u/OldHedgehog5802

So, I'm finally getting around to reading Leerhsen's bio and he's trying to explain Asia's hold on Tony's mind and body.

They met in her Vigna Clara neighborhood in front of the camera, then:

"His fresh haircut and, yes, teenage boy nervousness can be seen in season six, episode nine. So can her beauty, intelligence, and fierceness. She makes a good first impression. In an email to me in which she declined to be interviewed for this book, she quoted Oscar Wilde: 'It is always Judas who writes the biography.'" - p.246 of Down and Out In Paradise

So, I thought, Imma go back and watch that episode for some insight. But HBO Max cuts season 6 off at episode 8. Does anyone know why? Maybe they fucked up on numbering the episodes? Was there some sort of litigation?

As per a bulletin from Safe Streets Petaluma:

&gt;SMART has secured a $2 million grant to complete the engineering for the missing path between Penngrove and Cotati.<

This only affects a few of you in the r/BAbike ambit, but it's not nothing. Who knows when it will actually be bike-able. I'm certainly looking forward to it when it is!

https://www.ajmc.com/view/what-comes-after-anti-vegf-in-wet-amd-arshad-khanani-md

As always, a layperson needs to take what an expert is saying with a grain of salt, for so many reasons. But maybe the main reason: in today's world doctors/scientists/technicians are also deeply involved with developing therapeutics in which they might themselves have a financial interest. Hence: a potential for "hype."

That being said, Dr. Khanani:

> I think having a gene therapy that has a good safety and efficacy profile and that payers approve will be a paradigm shift and will be widely adopted. As long as these are reasonably priced—and payers understand that a one-time treatment with a 50% chance of not needing any more injections is a huge paradigm shift—they will be welcomed by both patients and physicians.<

My wet AMD, despite monthly injections of anti-VGF drugs, is moving along and yea, it's a major sad drag, but there really does seem to be much to be optimistic about if you're younger.

Let some of what this retinologist says be a spur to your own attempts to understand your disease: EX: "In terms of Ang-2/Tie-2 activation—Ang-2 inhibition leads to Tie-2 activation—faricimab [Vabysmo; Genentech] has already been approved for 4-and-a-half years now.^(1) It's a bispecific antibody that blocks VEGF-A and Ang-2, and we've seen better disease control and durability by targeting two pathways, so that's already validated. We now have programs with more potent bispecifics combining Ang-2 inhibitors with higher-molar-dose anti-VEGF, as well as anti-VEGF with direct Tie-2 activation. I'm excited to see what those programs show. But Ang-2/Tie-2 has already been validated as a beneficial pathway for disease control, both in wet AMD and DME."

Alright. Ang-2 and Tie-2 activations and inhibitions: pathways involved in our genetically driven excessive vascularization near the macula. These pathways are specifically known, so the two are "bispecifics"? I probably only dimly grasp this stuff. Tie-2 activation is what we want. We get that from Ang-2 inhibition, which supposedly is what Vabysmo does. And yet: while each of us has these pathways open to activation and inhibition: I don't think the genetics are all the same. Or are they? This is very complex stuff for the average person, innit?

At the same time, there's a line later about the potential of stem cells to "restore the vision." And this doctor is yet another who's saying that gene therapy is not science fiction and is showing fantastic promise, perhaps sooner than later. So much is not known. But when we read about Macular Degeneration and its treatment from the Long View: the injection of antiVEGF drugs just began a couple hours ago! Like 1999 or so. Going from "nothing much to do: sorry!" to the idea that we may be able to target AMD finely and specifically using gene therapy: Wow!

But again: grain of salt.

Just want you all to know there are probably many others like me: I feel nothing but sympathy, empathy, and admiration for the courage to try to be who you feel you really are. And this culture, right now, is both marvelously advanced in scientific techniques and knowledge to help you, while at the same time the generic fascists seem to think it's their business what you do with your own body and presentations of yourselves, and it really angers me. I've fought against those who wanted to sexually repress and persecute my gay friends my whole life; this trans-as-political thing still seems new to me, though I've read quite a lot of historical accounts of trans people and their difficulties.

I suspect there are others like me who read your posts and silently cheer you on in overcoming hurdle after hurdle. I've learned a lot from reading this group and I thank you all for being open about your difficulties. And successes. This subreddit evokes emotions more than any other, because the pains you're all going through go so to the bone.

When someone writes that they are passing in public, I cheer inwardly. There's nothing sexual in it for me - I'm really old - but it's a human thing.

The posts about familial rejection stab me in the heart. I feel nothing but empathy for you. Gawd that must feel horrible: to agonize about coming out, and when you do your mom rejects you. I can't imagine how fucked up that must feel. I try , though...

I often wonder what it must feel like to want to go from MtF. It reminds me of a famous very short philosophical paper from 1974, "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?", by Thomas Nagel. He says we can know all kinds of things about sleeping while hanging upside down, using echolocation, etc...but we cannot know what it's really "like" to be a bat. (He just picked bats as an example to make his philosophical point.) You are all like people I've known, so of course you're not bats. But I cannot know what it's like to want to change in the way y'all do, but I understand you feel like something was always wrong, and I definitely understand that, from other aspects of my own life.

One of the things that I really love about trans people - going either way, really - is how you function as stealth guerrilla monkeywrenchers: people think they know what sexuality, gender and beauty are, and a lot of what you do smashes all that. I think that's the source of the misplaced anger. Everything is FAR more fluid than we thought, or at least when people who were born in my day were brought up to think. Almost all of the pics you post about feeling "cute today": you really ARE cute! This makes me so happy, I'm not kidding!

Again: I'm just a straight old heterosexual man who never saw how what you seek to do with your own body was any of my business; I wish you ALL the most success in what you endeavor to do. There are a lot of straight people who think this...or at least that's my circle of friends and acquaintances. We would/will stand up for you against harrassment, simply because everyone deserves basic dignity. (Yea, I'm an old Leftist.)

My friends and I: we just don't talk about transitioning people all that much. But when we do, we're basically cheering for you. You just have to accept my word here.

Another reason a lot of cis-people don't pipe up like I am here: Maybe because it's too emotionally charged, and now, for some asinine reason: it's a political issue? Really? My gawd, some people need to get a damned LIFE! (We Americans have a good idea who I'm talking about right now.)

Carry on! Thanks for reading and I love you all!

I make this sound all click-baity, but last Wednesday something popped - or ping! -ed - as I rode along the SMART trail out of the N. Petaluma station. I thought I hit a small rock with my back tire, which caromed off all ricochet-like and hit something, possibly some broken glass. Hence the PING! We all know that sensation. But then my back tire started rubbing against the frame every revolution. Got off, expecting a flat. No. No flat. WTF could have happened to have caused all that?

Look again: broken spoke. Snapped right in half, about midway. This has never happened to me my entire riding life - and I'm old enough to be retired. Seriously.

But I was askin' for it: a heavy old Centurion, made sometime in the 1970s. Bought used from the Recycler in Los Angeles, for $50 circa 1987. Lotsa rust. Had the ball bearings re-packed 12 years ago in Berkeley. A tenspeed; not even a road bike. I love it like an old friend. But it was gettin' up there.

Do I know how to replace a spoke? I do not. So I take it to Mike's Bikes in Petaluma. They've never done me wrong. The quote seemed high but what do I know; they're sweethearts, good community members. I say yea, okay, and ask when will it be ready? This Monday or Tuesday.

Yikes. I know how addicted I am but internally I try to laff it off. Now I can get...other?...things?..."done"? until then? Right...

By Saturday I was jonesin' pretty hard. It is an addiction, friends. It's a physical addiction, with all the concomitant neurobiological aspects of exercise addiction. But I think I was also addicted to the quality of consciousness that riding affords. Which must be related to the physical aspects in some way. What the hell do I know about dopamine or endorphins or my native endocannabinoids? Not much, but maybe just enough to know this jit's fer real.

I expected a call today: come pick it up; it's ready and bring yer wallet. Had it circled on my calendar. I got the call: turns out my axle broke. Another week. A whole new wheel. Muy expensivo!

But hey, the dealer knows you'll pay. 'Cuz ya gotta have it. The bike-buzz, that is. I feel like a character in a William S. Burroughs novel. I went for a long walk today. It just wasn't the same trip, man.

And believe me, I do mean "Man."

El Cerrito just voted to have these taken down. Everything I read about them weighs pretty heavily in favor of the idea that they're going to be abused.

I've seen some other concerned citizens post here about Flock. And yes: our phones are tracking devices, too. But at what point is all this massive one-way surveillance worth it to the non-extremely rich class, which is all of us on r/SantaRosa?

In this WaPo article:

&gt;After The Post relayed its findings to Flock, the company said in a statement it “will soon be announcing better filters and tools to stop abuse before it happens.”<

Those of you who have read a recent book about the cult of Facebook, Careless People, will know how much to trust such a statement:

[Someone at the Reddit for Social Psychology thinks this group would be a better fit for my query. I don't know why that would be, but maybe things have changed in academia in ways I didn't understand 40 years later? Anyway...]

This is just in case there's anyone out there who's interested in these works. I'm not a Social Psychologist, but am influenced by the seminal texts. In the late 1980s I had a very stimulating semester in college reading Festinger, Zimbardo, Milgram, etc.

Recently I've read two criticisms of When Prophecy Fails: one, Timothy Jenkins's 2013 Of Social Scientists and Flying Saucers, and 2025's "Debunking 'When Prophecy Fails'", a 15 pager from the Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences, found here in a PDF.

As an outsider, I understand the critique of methods, especially any duplicity. That said, I wonder if anyone else here has read either one or both of these critiques of Festinger?

[Someone at the Reddit for Social Psychology thinks this group would be a better fit for my query. I don't know why that would be, but maybe things have changed in academia in ways I didn't understand 40 years later? Anyway...]

This is just in case there's anyone out there who's interested in these works. I'm not a Social Psychologist, but am influenced by the seminal texts. In the late 1980s I had a very stimulating semester in college reading Festinger, Zimbardo, Milgram, etc.

Recently I've read two criticisms of When Prophecy Fails: one, Timothy Jenkins's 2013 Of Social Scientists and Flying Saucers, and 2025's "Debunking 'When Prophecy Fails'", a 15 pager from the Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences, found here in a PDF.

As an outsider, I understand the critique of methods, especially any duplicity. That said, I wonder if anyone else here has read either one or both of these critiques of Festinger?

This is just in case there's anyone out there who's interested in these works. I'm not a Social Psychologist, but am influenced by the seminal texts. In the late 1980s I had a very stimulating semester in college reading Festinger, Zimbardo, Milgram, etc.

Recently I've read two criticisms of When Prophecy Fails: one, Timothy Jenkins's 2013 Of Social Scientists and Flying Saucers, and 2025's "Debunking 'When Prophecy Fails'", a 15 pager from the Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences, found here in a PDF.

As an outsider, I understand the critique of methods, especially any duplicity. That said, I wonder if anyone else here has read either one or both of these critiques of Festinger?

Does anyone know where I can get a stuffed pizza like Zachary's in Berkeley, but in our neck of the woods? There's Chicago deep dish style, but then there's stuffed style, which seems popular enough in Oakland, Pleasant Hill, Berkeley, Pleasanton, and Livermore...I can't believe there aren't people who want this style in Sonoma County. It must be here...but where is it?

I'm on a road bike. No way in hell am I riding 116 Gravenstein. I don't have a death wish.

This site has a million words and tells you where to start and that the "signs are well marked" but it lacks a damned MAP!

Do I have to get on Stony Point for most of the way? There's got to be a series of back roads that connect, but I can't find them online.

It was serialized in Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap's Little Review, and they were literally persecuted for it, as most of you know. I'm reading yet another recount of how what we now know as High Modernism got up on its legs: A Danger To The Minds Of Young Girls: Margaret Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature, by Adam Morgan (2025).

Two lesbians who loved avant, new ideas, anarchism, free love, women's rights, Anderson and Heap. Of course they were persecuted left and right. NB to those who haven't thought about it: lesbians were crucial to the rise of Modernism: Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, Bryher, HD (bisexual?), Anderson, Heap, Gertrude Stein and Toklas, Natalie Burney.

You, the current reader of this on Reddit, possibly: *This was probably written by a lesbian, self-serving, tryna claim credit....*Naw man: I'm a straight dude.

One of the few remaining subscribers writes to the Little Review in 1920:

"Can you tell me when James Joyce's Ulysses will appear in book form? Do you think the public will ever be ready for such a book?"

Jane Heap wrote 'em back:

"Ulysses will probably appear in book form in America if there is a publisher for it who will have sense enough to avoid the public."

It would take 13 years from then.

EDIT and WARNING: 2 hours after my initial post: there's a huge response to my query and I really appreciate it. To someone just happening upon this thread, there's a LOT OF BRUTAL MURDER stuff mentioned, so if this kind of thing really bothers you, please don't read. I know this stuff makes some people very anxious - it has creeped me out, I know, so I hope I don't have nightmares tonight - so I just wanted to get a warning in. Remember: Sonoma County is one of the safest places in the US! Those who responded already have reminded me of crimes I must have blotted out of my memory. Some I didn't even know about. Wow. I welcome fringe-weird stories about Sonoma County in addition to the hardcore crime. There must be other cults besides the 19th Century Fountaingrove one?

Here's my original post:

______________________________________________________

I just finished Joshua Paddison's book on the Thomas Lake Harris cult in Fountaingrove, Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal, and California's First Cult Scare.

And it got me thinking about how relatively calm and quiet Sonoma County seems to me. I mean, there was the Windsor house where Tim Scully and Nick Sands made hundreds of thousands of hits of LSD.

There was the Polly Klaas murder, a national news story.

There has to be a LOT more. But what? What stories about Sonoma County stand out to you about crime, celebrities, cults, drugs, very weird or eccentric people, and sex? The very idea of Sonoma County as some sort of National Enquirer hotbed is ludicrous...not that anyone has ever linked our area of the world with wild drug-crazed sex fiends, etc.

I talked to some friends about this and they basically had little more than what I've just come up. One said Manson and his gang lived here, but we looked it up: it was more Mendocino County. Of course San Francisco is brimming with lurid stories. But I'm wondering about Sonoma County.

But my mind is probably bad at filing away this stuff; I tend to concentrate on how Sonoma County is paradisical in many ways. I think of it as very safe, very sane and a wonderful place and that I got lucky to live here. I suspect there really isn't much more, but maybe there is a dark underbelly I just don't know about?

In doing research for something I thought totally unrelated to DSPD, I'm reading a 2001 book, Sounds In The Dark: All Night Radio in American Life, by Michael C. Keith.

There's a lot of writing on the perceived audience for all-night radio: the insomniacs, night shift workers, the lonely, and those who "like" to stay up after midnight.

Here's an expert: a person who had an all-night radio show for many years:

"Overnight radio is unique. It is a time when a significant number of people are alone lying in bed in the dark with the radio on. Maybe sleep doesn't come because they've got problems. Maybe a physical ailment. Maybe it's the emptiness of being alone that plagues them. For this group of listeners, all-night radio is a lifeline. For all-night workers, such as truckers or third-shift assemblers, there's a disenfranchisement from the daytime world. These people listen as they work for companionship." - Rollye James, who apparently hosted a nationally syndicated all-night radio show. (p.7)

The only thing that resonates here, with me, is the word "disenfranchisement." (You too?)

Nowhere in this book does an expert cite "circadian rhythm," much less delayed sleep phase disorder. These experts thought their overnight radio audience were misfits, lonely people, insomniacs, and shift workers. (To be fair, I think it's mostly true that DSPD creates misfits and loneliness, but that's some other topic.)

By 2001 there had been a lot of inroads in DSPS/DSPD, but they seem to have been confined to medical journals. There are hundreds of people in this book who made their bones by catering to people listening to the radio overnight, and no one has any idea about those of us who feel normal and, speaking for myself, great, at 2:30 AM.

As a kid and into my 30s (a long time ago) I was one of these overnight radio listeners, but I was never working "graveyard," never "lonely." I thought I was just a bad sleeper for many, many years because I didn't know about DSPD. But not one of these experts knew about the (7-10%?) of the population whose genes default to falling asleep after midnight. This book was only published 25 years ago. I wonder how much awareness there is of DSPD in the audiences for overnight radio now? I suspect it's not much better.

The way we make this better is to communicate the truth about this.

Today I rode the SMART path from near Old Caz brewery to the Rohnert Park library. Stiff headwind going there, a bunch of downed branches between E. Cotati and Southwest Blvd, so SMART crew out there with chainsaws. There was no warning and I happened upon it. They stopped cutting and one guy carried my bike through all the branches - cool dude! - and I made it to the library.

On the way back was a very strong tailwind - an almost "perfect" at-your-back tailwind -where you pedal once and the wind just kinda suctions you along the road. Which I remember from being a kid. It still, after all these years, feels weird to ride with such a tailwind, and is the sort of thing that feels like you're dreaming.

They have a ton of the wittiest songs ever written, and this one's a favorite of mine, but I'm reaching out to connoisseurs/mavens/geeks here: the 1970s ambient texture and mood is totally evocative of music I heard as "audible wallpaper" in my childhood (I'm olde!). However, I realize I can't name one "model" Schlesinger and Collingwood may be drawing from here. There's some artist (or a few artists) that were emblematic of this sound in the 1970s, but I can't name one off hand. The Temptations?

Someone throw me a bone here. Maybe you caught a little interview (that I haven't seen) in which they talked about this. The "wakka-choo" wah pedal for guitar is one thing, but that synthesized saturation another.

The chorus...

It's been so long

So long

Darling don't you know

We miss you when you're gone

...Is pure genius.