More reasons to love the Internet…

Not too long ago at home, offspring and I revisited an old cinematic friend (to be completely accurate, “old” for me; brand new for her): Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant take on the Stephen King novel, “The Shining”.

Afterwards, I found myself wondering what the movie’s dirge-like opening music is as Jack Nicholson’s character, Jack Torrance, is wheeling his Volkswagen up a winding mountain road to reach the story’s centrepiece, the Overlook Hotel. The sequence is exceedingly unsettling, the more so because the music, which is so loaded with foreboding, plays in jarring juxtaposition to some of the most stunning visual scenery ever committed to celluloid.

A very short Google search led me to this wonderful essay, which not only identifies the opening music as “Dies Irae” (“Day of Wrath”), it also makes a strong argument to suggest the movie is really about white North American society’s trampling all over the continent’s first nations. I know; I can hear the “Oh give me a break!” choruses already, but this is not the work of some overly idealistic second-year film student. Author Bill Blakemore is a long-time journalist whose current specialization is the environment. His ABC news biography sums up his career this way:

“stories of conflict and politics, the arts, nature and science -- and now global warming and other narratives involving the love-hate relationship between nature and man.”

Hardly surprising, then, that someone like him should find in “The Shining” some strong links to suggest that, for Stanley Kubrick, King’s novel might well have been the launch pad for a subtle lament for the Noble Savage.

Any “hidden meaning” aside, I had forgotten much that I loved about this movie – including its visuals. In “The Shining”, Kubrick plays very successfully with several opposites. I’ve already mentioned the ominous opening music playing over scenes of placid beauty. But Kubrick also makes his film’s images work against its own storyline. It is the story of a man’s descent into an insanity so complete that, late in the movie, the sheer force of how far gone he is insinuates itself into his wife’s mind and she also sees several disturbing visions in her own frantic search for their son.

But visually, in sharp contrast to the wild departure from reality the two principal characters suffer, Kubrick gives us image after image that is absolutely rock solid. His shots are often square-on, with a character hammered exactly into the centre of the scene, often surrounded by several powerful framing supports – a tapestry on the wall in the background, the top and bottom boundaries of that wall, even the leading-line boundaries of the same room’s side walls work to draw your eye immediately to the character’s position in screen centre. One gets the distinct feeling that this hotel, despite its shifting psychological bedrock of horror, is a structure that physically will last until the end of time.

As an aside, there is a brief “shock” scene where the Nicholson character erupts from one side of the picture while taking a wide sweeping swing of an axe. In one of those moments of cosmic unity, offspring was stretched out on a couch and at that very moment one of our two cats, in hot pursuit of a moth, leapt with no warning at all onto her chest. Based on her explosive reaction, this is one movie offspring won’t soon forget.

And as a Trivia PS, this is the property that served as the setting for all the exterior shots, the Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood, Oregon.

I don’t think I’ll be visiting it anytime soon. I mean, after all, there are bodies of the recently slain and skeletons of the more distantly deceased all over the place; the elevators spew rivers of blood and it seems it’s built on the graves of some late natives who are now grievously offended spirits.

Right?

= = =

I have some gripes about grammar.

Now I know there is a risk in opening up with the sentence, “I have some gripes about grammar”. Because no doubt I have also assembled a great many sentences and phrases in my years here which, ratio-wise, are to “models of grammatical correctness” what Paris Hilton is to “demure”. In fact, a case could easily be made that I long ago abrogated any right to complain about other people’s grammar. Nonetheless, I have some gripes about grammar when it is misused by people who really should know better. And if not the authors, then certainly their editors – where they exist – should know better.

For example, I am currently reading a thoroughly enjoyable book about the Royal Navy and their precursors, England’s merchant sailors and explorers, and how they defined much of the world’s present day geopolitics. (“To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World”, by Arthur Herman) It includes one of the most readable and flat-out exciting descriptions I’ve ever read of the Battle of Trafalgar but, in one of the run-up encounters leading to that battle, Nelson is described as “pouring over his maps”. One hopes they were waterproof.

- - -

In a recent article in the Vancouver Sun, the status of literacy training for immigrants to British Columbia is described thusly: “British Columbia has consistently offered the lowest levels of literacy training for adult refugees than anywhere else in the country.” Comparative vs superlative folks. You can be described as “lowest… in the country” or “lower… than anywhere else in the country”, NOT “lowest… than anywhere else”.

- - -

This, from a recent article in The Financial Post, from a labour lawyer who is also the editor-in-chief, no less, of The Dismissal and Employment Law Digest:

"Rather than dramatically increasing their wage loads by paying overtime, employers will hire less employees and contract out more work."

(Actually, this one probably is a little more subtle. It’s here because the misuse of “less” vs “fewer”, when comparing quantity vs numbers, is a family pet peeve and a deliberate trigger we use to get a rise from each other at the dinner table. You can “make fewer errors by writing less material”. You can’t “make less errors by writing fewer material”.)

- - -

This is a bit of a “golden oldie”: McGrath is a collection agency here in Ottawa that is pretty well the first – if not the only – name that comes to mind when a company wants to contract for collection services that don’t involve some guy named Guido collecting from behind the barrel of a shotgun. A while back, they spent a fortune on transit ads that adorned the sides and backs of dozens of the city’s buses, shouting for all the world to see that this company is, “The Name to Know to Collect Your Doe”.

Deer me, I hope the ads didn’t reduce the number of bucks they earned.

- - -
On a recent drive through the City of Ottawa, I found myself at a traffic light sitting next to a brand new, bright red, costing-many-tens-of-thousands pick-up truck that a General Contractor has obviously chosen not only as the vehicle of choice to get his material to the job site, but also as a rolling billboard to promote his services. Emblazoned across the full width of his tailgate in huge letters was this slogan: “Quality At It’s Finest”.

The use and misuse of the apostrophe in “its” is among the most common of the written English world’s grammatical errors, but it’s (it is) included here because of the unintended hilarity occasioned by the particular message in which its (possessive) misuse appears.

- - -

And here’s another in the “They really oughta know better” series. This headline opened a news release I received not so long ago from Canadian Press:

“Edmontonians offering to open there doors to a group of homeless Eskimos.”

- - -

Sesame Street sing-along time!: “Who are the people in your neighbourhood? In your neighbourhood, in your neigh-bour-hooo-ood. Who are the people in your neighbourhood? The people that you meet, as you’re walking down the street; the people that you meet each day?”

Well, in our neighbourhood, they include people who have decided that a six-foot-high fountain on their front lawn is not gaudy enough all by itself, and really needs a little something extra. So they added a lime green floodlight that, after dark, makes it look radioactive.
And no, this image has not been colour altered in the camera or in its subsequent reproduction here. (It’s a little fuzzy because I shot it sans flash, so the shutter was opened for the better part of a second.) This is precisely the popsicle green you see as you approach it from the front. And as if that weren’t enough to draw the neighbourhood’s after-sundown attention to the new “lawn friend”, another spotlight throws a brilliant red light on its back (house) side. The spectral collision that assaults your retinas as you walk past it from one side or the other is something to experience. Kind of like getting too much wasabe with your sushi.

À la next time.

Our last full day in California was deliberately planned as a not-too-long drive back to San Jose, but one that would take us through one of California’s legendary vineyard regions – in this case a corner of the one known broadly as the Central Coast, more specifically the South Central Coast and, even more specifically, the Paso Robles Wine Region.

The day we hit the road for the last time was the Monday after the City of Paso Robles ended a weekend wine festival, an event hallmarked by a program in the city’s main park where visitors are charged a flat fee of $50 and turned loose in a carnival of exhibits and tasting tents to drink as much wine as they want.

Apparently, it’s gaining in notoriety. The previous evening when we had toured San Simeon, immediately after our bus unloaded its 40-odd passengers at the estate to start the tour, the first question we were asked was, “OK, how many of you spent the afternoon at the festival in Paso Robles?” The slurred affirmatives were then assembled into their own tour, presumably to be placed under the control of a bigger, stronger guide whose mere appearance projected a visible priority on security. Our guide’s first asset, on the other hand, was his ability to impart endlessly fascinating information. But I digress.

At the Olallieberry breakfast table, we heard that one of the nicer road diversions in the Paso Robles region is a scenic drive called, appropriately enough, Vineyard Drive. We got there about the time the lunch hour clock was striking noon and, after passing several vineyard gates, entered one that offered a beautiful visual panorama of hillside vines, as well as the real lure: “Wine tasting and BBQ today”.

Personally, I would have liked to have seen this place, if only out of curiosity. But even though they have a website and are furiously selling promotional merchandise, the actual vineyard is not yet open to the public. But how can you not love a winery that came into being when its creators decided to “do something crazy and chase [their] dreams”, and which calls its wine club the “Crisis Management Team”?

The Opolo Vineyard
has its own illustrated website here, so I’ll skip the inventory description. I discovered that an automatic adjunct to a barbecue in California is a vast bowl of homemade salsa that, in this case, was an astonishing combination of light and tangy and herb-rich. You could have parked me in front of that keg-sized condiment bowl with a wooden ladle and I would have called it a fully satisfying barbecue.

But for me the highlight came as a set: a fantastic Zinfandel – an award winner, in fact – that was served to us by a very pleasant host who was, in this most unlikely of places, not only a fan of NHL hockey, but who knew that just days before, the Ottawa Senators had earned a berth in the Stanley Cup final round.

Up until that moment*, “Zin” had only ever been for me a breezy innocuous little summer wine that was a quick thirst quencher when you required only a “nice” glass of wine and things like full-body and aroma just didn’t need to enter the experience.

*“That moment” was when host Tom Hogan served me this.

And all of those little tasting notes in the upper right are just bang on with what we experienced.

As my conversation with tasting table host Tom turned to hockey and whether the Anaheim Ducks (his passion) would be able to beat the Sens to claim the Stanley Cup, the “tastes” he sent back with me to our table became 4 oz glasses of wine, somewhat to the chagrin of other tasters at adjacent tables who had to content themselves with the one-ounce shots they were being poured.

And of course we brought a bottle of the 2005 home.

The PS to the story is that, before we left the vineyard, Tom and I made a bet whereby a Sens Cup win would earn me yet another bottle, as well as an Opolo vineyard t-shirt. The Cup final, of course, is now history and suffice to say that Tom finds himself the happy owner of a bottle of Henry of Pelham Cabernet Sauvignon icewine, an official Ottawa Senators NHL-brand t-shirt and, as a bonus, a bottle of Quebec-produced maple syrup.

(Or at least he will just as soon as I can find a way to have a bottle of wine shipped across the border without changing the entire continent’s travel threat advisory warning colour. FedEx: “Are you kidding? If we shipped wine, we’d be bootleggers!”)

= = =

At the end of our last day in California, we stayed at an airport hotel in San Jose because we had an early morning flight out and being nearby just made a whole lot of sense. To further minimize the complications, we had also decided to return the rental car the evening before, because the hotel offered a complimentary shuttle right to the terminal, and also because the car rental return is itself a short shuttle hop from the departure terminal. Getting the car back the evening before we flew out would take that concern right off travel-day schedule entirely.

After we dropped the car, we climbed aboard the shuttle bus back to the hotel and wound up sitting next to a couple of burly guys who were clearly dressed in a “We’re on vacation” mode. So being my usual affable self, I asked them if they were just starting or ending their trip.

“Just getting home,” said one. “Had a great time in Texas.”

Ah Texas… the Lone Star State. A State steeped in the rich frontier history of the almighty U-S of A.

Home of the remains of this continent’s best-known icon of triumph and tragedy in the face of overwhelming odds.

(Remember that?... Sorry.)

Home of the world’s finest collection of flying versions of WWII aircraft.

Home of the world’s other city of canals.

Home of… well, take your pick.

“That’s great,” I echoed. “So what were you doing?”

“Shooting pigs.”

…

(That’s the sound of me being rendered speechless.)

…

Finally, after a few seconds… “Really?”

“Yep.”

(Think think think…) “Uhh… on your own or was this an organized tour?”

(Meanwhile, what I’m thinking is, “You guys are Californians, dammit! You don’t shoot things for sport!! They do that in… well, in Texas.”)

“Man, it was an all-included tour. Fly in to the camp, spend the day out shooting… Here, I’ve got some pictures,” he said pulling out his digital camera. Then, noticing my other half sitting beside me within easy viewing distance, he added in a surprising display of sensitivity, “but there might be some in here you … probably wouldn’t want to see.”

Mercifully, he limited his show-and-tell to a few shots of the cabin-style hotel, he and his buddy kneeling in front of a long, three foot tall pile of thousands of whitened bones stretched across the hotel’s verandah…

Then even more mercifully, after two or three more scenic shots of “really fine pig-shootin’ country”, the shuttle arrived at the hotel and he hit the camera’s off switch before the tiny viewing frame could begin to display red as its dominant colour.

“Well, enjoy the rest of your trip,” I said in parting.

“You betcha.”

= = =

And finally in the California Tales (Echoes of “Thank the Lord! You’ve spent more time talking about this trip than Sir Francis Drake spent in the State before there were even any roads!):

California Quirking… a few random bits and pieces from the trip in no particular order:

I suspect it’s because California is home to, at last count, 54 trillion or thereabouts personal injury lawyers (give or take an LL.B), but the state seems to have a great many public warning signs, a situation to suggest that either the liability of local businesses or the belief among all those same lawyers that almost pathological stupidity is the dominant IQ of the State's population -- at a level unmatched anywhere else in the country, if not the entire world.

Admittedly, some of them seem to make at least some sense. This one,
for example, advises that here on the Pacific shores, whose opposite edge rolls up on beaches in Asia, you are standing in a “Tsunami Hazard Zone -- In case of earthquake, go to high ground or inland”. Which actually is quite a logical warning to put on the coast of the State that straddles this. (Why are there never any tsunamis on the Atlantic coast, he wondered as an aside?)

And along the same stretches of beach you are also regularly warned that this is, after all, the ocean and that if you clamber over slippery rocks down by the waterline
you should not be surprised if a wave the size of Mount Hood suddenly rolls over you and abruptly sends you one of two new directions: either 1. smashed backward into the more jagged rocks higher up, which will result in your being featured on that same evening’s marine buffet as “freshly brined peopleburger” or 2. sucked forward into the water, next stop Japan. By the way, if you click on any of these photos, they'll open much larger.

But others seem to be just a little too top-heavy in the extent of their warnings, or just plain unnecessary. Here, for example, is a sign
at the end of a short bit of road (about 10 yards long in total) where you turn off a quiet residential street in Cambria that is right beside the coast – that’d be the whole damned Pacific Ocean coast. Given the presence of a heavy-gauge steel guardrail and nothing but Pacific Ocean immediately beyond, I couldn’t help but wonder if an actual sign at this point to tell you (very succinctly, I will admit) that you’ve suddenly run out of road was perhaps a tad redundant.

Apparently not.

The B&B where we stayed in Carmel was clearly caught up in the spirit. Here is what greeted us at the front door.


And if you can believe it, a hazard warning sign was posted directly above a hammock slung in the garden space just off the verandah. (The hammock is visible in the far back right in this photo
and the sign is that white rectangle on the fence just beyond.) Here’s a close-up.
To save you the trouble of seeking a magnification function on your screen, here – verbatim – is its text:

“DISCLAIMER / WARNING: Please do not leave children unattended around this product. Not to be used by people unwilling or unable to take responsibility for their actions. This product requires good balance and coordination during use. Improper use may result in serious injury. User assumes all risk when using this product. Do not use under the influence of drugs or alcohol. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!!”

= = =

Stellar jays, they’re called. And despite all sorts of posted warnings (more signs) asking visitors not to feed the wildlife, one gets the feeling that they’re frequently ignored. How do I know this? Well, for starters, by how close they get when you’re traipsing about their territory…


And second, during one walk into a redwood grove we stopped for a picnic and were startled when, just a few minutes after we sat down, at least three of the friendly (and obviously hungry) birds swooped in, in turn, to perch right on the end of the table at which we were seated.

So did we feed the sociable little featherbearers? Well, fortunately, this was the United States, home of the Fifth Amendment:

“Mr. Chairman, I respectfully decline to answer the question based on my right under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution not to be a witness against myself.”

(Besides, the fresh rolls we bought were only available in bags of six, far too much food for just two people.)

Until la prochaine.

(All photos, except this post's bird, and the book cover -- you'll know it when you see it -- and, as always, the ones reached by a link, are by yours truly.)

The Olallieberry Inn is a Cambrian jewel.

As we drove south past the entrance to the Hearst estate, about six miles farther on we turned off Highway 1 into the picturesque town of Cambria. After driving almost the full length of its main street until we were just about out the far end of town, we saw a massive Sequoia gracing a front yard on the right, and a sign telling us that we had arrived at the Olallieberry Inn Bed and Breakfast.


Our priorities in a B&B are not too complicated: a warm welcome; well-maintained accommodation in a quiet setting; some of the character of the community; freshly made, high quality breakfasts. Bonus features might include an environment where guests just seem to naturally mingle and swap stories of their day’s discoveries; a knowledgeable host on the premises – someone who plainly loves the responsibilities of running a haven for travelers from near and far. All of these are present in large quantity at the Olallieberry Inn, a property that was first erected as a private home in 1873.

We even came home late one evening to find ourselves face-to-face with a deer browsing in this garden.
Now how bucolic is that?

Co-owner and host Marjorie Ott (just “Marjorie” from the moment she says hello) is a fountain of knowledge of Cambria’s many sights and attractions, and was only too happy to point us to places that might be outside the “recommended highlights” offered in guidebooks to the area. One example: wishing a more leisurely start to one of our days there we took one of Marjorie’s suggestions and found ourselves strolling on a magnificent nearby section on the California Coast Trail that took us along the crest of a cliff from which we could watch the Pacific waves pounding into shore while a vee of pelicans slowly flew past just above the waves.
Slung from a waist “fanny pack” was a pair of Bushnell binoculars that Marjorie had loaned us to take along for the walk.

Of the Olallieberry’s daily breakfast starts, suffice to say that Marjorie and her kitchenmeister Larry have been asked for their recipes so often, they have produced a cookbook containing all of their very best to date – breakfasts, daily complimentary hors d’oeuvres and dessert offerings that are served each afternoon at 5. And if by some highly unlikely outcome the daily fresh-made hot special and freshly-squeezed orange juice had not been up to the task of (*buuuurrrrppp!*) filling us up, a sideboard was always stocked with homemade Olallieberry granola and a bowl of fresh fruit.

The olallieberry itself, despite sounding like something straight out of Beatrix Potter, is a real fruit. It’s the product of multiple crosses, i.e., it is known most directly as a cross between a loganberry and a youngberry, but each of those in turn is also a cross: between a blackberry and raspberry (loganberry), and a blackberry and dewberry (youngberry).

It’s a good thing we had only limited space in our luggage, otherwise we’d probably have acquired several pots of the olallieberry jam and bottles of olallieberry syrup and olallieberry salsa that were on sale from a heavily stocked cabinet in the breakfast dining room. As it was, we contented ourselves with buying a copy of their cookbook because the breakfast entrees and several of the wine & hors d’oeuvres we had (including, you guessed it: an olallieberry almond paté and a baked brie with an olallieberry compote topping) were all, in a word, amazing.

= = =

It’s nice to bump into a group of Americans for whom “FOE” has positive connotations. Back along the highway from Cambria towards the Hearst castle gates was a must-stop pull-off where we spent a good hour or so in the company of these creatures.
They are elephant seals, so named because a fully grown adult male has a bulbous nose that overhangs his face in a manner that obviously suggested “pachyderm” to those who were first responsible for naming the animal.

And apparently they return to this very beach, year after year after year, to bask (as these were) and, a few weeks later, to engage in the age-old Darwinian struggle to stake out a section of beach, gather a harem, fight like hell with constantly-challenging young bull seals to hold onto them, mate and then leave the job of raising the kids to the many moms.
These ones are almost entirely females with a few juvenile males scattered among them, but the day we were there the beach’s population included one enormous older male whose presence was puzzling to the beach’s monitors. (Well let’s see… be hundreds of miles away in the freezing ocean with a bunch of ever more grumpy males, or be basking on a warm beach with hundreds of females just coming into heat… decisions, decisions.)

Oh – FOE? Elephant Seal Beach (its local label. Officially, it’s the Piedras Blancas rookery) is monitored and interpreted for visitors by a corps of dedicated volunteers who collectively are known as the Friends Of the Elephant seal – FOE. They have a highly informative website, here.

= = =

William Randolph Hearst was a bazillionaire whose heyday was in the 1920s and 30s and who made his personal fortune initially through the luck of a large inheritance. But he sustained and multiplied it through a work ethic that saw him turn the purchase of a single medium – the San Francisco Examiner in 1887 – into a vast publishing and multi-media empire.

Combine this with a personal passion for the affairs of celebrities from all walks of life, and an exploding public interest in the same thing, and the result is the dazzling history of the Hearst “castle” at San Simeon.

There are a half dozen Google suggestions in the foregoing that will give you all the background – probably much more of it, in all likelihood – than you could ever want to know about the man and his California home. So I won’t be getting into a lot of the official history here.

My other half had already been to the estate, during a previous visit to California, in that state’s blinding daylight sun. In the course of researching suggested activities for our trip, she discovered we would be in the area for the season’s final weekend of their two-and-a-half hour nighttime tour. So that’s what we booked.

I can’t personally speak for this experience in comparison to the daylight tour but my other half told me afterwards that the nighttime tour was definitely the more interesting one.


One of the first things that struck me about “The Ranch” (Hearst’s preferred label) is that despite its geographical position roughly mid-way between Los Angeles and San Francisco, it really does seem to epitomize the description, “in the middle of nowhere”.
Although its entrance gates are directly beside the highway, the estate itself is a five mile climb up a winding road to a distant hilltop. Once through the highway gates, you park your car in a huge parking lot (because that five-mile climb is available only to California State Park shuttle buses) and make your way into an enormous Visitors Centre.

In the Centre, visitors will find the requisite souvenir shop, cafeteria and washrooms, in addition to the multi-bay shuttle bus departure area that resembles a bus terminal in a medium-sized city. (Right off the bat I noticed that, at the time of day when the property is winding down to its last tours, the Centre was also very lightly populated. Because the night-time tour also runs from 9 to 11:30 or thereabouts, there is also a distinct lack of energetic kids rushing hither and thither.)

Shortly after we boarded the bus, the driver welcomed us and then switched the bus’s sound system over to a pre-recorded travelogue that turned out to be (for me) a delight. It was an artful blend of information about The Ranch punctuated with period music from the Roaring Twenties. We were told that we were going to experience something of what Hearst’s celebrity visitors experienced, admittedly with a few comfort upgrades -- the first of which was to take the climb in an air-conditioned bus with soft fabric seats and comfort-glide shock absorbers over a modern paved drive.


You could write a book about Hearst’s San Simeon castle. In fact, several people have done just that.
One with which I came away is a fascinating look at the physical process of designing and building it, a process that, because of the sheer scope of the project and Hearst’s almost continuous mind-changes, led to a multi-year long-term professional relationship between Hearst and his architect, Julia Morgan.

Here’s what struck us most about our tour, several impressions in no particular order.

It might very well be a requirement for all guides at The Ranch, but the man who met us and escorted us throughout our tour seemed to be extraordinarily well-informed. His presentation style was also wonderfully low-key and he seemed quite content to let the surroundings and their resident artworks radiate their own awe without injecting it into his voice.
(By way of contrast, on our last stop on the tour we joined another group and received our closing commentary from a young woman who seemed to think she should channel Rod Serling and hit us over the head with some sense of the power and control that she obviously imagined was emanating from the hilltop estate. It was pure Disney and not a little grating after our preceding two hours of quiet, information-saturated professionalism.)

In addition to the torrent of requisite facts, he also liberally peppered his tour with endlessly fascinating trivia and anecdotes.

In the Billiards Room, for example, he told us that one did not, if one wanted to return home with anything left in one’s wallet, challenge Carol Lombard to a game of pool. In another example, although it is widely known that Marion Davies was Hearst’s mistress for some three decades, what isn’t as widely known is how graciously she let the Hearst family off the hook when Hearst left controlling interest in his massive corporation to her when he died. It was an outcome that clearly could have led to a protracted, expensive war of lawyers but Davies simply offered it right back to the Hearst family in exchange for a lifetime position as a member of the corporation’s board of directors and an annual salary of $1 per year. (That’s right – one dollar.) The family, reported our guide in a new benchmark for understatement, “quickly” accepted her offer.

Even for formal dinners, the Hearst dining table was always adorned with bottles of ketchup placed at several locations along its length. Hearst apparently loved the condiment and made no bones about its presence on his table at every meal.

Despite the regular presence at the estate of Hollywood celebrities with all their known capacities to imbibe, Hearst made it clear that hard liquor was not allowed on the property and any guest displaying public drunkenness would arrive at the breakfast room the next morning to discover – not a seat at the table – but rather his or her bags sitting fully packed in the foyer and a car waiting for the drive, immediately, to the San Luis Obispo railroad station and the long -- and presumably hungover -- trip home.

Hearst, however, was not a proponent of temperance. He had draught beer taps installed in the kitchen and a cool one was always available for the asking. It was the over-consumption of alcohol that offended him.

The estate’s theatre is stunning. Every night, Hearst would show a newsreel or two, followed by a first-run movie, occasionally featuring one or another of that day’s Hollywood guests. But it had to be almost immediately captivating because if “The Chief” didn’t like it, beside his chair was a telephone directly linked to the projection booth. At a word, a less than enthralling movie would be ordered pulled from the projector, to be replaced immediately with a Marion Davies film. We didn’t see a full-length movie, but we did see a wonderful period newsreel, obviously selected because it featured Hearst himself.

As our guide noted in great amusement, Hearst was filmed urging theatre-goers to “Buy American”, a laudable directive during the Great Depression. But the entire segment was shot while he stood in front of the estate’s magnificent front gates – acquired on one of his many European antiquity buying binges – these gates apparently brought over from some Spanish monastery.

Finally, well after dark, as we were on our way down from the mountain (and missing only the armload of Ten Commandments to feel we’d actually been closer to the Lord), our shuttle driver was in the middle of a vigorous upper body workout yanking the steering wheel from one tight turn into another entirely the opposite direction. Suddenly there appeared on the road directly in front of us one of the many ruminants that call the huge Hearst estate property home.

It’s not a rare occurrence, apparently, because the driver brought the bus to a swift stop. Then she slowly crept the vehicle around the glassy-eyed creature, which clearly was hypnotized by the bright lamps. Another old adage given living truth: a deer in the headlights really is a deer in the headlights!

= = = = = = = = = =

Non-California digressions

What’s in a name (1)?

Recently near the end of our customary evening walk, my other half and I had stopped to chat with some neighbours when we saw another neighbour’s puppy tearing up the street towards us, his owner in hot pursuit about ten yards behind. The young canine was clearly just looking to be sociable because in seconds he was bouncing around each of us happily accepting behind-the-ear scratches and generally just being bouncy-puppy friendly until his owner caught up with him.

Partway through our subsequent conversation, I asked the pup’s owner what his name is. She replied, “Tupac… but for the Aztec king, not the American rapper.”

I’m sure it was of intense importance to the dog (even more to his owner) to know that, when she was bellowing at him to stop running away, or to get the heck out of the garden, she was addressing him as this, and not this.

= = =

What’s in a name (2)?
Trivia time!

Quick – define “troglodyte”.

If you draw forth recollections relating to “cave dweller” and the like, you’re right smack in tune with the non-slang definitions. If you broaden your range to include its slang application to “a reclusive, reactionary, out-of-date person, especially if brutish” (From Wiktionary), then you’re also in the ballpark. If you’re a fan of novelty songs, you might also recall one about a trio or so decades ago when a band called The Jimmy Castor Bunch had a big hit with a song by that name, the tale of a lonely caveman engaged in a near-desperate search for the woman of his dreams (“Gotta find a woman; Gotta find a woman; Gotta find a woman…”) – who turned out to be a “big woman… BIG!”, named Bertha Butt (“one of the Butt sisters”).

Anyway, my point? OK, so now let’s say you’re a scholar working in the realm of scientific nomenclature and you’ve had the name “troglodyte” rattling around in your head just waiting for the right critter to come along and accept it. In fact, so taken with it are you that you have decided you would simply have to call the creature – when one finally exhibits the appearance and behavioural characteristics to merit the name – “troglodytes troglodytes”.

Ladies and gentlemen, please avert your childen’s eyes, because I now will yank the curtain aside and reveal to you the shocking power and might embodied in… “Troglodytes troglodytes!”:


No, I’m not making this up. As I first discovered from a close reading of one of my in-laws’ beautiful avian-themed placemats, it’s a winter wren. Go to Google. Click on “Images”. Enter “Troglodytes troglodytes”.)

= = =

What’s in a message?

Here is the transcript of an actual recent series of brief e-mailed messages between me and my boss, who is a very busy man (and is on a short term fill-in position in an office in one of the other towers in our four-tower complex):

ME: “I just signed for a package addressed to you. It’s on your chair, but if you’re in a hurry for it, I’ll be happy to walk it over to your other desk right away.”

HIM: “Thanks.”

ME: “Does that mean, ‘Thanks, I don’t need it’ or “Thanks, please bring it right over’”?

HIM: “I am in a meeting on the 13th floor.”

(This located him back in our tower, which has 14 floors; the one in which he is working on the acting assignment only has 11. Notice that, despite the information we have swapped in the four messages exchanged to this point, he still hasn’t told me whether he is in immediate need of the danged package!)

ME: “OK, I’ve left it on your chair.”

Thus closing the loop by returning the thread to its starting point. And we’re Communications, fergawdssake! No wonder people view Government of Canada news releases with an expectation of the same clarity they would find in the Klingon version of The da Vinci Code.

Next time:

The Stanley Cup finds a fan in the middle of a California vineyard; sharing a common language can still leave you with nothing to talk about when the topic is shooting pigs, and “California Quirking” – a few random oddities from this trip.

(All photos here -- except the two Wii titles at the end -- are by yours truly. Where photos are found through a link, they are someone else's.)

Driving from San Jose to Carmel takes one through some remarkable landform changes. Around San Jose – and this is something you can see from the air – the landscape is either the Santa Cruz mountains or their arid lowland environs. It is, in a word, dry. And scenery, dry-wise, is a variation on the colour brown. The greenest things you’ll see in the area are the golf courses or, as you get further out of the San Jose area, the heavily irrigated vast farmlands from which most of North America’s romaine lettuce (if you believe the highway-side billboards) comes. Inbound by air, you frequently overfly giant green polka dots, another dry land hallmark where farmers are irrigating with massive sprinkler systems that feed water from a central point through a long, pliable pipe that is held up on flimsy, wheeled A-frames. The entire pipeline is “walked” around in a giant circle by the motorized outermost strut as it waters the entire crop.

Here’s one.

And here’s their effect from the air.

But as you get closer to the coast – the Monterey Peninsula and the Carmel surroundings – the land becomes almost lush. At one point about 20 minutes out of Carmel, we passed through a stand of cypress that could easily have passed for a Louisiana bayou.

I suppose Carmel, California crossed the divide from “nice place to visit” to “legendary destination” when Clint Eastwood was elected Mayor for a two-year term in 1986. But Dirty Harry links aside, Carmel is also a beautiful place, peopled by the beautiful and obviously wealthy who walk beautiful and obviously expensive pedigreed dogs and drive obviously expensive sports cars (beautiful to their fans) that litter the curbside parking spaces, and where even a “fixer-upper” two-bedroom home can command an asking price of over a million dollars in local realty listings.

That being said, if you’ve visited Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, for all intents and purposes you’ve done Carmel. It’s a town whose main street consists almost entirely of small, specialty stores – a kite store, a music box store, for example – and restaurants, cafés and small galleries of widely diverse artworks. But where Niagara-on-the-Lake offers the Shaw Festival and nearby wineries as its lead draws, Carmel offers the nearby Carmel Valley for wine aficionados, its western border – a stunning Pacific sea-coast beach – and a quartet of golf courses whose roster of names is led by Pebble Beach, which is to North American golfers and fans second only to Augusta in terms of its awe-induction factor. (The others in the foursome are Spyglass Hill, Spanish Bay and Del Monte.)

While we were there, the front page of the town’s quaintly-named weekly newspaper, the Carmel Pine Cone, headlined two stories: one was about a teen-ager who had taken a too-fast spin in the family’s Oldsmobile SUV along a scenic coast road called 17-Mile Drive and, with none but his peers aboard (illegal for a teen driver in California), rolled and totaled the car. But it’s what he did next that earned him the headlines. He photographed the wreck, then uploaded the picture on his little corner of the MySpace website, with a caption congratulating himself under the banner “Mr Indestructible”. Oh those wacky teenagers and their antics!

The second story was about a local resident who has applied for a building permit to add a minuscule extra 12 square feet to her home’s bathroom to accommodate a washer and drier. It was only when she applied for the permit that she discovered the home’s previous owner had illegally turned a built-in single-car garage into living space without having first obtained those necessary permits, thus contravening local zoning regulations. The current owner discovered to her shock that she now has to convert what she bought as a home with a guest bedroom “feature” back into a home with its originally-zoned garage.

If a refreshing change from what the rest of the world deems to be front-page “news” interests you (i.e. an Iraq-free, Stephen Harper-free front page), both stories – with photos – appear in this archived copy of the issue we read while there (just boost its size in the image percentage box that opens at the top of the page box to 125% for the best full-screen readability).

Among the local strolls we took was a walk along the town’s magnificent beach. At its northern end, you are actually below a couple of the famous Pebble Beach oceanside fairways where occasionally a rules-conscious (if less-than-accurate) golfer might be seen, sand wedge in hand, energetically trying to loft his errant shot back up the short cliff onto the fairway. (I confess that were such a daunting shot to confront me, I would like as not employ a lesser known “club” that duffers like me refer to as a “hand wedge”.)

We also doffed shoes and socks with every intention of strolling in the surf, only to discover promptly why anyone out in the water was wearing a full head-to-toe wetsuit, and one probably incorporating a battery-powered warmer to boot. It was freezing cold!

One of the signature drives you can take from Carmel, as noted in the above reference to the young Mr Indestructible, is something called the 17-Mile Drive. It’s actually a state park and entry is via a ranger-staffed gate. For most of the year, it takes you past some remarkable coastal vistas, except for (Murphy’s Law at work here) the annual seal pupping time when the good local animal-friendly folks erect a couple miles of tall green fabric barricades right beside the road, and add regularly spaced signs all along its full length cautioning drivers in no uncertain terms not to stop, or even slow down. So we would miss the seals – today. (Something we will correct, as it turns out, a couple days farther on.)

One of the signature stops along the way that was open for viewing, however, is where (without exaggeration) the world-famous Lone Cypress, a 200-year old or thereabouts tree, sits stoically on a point of rock with an unparalleled view of the Monterey coast. But on closer inspection, it becomes all too apparent that the Lone Cypress’s sturdiness is somewhat of an illusion.
The tree is maintained with some exceptionally vigorous outside help. For starters, the entire point of land on which it stands has been buttressed with breaker-resistant reinforcement. The tree itself is surrounded with a second stone wall and is now held up with multiple steel cables. Its trunk is also reinforced in places with patches of tree-coloured concrete.

(Fans of the original “Star Trek” series may recall an episode called “Devil in the Dark”, in which Ship’s Surgeon Leonard McCoy saves the life of a badly-injured silicon-based life form called a Horta by trowelling a bunch of thermal concrete into its wound. It’s not a huge leap to see similar thinking at work in the concrete “bandages” with which Carmel’s Lone Cypress has been patched.)

But they remain fiercely proud of their elderly arboreal attraction in Carmel. At the lookout that offers the best view of the tree, there is a large sign warning that it and its image are copyright protected and anyone snapping a picture with the intent of using it as a logo or illustration to promote a commercial venture without first obtaining the requisite property release will face the wrath of something called the Pebble Beach Corporation. (The Corp’s own logo, appropriately enough, is in fact not a pebble-strewn beach, but the above-noted tree – note the black-and-white circle that fades in front and centre here on the Corp’s home page.

But we couldn’t leave the realm of the Pebble Beach Corporation without making a pilgrimage to its namesake golf club – 18 holes that probably place consistently in the top two or three of anyone’s list of the world’s best-known golf courses, sharing pride of place with the Old Course at St Andrew’s, Scotland, and the Augusta National, home of the Masters. (The line-up of ornery arguing golfers forms on the left. But Pebble Beach is certainly right up there.)

In fact, if you tour 17-Mile Drive, it’s hard to avoid visiting the venerable golf club – 17-Mile Drive’s route takes you right smack between the Pebble Beach clubhouse parking lot and its front door!

Pebble Beach is officially a public course, but given that its green fees are presently $475, “plus cart” (and probably rising monthly), it’s a pretty select “public” who will make room in their budget for a playing tour of these hallowed links.

And their bar prices match their green fees. Opting for a break on the clubhouse terrace, my wife and I each had a glass of California wine, she a Chardonnay, me a Merlot (Oh, save it, Sideways fans! *) overlooking the course’s most famous green – the 18th – and were returned no change from $50 for the privilege.
But how often do you get greenside at Pebble Beach? (Repeat with every sip.) We toasted the health of my father-in-law, himself a golfer of no mean skill for nearly seven decades (and who coincidentally is in possession of a small vial of sand from one of the bunkers beside the very same green we now overlooked).

*Jack: If they want to drink Merlot, we're drinking Merlot.
Miles Raymond: No, if anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving. I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot!

(Source: IMDb, Memorable quotes from the hilarious mid-life crisis movie, “Sideways”, about one guy’s farewell-to-bachelorhood California wine country tour gift to his friend.)

Next morning, my biology was still firmly ensconced on Ottawa time so I awoke at the crack of dawn. But as I discovered, that just happens to be the absolute best time of day to go for a stroll on an ocean beach. Beach access was a mere three blocks from the B&B in which we were staying and, in minutes, I was rambling slowly along the shoreline, now considerably widened by the low morning tide and exposing vast new stretches of sand.

The previous day, I had already noticed that the smooth wet sand was frequently marked by little trails that each ended abruptly in a small hole. On this early morning, I discovered why and, in the process, discovered what have to be the world’s dumbest crabs. (Of course, if one starts with “crab” as a benchmark, it might not be a big leap to “world’s dumbest”, but even by crab standards we are talking off the Mensa radar.)


When we were on the beach the previous afternoon, we had seen lots of little crab carcasses, each one the residue of a creature cored by one of the dozens of crows and gulls that cruise the shore looking for just such a delicacy. But in the early morning, the little creatures themselves are in evidence, having erupted out of the sand after crafting their random little sub-surface trails. But it seems they do so solely to flop over on their backs and wait to add their little bit to the great avian buffet circle of life. At one point, I reached down and actually turned one upright. It took exactly two uncertain steps and then once more flopped over onto its back.

Nature finds a way, and nature in this case has told these crabs, “Your role in life is to be bird food. Go to it!”

California Highway #1.

I have been on the Cape Breton Highlands coast road; I have been on Montana’s Road to the Sun that crosses the Continental Divide; I have been on France’s Rue de Soleil and crossed the Alps to get there; I have driven the twists and turns of the Cotswolds. And now I can add California’s Highway #1 along the Big Sur coastline to my personal short list of truly magnificent drives.


On a map, the run from Carmel south to Cambria is about 90 miles. And most guides suggest two hours’ drive time. But give yourself a day. And if possible take the trip south from Carmel (unless you’re an acrophobe) because then, as you navigate the cliffside highway, you’ll be on the side of the road where there’s nothing between you and the Pacific surf, sometimes several hundred feet below. The other reason to give yourself a full day is because you simply cannot – unless you’re immune to spectacle – avoid stopping at every other turnout to oooh and ahhh. (So sue me, I’m a tourist.)

At one point, we were passing what the guidebook told us was a stretch of the highway in the domain of the California condor and, unless some enterprising Californian has manufactured a medium-sized aircraft decorated with feathers, we saw one
-- this one in fact -- out for an afternoon soar.

Eventually you will grudgingly pass the last overlook (Ho hum, just another awesome west coast vista). Now the land flattens out, the sharp-edged cliffs change to rolling coastal hills and the road signs announcing the number of miles to the Hearst Castle at San Simeon show the distance in single-digit numbers. Just past the gates to San Simeon, whose twin white Spanish-influenced towers are visible on a distant hilltop, you come to a nest of roadside motels. None of them are bad places, but my advice to you is simply to blow right past them and stay on the road for another half dozen or so miles until you reach Cambria, California.

Cambria is such a damned pleasant little place to visit, you get the distinct sense they would be perfectly happy if you just stopped, stayed briefly and moved on without giving them a whole lot of extra publicity. (No worry here – Baby Duck, enjoyed by tens of… people!)

If you start hunting for information about Cambria, one of the first scintillating facts you’ll encounter is that Cambria is known as a CDP – a Census Designated Place. I’m not going into the particulars here about what that means, but I will steer you to this site if you have a burning desire to know more.

Among the attractions that the town’s Chamber of Commerce chooses to highlight on its website are an annual Art and Wine Festival where visitors are given a wine glass and a passport to track their many tastings; a Western Dance Jamboree (It’s certainly hard to argue “western”, given that one edge of the town is the Pacific coast, but despite the fact that the event’s promotion invites you to “bring out your inner heehaw”, the accompanying picture may come as a bit of a disappointment to anyone thinking the stage will be flooded with Shania Twain or Faith Hill wannabees.); a “Chili cook-off and classic car show”. (How did they decide these theme blends – “Art and wine”; “chili and classic cars” ??)

I’m over-mocking here. Cambria is a delight. It’s a main street jammed end to end with eclectic little stores and restaurants and after a day-long scenic drive, at its far end (assuming you’ve approached from the direction of Carmel), one of the nicest Bed & Breakfasts we’ve ever found – the Olallieberry Inn.

- - -

Non-California digression:

I’m finally beginning to understand the apparent “addiction” of video gaming.

Recently, the “supply” side of the basic economics principle of “supply and demand” at last caught up to the “demand” side in the Ottawa area and I was finally able to fulfill a long-delayed promise from Santa last Christmas to bring a Nintendo Wii into the house. (“Wii” is pronounced “wee”, and is thus – you guessed it – the source of endless puns among its teenaged fans.)

Until you’ve actually experienced the Wii, there’s simply no way to appreciate what it has done for video-gaming. For starters, there is no physical connection (like a wire) between you and the TV screen. A tiny remote sensor sits on top of your television and what is in your hand is a controller about the size and shape of a Coffee Crisp chocolate bar that regularly broadcasts its position to the sensor.

So for example, let’s say the game is tennis. What you see onscreen is you (your player) and your opponent. And when the ball appears to be coming at you, you quite literally swing your arm in a forehand or backhand motion. That motion is read by the sensor and your onscreen character either hits or misses the ball, depending on how well you’ve timed your swing. The same principle applies to Wii golf, where the controller is now the shaft of your club. And you really do have to swing hard for drives, more softly for chip shots and in a putting motion for putts.

But for me, far and away more fun than I should be allowed to have (with the following noted frustration) is flying a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain.

The controller device in this case becomes the aircraft rudder stick and one of its buttons, positioned just about where it actually sits on the stick in the cockpit of a real P-51 Mustang, fires your machine guns.

The graphics are truly amazing. Twisting the controller one way or the other yanks my nimble little fighter into a full banking turn. There’s a button I can push at the same time that puts me in the position of one of my own wingmen, flying glued to my flight path. From that perspective, I gain a much wider view of the skies around and, therefore, more advance notice of where the enemy’s aircraft are. I release that button, and bam! I’m back in my own cockpit with (hopefully) the enemy bomber or fighter just slipping into my gunsight ring.


At the moment in the game, I’m in the skies over London. But my frustration lies with what the game requires of you before you are cleared to move to the next level. In this game, each level is called a “mission” and within each mission, you achieve a number of “checkpoints”. This will be clearer with an actual example.

My present “mission” requires me be successful at several tasks: first to beat back a wave of unprotected bombers whose target is the London Parliament Buildings (As the last bomber falls, you are told onscreen that you have reached the first “checkpoint”.); then a wave of bombers who attack with fighter cover (Last bomber falls – checkpoint 2.); then a wave of low-flying Stuka dive-bombers that skim the surface of the Thames in their drive to bomb the Tower of London (Last Stuka falls – checkpoint 3.); then my own wingmen, who come under the guns of a horde of enemy fighters (Last enemy fighter downed – checkpoint 4… or so I am told.).

However, the game assumes that as you progress, you also move ahead in your gaming skills, so it gets a little harder after each checkpoint. But I am of the pre-videogaming generation and my reflexes still sit somewhere south of the three-toed sloth. So depending on how ably (or not) I have mastered the Wii controller and my own reflexes, I can find myself – taking each of the above checkpoints in turn – shot out of the sky by a bomber’s tailgunner because I stayed too long in level flight on his tail; shot out the sky by a fighter that got behind me while I was lining up on a bomber; blown to smithereens because I slammed into a building in my over-eager pursuit of one of the incredibly low-flying Stukas; or simply succumbing to unrepaired damage that I failed to notice after taking several hits from the enemy planes without having activated the necessary in-flight “repair” sequence. (Nice touch, that. Airborne in-flight repair of battle damage is definitely not something that was available to pilots during the real Battle of Britain).

All the while, there’s a small onscreen “status” bar that lets you watch helplessly as, in their turn, the “health” of Parliament, the Tower, and your wingmen slowly depletes the longer you take to shoot down the enemy attackers. When that “health”-o-meter reaches zero, well, sorry. But you are treated to surprisingly detailed graphics showing, in turn, Parliament being consumed by fire; the Tower vanishing under multiple explosions, or your hapless wingman’s aircraft plummeting to earth, trailing a stream of black smoke. In every such case, the game coldly informs you, “Mission Failed!”.

Still with me here?

Here’s my beef.

After each “Mission Failed!”, like Warner Brothers’ Wile E Coyote after a half-mile long plummet to the canyon floor in countless Road Runner cartoons, I am offered the opportunity to be resurrected.

And so back I go to the end of the previous checkpoint. BUT, if I should decide that at this point that I’ve had quite enough and want to return bleary-eyed to Biggin Hill for a nap and a pint, the game exits not to the previous checkpoint, but to the end of the previous mission! In other words, it doesn’t matter that I’ve saved Parliament, the Tower and one of my two ruddy wingmen, shutting off the game at this point demands that I have to do it all over again the next time I re-enter the less than friendly skies over London.

Now fun’s fun, and I must admit to taking a vicarious delight in letting “Parliament” burn down, even if it’s the UK’s. But having done that about 25 times now, and having been myself shot down or blown up, and having crashed an unflyable aircraft at least that many times, I’d kinda like to move on.

And the only way to do that is see the entire mission through to its successful conclusion.

So my new theory is that videogame “addiction” is not addiction at all. It’s, “I got this far and before I quit I will be damned if I will go back yet again and blast those same unprotected bombers!!!” (Note to the British Medical Association Journal, Lancet: write that up as a proposal and if it flies, i.e. if someone throws you a half million dollar research grant, just mail my cut to…)

Ah well… offspring bought me Tiger Woods 2007 for the Wii for this year’s birthday just this week, and apparently it offers a virtual Pebble Beach of astonishing clarity.
I have the feeling this game, too, will have its own frustrations (just like real golf!) but I least I won’t have to put up with my wingman Joe, yet again, screaming at me to help him out because “I’m taking hits here!!” and the horde of Me-109’s is “on me like fleas on a houn’ dog!”

Deal with it Joe, I’m putting for a birdie on the number 17 island green at Sawgrass here!

Next time: more bits of Olallieberry, Elephant Seal Beach and the unbelievable Hearst Castle at San Simeon.

À la next time.