Monthly Archives: February 2025

some questions for my elected representatives

Musings from the wee hours. I sent these to my three Federal representatives this morning.

  • Many references are being made in the news to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). By what authority is this a government department?
  • I understand Elon Musk is very wealthy and probably isn’t drawing a salary, but I see references to other ‘DOGE employees’. Who are these people? Are they being paid by the Federal government? Who determines their salaries? Do they get benefits?
  • For years, the Republicans have used ruthless tactics to advance their agendas: gerrymandering congressional districts, the hanging chad riot, McConnell’s obstructionism over the Supreme Court to name but a few. I am a retired Union worker. I have voted Democratic almost exclusively my whole life. When are the Democrats going to show that they can act with similar conviction?

F. X. Crowley

FX died this week. He got a real obit in the Chronicle so he was really somebody. Leader of my Local Union, IATSE Local 16, business manager of another IA Local 119, member of the SF Labor Commission for many years, member of several important San Francisco commissions including the PUC and the Port Commission. It was as a member of the Port Commission that he got the America’s Cup to come to San Francisco Bay in 2013. Pier 27, now the cruise ship terminal which is right down the street where I live, was the center of those activities.

I met FX in 1979. I was working on the pre-Broadway production of Evita at the Orpheum Theatre. The set was primarily a raked stage but there was a small counter raked stage built into a track system that allowed it to moved up and down stage for different scenes. Nowadays, there would be a big electric motor hooked up to some cables to pull the stage up and down but at that time it was Gary Heider and me cranking on a manual winch. One scene had about a dozen people on it and Harold Prince, the director, was unhappy because it wasn’t moving fast enough. Enter FX. He was a college student on summer break from a Southern California school – I don’t remember which, not one of the big ones – and got sent out by the hall to add his muscle to pulling the stage.

I had done stage work with FX’ older brother Joe so I knew he was well connected. Their father was the President of the SF Labor Council at that time.

We got along fine. A couple of years later, I was running the Sound Department for SF Opera and FX got hired to work in the Electric shop. He was a full time stagehand now. We were doing a thing we called archive video where we ‘archived’ each production by making a video tape of the final dress rehearsal. Because the camera did not have a good dynamic range, it was necessary to have an operator move the camera to follow the action. FX was that guy.

The archive video thing turned out to me be more trouble than it was worth and the company stopped it after a couple of years. FX moved on to other work away from the Opera House and I lost track of him.

In 1990, I decided San Francisco wasn’t a good place to bring up my kids, so the family moved to Grass Valley. I found it difficult to get work and so ended up driving back to SF for stage jobs. In fact, I was floundering around when FX called me to see if I might be available. He was working as a dispatcher in the Union office and remembered me.

After about 6 months, I found work in Sacramento and lost touch with FX.

In 2006, through a series of coincidences that will be the subject of another story, I became Business Agent for Local 50 Sacramento, where I had been working. FX was by then BA in San Francisco so we reconnected as colleagues.

He was riding high. The Local had lots of work and he had a great team in place in the office. He had a grand vision for unifying the the Bay Area Stage Locals to provide more leverage with employers. Local 16 was already leading the way with technicians who were among the best in the country. I told him I thought it was a good idea but that there would be many pitfalls, not least of which was turf wars.

By 2008, I was a mess. I had been forced to resign the Sacramento BA job, my marriage was finished and the real estate ventures we had taken on were failing. Bankruptcy was on the table and it seemed that San Francisco would be a better place to continue my career. I got in touch with FX and he was very supportive. He got me work right away. After acouple of months, I knew I was home again and I asked FX if I could regain my status as a Local 16 member.

Without going into all the technical details, he came up with a plan, got all the necessary approvals, and I was a Local 16 man again. Thanks FX!!

FX’s time as the Local 16 BA was not without problems, and, not long after I got re-established, there was a revolt at the ballot box and his office team was broken up. Within a year, FX resigned that job to run for San Francisco Supervisor. He lost by a very small margin in one of the early tests of the ranked voting system.

I only saw him a few times after that. He was always upbeat, a very powerful presence. Whatever it was that he was doing at the time, he was enormously positive about his chances of success. For the last couple of years, I had been hearing rumors of his failing health and I kept thinking I should reach out to him. But I didn’t.

With my shiny new retirement last summer, I was invited to the Local 16 retiree luncheon in December. FX was there and I was able to speak with him. I almost didn’t recognize him as all his hair was gone. He was as forceful and positive as ever, filled with enthusiasm and plans for his job.

What a man! Rest in peace, FX. You left the world better than you found it.

Zach’s thesis notes

Yesterday I alluded to the fact that Zach was close to finishing his doctoral thesis. I remember it had something to do with sex roles in co-ed recreational leagues.

I know he had made video recordings of games as part of his research. I’ve seen the files in listings but never looked at them for more than a few seconds. Today I was looking through a set of folders that were from his iPhone. One of them was called ‘Notes’. It was an even dozen text files with dates in their filenames. The dates were all from the week before his death.

I’m going to share some of these as I think the insights are wonderful. Without looking at the videos, I’m not sure what sport he is talking about. Judging from the context, it could be soccer or volleyball or even basketball. The cool thing is that it kind of doesn’t matter. I suspect – and I think he did too – that the insights would carry over into any mixed sex game.

Here’s a sample from the first one:

Males start in serve for both
Both team have alternating and positions that appear to be set
Sayre comes up from the back line in front of the girl and makes the play. She is weak – he is hiding her.
What is the rule with people running up from the back line and getting spikes? Check on this
Male overplay on one side exposes the other, which is then exploited by opponent – it imbalanced the court and the team couldn’t recover.
Sayre continually creeping up – he would say that he needs to, and he’s not exactly wrong. But what does it say about coed that it puts you in position where gender is so polarizing.

Game two a girl starts at serve for both
Both of these teams are hopeless. Does it even matter to try and assess gender when everyone is so out of their element?

‘Serve’ implies volleyball to me. Here’s the next one, later the same day:

Lesser teams celebrate each other a lot more.
These teams are also dreadful. The guys especially. The girls on gold are significantly better than the guys, and they control the ball more. It’s a refreshing reversal.

Now the next day:

I’ve seen at least one of these teams before. They are terrible.
Guy starts at serve for both
The other team has only two girls
Shitty guy player tries to make a hero play instead of bumping it and loses the point instead. This is a running theme.
. . .
Two guys on the white team are literally running around in front of their girls, including one where the girl was standing still and the guy kind of bodies her out of the way. Wow.
Now, that girl is playing more tentatively, and they just lost two straight points because of her lack of aggression.
. . .
Interesting to watch a girl talking up a guy on her team – a role reversal all the way down to the encouragement for having done a basic thing right.
Now the guy is overplaying in front of another girl. Ironic.

And another day:

Per usual, the really shitty guy overplays in front of a girl. Maybe it’s not a gender thing but a general sucking at sports thing
. . .
Second game when it’s close and late, the best girl made a couple overplays into her guys zone to keep him from screwing up the play.
I realize that i type that approvingly, even though if a guy did the same thing I’d take issue

Another:

Guy comes up from the back line, cuts in front of his girl twice on consecutive plays. Is literally ignoring her being there – no acknowledgment whatsoever. And in this case he won the point and is celebrated by his teammates for hos efforts (although the marginalized girl didnt say anything)
That is the quintessential anecdote for guys wanting to play an extra game and coed is that outlet, so they recruit female bodies to stand on the field for their own pleasure. If guys could play in unlimited men’s leagues, would coed numbers go down?
. . .
See a girl literally get down in basically the fetal position and her guy jump over her to make a play on the ball. Sounds crazy but it happened.

This sounds more like soccer:

Girl plays defense on a guy, steals the ball from him in normal fashion, and there is a chorus of congratulations and affirmation for her. The same level of affirmation does not occur when a guy does this same thing minutes later, despite the plays being quite similar.
Guy makes a normal play and trips up a girl, then instead of running on, stops for a second and looks to help her up
Guy runs from across the field to take an OOB, going past three girls and loudly announcing that he’ll take the ball. The girls don’t even look to do that. And then his throw in is a two foot toss to a guy. And then he runs back across the field.
Even during the championship team picture after the last game, the girls all group together, even though about half of them are bigger or the same size than the guys who are all grouped behind them. And the girls strike a stereotypical sorority squat.

And this is the last one in its entirety. It’s the first one I read and the one that made me want to write this post:

11/12/15, 6:35 PM

Guys play reckless when they low skilled. The low skilled over aggressive male is a unique and dangerous addition to coed teams. He has hero tendencies that lead him disproportionately into his female teammates. Oddly, i feel
Like i don’t see him crowding out his male teammates.
I’ve smiled more watching this game than i have any other. The VSA team is very genuine and positive. I’m rooting for them.
Other team confers on strategy before the third game and it makes me wonder about the thought process with gender alternating (as both teams are doing).
Is it really possible to assess strategy though? Or the merits of it?
Even on the VSA team…guy runs around, overplays, and screws up an easy point his girl was about to get. She looks at him disgustedly.

Two days later he was dead.

Zach’s computer files

When Zach died, I took control of all his computer devices and transferred his files to my storage system. I’ve carefully preserved them pretty much without any editing. I sent copies to Emily, Jeremy and Sarah. I did go through his writing and organized it into a couple of folders. For whatever reason, he used misleading folder and file names so that was an interesting exercise.

‘Corleone’ was the name of the folder where he wrote about work things. His personal diaries were in a folder titled ‘Appendices’. The sub folders and file names were headed ‘Statistical Appendices’. What does it mean? Beats the heck out of me! He loved the movie Godfather II but what did it have to do with thoughts about work? We’ll never know. He was consistent with his naming format which included the dates. That helped.

There were a lot of files relating to his academic career that I didn’t touch. For a while, I thought his advisor might contact me to get copies. That never happened. Whatever Zach had nearly ready for publication sits untouched on my hard drive Promises by LSU administrators to get Zach a posthumous doctorate never materialized.

I’m mostly over it now.

Anyway, today I had time and was thinking about it so I went through his files and found and eliminated a lot of duplicates. Broadly speaking, I now have his school files under ‘Academics’, his writing under ‘Diaries’, and everything else in a few other miscellaneous folders (texts, financials, etc). Any pictures I found – and they were all over – are in my pictures folder under his name.

I found evidence that Zach went to some trouble to maintain his papers from his entire college career. Papers from Xavier and OSU were saved in various folders that had clearly been copied more than once. I didn’t try to read any of them today but I will get to them someday.

Internments

Much has been made, and rightly so, of the injustice done to Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. Rounded up with little ceremony or warning, sent to faraway internment camps, their business seized or left to wither, theirs is a heartbreaking story of cruelty and hysteria.

The history of Chinese immigrants in America, and particularly in San Francisco in the second half of the 19th Century, is a similar cautionary tale. They were systematically deprived of rights and herded into urban ghettos.

When I was growing up, Chinatown in San Francisco was a fun place to visit. We walked down Grant Avenue and gawked at the souvenirs in the shops. I bought an abacus one time. But I recently saw a documentary that pointed out how the laws of 100 or more years ago led to the development of Chinatown and used the word ghetto in that context. that was an eye opener! For years, I’ve read about the Jewish ghettos of Warsaw and other European cities. It never crossed my mind that a similar ghetto was right here under my nose.

Getting back to internment, a couple of months ago, we were walking around Fisherman’s Wharf when I happened to spot a little sign explaining some of the Fisherman’s Wharf history. Reading it, I was astonished to learn that the San Francisco Italian community – centered in the North Beach neighborhood (not considered a ghetto) – was interned in a similar way as the Japanese. They were taken away from their home and businesses and put in camps. In their case, it was not as long nor as draconian, perhaps because Italy was considered less of a danger on the West Coast.

I took a picture of the sign so I could write about it with accuracy but now I can’t find it . . . I did find this article for those who wish to read up on the issue further. I must say that one phrase leaped off the page at me: ‘Executive Order’.

We will never learn.

Apollo and other big peacetime projects

I often have insights for writing in the early morning hours. They don’t get translated to actual writing often enough. This is a hybrid, an idea that I don’t remember perfectly that I still want to flesh out.

In my mind, as a child of the 1960s, I have held up the Apollo moon landing program as a perfect example of the best a country can do for its people. Spending on the space program in the decade of the ‘60s was a significant portion of overall economic activity. What other activity with comparable spending – non military, very important – has the United States taken on in the last 100 years?

The money spent, to say nothing of the lives lost, on various wars and weapons systems in that time period I am specifically excluding from this discussion.

A few mornings ago in the wee hours, I had an excellent comparison but I can’t think of it right now. Grrr! The Interstate Highway system comes to mind at the moment but I think there is a better comparison. I am not writing a scholarly paper so you will see no research, statistics etc. This is completely off the cuff. I do remember thinking that this comparison might actually be worthy of a real dissertation, though.

Hoover Dam? The California Water Project? Hmmmm . . .

This will have to be continued . . .

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