California's high-speed rail makes inaugural voyage

Passengers traveled the first run of the expanded route.

Editor's note: This reflects an optimistic look forward at one of California's most capital-intensive transportation projects.

FRESNO, Calif. (Feb. 23, 2028) -- The sleek train pulled into the depot on H and Mariposa streets like it has the past several years.

The whistle blew. Passengers disembarked. Some met warmly with family, and a few others hurried to their destinations in this Central San Joaquin Valley city. But most remained aboard, smiling from the windows at the crowd gathered at the station.

A porter hefted baggage and answered questions, while the station manager quietly met with the train's passenger director and several high-ranking officials from the California High-Speed Rail Authority. Previous runs have been limited to Fresno and Bakersfield and more recently to Merced.

They wanted the trip to be flawless. It is the first time the train, which can reach speeds in excess of 200 mph, has taken passengers along its entire 520-mile length, from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

"Today is a significant milestone and caps 14 years of world-class construction," said Authority CEO Jeff Morales, who earlier this month signaled plans to retire. "We had some bumps along the way, but our design-build approach and top-flight contractors did a fantastic job. Their work won us a lot of believers."

Puck Schmuck makes his political debut in Fairbanks

A cheap imitation, but you get the idea.

Author's note: Back when I was in seventh-grade, my friend Torg Hinckley and I created a character we called Puck Schmuck. He was a politician of sorts. A Zorro type inspired by our love of comic books. We ran him for election at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and our junior high. We thought it was funny. Nobody else seemed to.

I'm writing a memoir I suspect nobody will ever read. But here's a chapter from it.

After the resignation of President Richard Milhous Nixon on Aug. 9, 1974, we were all affected. The hippies celebrated. The press ran the story for months. And when President Gerald Ford was named, the entire country appeared to relax a bit. To me, it wasn’t that Nixon was all bad. After all, he created the Environmental Protection Agency, oversaw the first Earth Day, supported the Clean Air Act and, most importantly, stopped the Vietnam War.

But what stuck out to Torg and I was the image of Nixon flashing his peace signs. He did it regularly, usually with a big grin on his face.

About this time, Torg and I had gotten somewhat involved politically. I don’t mean we actually paid attention to politics, but we did start messing around in elections. Both our parents were politically active. They voted and made their thoughts known. His parents were liberal. My mom fancied herself a bit of a radical.

Our interpretation involved comics. We created a character who we called Puck Schmuck. Both of us were really into Yiddish words. They were so descriptive and rebellious. I mean, schmuck. It means a variety of things. But we fixated on it referring to somebody being a jerk.

We’d make lists of put downs, slang for genitalia, insulting racial and ethnic slurs. We were not politically correct. And it wasn’t a politically correct time. So we were terrible. We also watched a lot of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, Electric Company and Sesame Street. Maybe for balance.

I don’t recall how Puck Schmuck came about. Most likely it was Torg. He was quick and brilliant when it came to ideas. I loved it. Schmuck looked like a ghost, the old sheet over the head type. Actually, he looked just like the little phantoms the Pac Man creature chases on the video game. That game appeared several years later. I recall Torg showing it to me in an obscure quick mart store.

So Schmuck just remained our joke. We’d draw him a lot. He made commentary on various things. After looking at some of the cartoons we drew of the guy, a thought hit me. I figured to engineer a major prank. Our best yet.

“Let’s run Puck Schmuck for campus president,” I said one afternoon.

“What?” asked Torg. “Too stupid.”

“No, really,” I said. “It will work. Nobody likes the guy running. We’ll make a bunch of posters and encourage a write-in campaign.”

Confessions of a Hungarian Revolutionary

Imre Nemeth, fourth from right, was a freedom fighter.

Writer’s note: I finally was able to extract the story of my father’s involvement in the Hungarian 1956 Revolution on a sunny day in our tiny beach house on Camano Island in Washington state. It was 1998. My daughter had been pestering him, and he finally relented. When he started talking, I got out my notebook. What follows is his story. He now sits in a box in my garage. One of these days, I’ll take some of his ashes to the Danube River and sprinkle them at his favorite swimming hole off Margaret Island in Budapest. I posted this because I’ve seen so little written about the war, at least in English. This is just one man’s story, but it’s a piece of history important to our small refugee community that originally formed up in Seattle.

Apprentice electrician Imre Nemeth had been wiring a light switch in a tiny apartment pantry with his uncle. It was a day like any other, or so he thought. Work, eat, sleep. Repeat.

But this day would change his life and millions of others in the little Eastern European country. It was on Oct. 23, 1956 that he learned Hungary decided to kick the Russians out and stick a knife in Iron Curtain.

It was time. The cry for freedom was strong. But it was mostly young people like Imre who would repeat that cry and take up arms against Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a Cold War superpower that had occupied Hungary since the end of World War II.

Imre’s Uncle Istvan Nemeth, one of a dozen brothers in his oversized Catholic brood, was best known for being the one who got kicked out of the seminary for impregnating a woman he didn’t end up marrying. He was a humorous sort. Good for a laugh and a decent boss. He had begun taking Imre on side jobs for a couple of years.

The pair completed the small job and said their goodbyes. But as the 17-year-old Imre hopped off the streetcar to start his 2 kilometer walk home, somebody yelled: “Hallottad hogy tuntetnek radio?” Roughly translated it means: “Hey, did you see the demonstration by the radio station?”

Imre had no way of knowing what the next few hours would bring. While he and Istvan had been quietly working in another part of Budapest, the cultural and political center of Hungary, the seed of revolution caught fire.

Coming to a boil that day were the frustrations of a country that deftly avoided conflict in World War II until the waning days when its leaders no longer could stave off the rumblings of Russians on the east, the Allies in the west and the besieged Germans in the center. Hungary had arisen from that war beaten, poor and occupied by an emerging superpower bent on bending the rest of the world to a top-heavy derivative of Marxism.

Hungary had little choice but to sign a treaty with the Russians in 1945 that was supposed to last a decade. From Imre’s perspective and many others in the tiny Eastern European nation of about 10 million, by 1956 it was a year too long. They believed the Russians were sucking the factories and the country dry.

Grumbling had been going on for some time. In June of that year a half-dozen university students led by a member of the small Hungarian Air Force, a man named George Polyak, hijacked a Hungarian passenger plane, a well traveled DC-3, to West Germany and freedom. The news, although somewhat suppressed by the state-run media, sent a ripple through the Communist regime and the populace as the hijackers had hoped.

It was this creeping national discontent that spurred Nemeth that evening to act. A joke still on the lips of many Hungarians’ goes like this: “Hungary must be a really large country. The Russians still haven’t found a way out.”

Watch that next hurricane, super-heated Mother Nature may be angry

Miami used to be swampland. Could it return?

Disaster is waiting at every turn. As a kid, adults say the bad stuff is all in your head. The monster at the end of the hallway, in the basement or around the next turn in the dark alleyway isn't real.

Those kids grow up and may wish for that innocence back. The real world is far more harsh. Dreams of the high school and college graduate are often dashed when many realize their constant toil will never bring any of them closer.

The emerging threat of ecological disaster renders just about all those previous worries inert. What difference does it make if that dream home or job is out of reach when the ocean's expected to rise and wash out coastal communities and Pacific island nations and tear the world economy apart?

Really.

Goodnight Miami Beach

Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell takes a novel approach to illustrate the situation. In "Goodbye, Miami," he fast-forwards 17 years to 2030 after Hurricane Milo strikes. "Most of the damage occurred not from the hurricane's 175-mph winds, but from the 24-foot storm surge that overwhelmed the low-lying city," he says.

Prices for electric cars get more affordable

Nissan Leaf

Way back in the distant past, perhaps as long ago as last year, prices for electric cars appeared so high that they may have been just for rich people.

Or technologically savvy first adopters. Or both.

Strangely, that's no longer the case. Electric car prices have dropped. In the case of the Nissan Leaf, the decline has been precipitous. As in ka-boom. According to the link, the base model is $21,300 with an asterisk that says "net value after federal tax savings."

That federal tax savings could be as much as $7,500, depending on what model is purchased. Still, not bad.

J.Q. Public makes a call

I first heard of this by way of a caller I'll dub Nathan. His was a random inquiry to the front desk at the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District where I work as a grants processor. Normally, those I speak with want to know about grants to replace heavy-duty semi-trucks, the bread and butter of the Incentives Department at the Air District in Fresno, Calif.

But Nathan had something else on his mind.

Climate change: Indecision creates an increasingly dismal future

Photo courtesy bloguin.com

Looking into the future is a universal concept. While ancient man stared at the heavens for clues on what the seasons would bring, contemporary corporate man stares at the electronic equivalent of financial ticker tape, trying to discern future financial trends.

No matter what the era, those who picked right usually reaped some reward.

But from a climate scientist's perspective, every scenario looks pretty grim. Climate change is coming. It's just a matter of determining how dramatic it will be. Choosing the level of environmental impact due to rising levels of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and other pollutants leading to global warming depends on how quickly society accepts the situation and reacts.

Change is coming

Changing direction is impossible. An analogy made by the California Air Resources Board likened the situation to a person rowing a boat into a dock. Because the boat already is moving forward, it can't come to an immediate stop. Pulling the oars from the water will help. But what's needed is immediate reversal. In other words, dip those oars in and start reversing course. The boat will still drift forward, but it will begin to slow and turn.

What we're doing now, the ARB says, is rowing forward as if there's nothing ahead to ram into.

Boom.

In November 2000, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was jointly established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, released a report on the climate scenarios facing the planet. The highly technical report says everything depends on stemming the increase in emissions and decoding "long-term uncertainties."

Natural gas overtakes solar and wind in clean energy race

Is fracking the clean energy future?

Several years ago, I was newly downsized from the newspaper industry that had been my life for the better part of the previous 25 years.

My options were hardly inspiring. My dad was slowly dying of Parkinson's and dementia, royally pissed off at the guy he considered his jailer -- me. The news business tanked. The jobs that remained had a bunch of us old veterans lining up. Salaries were 50 percent or less what we had made.

I had purchased a foreclosed house in terrible shape to rent and subsidize the cost of my father's care. On the positive side, it took six months to repair. I relearned a lot of construction skills.

Clean energy to the rescue

Then after seven months, I found another line of work. The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act was by then in full swing, and it covered my salary assisting cities and counties in California's San Joaquin Valley installing energy efficient lighting, cooling systems and even insulation. Not too sexy to be certain, but it offered insight into the entirely new realm of clean energy.

Clean energy at the time still had a lot of hurdles, but with federal stimulus money and constantly increasing costs for fossil fuels the holy grail of cost "parity" appeared attainable. A former co-worker and I started blogging about it, using news gathering talents honed over decades to debut the latest studies, technologies and breakthroughs.

Go ahead, do the Time Warp in the Tower

Cast of the Rocky Horror Show.

Winter forces people indoors, for better or worse.

Imagine being stuck in the same house as the two old but likable biddies in Frank Capra's 1944 "Arsenic and Old Lace." Not so bad if you're a woman, or Cary Grant. At one point in the film, in which the women kill elderly bachelors with poison-laced elderberry wine, Grant famously says, "This is developing into a very bad habit."



Maybe Elton John's "Elderberry Wine" song had metaphorical depth. Regardless, quaffing it from two murderers might not be such a good idea.

Rocky, what have you done?

In the wrong-place, wrong-time vein, perhaps a thunderstorm strands you in the middle of nowhere and your names are Janet and Brad. Perhaps you've passed a mansion some miles back after a tire has blown on your car. There is no cell phone reception, and the niceties of society appear unattainable without a 2-mile hike back to that spooky mansion.

Of course, the next step is doing the Time Warp ... again.



Things could be worse. Definitely. My wife took me to the live production of the obscurely aforementioned play in Fresno's Tower District. And it was mind-blowing. Like a lot of my generation, I saw the Tim Curry movie version of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" in theaters. It was one of those midnight events in Anchorage when the outdoor temperatures made doing anything inside preferable to sitting in a frozen car.

I loved it. At the time, the concept provided a natural segue from my obsession with Kiss records.

The doctor is in

Daniel Chavez Jr. directs the Fresno version of the "Rocky Horror Show" at the California Arts Academy's Severance Theater in Fresno's artsy Tower District. He also choreographs, designs the costumes and plays the role of Frank-N-Furter. With the platform heels, he stands a head taller than most of the cast.

Sustainable driving: 3 options from the car show

Ford Fusion hybrid with DB5 overtones.

Options for the green-minded once were limited to small under-powered cars.

While that's still true to some degree, consumers now have an interesting dilemma. Choose the hybrid, clean diesel, electric or really small?

Depends. Even the bigger vehicles now support increasingly efficient technologies such that the differences are less than the similarities. This is true for design and efficiency.

At the Central California Motor Trend Auto Show in downtown Fresno, Calif. in November 2012, nearly all manufacturers showed their latest. Gleaming and with doors open to the general public, these vehicles offered the best opportunity for Joe Motorist to ask the question: "What if this was mine?"

I asked it while sitting in a number of cars. One was the Dodge Challenger, a throwback muscle car that delivers 375 horsepower with the 5.7 liter Hemi. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's www.fueleconomy.gov site rates the Challenger SRT8 at a combined 17 city/highway miles per gallon. Not bad compared to my old Jeep Grand Wagoneer (10-12 mpg) but no good if you want to stay away from the corner Shell station.

I avoided reviewing any of the Toyota Prius family on purpose. If you like them, buy them. I can't stand the user unfriendly interface. Makes me want to take a sledgehammer to the dash. The design also  leaves me wanting something else.

Ford Fusion

This year Ford designers took a nod from James Bond 007 and crafted their Fusion with a grill reminiscent of an Austin Martin DB5. My friend calls the Fusion a shameless ripoff using less-kind language, but I like it. Muy macho.

The DB5 originally appeared in "Goldfinger" (1964) but makes a reappearance and heart-breaking exit in the latest Bond film "Skyfall." The baddy, played with strangely crazy vulnerability by Javier Bardem, unleashes on the car (but probably a cheap facsimile) with a 50 caliber from a helicopter.

Zombie training for the apocalypse, running from the Dead

"Walking Dead's" Michonne kills the undead.

Katana in hand, Michonne shears body parts from a half dozen shambling zombies in the "The Walking Dead."

She gives a slight smile when the mayhem's complete in "Say the Word" Episode 5. Reid Kerr of examiner.com says it's her first grin on the wildly popular cable show on AMC. He predicts more in the episode ahead when the creepy Governor, who leads a protected community, hunts her down and she digs in with a bit of defense.

The show is the latest in the zombie-apocalypse genre that began so convincingly with George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" in 1968. Romero was the first to use zombies, or "ghouls," as metaphor. Elliot Stein of the Village Voice says Night's "gorefest" had the look and feel of a documentary. He says its Pennsylvania farmhouse location showed Middle America at war, and "the zombie carnage seemed a grotesque echo of the conflict then raging in Vietnam."

Cataclysmic metaphor

"The Walking Dead" updates the theme and adds multiple story lines. The product intrigues enough people that the network justifies a talk show dubbed "Talking Dead," which appears after the airing of an original episode. Even Kerr's Episode 5 Examiner story is a character play-by-play of who did what and what's expected.

The power of the Walking Dead, at least for me, was series star Rick Grimes, played by Andrew Lincoln. He's a small-town sheriff who rallies a small band of survivors. Great stuff, especially the characters who, like Michonne, don't let adversity get in the way.

Flash Gordon didn't bother with fossil fuels

Buster Crabbe played the iconic Flash Gordon like a man obsessed, giving the legendary movie serial its high-octane action and frenetic speed.

He didn't wait around for help when faced with certain death, and leaped into action. Somehow rescue always came after the cliff-hanger that ended each episode.

Likewise, the creators of the then high-cost production didn't mess around to make sure all scientific details matched reality or potential possibilities of space-time theory. They created staged sets complemented with electricity arcs, surreal noise and big machines with concentric circles of blinking lights. They fuzzed over details when it came to power sources, transportation and various high-flying technologies. The bird men's floating city comes to mind.

Doctor Zarkov in his introduction to the dungeon-like palace laboratory immediately figured out the nuclear energy source that enabled Ming the Merciless to rule over all of Mongo and threaten the hapless planet Earth. Things that make you go, "Hmmmm," to quote Arsenio Hall found no answers in the script.

Society could use such enthusiasm and blind faith about now. The debate over climate change has dropped out of the presidential campaign. And energy independence is coming to mean relying on burning coal and natural gas. But sordid, particulate-filled air will soon be determined to be the most costly disaster in the history of mankind.

We could use a hero.

Mongo and climate change

Eugene Robinson with the Washington Post calls out the president and his challenger on climate change, saying "neither has mentioned the subject in the debates."

Economy got you down? 4 ways it could get (way) worse

Milla Jovavich dealing with a collapsed economy.

The way I see it, there are four main ways for society to come crashing down.

I'm actually pretty optimistic. It's just that a post-apocalyptic world appears to be gaining interest amongst the geek set yet again. My first brush with this mindset began with the off-grid moves inspired by early 1970s works like the "Last Whole Earth Catalog," evolving to the fiscal depression that accompanied the decade's end and the first of the real resurgence of zombies with "Dawn of the Dead."

Don't grok that? Sky-high interest rates and crap job prospects. Remember Foghat?

For the record, I have nothing against Foghat, or Foreigner for that matter. And the Sonics won the NBA championship so it wasn't all bad.

But back to the topic at hand. Dealing with all forms of the societal destruction I have in mind would require talents of survivalists, off-grid enthusiasts and teachings of pioneers from the past who created all they needed with a Bowie knife, some twine and spit.

Of course, my premise is heavily influenced by the devolving political global landscape, spiraling ecological devastation and science fiction with a good dose of Hollywood suspension of disbelief.

Scenario No. 1: Trickle-down. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the cyberpunk culture foreseen by writer William Gibson, specifically in his Bridge Series. In the third and final book, "All Tomorrow's Parties," he paints a society where the Golden Gate Bridge has become shanty housing and various corporations control everything except cardboard chic.

Scenario No. 2: Climate change. The never-ending pursuit of profits pushes the planet over the edge. Oceans rise, island nations disappear and hordes of refugees from low-lying coastal communities pour into higher ground, triggering economic disaster.

Space-based clean energy could alter the future

Harry Harrison at his best.

Clean and cheap energy has been percolating in innovators' minds for centuries.

Far longer ago, alchemists and wizards sought the source of ultimate power somewhat differently, calling it magic.

The economic consequences of cheap clean energy would be tremendous. Imagine energizing rural Africa or infusing India's poorest neighborhoods with uninterrupted inexpensive power. All that brain power just waiting for an opportunity to connect with a money-making idea could make substantial changes in technological development, not to mention economic might.

So far, however, that pursuit remains unrealized. Recall cold fusion? How about the mythic magnetic power generator, a device that purports to produce "free" electricity.

Alas, it's a crock. So far, anyway.

Pursuing clean energy

That doesn't stop the pursuit of some nearly free energy source. Or the daydreaming. Or the bona fide research bringing existing clean energy technologies more in line with the cost of conventional carbon-creating fuels.

Writers regularly take on the challenge, imagining star travel as the likely result of conquering energy. Isaac Asimov's universes were fueled by atomic power. Even Albert Einstein and Otto Stern envisioned a hidden source of power in all things. They called it Nullpunktsenergie, which was later translated to zero-point energy. Imaging that is one thing. Tapping it is another.

The key to pollution reduction may be to restore more vintage cars

A well tuned engine produces less pollutants.

I spent most of the Labor Day weekend working on my VW.

Certainly not the pursuit many would choose. But getting the thing back on the road one of my over-riding goals. The next one is cracking that novel. Can't do one without finishing the other. At least, that's the way my mind works.

The engine's back in. The wiring harness is replaced. The engine-insulating tarboard is installed. Rust has been painstakingly removed from the floorboards and Por-15, the rust-murdering paint, applied. The interior heater hoses have been replaced (finally figured out how to source them). I figure the 1974 Super Beetle has several more major weekends before I can haul it off to somebody to put the final touches on the electrical and I can hear it roar to life.

Then it's off to my friend, another class of 1979, in downtown Fresno, Calif. for fresh paint.

All said, this will be a three- or four-year project. But we car guys do what we do. We love this stuff. I'd enjoy nothing better than pulling my bug into the Madera VW show and rubbing shoulders with more aging air-cooled enthusiasts.

Truly, this car is more sculpture than gas-burner. The NOx and related pollutants coming from its dual exhausts have been curtailed significantly.

Yet, that's exactly where many of our current vehicles are headed.  And that may be a good thing for the environment. Economics and regulations will be removing most of the older vehicles on the road that don't have support from nostalgic collectors like myself to restore and repurpose them as spares or show cars.

Reducing emissions

It's hard to imagine the discontinued Ford Excursion finding many such fans. Or the AMC Pacer. At one point, I day dreamed of taking a rocket launcher to that particular model. But the Edsel will remain. So will the 1955-57 Chevy and a host of others.

How ripping off my roof put me on the fence about solar

Back in spring 2010, my wife said it was time: Rip off the roof and put on a new one.

Simple right?

Hardly. It took four months.

But it got me thinking: With a fresh, new 30-year composition shingles, what would it cost to put a solar system on the roof? Hmmm... So I called Julie at Solar City. I told her some of the details of my house -- that it's 1,278 square feet, that my kWh consumption according to my PG&E bill never exceeded 900 per month and that I was only looking to pick her brain for information.

Not a great way to get information, but at least I was straightforward. Julie told me a number of things I missed but did say I'd be spending between $20,000 and $25,000 for a system and that I could get a 30 percent tax incentive. One thing I would have that she said was important: a new roof.

Roof quality a must

Or at least I will have a new roof. Some day. Anybody ever watch an asphalt shingle melt in your hands? Not a pleasant experience. That means, when it's hot, don't roof.

That's -- mostly -- another story.