Barry's Life in Napa Blog

A story in the Chronicle tells us you can join the thousands of people who are raptly watching a pregnant horse on a webcam . The mare is in Petaluma, and is due any minute now, so you can link to it (quick before you miss it!) although it requires a plug in to see what's happening. But after you install the plug in you can go to www.marestare.com (I kid you not) and look at all kinds of horses, donkeys, alpacas, lemurs and orangutans all over the world on webcams. Well, I didn't actually see any lemurs or orangutans on marestare.com, but I think if I keep watching enough webcams, some lemurs or orangutans might eventually show up. Now before you think this is some kind of sick weirdness, it appears that people who own or manage a lot of horses are using the webcams in stables to monitor multiple animals. Has this idea replaced the baby monitor yet? What IS weird is that this newspaper story will send a bunch of goofballs (like me) to rush off to their computers to look at the...

Like the majority of Americans, I am overweight, and that's been the story for most of my life. I've never been over 225, but since I probably ought to come in at 190 max, that's overweight by quite a bit. I have always been conscious of it, too, from the day Mel Campbell punched me in the gut and called me fatty. We were about 5 years old when this disturbing incident occured out by the raspberry bush in the sideyard. My snappy comeback was "I'd rather be fat than skinny like you," which, of course, was a lie. As I've gotten older and my metabolism has slowed, stopped, and gone into reverse, the ability to drop 10 pounds in no time has disappeared. So you can imagine my delight in discovering the secret to weight loss. Ready? Here it is: Stop eating and drinking 75% of the things you normally eat and drink. Yes, it's that simple! My spousal unit and I have been on what is called the "Daniel Fast," which is not really a fast since you are eat...

We have a breakthrough. Thanks to the all-encompassing memory banks of Bryce (see the comment on the 3/28 post) we now have a reference point. For those who did not read the 3/28 post, and have a strained index finger and can't scroll down, I have been looking for the basis of the belief I hold that people with unusually large heads are more successful in on-screen roles on TV and in movies. It's one of those "I know I heard it somewhere" things. So here's our definitive citation: Well y’know, that’s why Merv Griffin hired Vanna White — her head is too big for her body. Apparently big-headed people are thought to “read well” on TV. And yes, that is the only qualification to be a TV “journalist. This is attributed to a person using the name "Cervantes" commenting on a blog here . (This blog also refers to Tony Snow and Brit Hume as examples of the big head phenomenon, and along with some crude language and general meanness, uses the term megacephalic, w...

Question: Successful film and TV actors have abnormally large heads. True or False. Today I appeal to you, the Barry's Blog readers, to address this pressing question. I can't remember where it first came up, but somewhere sometime someone said that it is a fact that the people whose heads are disproportionately large are more successful in the movies and TV. Something to do with how the camera, like the sitting President, conveys data that is not exactly reality, but an interpretation of it. This accounts for the old saying that "the camera adds 15 pounds." Try as I might, I cannot find any references to this "big heads = success on camera" concept, even searching my old favorite Snopes - and amazingly the query stumps Google. I thought Google knew everything. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places. Or maybe YOU have the knowledge I seek. Recent examples of the ginormous cranium on TV include Giada Delaurentiis from the Food Network, and I bel...

The Chronicle gave the Sunday front page above the fold to a story on how foodie bloggers are impacting restaurants with their reviews. If I were a restaurant owner or a chef, this trend would give me the willies. Here's why. I took a look at yelp.com as a test. There are pages on pages of restaurants listed and all the places have a 1 to 5 star rating. If you're looking at San Francisco, you will see many places that have 30 to 100 reviews posted. I would place some value on the collective rating of 30 people, whether we were talking about food, a movie, or a website, so if one of those places has 4 stars, I imagine it must be good. On the other hand, search for Napa and you find another long list of eateries, and they all have their star ratings. The difference is, many of them have been given this rating based on 3 reviews - some have only 2 reviews. Therein lies the rub. Imagine pouring your heart and soul into a restaurant and having your fortunes shaped by 3 anonymou...

It never ceases to amaze me that California, with 35 million people, the world's fifth largest economy, a magnet for some of the most innovative people in the world, produces such a meager crop of politicians. In the last 50 years, the state has produced a total of two pols of national stature, Nixon and Reagan. You'd think that the Governor of California, whoever he or she is, would be a viable candidate for President in every election with a headstart of 55 electoral votes. But instead, we've had your George Deukmejian, (wow!) your not-the-TV-news-guy Pete Wilson, (ooh...aaah) your Gray Davis (sensational!) and now Schwarzenegger (who at least has some ideas and some personality, if he could just figure out what he stands for. ) All of this comes to the forefront with the Matier and Ross item from the Chronicle reporting that polls have Jerry Brown as the front runner for the Dems in the next Governor's race. (All together now - you've got to be kidding me!) ...

So I'm flipping channels a few days back and The Born Losers is on, so I cannot resist watching a bit of that. For those who have not had the pleasure - no, pleasure is not the word....hmmm, let's say the experience of viewing this 1967 film, here are a couple of the tag lines from IMDB: CORNERED! A HOT SUMMER NIGHT...A PACK OF STRAY 'CHOPPER JOCKEYS'... An innocent girl is first prize in the dirtiest game ever played! Kitten on wheels, with her bike, her boots and her bikini! So you get the idea. However, the reason I flipped to it in the first place is that this is a Tom Laughlin movie, he who would be Billy Jack . Now Billy Jack may be, by traditional standards, the most technically pathetic yet commercially successful movie ever made. Little considerations like the quality of cinematography, sound, editing, and acting did not deter Tom Laughlin from making a movie. Billy Jack has a special place in my mind because (a) the character was really cool to my 12 y...

When I was a kid, my mom sold the World Book Encyclopedia . I don't know how many years she did it, but long enough to earn a set for our house, which I'm sure was her primary objective. While the older set of (no doubt hand-me-down) Encyclopedia Brittanica remained mostly untouched, I spent a lot of time with the World Book. I remember being both fascinated and repulsed by the plastic-sheet overlays depicting the systems of the human body, a frequenter of all the articles on the moon and space travel (we were nationally obsessed with the moon in those days) and often inclined to just pick out a volume at random and start reading (or, more likely, looking at the pictures.) As my mom had hoped, I loved the World Book. Logically, I now have a deep and abiding relationship with Wikipedia . (If you need to get up to speed, read the "About" page, or read the article on the topic of Wikipedia in the Wikipedia.) Wikipedia is everything the web is supposed to be, and I thank ...

Appropos of nothing, here are two photographs with stories behind them. I took photo 1 from the top of the Clay Street parking gargage in downtown Napa. It's a good spot for viewing construction on a couple of current downtown projects. When I looked straight down, I saw this old TV that had obviously been dropped from the spot where I was standing. Shades of the old Letterman show. I imagine the spectacle was diminished by the fact that the tube did not explode. Photo 2 is from our front yard. These blooms are from tulip bulbs we brought back from Amsterdam in 2003. Every year so far it was all foliage and no flower, but this year we get the blooms. I'm sending this photo to Al Gore as more proof of global warming.

Kind of hard to imagine that Al Gore is not running for President, especially after yesterday's global warming show he provided for the Congress. And also hard to imagine that he could really get the nomination. I know he's riding a wave with the Oscar and all, but he has become such a preachy blowhard I can't see middle America getting on a Gore bandwagon. I can't get past the idea that he is using the green theme to remake himself, and at the bottom line it's all about Al Gore and getting elected. Lest we forget, this is a guy who couldn't carry his homestate in 2000 - is he more popular there now that he has cozied up with the granola wing of the party? One thing we know for sure - Al plays fast and loose with the facts in his movie. In this piece from NPR, it's noted that Al's "20 foot rise in sea level" theory is not supportable, and the tying together of global warming and Hurricane Katrina is not something a reputable scientist will do...

Apple 1984 ad mashup markets Barack Obama, not Macs This headline means: Hilary Clinton is clean and articulate, but she will have a devil of time getting the Democratic nomination. Forever stamp will absorb rate hikes This headline means: The name of the stamp describes the amount of time US Mail takes to reach its destination. That one was too easy. Human Skull, Bones Found in Chicago Golf Club Fairway This headline means: You're playing the round of your life, totally in a groove, and you come up on a foursome of doofusses playing slow. At first you try to keep your patience, but soon you realize the delay has broken your rhythm and your great score is ballooning. When one of the slow-playing nimrods stops in the middle of the fairway to answer his cell phone, you kill him with your 3-iron, a club you don't use that much so a little bend in the shaft is not a major problem, and hastily bury him in a large divot. It's the kind of thing that happens to all of us now and th...

It perplexes me that so many people choose to go in living in such a dreadful world. In that world of their own creation, we are about to wipe ourselves out with greenhouse gasses, genetically engineered food, or cell phone radiation - or we are about to become victims of bird flu, flesh eating bacteria, or something that has become antibiotic resistant. In the dreadful world, teenagers are illiterate and drugged-up, aliens are either over-running the borders all day or probing us at night, depending on which type of alien one fears the most, and the old folks are sucking up all the Social Security money. And let's not forget to worry about the imminent collapse of the currency due to our lack of a true gold standard, the impending doom to come when the Chinese bail out of the bond market, and, most important for us Californians, the inevitable housing market crash. In a nutshell, we're all going straight to hell in a handbasket (made in Sri Lanka and purchased from the evil tr...

Last night we had burgers from In-N-Out and I had my first experience with fries "animal style." For those who do not feel they have quite enough plaque in their arteries, this treat comes highly recommended. (It reminded me of a dish called the "Magic Mountain" that I savored in a diner in Bettendorf, Iowa, many, many years ago, although in those parts they like to add the "Maid Rite" loose meat to everything.) For those who are not acquainted with the many In-N-Out options that do not appear on their deceptively simple menu, here is a list of all that is revealed when we lift the veil the separates the seen from the unseen world. Sarah tells me it is some kind of Napa rite of passage to order a "9 by 9." Delving more deeping into the mystical, here is a list of shortcuts you can use to conjure up an actual living human being from the depths of voice mail hell. If you've ever tried just pressing zero, you may have learned that not all compa...

Has political correctness run amok? Well, sure. Some people have taken a fundamentally positive idea - the golden rule? - and turned it into a monster. Got to watch every word you say, dumb down your language and take all the spice out of it, and God forbid you should tell a joke. All the same, I try to be sensitive to what other people may not want to hear or see. I don't have a right to inflict what I think is funny or clever on anyone who doesn't want to be the inflictee. That said, a pet peeve today, in another case of the phrase "tar baby" being pointed to as some kind of racial slur. This time it's John McCain who used the term. The topic was parental rights in custody cases. There was no racial connotation to his remarks. Not long ago, Mitt Romney and Tony Snow got chastised for using this term. It is well described here that the "tar baby" in the Uncle Remus stories was not racially weighted at all. Since the Remus stories were of and from the...

Here's one from the you-gotta-be-kidding-me files: Iran's Cultural Minister is protesting the movie 300 , while one of the Iranian newspapers says Hollywood has "declared war on Iranians." (Little do they know Hollywood only protests wars, it doesn't declare them.) The problem is that they think the movie makes Iranians looks bad. Of course, there are no Iranians depicted in the movie, just Persians, who are the ancestors of some modern day Iranians. Ironically, the vast majority of Americans going to see this film would never have made the connection between Iran and Persia if it hadn't been pointed out, since the day that was covered in World History we skipped class to go see a movie. I haven't seen the movie yet, although I've been looking forward to it for weeks. I read Gates of Fire recently, which is an excellent telling of the Thermopylae story, and even though I'm not into the gaphic novels, I liked Sin City , another Frank Miller creatio...

It has been a little like Christmas this week - the end of a long wait, after a prolonged period of growing anticipation as the circled day on the calendar drew closer. There was no stack of wrapped packages, and none required. All we wanted was Nate's return from Iraq. I am made aware this week of all that I take for granted. I knew from our phone calls that he was putting in long hours. I did not know that he and his buddies were on duty every day of their 7 month deployment, working 10, 12, 18 hours - that they spent every single day in their "work clothes" with no furlough, no R&R, sleeping with the rifle next to the bed every night. And then the convoys, traveling through places with names like "IED Alley," as shown in this photo. And so I am thankful that Nate is home, but today tens of thousands of other young men and women will spend another 18-hour day in their work clothes, eating sand, getting shot at, and missing home. I'm thankful for them. ...

I'm driving on the 405 yesterday and as I'm passing LAX a plane slides over my head so close I thought I felt the jet wash. A million other cars are an inch from me and we're all doing 80 and our cell phones are chiming and I'm listening to the radio news reporter describing a fire in the Anaheim Hills. A minute later the road curves and there's the smoke plume and it's billowing and I know there are hundreds of people evacuating and hundreds more fighting the fire. The lady on the radio is talking about freezing river rocks to cool your single malt scotch and how most of our coffee beans are over-roasted. In the time it takes me to drive a few miles on this particular highway I know some thousands of people have flown into or out of that airport I just passed. And I know that my son is in the air somewhere, too, somewhere between Kuwait and Germany maybe. I believe that he will be home the next day and we will see him again after the seven longest months in our...

I know that the people who are putting up the white crosses on their lawns think they are doing the right thing. In their minds, they're protesting the war. The hillside of white crosses in Lafayette, California, makes a strong visual statement, and the people behind that think they are doing the right thing. They just don't get it. Doesn't seem to matter how many times they hear it, directly from parents who have lost their sons and daughters over there, that u sing these mock grave markers is an insult to the memory of those killed in action . That those who have died were serving voluntarily - not draftees like in Vietnam. That maybe they didn't really want to be there, maybe in some cases they disagreed with the war - but they were doing their duty with honor. Voluntarily. They just don't get it. When you plant that white cross, you are casting those killed in service as victims. These honored dead are not victims. They just don't get it. It's the same ...

Here in northern California, as in much of the country, we are married to our illegal immigrants. Not necessarily in the going-to-the-chapel sense, but we are in a committed relationship. Just the same, we are married to sewing machine operators and call-center tech support in India, steel makers in China, and soccer ball stitchers in Pakistan. Our high standard of living and the low cost we pay for goods and services is built upon cheap labor. Immigration rhetoric is meeting reality in Colorado these days. After passing strict laws on illegal immigration there, a shortage of farmworkers has led to a proposal to use labor from the prisons to pick the crops. Maybe there is some truth to the "this is work no one else wants to do" line of thinking? California has the largest ag economy in the country. We rely on the immigrant workforce. Fortunately, we also have one of the largest prison populations in the country, too, so if the anti-immigrant camp gets the crackdown they'...

I never got into South Park , or Beavis and Butthead , and I try hard but don't get many laughs from Family Guy - but to my credit, I am a major fan of Team America: World Police , everything by Sasha Baron Cohen, and I can trace my lineage as a fan to Steve Martin and Mel Brooks. So that says I like satire, and you can go so far over the top with something totally sophomoric and still be killing me on an intellectual level. And I will also admit that you can't make something that will offend me if it is funny at the same time. If you can make it work, there is no topic, language or style that will put me off. Case in point, The Aristocrats , in which the star of today's post delivered one of the most memorable renditions of the legendary joke. All that said, I give me whole-hearted endorsement to the fore-mentioned star and her new show the Sarah Silverman Program . The season finale featured Sarah having sex with God. I think she's breaking new ground here. Wikipedia...

A few weeks ago I heard the first tink of the season. It came from the baseball field that's about one crisp relay from our front door. Probably a dad over there, pitching to a child, getting ready for tryouts, or just a kid version of spring training. The tink comes from the aluminum bats, and is a sound I can't hear without lamenting the demise of the real thing. One of the best reasons to go early for BP at a pro game is to hear the crack of the bat echoing through the mostly empty stands. There are few feelings that flow through your hands that are more pure than getting good wood on a fastball, and few that punish you more than getting one out on the end or right up on the handle. That luscious sound has been eliminated from the neighborhood, from the Little League park, and from the high school diamond, and replaced with the embarassing tink. And then there are the cheap hits that metal bats give like gifts, balls hit off the trademark that sing into the outfield instead ...

A few days back I mentioned 95.7 FM in SF had switched to a country format, and was kicking it off by playing "10,000 songs in a row commercial free." The commercial free part is swell, but I guess I didn't realize they were going to play the same 100 songs a 100 times each. I should have guessed. I've been reading Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media by Eric Klineberg, which explains a lot about why music radio has such tiny playlists. One explanation is simple-the big recording companies have been paying the big broadcasters for spins. What? You thought payola was outlawed in the 50s? Well, sure it was, and no one ever finds a loophole, do they? So today in the news, reports of a deal between the 4 big media conglomerates and the FCC to settle the latest payola scandal. And what a surprise! An insignificant fine, a token offer to play some non-corporate tunes (for a little while), and back to business as usual. With the huge amounts of com...

There's a story in the news about a vote in the Cherokee Nation to change their definition of citizenship, restricting it to descendants "by blood." The story goes on to say that this change will cut off the descendants of blacks whose ancestors were slaves to Cherokee owners. What? Wait a minute, what?? Indians owned slaves? Here you can learn much about what the Indian learned from the European settlers about keeping slaves , and how they adopted the practice. You think you know your history, then something like this pops up. There's a new show coming out on the BBC that will represent the global-warming-is-caused-by-the-sun theory. Titled "The Great Global Warming Swindle," it it set to air March 8. It's directed by a guy named Martin Durkin, and he says "It’s very rare that a film changes history, but I think this is a turning point and in five years the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind global warming will be seen as...

Item 1: Any conspiracy nut worth their salt believes the Council on Foreign Relations is a nefarious organization that is secretly controlling the world. Never seemed all that secretive to me, seeing as how the conspiracy nuts could easily produce a list of all the people who were members. Secretive or not, looks like the CFR wants a little more sizzle, as Angelina Jolie is joining up. As the newest member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Jolie will join other prestigious members such as Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Alan Greenspan among many others. According to the Post report, the Council requires "no academic credentials but looks for members who take part in world affairs." Speaking to the paper, Dr. Gordon Adams, an international-affairs professor, said "Bring her on...the idea of having Henry Kissinger and Angelina Jolie in the same organization is dazzling." Former head of U.S. foreign-aid programs and current Counci...

I am worried about the fate of the great institution of the daily newspaper. That worry becomes panic, outrage, and complete flemesifation when my delivery is late. (Sorry, I couldn't think of a word that described my feelings so I had to make one up.) Not only is the paper business up against this new-fangled internet thing, but it's also up against the tendency to consume information at a higher level than the local. As the world gets smaller, we live regionally. Lots of people today don't care what's happening in the neighborhood until something bad happens, like a sex offender moves in next door, or even worse, a subdivision gets approved. So the daily newspaper isn't essential as it once was. I don't really need it at all. That is, until I don't have it. If I am up at 6, I can wait almost patiently until 7, but if that thing's not in the driveway at that point, God have mercy, my vengeance will not be assuaged. This, of course, is a learned behavio...

Since I can't drive without constantly changing the radio station, it's no surprise that I ran across 95.7 FM yesterday (3/1) broadcasting a countdown to a format change. They had a robotic voice doing a "T-minus 14 hours, 28 minutes" kind of thing, and having done some format flips before I knew right away what they were up to. So "Max FM" and the voice of Mr. Peterman is gone from Bay Area radio, and once we have all dried our tears we'll try to gather the pieces of our shattered lives. Today, you can hear "95.7 The Wolf" on that spot on the dial, which as you might guess, is a country format. They are kicking it off by playing 10,000 songs in a row without a commercial. After that they will play 10,000 commercials in a row without a song, or at least it will seem like it. It will be interesting to see if this version of a country station can survive here - undoubtedly the largest media market in the country where country stations are rare t...