Dave Badtke’s Blog

This is a picture of Luke and Kaori’s home-office in Tokyo. (Luke, our older son, and Kaori, our daughter-in-law, own Knee High Media in Japan.) The mural was painted recently by HITOTZUKI, a collaboration of two of their friends, Kami and Sasu, who have painted murals throughout Japan and also in Europe.

The forms that Kami paints are inspired by his passion for skateboarding. Luke told me that when they were painting his house, Kami, in creating the design, would move his body as he might when skateboarding. It’s intriguing the way the light and dark curved paths, with Sasu’s flower-like designs drawing attention away from the path, soften and enhance the rectangular rigidity of the building, organically changing the structure into a painted sculpture.

In the NY Times today is a story about rats in need of a novel. My guess is that the author of the segment, Anand Giridharadas, is already writing it.

MUMBAI, India, July 19 — Behram Harda was a dancer in the Bollywood films of the 1970s, gracing the screen with his twist and his cha-cha.

Then he became a rodent assassin.

Today, in the sprawling B Ward of this teeming, filthy, exhilarating city, Mr. Harda is admired by his colleagues as the last of the great Mumbai rat catchers. His is a dying breed in a city whose dreams of being rat-free recede year by year.

The rat catchers can snag buckets full of rats in minutes, which they then kill in various gruesome ways, the worst being to grab the rat by its tail and beat its brains out on the ground. But then we’re talking about rats that might be carrying bubonic plague, not cuddly squirrels, beady-eyed raccoons or Remy, le rat de Ratatouille, who wants to be a master chef.

Unfortunately for Mubai, the number of rat catchers is decreasing because of better jobs, especially in call centers and software firms built from bytes:

But Mr. Harda is an Indian Sisyphus. When he got the job 33 years ago, the rats were no match for the catchers. Government service attracted India’s brightest in those days, and Mumbai was still clean enough to starve rats of the garbage on which they snacked. But in three decades, India has turned inside out, and so has the equation between catchers and rats.

Private-sector jobs in call centers and software firms beckon, and the government struggles to attract men of Mr. Harda’s caliber. Many rat-catching posts lie vacant. Meanwhile, Mumbai has metastasized from a genteel city of a few million into a grimy megalopolis of 17 million. More than half of the population lives in shanties surrounded by garbage — and, consequently, by rats.

So if you’re looking for a job in India that is more about spirited scurrying about than a lot of heavy lifting . . .

Here’s the news on the bridge opening from the San Francisco Chronicle.

I just remembered to check on the Jackson County vote on library funding. I was sure it was going to pass, and it seems some who actually live there and would have a better sense of local feeling thought it would be a close vote. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as reported by the School Library Journal:

The [Jackson County] system shut its doors in April, throwing most of its 115 employees, including 17 librarians, out of work. Jackson County is believed to be the largest library closure on record. “I thought the actual vote would be a nail-biter, and it wasn’t,” Interim County Library Services Director Ted Stark says of the vote, in which 58.3 percent of voters said “no” to a ballot question asking voters to approve an additional 66 cents-per-$1,000 of their appraised property value. (Link to article)

Facing the reality of people’s reading habits, which are rapidly dwindling, and the disinclination to support local services that are not directly linked to life and limb, i.e., police and firefighters, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it does hurt Ashland, Oregon, which is one of the 17 Jackson County libraries, since Ashland is a vibrant arts and education community. It’s not clear what Ashland can do. And it could be that the problem is spreading since neighboring Josephine County may be the next to shut its library doors.

While it’s nice not paying sales tax when we go to Oregon, the state is suffering as a result and should implement a sales tax that would help offset some of revenue lost when fed funds for nonexistent logging dried up and that would also mean that on cultural visits we’d leave a little extra behind.

Yesterday we had the pleasure of visiting with our niece, Katrina, her husband Zimran, and their friend Joel. Katrina, who recently finished her residency in Boston, is an emergency room physician who moved out here to work for a hospital near Los Altos, where she and Zimran live. Joel, who is South African but lived for years in Chicago, just finished his first year at Harvard Law and is heading off to Israel for a summer internship. And Zimran, who works for Creative Good, knows a lot about a lot, by which I mean that I can pretty much ask Zim a question about most anything and then sit back and listen with fascination to his response. (To get a sense of what Zimran knows and has done, check out his blog winterspeak.com.)

For example, there’s a large fish tank in their dining room. I pointed at it and asked Zim about the fish — they were small and, I thought, blue — that were swimming about in the large enclosure, with coral and seaweed and an eerie, ethereal light that seemed to be encouraging the seaweed and stuff growing on the bottom and sides of the tank. Zim told me about the fish, green chromis I think, that like to school and can handle significant changes in the tank environment, though Zim talks fast and was quickly on to the topic of tank filtration, opening up the cabinet below the tank to expose the whirring mechanisms that control temperature and salinity and chemical composition and nitrogen cycles and stuff like that, I think, though my head was spinning with details and I wasn’t taking notes.

I’m sure Zim could have talked on this and any number of other topics for as long as we were willing to listen, since he likes to get deeper and deeper into the details, philosophy, psychology and unintended consequences of whatever he’s thinking about, but then Katrina told us that Zim has a quota for such discussions. While I’m not sure how she measures Zim’s eclectic discursions, it seems that the threat of something like a warning bell urges him to move on to the next interesting idea.

Joel, who met Katrina and Zim when they were all undergraduates at Harvard and who was part of a rather large “family” of students with similar interests that brought them together when they were juniors and seniors, is like Zim in his ability to hold forth at length on subjects as diverse as the political history and future developments of Africa — he worked for the opposition party in South Africa before returning to Harvard — and legal issues. After my wife told him about a case pending before the State Supreme Court tomorrow, Joel was able to summarize its main points and highlight its importance with details, it seemed to me, that my wife hadn’t even told him about. Quite amazing.

So we had a great evening, made even better because Zim likes to cook, and he’s a good cook. After Zim’s grilled chicken and garlic bread and Joel’s salad, we had Bonny Doon Vinyard’s NV Bouteille Call dessert wine, which tastes like raspberries and blueberries and I don’t know what else. Into this sweet drink we dunked brownie edges. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Well, they’re a different kind of biscotti made by Sugardaddy’s Sumptuous Sweeties, famous for round brownies. You’ve got to see this stuff to believe it, and taste it too. The biscotti dipped into the wine was really, really good. Zim told us all about it, Katrina warned us not to leave out the apostrophe when searching for the website or we might be surprised by what we’d find — would I ever do that? — and Joel added color commentary. A great evening of adventure!

We went down with the kids to Monterey and Carmel for a few days, with an excursion to Big Sur. When we’re thinking about going south, we seem to always end up here since over the years it has become such an interesting place. Of course the area has gorgeous geography, but now it also has a small theater that shows art movies, another that shows old movies, at least one good used-book store, BookBuyers, and the Monterey Bay Acquarium where you can see the most amazing sea jellies. But what I couldn’t find, and am now pursuing, is a good book that explains the life cycle and evolution of these amazing creatures that seem to blur the line between plants and animals. Which also brings to mind our cat, Prink, who’s about as fat and sedentary as a black-and-white squash, but that’s another story.

As reported by NPR, there are more than 10,000 mothers in the U.S. military who are celebrating this day in Iraq. Not that long ago, Liz Vazquez, about whom I wrote today in The Benicia Herald and who is pictured here when she was in Iraq, was one of them. (See also my earlier blog post.) On this special day, all the best to those who have served, who are serving as I write this, and who are preparing to serve in the U.S. military.

One of the joys of writing for a local newspaper like the Benicia Herald is that I get to sit down with people for an hour or more to listen to their stories.

Well, you might say, you’re not living in New York or Los Angeles or Tokyo or London or Paris or even, for that matter, in San Francisco, where there’s a chance that around the next corner you might meet a celebrity or mover and shaker. And you’d be right that the people I meet aren’t the famous and fabulously rich and influential — they’re people who don’t feel comfortable in the spotlight and usually cringe when I pull out my camera — but they’re interesting and always surprising because like all those people you know so much about from watching too much TV or from guiltily reading tabloids while you wait in the grocery story checkout line, these people have spent their lives getting an education, developing skills, creating careers, supporting their families, having interesting experiences and serving others.

Such is the case with Elizabeth Vazquez who, along with her partner Chuck Bowen, owns Galley Cafe, a fantastic, inviting, comfortable little restaurant with a beautiful water view at Glen Cove Marina. Elizabeth was in the Army in the 70s and then recently served in Iraq. She has worked as a social worker advocate for the homeless and recently earned her paralegal degree at St. Mary’s College in Moraga. And she and Chuck, who live in a houseboat in the marina, make wonderful breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks at Galley Cafe in addition to catering special events. But for more about this you’ll need to read my Sunday Column on May 13 in the Benicia Herald.

In corresponding with Les Mahler, editor of The Benicia Herald, I was reminded of The Ashland Dailing Tidings, which in turn reminded me of the threat that all Jackson County Libraries were closing down in April for lack of funds. We’ve been going to Ashland each year since our older son was young — his school class was the reason we went —  for Shakespearean and other theatre, so the thought of a city of Ashland’s qualities without a library was certainly tragic even though we didn’t go to the library more than a few times. But then we don’t live there: we just visit.

I checked a few library links, but none of them worked any longer.

I then checked jcls.org. How awful for a city like Ashland with a beautiful library building that was renovated not that long ago to now have no library at all.