10

There are 10 cell phone stores/kiosks in the Vintage Faire mall in Modesto. That's not counting either Radio Shack or Circuit City, which of course both also sell cell phones.

Douglas Adams loved physics, but in the radio series of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy he also explained an economic phenomenon called the Shoe Event Horizon. The Shoe Event Horizon is the tipping point in a civilization's economic development when shoe shops overtake all other production, so that it becomes unviable to build anything but shoe shops. As a result, the economy and civilization collapse and everyone who survives evolves into birds.

Obviously he was right, he just had the wrong product at the center of the theory. But to be fair, cell phones didn't exist when he wrote Hitchhiker's Guide. At the current rate, by 2011 every shop in the mall will be a cell phone store, and all anyone will do is work selling cell phones to one another.

I am not a fan. I don't desire an iPhone, or a camera phone, or a Blackberry. We have a pre-paid cell phone we only use while driving to LA, to report on our progress or the smog level in Bakersfield (on a scale from Totally Obscured By Brown Air to Instant Death). But even I felt like I should have a more up-to-date and snazzier phone, passing all those damn stores - all of them busy, by the way.

fruit and music

As might be expected, the opinion pages of the Modesto Bee have been full of denials, rebuttals, confessions, challenges, and lamentations in response to the "news" from last week that Modesto (a.k.a. Motown, or in the very local parlance of the House About Town, Funkytown, or, especially in transit away from it, a place named by the phrase "No me Modesto") is the worst city to live in in the US.

So far, none that I've read (admittedly a random and unscientifically small sample) have mentioned the single most obvious thing Modesto has going for it: fruit. This is probably because you could live just about anywhere in California, including, say, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Napa, Tiburon, Santa Cruz, etc., etc., and still get fantastic fruit. In that sense, fruit isn't a reason to live in Modesto.

However, the fruit is gorgeous. We're two weeks into cherry season, a week into apricot season, and we've had strawberries for quite a while already. Peaches and plums are around the corner. We'll pick the first cherry tomatoes soon. We've already had pounds of lettuce and Swiss chard, all from the little piece of yard my loveliest has tended so - er, tenderly.

I have no point. I have two more class days left this semester, and I have no point. I'm out.

Also in the Bee this morning was a review of the Modesto Symphony chorus performances of Friday and Saturday nights. I went Saturday and enjoyed it tremendously, although, like the reviewer in the Bee (none other than CSU Stanislaus' own Stephen Thomas), I was bothered at first by the lousy acoustics in the hall, and also thought there was something fishy going on among the violins in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. The Haydn Dm Mass was tumultuous, as its name implies. Good stuff.

Yesterday we found ourselves fruitlessly searching for a second-hand bicycle, but fruitfully finding fruit, of which I shall now consume.

funkytown worst of all

Apparently, a book detailing life and livability of a few hundred US cities has ranked Modesto last. The Modesto Bee article focuses on local reactions to the news, and of course Modestans interviewed by the Bee didn't see anything so terrible. Even the author of the book seemed to tell the Bee that the situation was not all that dire.

And really, if you take away the disgusting hot summer, the pollution, low level of educational achievement, minimal cultural scene, lack of good jobs, lack of affordable housing, poor urban planning, poor health care, high crime rate, lousy traffic, and the fact that despite all this thousands of people commute 2.5 hours each way to good jobs in the San Francisco Bay area (thus contributing to the pollution and lousy traffic), really, it's not too bad.

If you ask one of those commuters why he or she lives here, I imagine the likely answers are (1) the housing market, as inflated as it is, is more affordable than the Bay Area, and (2) it's a safer, more wholesome environment in which to raise kids. The latter of these rationales is easily understood, because it's entirely false. People who believe that are, simply, wrong. They do not want to know, and in many cases would flatly reject, the facts. As for the former rationale, it is certainly true that the housing market here has been better lately: a mere $289,000 can get you a 1100 square foot bungalow in some less desirable areas. So people who commute 5+ hours a day in order to buy a house are, clearly, more interested in achieving the American dream (to wit: mortgage) than in health, well-being, and so on.

To set the record straight on at least one point, there is no truth to the rumors that Modesto city planners intend to embark on a major urban renewal project involving razing all structures in the county.