Live from Austin!

Last year:

Investigators handed 26 items, including clothes, phones and cameras, to transit workers, “explaining that they had found the lost articles on a train or bus.”

But, the report states, “Three months or more after these items were placed in the system, we recovered only three from the Lost Property Unit at 34th Street. The whereabouts of the other 23 articles is unknown.”

Last year:

The report said that the transit agency’s lost property unit received more than 8,000 items each year and that only about 18 percent wound up back in the hands of their owners. Most unclaimed items were eventually auctioned off, the report said.

This year:

While riding in the New York subway, Carlos Alayo found a wallet sitting on an empty bench. In a hurry to get to a meeting, Alayo picked up the wallet and said he was going to check it for ID later. Before he knew it he was being frisked by police.

It turns out the wallet was planted by New York City police as part of “Operation Lucky Bag,” a decoy operation involving planted wallets and undercover officers watching how bystanders react.

I can imagine the conversation:

“This is a public relations disaster. Now that people know that practically nothing they hand to officials ever gets returned to its rightful owner, they’ll stop handing stuff in and we’ll lose the auction profits.”

“I’ve got it: we’ll start a sting operation to make people scared to return anything to its rightful owner!”

The Bush re-election campaign is being deliberately arranged to coincide with the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and is starting in New York City.

In New York City in August, businessman Herbert Black sued socialite Denise Rich (ex-wife of the Clinton-pardoned Marc Rich) for nonpayment of fees he said he earned by saving her nearly a million dollars annually as a personal financial adviser. Included alleged savings were: $125,000 in flowers (by having fewer deliveries to her apartment when she wasn’t at home); $30,000 by changing the payment plan for her yoga instructions; and $52,000 in “dog maintenance” (mostly by giving away her two oldest dogs, which were so feeble that they had to be pushed by sitters around Central Park in an $8,000 baby carriage). [New York Times, 8-19-02]

I’m not sure when I first became aware of California. Maybe I saw it on TV. Or maybe on a box of raisins.

No, I think it was the Beach Boys. I was a young boy at a seaside resort in England, and music was playing. It spoke of a far off world, a mystical place where people stood on polished wooden boards and somehow rode on the waves. I’d never seen waves like that on an English beach—or at least, not on a sunny day. Waves like that ought to mean the gale force winds and torrential rain of an English summer.

Ironically, decades later I learned that Brian Wilson was morbidly afraid of the water, and would never go near the ocean.

Clearly this “California” was a strange and marvellous place. People threw plastic discs at each other through the air, and they sort of hovered. I found one in a seaside shop and tried to interest my family in the idea, but they didn’t seem as inspired by it as I was.

At some point in the 70s I must have seen The Streets of San Francisco. All I remember is the way the cars would drive really fast down a hill, hit a crossroads with a thump, and launch slightly into the air.

I don’t think we’ll be trying that.

My young mind gradually came to understand that California was more than one place. In fact, it was three places: San Francisco; Hollywood, where TV and movies came from; and Disneyland.

Years later I got SubLogic Flight Simulator for the Atari ST. The default start location was a runway at Oakland airport. My first and favorite route was to take off, fly across the Bay Bridge and over Alcatraz, and dive for the Golden Gate Bridge. After New York City, it was the most impressive scenery in the game.

The point of all this is that my strongest associations with San Francisco have always been unreal ones. That’s part of why I wanted to confront them with reality.