Murmuration

New Year's, normally a time of fireworks, was this year rung in, more or less, by a murmuration of starlings instead. If you're in the Bay Area, go see them, it's truly unmissable: 4:30 PM, anywhere with a view of Mt. Olivet Cemetery (their current roost). And if the cemetery is open, go inside and listen:

Cornmaze · Murmuration Murmuring

 

The Family Christmas Letter, 2020

Another year, another chirpy Family Christmas Letter from us, the lower-case fantastic four! But this wasn't just any year, this was 2020 [insert obligatory dumpster fire image here], which, as everyone knows, suuuuuuucked. Did 2020 get us down? Did 2020 make us frown? Oh, it tried, but you can't be sad for long when you're living with...

QUBIT!

 

 

Aside from occasionally masquerading as a sheep, Qubit behaves like a normal dog. Dogs are dogs, that's kind of the whole point. They aren't family members, they don't have intricate personalities, they're just animals who hang around underfoot, hoping you'll drop food. If you expected a paragraph about how cute and special and part of us this dog is, well, you're reading the wrong Christmas Letter. Go find one written about a dog named Quubs, or Q2, or QuberBoober. You're looking for someone whose pen name is WhoQueue, or The Qubinator, or, for some reason, Ms. Badoobs. When you find the story of that dog--Santa's Qubiest Little Helper--you'll know because it will ring Que.

 

TALIA

 

Convicted of wasting Qubit's entire training vocabulary on cute nicknames, Talia was sentenced to hard labor breaking rocks, no no no.... Talia was a wonderful person who adopted an elderly villager, painted a parking lot into a dance floor, volunteered at a food bank, sent postcards to hundreds of forgetful people reminding them to vote, and cooked dinner every god damn day of the last 365, so if she wants to buy some rocks then she gets to buy some rocks. And she did, literal tons of. Also rolls of native grasses, lots of small plants, and a fire pit, giving us a brand new backyard in which to place our rebuilt one-room school-from-home barn. Life saver.

 

FELIX

When not building cartoonishly oversized furniture, Felix is himself growing cartoonishly large. Those of us who have been sheltering in place with him don't notice this so much or even think to buy him new shoes, but if all you've seen of him this year is his disembodied head on Zoom, well, you're in for a surprise. When not away at school in the barn--Felix is majoring in something called "Bed Wars," we are so proud!--you will find him getting his mountain bike repaired (fortunately, in Marin, bike shops are considered essential services). In a major milestone, after somehow accumulating thousands of MTG cards Felix just the other day managed to sell one.

GIDEON

 

Gid--or, as he prefers to be called, "Rocketman"--had another busy year, which is to say he made a lot of work for other people, specifically us, his parents, who, as a supplement to what we thought was quite enough conversation on the topic, he invited to online surveys, two of them alone for his birthday party next May ("How did you hear about this event?" the surveywriter has the gall to ask). Gideon also conducted a persuasive grassroots campaign to evict Felix from the house, but was defeated in a recount. Salt in his wounds, he finds his teenage brother one cubicle over in the barn-we-call-a-school. Gid spends most of those school hours updating his profile picture (confusing both Google's vaunted surveillance AI and his fifth grade teacher) and trying to talk his classmates out of their lunch at a distance. In a worrisome first, our younger boy attempted to assert editorial control over the 2020 Family Christmas Letter, but not this year, young Padawan, not this year.

ALEC

 

 

Alec's proudest achievement of 2020 (possibly ever) was being crowned the King of Payne twice by a local, underplayed pinball machine. He has also been named the Imperator of Impeachment, the Bretwalda of Brexit, the Samrat of Shelter in Place, and the Fidalgo of Forest Fires, but never fear, peasant, We haven't let any of that go to Our head. When not reopening badminton courts, schools, and entire (very small) downtowns, Alec runs a thriving toothpaste import business for which he is the only customer.

THE VACATIONS

 

Let's not forget that Christmas Letter favorite, travel photos! 2020 put a stop to our globe trotting--that's OK, we were planning to reduce our carbon footprint anyway we tell ourselves--so we bought new sleeping bags and put California on heavy rotation. Radical!

 

 

 

 

OK, that orangey one is from Nevada (pre-lockdown) but you get the idea. Actual Christmas vacation is being spent at home, because if we leave our county they probably won't let us back in. But there's always a silver lining: this year, lacking distractions, the Christmas Letter is going out right on time! We hope you enjoyed it and wish you a HAPPY (it's finally a) NEW YEAR.

 

Oh, more pictures? Yeah, we took a few, 'cause what else was there to do? Cue music and...

Roadtrip: Death Valley

What's safer under the circumstances? Hang out for a week of no school, with the kids mixing promiscuously with their peers, or isolate in the enormous empty expanses of Death Valley? We made the right call...

Shots above include the Mojave airplane boneyard, the Panamint Valley, the Badwater Basin, a Ford Expedition, a truck on fire (not the Ford Expedition), Tatooine, our Thanksgiving breakfast, and the Mobius Arch.

Birthday wishes

 

Voting, 2020

Choices, choices....

When I posted on this topic a lifetime ago in 2016, I made two predictions: that Trump would not be elected (wrong), and that he would be a disaster from a climate point of view if he were (too, too right). Facing the 2020 election, I repeat these assertions, though I would change one thing: Trump has shown himself not to be an undirected force where the climate is concerned, but an active and highly successful agent in retarding or even reversing progress on the environment. The situation in 2016 was already dire, the lost years may have made it irretrievably so. The only positive note is that awareness of the climate catastrophe has grown--being unable to breathe focuses the attention wonderfully.

Voting for Biden/Harris requires no thought (and if you think otherwise, please do reach out to me), but there's more to be decided than just that. Our House Rep is up for reelection (yes, I'll take the Dem over the Republican, who lists his occupation as "Cashier," though honestly I don't know what I'd do if the situation were reversed), as is our state assemblyman (or will we vote for an assemblywoman?). But mostly what's at stake here is control of the schools and of the town (give Chance a chance!): local politics, thus, so not of interest to my mostly non-local readership.

That's all I will say this time 'round about voting for people. But California has a proposition system, so I need to vote on ideas, too. Figuring that out is time-consuming: it's easy enough to react to a proposal, but propositions as stated on the ballot may be very different from those same propositions in effect. Research is required, so research I did, spending many an hour (OK, maybe two) inside the Lincoln/Douglas debate for each one. In the end (and I did not check this until the end), my preferences tallied exactly with those of the California Democratic party's. Except for one thing: they offer no recommendation for Prop 24 and I do.

Prop 24 concerns itself with an issue near to my heart: consumer privacy laws. This is an especially important matter here in California, which, in the absence of federal leadership, is the strongest US force supporting privacy rights. Does 24 move us closer to a new regime in which each individual's data is recognized as uniquely sensitive, uniquely valuable, and uniquely deserving of the protections of law? The answer is yes and no, which is why neither the Dems nor even that most opinionated of online organizations, the EFF, support or oppose it. So why do I urge you, my probably non-eligible reader, to vote NO on 24? Three reasons:

1. The single most impactful change we could make to the existing California Consumer Protection Act is to make opt out the default selection for data collection permissions. Prop 24 doesn't change the current standard, which means that most of us will continue to be opted in, and the rest of us will eventually give up on opting out as data collection schemes find new ways to make it increasingly laborious to do so.
2. Prop 24 would end the CCPA's protection of biometric data. That would be a terrible mistake: in the age of facial recognition and Fitbits, biometric data needs more protections and a broader definition of what is included in that rubric, not less.
   
3. Prop 24 does not allow consumers to sue businesses for privacy violations, instead inviting a to-be data protection agency to guard our interests. But the struggles of similar agencies in Europe do not give me a lot of hope for this approach, or not, at any rate, as a standalone means of enforcement. We need to be able to sue the bastards because only then will they behave. Maybe.

One final comment: your vote doesn't count unless it's counted. Voting fraud by individuals is negligible, but I'm not as sanguine about vote counting. No, this is not the start of another conspiracy theory, but rather a recognition that there's a lot of work to be done tallying votes, that humans make mistakes, and that it's an easy enough thing to check the status of your ballot, so do so. Then, come November, check the results!

UPDATE: How'd it turn out? Well, I got my ballot in...

But not everything went as I wished it:

California is my home, but even more so, Marin.