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Lee Press-ons

THURSDAY

I went to the library and looked up books on freeway construction — the asphalt and cement kind — Dewey Decimal number 625.79 — and there haven’t been any published on the subject for two decades! It’s bizarre — like a murder mystery. It’s as if the notion of freeway construction simply vanished in 1975. Sizzler titles include:

Bituminous Materials in Road Construction

Surface Texture Versus Skidding

Engineering Study: Alaska Highway

Better Concrete Pavement Serviceability

Vehicle Redirection Effectiveness of Median Berms and Circles

Actually, there weren’t all too many books on freeways ever published in the first place. You’d think we’d have whole stadiums devoted to the worship of freeways for the amount of importance they play in our culture, but no. Zip. I guess we’re overcompensating for this past shortcoming by our current overhyping of the InfoBahn — the I-way. It’s emerged from nowhere into this big important thing we Have to Know About.

I have borrowed, among others, the seminal work on the subject: Handbook of Highway Engineering (1975), by Robert F. Baker, editor; Van Nostrand and Reinhold Company. It’ll help melt away my lax days before I join a new product group.

We ripped away some wallpaper in the kitchen by the fridge and found that underneath the various stratum of paper (daisies; Peel n’ Stick pepper-mills), in condition just as fresh as the day they were written, the words:

one mellow day

June 6, 1974

I’m long gone but my idea of peace now remains with you

d.b.

Hippie stuff, but I lost my breath when I read the words. And I felt like for a moment that maybe an idea is more important than simply being alive, because an idea lives a long time after you’re gone. And then the feeling passed. And we found all of these old, early 1970s Seattle newspapers behind a wallboard. The prices back then … cheap!

At the Bellevue Starbucks, Karla and I discussed the unprecedented success of Campbell’s Cream of Broccoli Soup. On a napkin we listed ideas for new Campbell’s soup flavors:

Creamy Dolphin

Lagoon

Beak

Pond

Crack

Note: I think Starbucks has patented a new configuration of the water molecule, like in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, or something. This molecule allows their coffee to remain liquid at temperatures over 212° Fahrenheit. How do they get their coffee so hot? It takes hours to cool off — it’s so hot it’s undrinkable — and by the time it’s cool, you’re sick of waiting for it to cool and that “coffee moment” has passed. At least Starbucks doesn’t stink like sweet coffee-flavoring chemicals … like the way you’d expect a Barbie doll’s house to smell.

Saw a documentary about the commodities market. Read some books that were lying around. Watched some old 1970s TV shows later. I remembered an old Nova episode in which German hackers published a secret document, and some Ph.D.³ hippie geek from UC Berkeley tracked them down with a baited document. Was this hippie geek tricked into trapping one of his own kind by the NSA or some other such organization? Ethics.

Then I started to think about those old Time-Life books with such all-embracing names like, “The Elements,” and “The Ocean,” and of how the information in them never really goes out of date, whereas the computer series books date within minutes: “Most ‘personal computers¹ now contain devices called ‘hard drives’ capable of storing the equivalent, in some cases, of up to three college textbooks.”

Felt a bit random.

* * *

Capture

specific

functions

Microsoft

Navajo

NASA

Flesh-eating bacteria

Arthur Miller

Kristy McNichol

Lance Kerwin

skateboard

trail mix

PERL

Job description

toner cartridge

very

really

a lot

ummm…

Martin-Marietta

FRIDAY

Susan and Karla came into the living room when I was reading the Handbook of Highway Engineering, and they both flipped out. They totally grokked on it. We kept on oohing and ahhhing over the book’s beautiful, car- free on-ramps, off-ramps, and overpasses—“So clean and pure and undriven.”

Karla noted that freeway engineers had their own techie code words, just as dull and impenetrable as geek talk. “Examples: subgrades, partial cloverleaf interchanges, cutslopes, and TBMs (Tunnel Boring Machines) …”