four from Muir

We went hiking in the Muir Woods. It amazes me that you can drive a half hour from San Francisco and be in an old growth forest.


It's always exciting to be in a forest that's never been logged. Where I'm from, you don't use the word primeval as often as you'd like.



We heard a terrific ranger talk about how this patch of coast redwoods was narrowly saved by an 11th hour intervention from Theodore Roosevelt. A water company had wanted to build a dam upstream and flood the valley.


Just another example of activist government hampering the free market...

The coolest fact we learned about Sequoia sempervirens is that an entire grove may spring from the root system of a single parent tree, and may be considered a single organism.

I was resisting the temptation to post a long shot of some redwoods as it is impossible to get a sense of the scale, but I find I can't resist, so here is one anyway:

he and his cousin bond over wondrous shiny Chuck Taylors for the latter's wedding

Black and shiny as a hornet's ass, these converse sneakers are what we will be wearing in my New Jersey cousin's wedding one month from now.

yoda contemplative garden

The Presidio isn't just a limp movie from the '90s starring Sean Connery. Situated on a wedge of land that juts into the San Francisco Bay, it was originally a garrison of the Spanish empire, before passing to Mexico, and then to the USA, and, in the idealized future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry, to Starfleet Academy. It ceased operations as a US military base in 1994. We walked around the Presidio, looking for the remnants of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition buildings, and George Lucas's headquarters.

We couldn't get to the former, but found the latter, and admired the statues of the inventors of television and the zoetrope, and of Yoda, seen above. No, I didn't photoshop that. Yoda really does preside over a tranquil oasis of contemplation in San Francisco, and thanks to the largesse of George Lucas, you can visit him there.