Let me tell you about the time I impersonated Elijah

Let me tell you about the time I accidentally impersonated the prophet Elijah.

I suppose I ought to preface my story by noting — even at the risk of sounding like I’m saying, “Some of my best friends are Jewish” — that I hope I’m not offending anyone with this story. I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who practice any religion with sincerity, as well as those who practice no religion with the same conviction. I’m in a giving mood — so people who aren’t sure, I respect you too.

Anyway, when I was in college a friend invited me to a seder dinner at her house. I accepted, but the dinner was to take place on the night I got back to school after spending spring break with my family in San Francisco. I had a ride back to school with another friend, but traffic was worse than expected and we were very late.

When I arrived at the home of my friend who was hosting the seder, I walked up to the front door, a bottle of wine in each hand, and noticed the door was slightly ajar. I had never been to a seder before, so I had no idea that (at least in my friend’s seder tradition) this was to be expected.

I could hear people talking inside, so as I pushed the door open wide I said, “Hi, everybody, sorry I’m late!”

Much to my surprise, the dozen or so people sitting around the dining room table were already facing the door. They had just started the portion of the seder known as the Cup of Elijah the Prophet, and were looking to the door because they were talking about the tradition that Elijah visits each home on seder night. Everyone’s eyes widened as I walked through the doorway, and some people just sat there with their mouths open.

Finally, someone picked up his glass of wine, raised it up, and shouted, “Elijah!”

Everybody else shouted, “Elijah!” too, and burst out laughing. I had no idea what was going on.

My friend got up from the head of the table, still laughing so hard she could hardly stand, and showed me to my seat as she explained what I had done.

To this day, I have never had such good timing as that night I walked in the door so late.

Reason 927 why my missus is awesome

From my wife’s blog, Dancing Hula in the Sunset:

OK, so 927th place out of 1086 is pretty close to coming in last but I still did it. I climbed 1197 steps in 27 minutes, 10 seconds.
I was super sweaty and stank a little but I did something I was only “pretty sure” I could do.

Read more here.

Fancy Food Show, here I come

I’m spending the day at the Fancy Food Show at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Look for short posts from the show today, plus tweets at http://twitter.com/tomprete.

Wireless connections are a bit spotty in Moscone Center and no cameras are allowed in the show, but I’ll post what I can, when I can.

Top 10 best and worst communicators of 2008

If the past is prologue, perhaps I’m not too late to point out communications guru Bert Decker’s list of the 10 best and worst communicators of 2008. I was pleased to introduce San Francisco Examiner readers to Bert’s observations back when I was editorial-page editor there, and he’s never failed to produce relevant insight each year. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has the uncommon distinction of making the 2008 list twice: once among the best, and once with the worst.

Sarah Palin photo by Jeff Geerling, http://flickr.com/people/lifeisaprayer/

PretePress readers may recall a similar observation I made following Palin’s speech to the Republican Convention in September.

From Bert’s blog:

1.    Barack Obama
As his star continues to rise, there’s just no contest for #1 Best Communicator.
And it’s not just because he was elected President that he deserves #1, but that he was elected President BECAUSE of his communications ability. President Elect Obama is the first repeat at #1 (2006) and for the same reason. He vaulted from obscurity on the strength of his words and speeches at the 2004 Democratic Convention, and just kept talking. To date he hasn’t really done much except communicate. Shows you how important that skill is. One of the greatest modern orators, we’ll now see if he can replace Bill Clinton as “the great communicator” while in office.

2.    Tim Russert
He was one of the best, and we’ll miss him.
One of our best TV journalists died this year, and he would have made this list without the posthumous honor. Russert was personable, energetic and open but also tough, incisive and smart. Meet The Press, and Network TV News will never be the same. His son Luke Russert was eloquent in his eulogy, and maybe there will be more…

Read the rest of Bert Decker’s list on his excellent — and useful — blog.

Looking back on the Cosco Busan

One year ago, the container ship Cosco Busan hit a bumper on one of the towers of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, spilling more than 50,000 gallons of toxic bunker fuel in San Francisco Bay.

(More following video below)

I went down to Ocean Beach to see the damage for myself, and things were pretty bad. I expected the beach to be completely black with oil, and thought it wasn’t that bad, it was bad enough, with blobs of oil from the size of marbles up to the size of dinner plates all over the sand, and more stuck to the wrack that always rests on the beach.

Oil blob, Ocean Beach

The worst part was the birds. I saw a dead bird covered with oil right away, and farther down the beach I found more that were still alive but heavily oiled and clearly in distress. I think the saddest sight was two little eared grebes hunkered down in the sand near the end of Sloat Boulevard, desperately trying to preen the oil out of their feathers. They likely ingested quite a bit of the oil stuck to them, in which case they probably didn’t survive.

Dead murre on Ocean Beach

One year later, some measures have been taken to prevent another spill and to better clean up afterward, but much more remains undone. A proposed law requiring double-hulled fuel tanks on cargo ships is stalled in Congress, some proposals for faster required response times have been rejected, and most glaringly there still is little training available for people who want to be part of volunteer cleanup crews in preparation for the next spill.

Oiled grebe on Ocean Beach

As for the impact of the spill on the environment of San Francisco Bay and the nearby parts of the Pacific Ocean coast, that’s still under study. One important piece of information will come in just a matter of weeks, when schools of herring make their annual journey into the bay to lay their eggs on eelgrass and various seaweeds. The herring fishery is the last commercial fishery in the bay, with herring eggs (preferably still attached to the seaweed) fetching a good price in Japan.

The pilot guiding the Cosco Busan on the day of the crash is set to go to trial in the spring.

For more videos of the Cosco Busan aftermath at Ocean Beach and Aquatic Park, including video of oiled birds and bird rescues, visit my YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/user/tpretesf.

For more photos of the oil spill, including some that the Weather Channel picked up for an episode of its Forecast Earth show, click here to visit my Flickr photostream. I’ve separated some oil spill photos into two folders to make them easier to find.

The San Francisco Chronicle did a good job of covering the Cosco Busan spill when it happened, and they’ve done a good job following up a year later. I don’t see any reason to reinvent the wheel here, so here are some links to my posts from last year, plus some Chronicle stories:

PretePress: Black death on the beach

PretePress: Oil spill updtate November 9

Pretepress: Track the path of San Francisco oil spill tanker

PretePress: S.F.’s Aquatic Park reopens after oil spill

Chronicle op-ed reviewing reactions to the spill and what needs to be done

Chronicle article on the role of the pilot and what went wrong

Chronicle on the ongoing environmental effects of the Cosco Busan oil spill

Chronicle on the lack of training for public oil spill response

Chronicle article providing a considerably rosier view of the bay’s recovery, from the USCG

Vote, vote, vote!

I’ve emerged from under the cruel thumb of my baby-borne cold too late to write anything of significance in advance of today’s election, unfortunately. But on the plus side, I feel pretty good now, which probably also has something to do with the fact that I’m basking in the afterglow of casting my vote in what has been a fascinating election on the federal, state and local levels.

Voting feels good. Go vote.

Polling place sign, November 2008 election

PretePress’ October surprise: a horrible, debilitating cold

It figues. Just a week before what is probably the biggest Election Day I’ll ever see in my life, I’ve come down with a really bad cold. It’s the kind with chills, uncontrollable sneezing fits, running eyes and nose — and it has made my head so fuzzy I sometimes get confused trying to make tea.

I feel like i’ve let down my six readers, but there’s not much I can do when my life is filled with spit, snot and worse from a 7-month-old baby. When he gets a cold, I get it too. So on the off chance you were actually disappointed that I haven’t written lately, I’m sorry. I’ll try to post something soon about the final days of the run for the White House, and probably something about the most important issue on California’s ballot, the one that touches every other issue in state government in some way: redistricting.

That is, if I can make it to the keyboard.

PretePress poll gives Obama big edge over McCain

PretePress readers overwhelmingly believe Barack Obama beat John McCain in the third presidential debate, and

Obama stencil found on sidewalk in San Francisco Aug. 24, 2008

by an even larger margin indicated they expect Obama to be the next president of the United States.

It was an unscientific poll by anyone’s standard, and included some conflicting responses, so take the results with plenty of grains of salt — but the fun survey I created after Wednesday’s presidential debate (using WordPress’ nfity new PollDaddy poll feature)  was interesting nonetheless.

Of the PretePress readers who took the poll, 84 percent said Barack Obama won the debate, while 16 percent gave the victory to John McCain.

Barack Obama will be elected the next president of the United States, 95 percent of respondents believed — even though only one-quarter of respondents identified themselves as registered Democrats.

The rest of the poll:

• 90 percent of respondents said they were citizens of the United States.
• 95 percent said they were registered to vote in the U.S. (get out that salt).
• 50 percent of participants said they did not belong to any political party, 25 percent said they were registered to vote under the Democratic Party, 10 percent said they were Republicans, 5 percent Greens and 0 percent Libertarians. 10 percent said they were registered under some other party.

You can see the original post will the poll here, but I’m still learning to use the PollDaddy polls and at the moment I’m not sure how to turn off the poll. The results you see in the original post may not match the results at the time of this writing.

How did you get here? Week of Friday, Oct. 3

I don’t know what was more fun this week, watching the Palin-Biden debate on TV or watching MC Hammer at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in Golden Gate Park. In any case, both events proved quite popular among visitors to PretePress. I’m sure that if I had included that photo of a woman dressed as a cow that’s going around, it would have beat everything.

Some of the search terms that brought people to my blog this week, in no particular order (remember that WordPress truncates some terms when compiling its lists):

• weird stuff found in the bay after hurri
• galveston pictures – fish in fence
• bay bridge tanker oil spill san francisc
• anti-palin rally burlingame
• elitada
• carmen chu
• vice presedential debate grading
• newspaper headline “bastards” for 9/11
• http://pretepress.wordpress.com
• palin biden debate
• nucular
• cnn debate audience response graph meter
• old fashion gas stations
• animals covered in oil
• dave burgin
• oil spill photos of cosco busan
• tom prete
• is stuart hanlon a good attorney in san
• na lei hulu i ka wekiu
• i hate critical mass

Elitada News stole my content

I know I’m not the only blogger whose content has been stolen and reprinted in its entirety elsewhere without payment or acknowledgment of ownership, so I won’t whine on forever about this — but I do want to say something for the record.

Please don’t visit the site (no reason to reward thievery with page views), but this morning I found that my post analyzing the first McCain-Obama debate reprinted on www(dot)elitada(dot)com/news/ — every word of it. The only indication that they got the content from me was a tiny link to my original post at the bottom of the page, with the permalink concealed. This isn’t an excerpt or a blogroll we’re talking about, it’s a clear violation of U.S. and international copyright laws.

Furthermore, the site seems to have a dummy comment form designed to prevent feedback. The form looks normal, but trying to submit a comment results in an error message that the commenter didn’t fill out the email address field — which doesn’t exist on the form.

The content presented at this site seems to be almost entirely stolen from other sources and reprinted without acknowledgment, so I’m not the only one with this issue.