the Rottweilers of Dog Beach - Saturday August 21 1999    

Renee and Scott were gone by the time Kim and I were out of bed. We had arranged to meet our new friend Rash down at the Zen Bakery at 10:00am and (well, by the time we got out of bed) it was already time to get going.
It was the usual Zen Bakery routine, featuring bagels with cream cheese, cherry strudel and several refills of coffee. Instead of the newspaper, though, we had Rash to talk to. He's a low-key guy with a literary/technical spin on most of his detailed observations. When he saw the burnt-out remains of the Dago Choppers Harley shop across Voltaire, he suggested that perhaps Italian American extremists had torched the place. He'd been reading a book before we came, and the bookmark holding his place was a vintage 72 byte punchcard, unpunched. I examined it up close, the first time I've looked at a punch card since I knew anything about data storage. Indeed, it was the first time I've looked at a punch card since the mid 70s, when my Dad would bring a few of them home from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center for us kids to use as playthings (those punch cards definitely contributed to my childish fantasies of a world where all things could be known and controlled from a single Lite-Brite computer terminal).
A guy wearing a green "Fuck Me I'm Irish" tee shirt kept walking by, eventually joined by thin young woman in a miniskirt helping him with the laundry. They were so in love that she climbed up on his back at one point and rode him back to the apartment to get another basket of laundry, giving us all a glimpse of her tiny black panties in the process. Though the guy's tee shirt was the sort I'd imagine a schteve wearing to an American pub on St. Patrick's day, Kim actually overheard the guy talking with a genuine brogue.
We decided to walk all the way to the ocean at Dog Beach. Naturally, Sophie was delighted when we arrived and I unleashed her upon the turd-studded sands (Rash compared it to a vast cat litter box). Sophie charged several times through fairly deep water to get out to a temporary tidal island and then back again, seemingly just as a demonstration that she could. There were a few big dogs who were aggressive in their friendliness towards her, and she was intimidated. But her social skills were sound. When she'd notice a big dog on her tail, she'd stop and face him (as opposed to letting him chase after her). The vast majority of the dogs seemed to have only the best intentions. But as we sat on the beach watching the gleeful dogs charging about after Frisbees and socializing in the surf, we'd hear an occasional dog fight break out. One of these left a Greyhound whimpering pathetically, but he recovered amazingly rapidly shortly thereafter.
Dog Beach definitely gives a sense of the sorts of dogs people own in San Diego. Judging from the incredible number of Rottweilers, I'd say that's the most popular dog here in 1999. This must say something about people's fear of urban crime, one of the main reasons so many uptight white people live in San Diego to begin with, I suppose.
Unlike the Dog Beach of the 50s, there was only one Lassiesque Collie Dog on Dog Beach today.
One of the dogs (who happened to take an especially strong interest in Sophie) looked a lot like my parent's Australian Shepherd-mix dog Fred.
We continued down to Newport to give Rash a view of that scene. It was the usual hustle-bustle weekend scene, but nothing especially interesting was happening.
We returned home. Eric the Web Developer came by to pick up his cellular phone and car stereo face plate, both of which he'd left last night. I tried to watch a movie brought over by our neighbor Jason, but in the end it just put me to sleep. Eventually Kim went to work and Rash headed off to wherever he's been staying.
I would have liked to accomplish things today, but I was too hungover and unmotivated. Alas.



Kim in front of the Zen Bakery. In the background you can see the brightly-painted Voltaire Street wall of the burnt-out remains of the Dago Choppers Harley shop. Perhaps Dago Choppers was torched by operatives from an extremist Italian-American group.


Rash (left) and me chatting in front of the Zen Bakery.


Sophie the Miniature Schnauzer, in my lap.


Some pissed off dogs in a second floor apartment look out over the beach at the end of Brighton Avenue, just south of Dog Beach in Ocean Beach.

I further articulated my thoughts tonight about Y2Kesque computer problems we're likely to experience after January 2000. I'm willing to bet that plenty of programmers will immediately revert to coding the year with only two digits after January 00, setting the world up for yet another big computer disaster on 2100. I won't be around for that one, but I'll definitely get to see a few other computer date-related crises beyond Y2K itself, such as the Windows rollover on 2K+[XX] and the Macintosh rollover on 2K+[YY]. (I can't find the specific values for either XX or YY just now.)

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