Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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10/6/2003 -  10/8/2003
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11/4/2002 - 11/10/2002
10/28/2002 -  11/3/2002
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10/14/2002 - 10/20/2002
10/7/2002 - 10/13/2002
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9/23/2002 -  9/29/2002
9/16/2002 -  9/22/2002
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8/26/2002 -   9/1/2002
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8/12/2002 -  8/18/2002
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7/15/2002 -  7/21/2002
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12/31/2001 -   1/6/2002
12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Saturday, November 2, 2002
02:13 - Santa Cruz	(top)
I spent the day today down in Santa Cruz, sightseeing with my folks; seeing things I'd either never seen before, or hadn't seen in years. While it's easy to tar Santa Cruz as a Berkeley with the added handicap of being isolated from civilization, it must be said that it's what I believe is the most California of all California towns. That is to say, it's a microcosm of the entire state; it has steep pine-clad hills, quaint homey town life, a huge volleyball beach with a Boardwalk that became prototypical of the whole franchise amusement park genre, a University, a beach highway, vast ocean and mountain views, a Monarch butterfly wintering ground, and a prime surfing destination. It's everything about California rolled into one thick doobie. After lunch on the Wharf and a stop at the Monarch butterfly grounds at Natural Bridges (with the interesting interlude of a large brush fire breaking out behind the visitor center, which attracted two fire engines who had to string their hoses for a mile out to the nearest hydrant), we headed up to the UC Santa Cruz campus. If this were 1994, and we'd toured this campus back then, I might very well have been so enamored with it I'd have directed all efforts toward going there. This is one of the most gorgeous college campuses I've ever seen. Sure, any Ivy League can boast fine architecture and genteel Dover Boys leisure life. But how many of them can do it on the side of a mountain, packed into a forest? Picture a long, long, wide hillside-- no, a bigger one. Like, three miles on a side. Most of it's wide open, just bare grassland. And it's all on an incline that would make a bike trip from the bottom to the top just too tedious to want to do every day. Picture numerous clusters of "colleges" scattered throughout this road-encircled space, each one with its own unique architectural style and its own academic discipline, comprising both residential buildings and academic facilities (one such cluster is neo-natural slant-sided post-modernism, one is neat Northwestern peak-roofed white-trimmed Colonial, one is almost Plantation-like in style-- look at this virtual tour full of QTVRs for the visual record). All the signs are spotless, all the parking lots are tucked away behind hillocks and trees. But wait-- it gets better. The entire northern, uphill half of the campus area is sown directly into the forest primeval-- the roads wind up into thick redwood groves and deeply cleft canyons, and at the top of the main entrance road, in the northwest corner, there's a five-story parking structure-- all but hidden from view in among the trees. You look around and see other large buildings, built in such a way as to not disturb the trees that are already there (presumably at great cost-- this is massive construction at the top of a large hill, at the limit of human penetration into a large redwood forest, for crying-out-loud). It's like they built a city's downtown into the middle of a State Park forest, with no detriment to either's sensibility. I thought it was breathtakingly attractive. Since everything is so far-flung, buses travel up and down the hill all day, ferrying students from residences to academic locations and gyms and student unions and the like. And naturally, because this is a liberal university in a liberal town, the campus' sentiments beat on you like the humidity in the South. But when you're driving down the hill and you break out of the treeline and are faced with a panoramic view of the Monterey bay and the surrounding hills, it's almost enough to offset any unpleasant peer pressure towards smirking cleverness of parallelism and moral equivalence and America-loathing. By its very character-- its architecture, its placement, its views, its playful layout, its mascot (the Banana Slug)-- it embodies more that's cool about living around here than almost any number of shrill banners hung from residence-hall balconies can negate. ...Almost. Anyway, the Boardwalk is as much fun as I remember it-- it's still freely open to the public and each individual ride operates on tickets, rather than it being a single-massive-cover-charge with a big entrance gate like so many modern theme parks. The Giant Dipper is still great fun-- built in 1924, and still a thrill even by today's standards. And the "Neptune's Kingdom" arcade is full of as many 1980s-vintage classic games as of modern favorites. You'd almost forget they're having trouble keeping the place open these days. Why they close it at 5PM, though, I'm afraid I don't understand.