He ventured forth to bring light to the world

I had to post this. A friend posted it on Facebook. It's on The Financial Times Web site.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/article4392846.ece

Here's an excerpt:

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

You get the gist :) Enjoy!

Good Samaritans

Yesterday a group of good people got together to help an elderly couple scammed by an unscrupulous unlicensed contractor of their life savings. I wrote the story about the scam months ago. It wasn't even front page news, but a contractor - a legitimate one - read the story and contacted me. At first I was skeptical about his intentions to help. Why would he go out of his way to help complete strangers? He made hundreds of calls, on his own time, to other builders, non-profits organizations, churches, elected and government officials, to ask them to help. The group had to clear a few bureaucratic hurdles before they could begin work on the house. The effort took months, but they broke ground yesterday.

I asked the good contractor to keep me posted on developments, so every time there was one, he would email me, which is why I knew the trouble the volunteers had to go through to make yesterday happen. His persistence impressed me and his determination to help this couple, at the expense of his own time, touched me.

We never know how God touches a person's heart, and how one man's kindness and generosity triumph over another man's evil greed.

The Bug That Wouldn't Burn

This one is about an amazing, annoying little bug.

I met the bug this weekend in Butte County while covering the aftermath of the wildfire. Millions, or even billions, of this tiny bug swarmed the desolate landscape of Concow, which was hardest hit by the fire. A resident whose property was spared and who had stayed behind to defend her home remarked to me that she has never since the bug, not until now. It suddenly came out of the woodworks, so to speak, in the fire's aftermath.

This flat-bodied, dark-greenish bug bites. It flies (or jumps), and lands on you forcefully, in a willy-nilly fashion. It flew into and inside the shirt of a resident while I was talking to her. I almost got one in my mouth and another one in my eye. I felt like I was being attacked. I'm sure someone can make a horror movie about this bug too.

We met a veteran firefighter, who explained that the bug lives inside the bark of the trees. After the fire, the trees are still hot and the heat drives the bug out. He didn't really know the name of the bug, but he calls it a wood beetle.

What puzzles me most is how the bug even survived the inferno. Many homes were burnt to the ground. Material that did not turn into ashes melted. Yet the bug survived, in numbers! Where did it hide from the flames?

Fourth of July

I cannot say enough wonderful things about kids. They never fail to amaze me.

Taking advantage of a long holiday weekend, I visited my friend and her family in Stanford, and spent some time in the Bay Area. On Friday morning, we visited the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz, where the guide was doing his best to convince us that our physics-defying experiences on the hill and in a hut has nothing to do with optical illusions, when it has everything to do with optical illusions.

On our way back to Stanford, we stopped by Cupertino and had a delicious lunch of Taiwanese porridge with an assortment of side dishes.

In the afternoon, I took a nap, while my friend worked on her dissertation, her children played and her husband prepared another delicious meal for dinner.

If I haven't already mentioned this, my friend has a 7-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter, who are at about the same ages as my niece and nephew. Her son is curious and precocious, and draws and paints very well. He also knows how to cook, in fact, he made all of us breakfast that very morning. Her daughter is a darling, although somewhat of a dare-devil darling. And she likes to sing to Norah Jones songs and put on a dramatic performance while she's at it.

Now, the little girl has friend, a Jewish-Russian-American girl with brown curly hair about 2 months younger than she. I woke up from my nap to hear the chatter of little girls' voices and went downstairs to find my friend's daughter arranging a jigsaw puzzle with her friend. The two little girls could not be more different, if you look at them from the outside. My friend's daughter, who looks like "Boo," the little girl from the cartoon Monster Inc., has straight jet-black hair framing her Asian features. She spoke little English and even her Mandarin is hard to understand sometimes. And as I've already mentioned, the Jewish-Russian-American girl has brown curly hair. She articulated fairly well in English, but I'm not sure if she spoke or understood Mandarin. Yet the pair has no problem communicating with each other, interacting and engaging as three-year-olds would.

At first, the girls didn't really pay attention to me, but at one point, one of them looked up at me and asked that I help find a piece of the puzzle - so sweetly that I could not resist. We moved around a few pieces, and at some point, both of them decided to show me band-aids on their knees. My friend's daughter had Snoopy figures on hers, whereas her friend had a flowery pattern. I had already seen the band-aid on my friend's daughter, thinking initially that the little girl had scraped her knee. But as her parents explained, the band-aid was purely ornamental, like a necklace, or a ring. And apparently, it's fast becoming a fashion trend among three-year-old girls, as I've learned over the weekend.

The girls eventually moved outside to the play yard. I decided to check in on them and when they saw me, they asked me to put them on a harness-style swing, which I dutifully obliged. (Note: it is very hard to resist the demands of cherubic three-year-old girls.) They took turns waiting for me to swing them and I tried to be fair: if I swung one of them to a certain height, I made sure I gave the other girl equal treatment.

At some point, my friend's daughter, while in mid-air, started saying something that sounded like it was in Mandarin, but I could not understand what she was saying. She kept repeating the same phrase, and I kept asking her what she wanted. I turned to her friend, and asked "Do you know what she's saying?" To my surprise, without even looking like she was trying to decipher her friend's words, the Jewish-Russian-American girl said,"She wants to get down (from the swing)." And when I asked my friend's daughter if that is indeed what she wanted, she nodded her head.

Perhaps it was the body language, or perhaps the girls share an unspoken code, or a secret wink. They certainly share a lot in common, but they are also from very different cultural and religious backgrounds. I do not think that at three, they are aware of those differences. So at which point do children, or people, for that matter, become aware of their differences, be it their skin color, the language they speak, the food they eat, the faiths they practice. When do prejudices seep into our lives and prevent us from forming friendships with those who look so different from us, whose parents are from different continents and who have different customs?

In the late afternoon sun of that lazy, breezy Fourth of July, I saw something beautiful - the unfettered friendship of two little girls of different races, squealing with delight as they played together.

The Freaky Freaks

For as long as I can remember, I have had three best gal-pals. We met our first year in high school and bonded over campfire, class projects and common interests. Maybe a year into our friendship, we were chilling in the school gym and decided to make our group official. So we sealed the pact with some chant and hand-joining. The Freaky Freaks were born.

Over the years we grew up together, sharing with one another many of the normal teenage angst - boy-girl relationships, school grades, parents etc -and many of the aspirations that a young person has. In many ways, we are diametrically different people, so we have had our fair share of arguments and fights, some small, some big, but always followed by attempts at reconciliation, forgiveness and the ultimate "we are friends forever no matter what happens" pronouncement that melts away all hard feelings.

A few years ago, one of the Freaks found a cancerous growth on her wrist. I was abroad and could not be with her until after a surgery to remove the malignant cells. She was in a bandage but recovering. I realize I could not bear to lose any of them - a thought that had not crossed my mind until I saw my friend in her bandages.

In the last two or three years, all three of them got married - two of them within a week apart of each other at the end of last year. I spoke at all three weddings, recounting our childhood and our shared experiences, also our time apart as each of us sought our dreams and our careers. I believe each of them has carved out the life she wanted for herself successfully and married the man of her dreams, and for that, I thank God.

I don't see them often since I'm in the States and they are in my home country, but I miss them dearly. Of recent years, they have taken upon themselves to find me a husband. Initially, those matchmaking efforts kind of annoyed me, but when I realized their good intentions, I wasn't so annoyed anymore. I usually oblige. What have I got to lose?

Also, I had thought I would feel left out of their lives once they were all married and that I may lose our friendships. But quite the opposite has happened. Instead of losing three of my best girl-friends, I have gained three more friendships - that of their husbands, the "Freaks-in-laws."

"The family has just got bigger," one of them said to me during my trip home last year for her wedding. Having the men around is also an advantage, since they can be tasked to do certain things. Such as: When their wives instruct them to drive me home, they usually oblige. I also feel rather pampered by the six of them, who would take me out for meals and play hosts to me at their homes.

As Carrie in Sex and City has once wondered aloud to her three bosom friends, just before she left New York City for Paris, "What if I've never met you?", I wonder too, "What if I've never met the Freaky Freaks?"

Wild Fire near Fairfield

More on the Humboldt Fire

One of my former editors once said to me: "California seems like it's either drowning or burning." Barely a few weeks into the official start of the fire season for more than a dozen counties, parts of Northern California were already burning. One part was in Butte County, in the rugged canyons of pines and oaks that lead into the Town of Paradise, a quaint foothill community of about 27,000 residents. It was the first time I've ever covered a large wildland fire.

I left Wednesday evening, and arrived two hours later in Chico at about 9 p.m. I went first to the staging area, only to find two firefighters sitting by a parking lot. I decided to check out the evacuation shelter, and found a handful of people who had evacuated. By the time I fed some of the quotes and color to my editor, it was around 10:30 p.m. -- time to seek out accommodation for myself. The first three hotels I drove to were fully occupied, and I thought I would have to spend the night in the car or at the shelter with the evacuees and the Red Cross volunteers when I finally found a hotel with vacancies.

As it turned out, several fire departments from out of town were also putting up their firefighters at the same hotel. Around midnight, while I was sorting out problems with my key at the front desk, they arrived en masse with their trucks and engines. I chatted with a few of them, and found out that fire officials were holding an early morning briefing session at the command center, which was at a college campus about 8 to 10 miles south of the hotel.

I woke up about 6 a.m. the next day, so I could make it to the briefing by 7 a.m.

After stopping by the shelter in Chico, I decided to head towards Paradise, where more evacuations were underway and the fire was threatening thousands of its residents. As I later learned, Paradise is only accessible by three main routes from the south. I took the route called the Skyway, where I came close to the flames and the smoke, but not before I stopped to talk to some residents who live in the canyon on Honey Run Road. A woman told me how she and her family survived the fire storm that surrounded her two-story stucco home the night before. She watched as flames seared trees across the street on a hillside behind her neighbor's home. At some point, the fire jumped, narrowly missing her house and engulfing the slope behind her property. She hunkered down with her family and listened to the crackling sound of charred leaves. The fire calmed down after midnight, and she went to sleep at about 1:30 a.m. I told her she was brave, or crazy, and she laughed. "We have a house we want to protect," she said.

The Skyway runs along a ridge. I saw some firefighters by the roadside who had been fighting a flare-up. I put on my gear - a pair of oversize bright yellow pants I had to hold in place with a belt, an equally oversize bright yellow jacket, a pair of goggles and a fire helmet that made me feel like I was balancing a jug of water on my head - grabbed my notebook and pen, and got out of the car.

As it turned out, I recognized some of the firefighters, and they recognized me (even though I looked like I was in a spacesuit). They were the ones I met in the hotel lobby. One of them gave me a quick interview and described how the fire had been "skunking" around the canyon the whole morning when the winds finally picked it up and brought it out of the canyon and onto the ridge. The landscape was charred, with smoke rising out of the ground. The winds were brutal, the temperature was boiling and I was swimming in my "spacesuit" -- and in perspiration.

I would return to my car intermittently, to dictate notes to a colleague and to talk to my editor. On one occasion I was on the phone with my editor and not paying attention to my surroundings. Suddenly, flames erupted from a smoldering spot near the car. I hung up on my editor abruptly and hit the accelerator (a colleague had advised me to keep the engine running - good advice, as I've realized) to escape the flames.

I tried to continue eastbound towards Paradise several times, to an area where structures had already been burnt or were burning, but the heavy smoke and unrelenting fire that just seemed to grow bigger and bigger made it close to impossible, and dangerous, for me to advance.

I waited, along with some other law enforcement and government agencies (non-firefighters) on the eastbound lanes, for the fire to calm down. Flames rose out of the canyon, like the tongues of hell, licking the ridge mercilessly and furiously. At one point, I saw flames burning inside the trunk of a tree that has cracked open. The phantasmagorical landscape, shrouded in thick smoke and aglow in a faint orange hue, was strangely beautiful, savage and scary at the same time.

More fire engines and emergency crews came tearing up the highway to battle the flames, but the high winds continued to pick up errant embers and start new patches of fire in what firefighters call "heavy spotting."

When the flames jumped the highway to the other side, I decided it was time to go. I couldn't proceed to the turn-around point because the fire was there; I couldn't cross the median from where I was because it was a wide ditch. I couldn't go onto a shoulder because there was none. My only option was to travel west on the eastbound lanes, i.e., in the opposite direction of oncoming traffic. The roads were closed to all but emergency crews, law enforcement officials and media personnel, so my odds of meeting with a head-on collision were greatly reduced. I turned on the hazard and head lights and prayed, while I drove slowly and watched for traffic.

An intern had asked me recently what has been the scariest incident I've encountered in my career so far. I've had a few "uncomfortable" situations -- when I have knocked on doors in sketchy or isolated rural neighborhoods, when I have met hostile and belligerent news subjects, when I have driven in a snow storm, when I have walked through a rice field with snakes and when I have encountered not-so-adorable dogs (in fact, I am afraid of most dogs so sometimes going onto an unfamiliar property and hearing a dog bark is scary enough in itself, but I hate to admit that to my editors) -- but I couldn't really give an answer to the intern then. If she asks me again now, I will definitely have an unequivocal answer for her.

Almost a third of the town of Paradise evacuated Thursday, packing the shelters in Chico. I stopped by one of them, and noticed that many of the evacuees were elderly retirees. One woman (I think she was 81 years old, if I remember correctly) was worried about her kitties.

I spent most of Friday in Paradise, interviewing people preparing to evacuate as fears of the fire spreading to the western part of town grew. I stood with a woman on her back porch, which offered a spectacular view of Butte Creek Canyon, where a recalcitrant fire was still burning. Her raw timber house, tucked at the end of a dirt road amidst tall trees and shrubs, was gorgeous. Amongst her prized possessions was a baby grand piano, which she was afraid of losing if the fire came across from the canyon.

I hardly slept or ate while working on the story, but the adrenalin sustained me. I came back home Friday night. By then, it appeared the situation was improving but the damage already done. The fire had scorched more than 20,000 acres and destroyed about 70 homes.

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In a story that my colleague wrote for Monday's paper, the Paradise town clerk was quoted as saying "what gave it its beauty also gave it its danger." She was talking about how the stunning natural features of the town also acted as fuel for the fire. I thought it was a good commentary for some philosophical reflection, if anyone is so inclined to ponder over it.