18 August 1999: Giants 5, Expos 4

Wednesday, 18 August 1999:

Giants 5, Expos 4

Yesterday, Matt and I went in to Apple so I could show him around the place. It is a place worth getting a little tour of, if you have someone to show you around. Not that it's stunningly fascinating, but the cafeteria is good (Matt says it's perhaps the best he's ever seen, although I don't know how many he's seen), the architecture is moderately interesting, there's various old Apple stuff lying around (okay, some of it is in display cases), and there's the Apple Store.

We had lunch with my cow-orkers, who seemed pretty interested in chatting with Matt about architecture and various other subjects. It's a pretty friendly group, which seems to accept people into it fairly easily.

We were at Apple until after 1 pm, and then we drove up to Berkeley. We tromped around Telegraph Ave - the collegiate 'downtown' area, as opposed to the businessy downtown, which is a number of blocks away - and I saw the main branch of Rasputin Records, which has a branch near my apartment and is very cool.

Matt wanted to check out the Berkeley campus, too, so we walked all around that. Berkeley feels more like a campus than Stanford did: The buildings are closer together, and look more like traditional college buildings - large squares and rectangles with lots of windows. Matt specifically wanted to check out the architecture building, which he says is famous in architecture as an example of 'new brutalism' style.

It is, I swear, one of the ugliest buildings I have ever seen on a college campus.

'New brutalism' isn't that bad, but it's not particularly attractive, since it's basically a big concrete monolith with lots of right angles and not much decoration. What really set this building apart from (and below) other buildings was the hideous interior. The first two floors seem to have paneling made of plywood, and the whole place was dark and dreary and uninteresting. One presumes that the architect was playing a joke on all architects to follow him at Berkeley; it's hard to see any other reason for this monstrosity.

Its sole interesting point is that the main stairwell has been spray-painted with graffiti (by the students) from top to bottom, which can be amusing and occasionally attractive. But otherwise - yuck.

Oh, and while we were in the building, an earthquake apparently hit Marin County north of San Francisco, shaking the city and the region all the way down to Silicon Valley. (My cow-orkers later told me that it was clearly felt at Apple.) We didn't notice a thing, though. I guess Berkeley is on more solid ground than much of the region.

(You may not have heard about this quake because it was overshadowed in the news by the huge earthquake in Turkey earlier in the day.)

After Berkeley we drove back into the city. Matt wanted to see the Haight-Ashbury district, and go by the UCSF hospital, where he was born. We also drove to the City Hall area, which is apparently notable because it was designed so that all the major government buildings (city, state and federal) were in the same area. Many of the buildings are fairly attractive, but I commented to Matt, "So, I work at city hall, and it's noon and I want to go to lunch. Now I have to walk five blocks to get out of the government district and find an actual restaurant." Not, perhaps, the best design, as it turns out.

On the way home we had dinner at a taco place in Redwood City which John had introduced me to. We also hit a couple of bookstores since Matt wanted to find a book on Bay Area architecture. I don't think he had much luck, although possibly he just wanted to look at one, not to buy one.

I, however, bought copies of the remaining books of the comic strip Mutts, which are just as good as the one I already owned. I do highly recommend this strip; I'm trying to convince the Mercury News to pick it up.

Today, Matt and I met up with Ceej to go to a baseball game. The Giants' young phenom, Russ Ortiz, was pitching. He started off the year strong, but the Giants' shaky bullpen has caused managed Dusty Baker to leave him in games too long, and he's been slowly deteriorating over the season.

Well, Ortiz didn't have his best stuff, but he held the Expos to only a game-leading-off home run for seven innings. The Giants, meanwhile, got a couple of home runs to take a 5-1 lead. Ortiz struggled through the 8th, giving up another run, and it seemed clear that he was out of gas. Mysteriously, Baker sent him out again in the ninth, and he promptly gave up a 2-run homer. So Baker brought in struggling closer Robb Nen, who managed to preserve the one-run lead. It was a pretty exciting game - but more exciting than we'd hoped it would be after the early going!

CJ has scored our last two games on scorecards. I've scored one game in my baseball fandom, and didn't find it that thrilling. She seems to like it, though. It does make you pay more attention to the game.

After the game, Matt and I decided to punt on gaming at Subrata's, and instead just headed home where we both did some reading, watched some TV, and I puttered on the computer for a bit. We also watched the latest episode of Crusade, "The Needs of Earth", which was not as good as the last two, as it ended with a rather heavy-handed polemic.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)