I started going to San Francisco Giants baseball games with my family in the late 1960s. Willie Mays was my favorite, but I thought Willie McCovey was pretty good too. Last week I was at a Giants game, eating some peanuts, and I remembered something my Dad said at another Giants game decades ago. It occurred to me that I could make a list of things I learned from Dad at the ballpark:

1. When eating peanuts at a game, do not be neat and tidy. Drop the empty shells directly onto the concrete.
2. Don’t look at the fly ball to see where it’s going, watch the outfielder who’s trying to catch it.
3. People arrive at the ballpark at different times, but everybody leaves at once.
4. Janitors do not make good money.
5. The first person to touch a foul ball is almost never the person who ends up with it.
6. Always bring a thermos of hot chocolate to a night game at Candlestick.

If, like me, you are a fan of the Arts & Crafts Movement, then join Arlene and me at the 16th annual Arts & Crafts show, August 14 and 15 at the Concourse Exhibition Hall, 8th & Brannan, San Francisco. Furniture, pottery, graphic art, both period & modern, also lectures, exhibits and book signings.

Also: on August 14 from 5-9pm, there will be an open house at the beautiful William Thorsen house in Berkeley. Enjoy wine and hors d’oeurvres and network with fellow Arts & Crafts enthusiasts in this historic setting. The house is famous as one of Greene & Greene’s “Ultimate Bungalows“ and is rarely open to the public. Don’t miss this opportunity!

Apple is certainly taking its lumps about the iPhone 4 antenna, and Apple’s competitors are no doubt loving the whole episode. But as Spencer Webb of AntennaSys so elegantly pointed out on This Week in Tech (two weeks before Consumer Reports dissed the iPhone), all you have to do is put a rubber case on the iPhone and the dropped calls will stop. You were going to put a case on your iPhone anyway, right?

Apple’s previous problem was having to admit that the iPhone iOS showed more signal-strength bars than it should have: but as Spencer Webb also pointed out on TWiT, that’s a complete red herring. There’s no such thing as two bars, or four bars. It’s digital, not analog. Back when phones were analog the bars mattered, but on digital phones bars are meaningless. You either have enough signal strength for a connection, or you don’t. Instead of bars, the signal indicator should be a big dot that’s either red or green. The only reason that phone companies continue to show the bars is because the public thinks bars still have meaning and demand that they be there.

We have created these reception problems ourselves. All tiny phones have congenital antenna problems, because the best antennas are big and long. Mobile phones used to have pull-out antennas, and reception would be far better if those still existed. But the public hated them, so they no longer exist. Yet we demand “five bars”.

All of which is to say that Apple has completely screwed up the public relations on AntennaGate. They could have said “bars are meaningless on digital phones,” but instead they apologized for the bug in iOS. They could have said “Human hands cause call drops on all smart phones,” but instead they pretended the problem didn’t exist. Now they’re providing free cases for all iPhone owners. This whole kerfuffle is one part technology and three parts PR.

Fuller in his one-paw pose.

Aloe aristata (Torch Aloe), native to the Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa. This is the first flower spike we’ve had in several years.

Aloe aristata

Whenever I give someone my name—say, when I’m making a restaurant reservation—the other person invariably asks me to spell it. This has happened my whole life, and my father’s whole life before me. And my name is not difficult to spell! I have known people named Szczepanski, Schweikhardt and Schuldheisz: you think maybe they have had problems making reservations?

Thankfully, there is one exception to this rule, one place where I have never had to spell my name—my ancestral homeland of Italy. Making a reservation there is like a breath of fresh air:

“E il nome?” (And the name?)
“Mostardi.”
“Mostardi, perfetto. Arrivederci!”

You have no idea how liberating this is. Better yet, this extends also to Italian restaurants in America run by native speakers. Just today I reserved a table at Ideale, our favorite dinner spot in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. We spoke in Italian, and he didn’t ask how to spell my name. Ahhhh. It’s a beautiful thing.

Twenty years ago today, Arlene and I were married. We spent time today looking through our wedding photographs, remarking how we all look twenty years older, and noting with sadness those that have since passed away. Arlene pointed out a picture of me pruning a redwood tree in my morning coat, so that our huppah wouldn’t get caught in dangling branches; I had forgotten all about that. This evening we celebrated with dinner at the Chez Panisse cafe; it was delicious. The years have been full of love. Thank you, sweetie.

Today Arlene and I had lunch at Ebisu at 9th & Irving in San Francisco. Ebisu is one of our two favorite Japanese restaurants in the City (the other is Takara on Post in Japantown), and we often eat there if we’re near Golden Gate Park. We both ordered a bento box with tempura, sashimi and sushi. Ebisu’s salads (which in many bentos are mere afterthoughts, often cole slaw or potato salad) are delicious: seaweed salad, oshitashi, and mixed lettuce & radish.

Lunch bento #2 at Ebisu

100 years ago today, my grandmother Lena arrived at Ellis Island, two weeks after sailing from Palermo, Sicily. In her honor, I dined this evening at Trattoria La Siciliana, in the Elmwood neighborhood of Berkeley.

Pappardelle in sugo di maiale, from Trattoria La Siciliana

Here was my entree, homemade pappardelle in sugo di maiale (pork sauce). Not only was it really yummy, it tasted quite like what Grandma would have made herself. The owner, Angelo d’Alo, is very friendly and speaks Italian like a native. The restaurant is decorated with all sorts of Sicilian ceramics, posters and photographs. Two thumbs up!

One hundred years ago today, 10 June 1910, my grandmother and her older sister stepped off the S. S. Neckar onto Ellis Island in New York City. They had left Palermo, Sicily on 28 May.

Last night I was listening to a podcast of an interview with novelist Isabel Allende, who was went into exile from her native Chile in 1973 after a military coup. Her words speak for the experiences of millions of others:

It’s very hard to leave behind everything that is familiar and go to another place to make a life. You do that only because you’re desperate, because going back is worse. But the dream of what you leave behind stays with people, and it haunts the first generation.

Being an exile is very different from being an immigrant. An immigrant, ultimately, chooses to go. The person in exile has no choice. In that case, the only way out is going back. So they never unpack, and in their minds they’re always waiting to go back. An immigrant looks to the future. An exile looks to the past.

What I try to tell the immigrants my foundation works with is “You can live in the United States, you can adapt here, you can get to love this country the way I love it, without losing any of what you bring with you. You don’t have to lose the language, you don’t have to lose the traditions, the food, the family. No! The idea is to add, add as much as possible, and be totally bi-cultural.” But immigrants don’t understand that, because they feel so alien, so left out, that they think if they don’t become American, completely Americanized, they will never belong. But I say “You will never belong anyhow. Your children will. So forget about it. Your children will, and you will always have a foot there and foot here. And that’s ok. That’s the way it is.”

—Novelist Isabel Allende, speaking at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center on 14 September 2009

To the memory of my grandmother, Onofria Napoli, 1894-1977.