out after the play, but failed. Or that it was clear that Prior was tiring, that his location was slipping and his curve ball had gone flat, and one moment in the game was not the real harbinger of doom. Maybe Dusty Baker should have lifted Prior sooner. How would things be different if not for a fielding error by Alex S. Gonzalez?

We’ll never know the answer to those questions either.

It’s clear, though, that a few fans doing what fans do naturally will become the moment in history no Cub fan ever forgets. The only way these fans will be saved from infamy is if the Cubs win tomorrow night. Otherwise these fans become the Bill Buckners, the Donnie Moores and the Fred Merkles of the 21st Century.

My sympathy is with these fans tonight, and all Cubs fans everywhere.

This is Sal’s Mexican Inn, a restaurant in Oxnard I’ve been hearing about for years, but have never visited.

This afternoon, my wife announced that I was taking her to lunch and I was taking her to Sal’s.

The story of Sal’s dates back to 1947 when Mary Lopez, the 20-year-old wife of Sal Lopez opened a restaurant in Oxnard. Sal was working in LA, but within a week, business was booming and Sal was working in the restaurant full time to help out.

In the early 1950s, a larger location on Oxnard Boulevard became available, but Sal didn’t have enough cash on hand for the down payment. In walked Mary and her secret savings account. The Mexican Inn was born. The Lopez’s have added on two more dining rooms since they first opened, and one of the cooks (they now employee 55 people), has been working there since the Mexican Inn first opened. He started at 14 as a dishwasher (this whole history is printed on the menu … I didn’t actually interview anybody to get this story!).  Sal died in 2000, and one of his daughters runs the restaurant (the rest of the children are spread out across America as small business owners or successful professionals).

Sal’s is the kind of place where you sit in brown wooden booths, with a framed picture of the entire family in white gowns and tuxedos hanging on one wall (we guess this picture was the Lopez’s 50th wedding anniversary photo), and on the other wall is a HUGE picture of downtown Oxnard from 1969. There’s also a “We won’t forget 9/11″ sign by the front door.

The food is your standard Mexican fair — tacos, enchiladas, tacitos, burritos, with rice and beans. The salsa is perfection, the chips overly crisp and hard, but the meal was quite good. We had a Mexican BBQ dish we’d never seen before. It was good, but I wished I had ordered the cheese enchiladas. The tortilla’s were homemade and delicious. I love slathing tortillas in butter, sprinkling a fine layer of salt on and dipping them in enchilada sauce.  The tortilla’s were good enough that when I go back, that’s what I’ll order.

One of the great philanthropists of the era, and a woman who is nothing short of a hero in San Diego,

How can a conservative fuck like me spend an evening talking to a bunch of liberals and have a good time? Well, when they’re reasonable people like Matt Welch, Brian Linse, Steve Smith, Kevin Drum, Mickey Kaus and Armed Liberal — one can have a very good time, especially when the host is as accommodating as Linse, who not only opened up his liquor cabinet and ordered pizza, he also offered fine selections from his humidor. So what is there to complain about? And Cathy, sorry the picture of you and Kaus didn’t really turn out.

UPDATE: Cecile found us unsafe!

Then I went to another small circle of four male bloggers including Matt Welch. Some mention of Reason and politics here and there interested me as I noticed that they all wore glasses.

I popped a carrot into my mouth and went back to comfortable territory, Amy Alkon.

Amy is indeed safe territory. I’ve been reading her column in the VCReporter for at least six years now. She’s the best advice columnist in the universe, and if your newspaper isn’t running her column, your newspaper is downright primative. Amy, btw, is as lovely and charming as her writing. It was a thrill to meet one of my contemporary prose heroes.

P.P.S: Cecile’s Mom also has a round upof the Linse Affair. And I still say she needs her own domain and the more customizable MT for her blog. It’s brand, and if you’re a freelancer giving away your pearly prose on the net, you should at least (IMHO) get paid back in better branding. But that’s just me.

OK, and it’s confession time … at 3 a.m. last night I only looked at my pictures in preview mode … and I thought Cathy’s eyes were closed, so I skipped over the pic I’m including in this update. Just now I opened it in PhotoShop and I think it really capture’s Cathy’s charm and Mickey’s … um … Mickeyness. Does the picture say they’re married or divorced? I don’t know. I vote for married.

P.P.P.S: More from Drum.

BTW: Key piece of information left out so far … the whole reason for the party, really, was so we could all meet Perry de Havilland and Adriana Cronin of Samizdata.net. I spent a good deal of time talking with Perry, who is quite the urbane Londoner, and London being just about my favorite city that I can’t afford to live in on earth, it was fun talking with him. Here’s more photos. Also, check out Perry’s post on regulatory insanity, which was a topic we discussed briefly.

This morning I did a little catch up on Charlie Rose and caught an interview from a couple of days ago with Mark Halperin, political director for ABC News. Halperin offered what I see as a prescient insight into the kind of media coverage Arnold Schwarzenegger can expect … and keep in mind, this quote is coming from one of the card-carrying members of the East Cost Media Elite.

Let me tell you something that your viewers, I think, particularly should be a aware of as they follow the chance Arnold Schwarzenegger has to succeed. Most of the news your viewers, the news and information your viewers are going to get about Arnold Schwarzenegger the man and the emerging politician is going to come from media that’s a little more radically left of center, that is dismissive of Arnold Schwarzenegger because he’s a movie star, and because of his accent, that’s dismissive of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s intellect and of his capacity to be a broad governor in terms of his ability to reach a broad coalition.

And they’re going to be infused by friends of theirs that they see at cocktail parties and dinner parties who are more dismissive of him and feel about him the way a lot of Democrats felt about Ronald Reagan and feel about George W. Bush — completely alienated from him; culturally in some ways; intellectually in some ways, and they believe on social issues, although he is liberal on a lot of social issues.

I think people who are looking at it through that filter may well miss a deeper intellect that your story may suggest and somebody with the capacity to achieve his goals than they are going to give him credit for.

Once again, I think, it will be up to bloggers to check the media bias and put things in context as much as possible. Fellow Bear Flag Leaguers, I take this as a call to arms. What do you think?

UPDATE: National Post column from Matt Welch on media coverage of the new governor.