California's Strange Monopoly on Famous Valleys

When you think of valleys that are world-famous, what comes to mind?

In America, the list would probably include:

• Death Valley
• Hidden Valley (the birthplace of ranch dressing)
• Napa Valley
• Silicon Valley
• "The Valley" (San Fernando)

What do they have in common? They're all in California.

No other state has a valley with the same name recognition (yes, the Grand Canyon is technically a valley, but I mean ones with "valley" in the name).

Oregon's Willamette Valley really isn't up there, and neither is New York's Hudson Valley. I was born in Western Massachusetts' Pioneer Valley, but I'm pretty sure even people in Boston couldn't tell you where that is.

What's the reason for California's dominance? Our topography is a factor, no doubt. California is a big state with lots of hills and dales.

But most of our famous valleys are also synonymous with a product. That helps make them memorable. Napa = wine; Silicon Valley = technology; San Fernando = porn.

So buck up, Californians. Our economy and state budget may be in tatters, but when it comes to valleys, we RULE.

Sim Simma, BART Got the Keys to My Bimmer

BART suffered a major service disruption tonight, stranding thousands of passengers. (I made it home just before it happened.) The event marred a day when the transit agency had exciting news: BMW has designed new cars for the rail system, and they're ready for public feedback.

The new cars are coming none too soon. BART says it has the oldest fleet of any transit system in the country. (I'm assuming Muni's cable cars are excluded from this ranking.)

The designs look pretty cool, but you have to wonder about the implications of going with BMW.

Some questions:

1. Will BART be pressured to service its cars at the dealer, even after its warranty has expired?

2. Are urban youths going to start stealing BART medallions to wear around their necks?

3. Will BART riders use this to pick up women? "Hey ladies, I came here in a BMW."

4. What, BART is too good for Volkswagen?

5. How soon before the jokes start? "This BMW rides like it's on rails." "What's the difference between a BART BMW and a porcupine? The pricks are on the inside."

I hope transit officials will take these issues into consideration.

Most Popular Posts of All Time

I updated my settings: BuboBlog now lists the site's 10 most popular posts (based on hits) along the right side of the page.

It's a surprising list. The top entry is about infant sign language, followed by one on the Gerber baby.

I have the sinking suspicion that parents are arriving at this site in search of legitimate child-rearing advice.

If so...sorry!

Elliot Memes

We've all heard of Internet memes — the sayings or concepts that spread quickly online until people just as quickly grow tired of them.

Not my birthday

Well, our 2-year-old has his own memes. He repeats them dozens of times a day, to the point where I assume everyone else is saying them too. That's how I know I'm slowly going insane.

Anyway, just so everyone else can get on board with Elliot's memes, here are five of the top ones in rotation right now.

ELLIOT MEMES
1. The ever-present threat of ticklebugs
2. "I'M HIDING!"
3. Putting Band-Aids on stuffed animals
4. "Happy birthday, daddy" (it's not my birthday)
5. Why is a tiger chasing us?

Out of rotation:
"No baby in dere."

What People Name Their Kids in Berkeley

One pleasant surprise upon moving to Berkeley: Our neighborhood is awash in toddlers.

Including us, four families have moved to this block in the past year — all with children age 3 or under. And another recent arrival is pregnant. That means Elliot is going to have lots of playmates. (It also means we're gentrifying and/or ruining the neighborhood, which used to be older, more African-American and working-class.)*

For me, it's fascinating to discover what people name their kids. And since we're only days away from having to choose a new name ourselves, I love to gather data.

Here are the names of the toddlers we've encountered in the neighborhood:
Orlando
Oren
Zoe
Olive
Banneker
Harlow

No Jacobs! In fact, other than Zoe, none of the names ranks higher than 400th nationally. (The Olivia variant of Olive, though, is very popular — No. 3 in the U.S. and No. 1 in the U.K.)

I'd also say Elliot is a pretty good fit for this name environment (maybe a bit less eccentric than some, but it still feels Berkeley-ish).

Incidentally, the Bay Area's first baby of 2011 was born at Berkeley's Alta Bates hospital. Her name? Azaria.

*It's worth noting that we helped wreck our last neighborhood, which not too long ago was almost exclusively gay, male and childless.

Jerry Brown Time Machine: Then and Now

When Jerry Brown was elected governor this week, he set a record for the longest period of time between terms of office.

To get a sense for how long it's been since his last go-round, consider what the world was like when Jerry Brown first took office in January 1975.

Riding Muni cost 25 cents.

Forty-one percent of televisions sold that year were black-and-white. Remote controls were extremely rare and relied on ultrasonic frequencies, rather than infrared.

Apple and Microsoft didn't exist.

The 49ers had never won a Super Bowl, or even a conference championship.

Muhammad Ali was heavyweight champion of the world.

The No. 1 song was Elton John's cover of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." (It got bumped the following week by Barry Manilow's "Mandy.")

"Jaws" and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" were released later in the year, becoming two of the highest-grossing pictures.

The highest-rated TV show was "All in the Family."

California had about 22 million residents, compared with roughly 38 million today. About 215 million people lived in the United States (now it's almost 311 million).

Dmitri Shostakovich, Thornton Wilder, Howlin' Wolf, Agatha Christie, Vladimir Nabokov, Groucho Marx, Maria Callas, Charlie Chaplin and Elvis Presley were still living.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was preparing to compete in the Mr. Olympia bodybuilding championship. He went on to win a sixth consecutive title that year (Lou Ferrigno was a finalist).

Barack Obama (then known as Barry) was attending middle school in Hawaii.

Jerry Brown was 36.

I had barely started walking; my wife wasn't born.

UPDATE: I thought of a couple more good ones.

In 1975, the California budget was $10.3 billion. The latest state budget, which passed last month, was $86.6 billion.

Though touch-tone phones debuted in the 1960s, rotary dials were still far more common in 1975.

Haverford Gets Shout-Out in Keats Film

Last night we watched "Bright Star," a Jane Campion-directed biopic of John Keats that came out last year. I noticed that Haverford (my alma mater) got mentioned in the credits. It turns out the film uses a Keats letter from Haverford's collection.

Nice to get the mention, but I wish Haverford researchers could also have helped with some of the film's many anachronisms and inaccuracies.

For instance:
1. No one in 1818 would use "hello" is a polite greeting. They would say, "Good morning," "Good day," etc. The word "hullo" did exist as an expression of surprise or maybe to get someone's attention, but "hello" didn't come into popular use until the telephone.
2. Keats' lover, Fanny Brawne, wouldn't have been able to capture tropical butterflies in the English countryside — then or now.
3. Fanny appears to use a steel-ribbed umbrella that didn't exist until the 1850s.
4. It's unlikely that Charles Armitage Brown would be able to do a spot-on impression of a gorilla, since they were unknown in Western culture until the 1860s.

With that said, I enjoyed the film — though it was slow in spots. I'm also not sure Campion quite conveyed the excitement of poetry on screen, but that may just be a limitation of the medium.

Brown, who was a close friend of Keats, is presented as a boorish cad. He spends much of the first act of the movie insulting Fanny. That's only weird because the setting of the film puts you into a Jane Austen state of mind. And if this story were one of hers, Fanny would have wound up with Brown, not Keats.

BuboBlog Rating: 3 asterisks (out of 4).

Parenting Year Two: Lessons Learned

When Elliot turned 1, I wrote about the surprises I encountered as a new parent. Since he turned 2 this weekend, I thought I'd share some lessons about having a toddler.

1. Toddlers are very materialistic: Elliot is obsessed with possessions. In addition to saying "MINE" whenever he wants something, he'll describe objects based on the person they belong to. The iPhone, slippers and purse are "Mama," the BlackBerry, laptop and briefcase are "Dada." (A beer is always "Dada" too...I'm not sure what that says about our household.)

Now, you could turn this on its head and argue that Elliot is less concerned about objects, and more interested in the people associated with them. I guess that would make him less materialistic. But that's probably giving him too much credit.



2. Toddler boys are walking stereotypes: We haven't tried to impose gender roles on Elliot, but he adores trains, construction equipment and other heavy machinery. (Then again, he also loves his baby doll, so he still has a shot of becoming a sensitive male.)



3. Toddlers are narrow-minded: Every woman he sees is a "Mama," and every man is a "Dada." Sometimes when Elliot sees a couple of women together, he'll try to figure out who the Dada is. For a San Franciscan, he has a surprisingly conservative worldview. Human beings should not be defined by reproductive roles, Elliot.

4. "MamaDada" also can be an expletive: One time Elliot fell down and I heard him exclaim this as if it were a curse word. (I guess that's no worse than Monday-to-Friday.)

5. When it comes to the awesomeness of vehicles, the hierarchy goes something like this: Rocketships are most awesome, followed by helicopters, planes, boats, trains, construction vehicles, buses and cars. In the animal category, birds and sea creatures are locked in an epic battle for supremacy — the winner depends on his mood that day. (That's why ducks will always be awesome.) Elliot still hasn't really discovered dinosaurs, which I'm sure will trump everything else.



6. Words with repeated syllables comprise 90 percent of his language: We made an effort not to use baby talk with Elliot, and yet half his vocabulary consists of terms like "numnums" (food), "baba" (sheep), "hop-hop" (bunny rabbit), "yaya" (his blankie), "night-night" (pillow, bedtime) and "she-she" (urination). Why do toddlers have to say everything twice? To make things more confusing, his words for monkey and owl are both "hoohoo."



7. Toddlers are obsessed with water: If there's a puddle, Elliot has to stop and stomp his feet. If there's a fountain, he has to splash around in it. If we're at the beach, he has to run down to the waves. This isn't a shock, of course — who doesn't like water? But as an adult, the level of fascination seems extreme. "It's a puddle...keep walking."



8. Toddlers love pretending to go to sleep, but not actually doing it: Any time of day or night, Elliot will gladly engage you in a round of "night-night." He'll put his head down on the nearest surface and insist that you and his stuffed animals do the same. Beware of actually trying to sleep, though, because his next move is usually to headbutt you.

9. Toddlers want to help you — they're just not very good at it: Elliot loves to feel like he's contributing, whether that means sweeping up, pushing the stroller or putting away his train set. It's touching that he already feels a strong sense of wanting to assist others. Unfortunately, his incompetence just creates more work for everyone. The other day he was using a glass to help water the plants. Then he dropped the glass and it shattered. Not helpful!



10. They understand a lot more than they're letting on: Elliot seems to have a limited vocabulary, so I'm amazed when he listens to fairly complex instructions and follows them exactly. Or when I ask him to point out certain animals or objects, and he can do it with no problems. He just lacks the will or ability to vocalize much of it. Most of the time, he can get by fine with his 20-plus favorite words.

Side note: Sign language is very important to a toddler, even if he's not using the official version. Even now that he can talk, Elliot still likes to say "duck" by doing this.



I recently learned that the real sign for "duck" is to put your hand on your face and pretend it's a bill opening and closing. Frankly, Elliot's version seems clearer.

Are We Too Sophisticated for Soccer?

Every four years Americans are made to feel like provincial rubes for not caring about the world's most popular sport, soccer.

I myself have suffered from these insinuations, just because I have no interest in the World Cup. I made some remark about how I thought it had already started a week ago, and a soccer enthusiast rolled his eyes.

I find this odd. Since when is anyone made to feel like a barbarian for not liking something that's incredibly popular? San Francisco hipsters refuse to like a band that gets played on the radio. And yet they're supposed to be enthusiastic about something that has TWO BILLION fans?

Let's put this in perspective:

The most popular beer in the world is Budweiser.
The most popular restaurant is McDonald's.
The most popular musical artist is Michael Jackson.
The most popular first name is Muhammad.
The most popular book (other than the Bible) is "Quotations from Chairman Mao."
The most popular view on wife-beating: that it's totally okay.

I don't have anything against these things being popular (well, except the wife-beating), but would anyone EVER be made to feel like a halfwit just because he didn't embrace them. Popularity is no sign of quality, people.

Soccer is widely loved for three reasons:

1. It's cheap. All you really need to play is a ball. (You don't have to get helmets, shoulder pads, bats, rackets or a skating rink.)
2. It's easy to grasp. The rules are simple enough for anyone to learn quickly, whether they're a team of 8-year-olds or the illiterate masses.
3. There's not a lot of starting and stopping.

None of those things is true of America's two most popular sports: baseball and football. I've been watching football for most of my life, and I still don't really get what most of the players are doing out there (I hope I never have to explain "backfield motion" to anyone).

Baseball and football both rely heavily on strategy and playmaking. The coach is orchestrating everything, using reams of statistics to make decisions. That's less the case with soccer, which is more about players making quick decisions on the fly.

Are baseball and football "better" than soccer? I'm not going to pass judgment (though arguably a sport where a large percentage of games result in a tie is poorly devised). What I'm saying is baseball and football are thinking men's games. They're more cerebral.

That makes it all the more ironic that Americans would get hassled for not liking soccer. It's like you're on the bus reading Thomas Pynchon and someone says to you, "You moron, why aren't you reading 'The Da Vinci Code'?"

Final thought: In England — a soccer-crazed country if there ever was one — the most popular movie at the box office right now is "StreetDance 3D."



Are you really going to let them make you feel bad?