The Burlingame Voice

High Cost Rail - Part 104 Prioritize Water

There were two great letters to the editor in the Sunday SM County Times.  Unfortunately, the Merc/Times website is such a mess that I cannot do them the favor of linking to the letters, so here they are:

Water surely is more important than HSR

Given that scientists and meteorologists at NOAA have gone on record predicting, from current data, a weak El Nino or else no El Nino at all this coming winter, isn't it time for Sacramento to get serious about statewide efforts to conserve water?  Simply put, what could be more important to California residents than ensuring an adequate supply of water for their everyday lives?  Gov. Jerry Brown is poised to invest untold billions of dollars chasing his dream of High Speed Rail (HSR) becoming a reality.  Can moving from Point A to Point B as rapidly as possible be more essential than safeguarding our most valuable natural resource?

Chris Rackowski, San Jose

Desalination plants, not bullet trains

It seems to me that is time to build desalination plants.  We need water a great deal more than we need a bullet train.  With no El Nino on the horizon we should be looking for ways to get water sooner than later.  Take that train money and build that substitute for the rain we aren't getting.  Now

Micki Miller, Mountain View

Kudos to both letter writers for their commons sense alerts.  I might quibble that there is any "train money" at all or that the government should be the one to build a desalination plant, but we are generally alligned on the relative priorities of the Gov.'s boondoggle vs the real issue in the state.  And our county supes aren't much better with their talk of a "slow-moving emergency" vs addressing the immediate concern.

Local Real Estate Moguls

Maybe you get the Gentry magazine in your driveway the way I do and maybe you even read it.  If you read the current edition that landed this week you saw that two of our local real estate pros are at the top of the WSJ national lists.  Stanley Lo heads up the Bay Area list with $300M+ of transactions in 2013 and he came in eight in the whole darn country.  Stanley is quoted saying

"Entrepreneurs and professional people account for 60% -70% of my clients.  The other 30% - 40% were from mainland China.

Landing at No. 9 on the Top Teams list is Tom Neel and Associates with $88M of transactions last year.  They did this by

selling everything from grand Mediterranean-style mansions to historic arts and crafts-style bungalows.

Glad to see someone in the biz thinks our Arts & Crafts bungalows are historic--even if it is an uphill battle at City Hall to get them to acknowledge it and treat them as special.

Congrats to both of the B'game pros.  You have to wonder what they think about "rack 'em and stack 'em" high density, faux affordable housing and other forms of dumb growth encroaching on the Golden Egg?

New School Math

School is out for the summer, but the debate over the "Common Core" standards rages on.  I have to admit I haven't paid a lot of attention lately since my kids are well past high school, but I do know the issue of the "New Math" has been going on since I was in high school.  And we don't appear to be making any progress with each new generation of math.  So an article in the WSJ by a professor emerita of math at Berkeley caught my eye on Wednesday.  Marina Ratner wrote it from the perspective of a grandmother with a grandson in the Berkeley public school system so it has a front row feeling to it.  She writes

...when teaching fractions, the teacher required that students draw pictures of everything: of 6 divided by 8, of 4 divided by 2/7, of 0.8 X 0.4, and so forth.  In doing so, the teacher followed instructions...to use visual fraction models and equations to represent the problem.

Who would draw a picture to divide 2/3 by 3/4?

The model-drawing mania went on in my grandson's class for an entire year, leaving no time to cover geometry and other important topics.

I'm pretty sure the B'game school curriculum is in the same boat.  Can any parents or grandparents confirm this?

Kohl Mansion hits 100

The Kohl Mansion centennial celebration brought out a lot of locals to hear the West Bay Community Band, tour the mansion, enjoy some birthday cupcakes, check out some classic cars and hear a nice history of the Sisters of Mercy and the mansion.  Sister Ellen Fitzgerald gave the crowd and more detailed history than I had heard before and the proclamations from Mayor Michael Brownrigg, Supe Dave Pine and in absentia-- Jerry Hill, Kevin Mullin, Jackie Speier and DiFi were also presented.  Here's the Supes proclamation and a few of the nice rides parked out front.

 

Jerry Day 2014

After celebrating the Kohl Mansion's 100th anniversary, I went up to McLaren Park in EssEff to catch the last band of the day at the 12th Annual Jerry Day in memory of the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia's birthday.  Tucked in between the Excelsior district and Visitacion Valley, this we a fun little find albeit foggy as expected even while B'game is beautiful.  Jerry would have been 72 yesterday and next Saturday is the anniversary of his passing. Here's Melvin Seals and JGB closing the festival.

 

See Burlingame's past.

If you're a Burlingamer, today is the day to take advantage of the rare opportunity to take a FREE tour of Downtown Burlingame led by costumed members of the Burlingame Historical Society. You will never look at downtown Burlingame the same way after taking this tour. Meet at 11am today ( Saturday) at The Burlingame Train Station. Tour should last approx. 45 minutes. Photo courtesy of The Burlingame Historical Society. No use allowed without permission.