a little stroll 'round the neighborhood.
I'm a great fan of irony.
Two years ago: Some of my USC classmates cause a serious rift right before graduation. Three years ago: I discover Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Today's news question:
Some lucky person in Michigan may be able to afford a small patch of Bay Area real estate soon. How come?
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
I spent yesterday trying to figure out cascading style sheets. What I've ended up doing is stealing Beth's style sheet and one of her pages and playing with the style sheet to see how it affects the page. I'm not proud. I'm also still going really, really slowly at figuring out what my page is going to look like.
Unfortunately, Fernando gets paid for this kind of thing, so helping me redesign my page is not high on his list.
My fourth anniversary rapidly approaches, so I want to be done by then. Of course, that was my ambition last year.
We haven't been taking many pictures of Sophia recently because we've been waiting for Darin's new camera to show up.
This, of course, is stupid: she's changing every day. And it's not like we can go back to see what she looked like at 11 weeks as opposed to 6 weeks.
She still is the cutest baby ever. And I am totally unbiased when I say that.
We called Fernando this morning for a purely selfish reason: I wanted to borrow one of his cameras that uses film. Yeah, I know: antiques.
So he came over and we went to brunch at the Daily Grill. When we came back we went for a walk down to Cafe Bizou, where we got dessert--the flourless chocolate cake, which is to die for. Yum.
As we walked out we noticed street banners on Ventura Boulevard for the Buckley School Fair and decided to walk over, which involved walking up a few steep blocks and one very intense hill on the grounds of the school that led up to the fair. So the three of us were going to get more exercise in one day than we usually do in a week.
The Buckley School is a private school that's a few blocks from our house. Several times when I was out jogging people driving by would ask me where it was and I never knew. Now I do.
Turns out it's a gigantic school laid out over what I think may be dozens or possibly hundreds of acres. Yes, right in the middle of Los Angeles. We had to walk through the campus--which had buildings such as the Robert Young Library and the Quinn Martin Science Center--and up to the playing field, where a fair with a ferris wheel and a giant slide and other rides had been set up, along with lots of tents with merchandise and food for sale.
On the fence leading to the fair were posters from the corporate sponsors (including Mercedes--cracked us all up) and the donations from individuals, whom I assume were the families of students (including the Hasselhofs). The hilarious thing were the names attached to the various levels of donations: exec. producer, producer, director, star, co-star, and, lastly, I kid you not, screenwriter.
(Ghettoization starts early for screenwriters.)
"If Sophia goes here," Darin said, "she's going to be hanging out with a lot of showbiz types."
"Is that a problem?" I said.
One of the rides had a sign that said, "You must be at least 5 years old to ride." I said, "Sophia will probably be able to sneak by at four, given how tall she'll be." Not that I'm pushing her or anything.
We walked back to our house, stopping every so often at one of the houses for sale so that Fernando could take one of the flyers out of the dispensers on the For Sale signs. The houses around here have gotten very expensive--Fernando is not happy about this, as he and Nancy wanted to move near us. But it might be good for us--this way, we can trade in our beautiful four-bedroom house here for a two-bedroom fixer-upper in Palo Alto.
My friend Dave Feldman (no, not America's Funny Man, the other one) wrote to me recently to point out that I was wrong in my "Reply to Todd Napolitano": Kierkegaard wasn't German, he was Danish. Well, whip me with a noodle. It's a damn good thing I didn't get that degree in Philosophy (which I actually thought about for a couple of moments).
His letter prompted me to reread my "Reply," which is now three-and-a-half years old. And I have to admit, I cracked me up. I can't believe I wrote this. I sure as hell couldn't write the same thing today.
So you can share the hilarity:
- Read Todd's essay first. (I do reprint it on my page, but it's not easy to read there.)
- Then, my reply.
(I was just coming off of a class at De Anza in critical thinking...can you tell?)
Okay, okay -- maybe it didn't strike you as that funny. What do you know?
The answer to Wednesday's question: The London and Frankfurt stock exchanges are merging to form the iX exchange. (And they have to buy the name from a computer magazine. You'd have thought they'd have checked that out first.)
What does this mean? The Guardian puts it this way: "The global investment banks have pushed hardest for the London-Frankfurt merger - no surprise there, as their geographical reach and cross-border expertise will give them an edge over purely domestic competitors. Also, their transaction volumes are such that even minor economies of scale could have a very material impact on their profitability." As always, it's the money.
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Copyright 2000 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@nobody-knows-anything.com