Pocketful of Notes

It seems like some people think that Angels and Demons is a sequel to the earlier movie DaVinci Code. It is not. Dan Brown wrote Angels and Demons first and it was published in 2000. Dan Brown's next book, The DaVinci Code, was published in 2003. In fact, there is even a brief reference to an incident in the earlier book. Why Ron Howard decided to film DaVinci Code first is a mystery to me unless he was not sure how successful the movie would be and then when it became very popular he decided to cash in on that by filming the other book.

Did I hear correctly on KCBS this morning that some people are delaying or not going on vacation because they might miss their e-mail messages? How could that be? Certainly in my travels in Thailand and in France I have found quite a number of Internet shops all over the place. Perhaps I heard incorrectly at 6:30 this morning or did not hear more important parts of the story.

I do not understand how the City of San Francisco could let the 49ers get away to Santa Clara. At one time it was mentioned that the toxic clean-up of the old Hunter's Point Naval Yard would take too long and that Dr. York wanted to be in the new stadium sooner than that time frame allowed. Well, even in pristine Santa Clara that will not happen until at least 2014 with a public vote on the proposal not occurring until 2010 and the outcome of that vote is not assured.

And in these financially troubled times Cal-Train is planning service cutbacks. The nature and extent of those cutbacks is not certain at the moment but one proposal would be to eliminate weekend service. That would be terrible to say the least and would even make it more difficult for 49er fans to get to games in Santa Clara where there is a direct VTA light rail connection between the Mountain View Cal-Train stop and the Great America stop.

Even here in San Francisco the Muni is proposing to eliminate N-JUDAH service on the Embarcadero on weekends. They say that the T-THIRD ST. line can handle the traffic there. Well, I don't think so. Currently the T-line only runs single car trains and they need 2-3 car trains on the days when the Giants play home games. Or will they just re-extend their N-line service before, during and after weekend Giants games. They really need to re-consider that proposal as I do not see how eliminating the final four stops would save them any appreciable amount of money.

Everyone is just grasping at straws with no real plans to deal with the financial crisis.