Not Big County
California's least populous county (1,208 residents) led the state in voter turnout earlier this month, with 86 percent of its eligible voters doing their civic duty. (You'll note I didn't say "going to the polls" -- Alpine County is so sparsely peopled, voting is done by mail.) But what I found interesting was that once again, newspapers could not resist calling it tiny Alpine County. Even before this latest story popped up, Google returned 94 instances of Alpine tinization.

By the way, Alpine County was blue, one of the few inland counties in California to go Kerry's way.

UPDATE: Sacramento Bee story avoids use of "tiny"! Calls it "little Alpine County."

Uh-oh
A decade ago I couldn't avoid the O.J. trial. I was working on the desk at a tabloid-style newspaper and Ito, Cochrane, Clark et al. provided us headline fodder for months. But like you, Thinking Reader, I tend to find these high-profile, media-soaked celebrity prosecuctions to be debasing to anyone who gets near them. So it wasn't until a couple of months ago that I paid any real attention to the Scott Peterson case. When a colleague of mine explained the situation -- the body found 80 miles from the couple's home, and just where the husband had happened to go fishing on Christmas Eve, the day the wife went missing -- I said: "Of course he did it." For a brief second I entertained the idea that actual evidence connecting Peterson to the crime might be necessary, but I quickly dismissed that thought. Of course he did it, I was surprised to believe, was good enough for me.

In the weeks after arriving at this view I thought a few more times about the case, testing myself to see if I really believed instinct was sufficient to convict a man of murder. To my continued amazement, I kept saying yes. I heard excellent arguments as to the danger of my view, but to me these arguments began to sound like silly intellectual exercises. Yeah, gut reaction is no way to run a system of justice, and going down that path could be mighty dangerous. But what about the danger of ignoring overwhelming human intuition? What about turning our back on what we know to be true? I remained comfortable with the idea that the pure implausibility that anyone other than Scott Peterson committed the murder was enough to convict.

Now, a jury apparently agrees.

My first reaction upon hearing the news yesterday was relief. The election results had left me wondering about my worldview. Twelve people in San Mateo County agreed with me. Excellent.

Then I saw the paper. The crowds cheering outside the courthouse. The glee at the conviction. The treatment of the trial as a sporting event and the verdict as Our Side winning.

Now I'm a bit scared where this might be taking us.

The Internet Never Forgets
Back in 1995 I co-authored an article for the American Journalism Review about journalists leaving the profession. I long ago lost my copy of the magazine, and every nine or 12 or 17 months over the past several years I've found myself Googling the article. Today, suddenly, the piece showed up, right here. It's not a bad bit of work. I actually think it holds up pretty well. You might even say it exhibits a certain prescience. So I'm glad to have found it. Nevertheless, what an alarming development!

Most of my journalism was committed pre-Internet. So I've rested comfortably, sure that my oeuvre, such as it is, was buried deep in the ink and dead tree past. But now I can't be so certain. Busy archivists are clearly at work, exhuming away. They couldn't possibly find their way to the Daily Californian of the early 1980s, could they? One shudders.

Payne in My Brain
Last week I had the chance to see Alexander Payne and his screenwriting collaborator, Jim Taylor, in conversation at the Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles. I'm tempted to say the event rocked my world, but probably the effect will wear off soon and nothing will be different. I'll stumble along in my prosaic PR position, only occasionally to recall with shame that I ever imagined I'd get off my ass and make some serious changes in my life. Be that as it may, sitting there and hearing two creative men whose vision and sensibilities I find in excellent accord with my own discussing how they approach their craft was exhilarating. It reminded me how inspiring (above caveat still in force, of course) it can be to surround oneself with artists.

Taylor got off some nice lines and struck me as every bit as valuable as Payne in creating the pair's four great screenplays. And yet it was Payne who stole this show. The man is too sharp. I mean it. His sharpness can inflict pain (in addition to hilarity). Ask a question that veers the wrong way and eeek he'll jab you. Only by the least generous interpretation possible did the poor fellow next to me imply that Payne's movies were repetitive in their emotional arc. "So you're saying we've made the same movie four times in a row," Payne answered bitterly. The questioner was shocked and babbled his denial/apology, but Payne stuck the needle in even farther -- not to hurt the guy, but for the great laughs. Finally, Payne did give the guy a sly look of sympathy, and said barely audibly, "We'll talk after." That's Payne: He's got a heart, but he hurts, too.

Anyway, the three things Payne said that I've really been thinking about:

1) That to write is to learn to live with despair. He wasn't talking about that romantic schlocky writerly oh woe is me I am an artiste kind of despair. He was talking about writing and hating what you create and the feeling that comes with that. "A day won't go by when you don't look at something you wrote and say, 'That sucks.' There's the despair. You have to be able to live with that and power through it."

2) Ultimately, the creative process is about "figuring out what's rattling around inside you." Not exactly a new sentiment, but hearing someone who is turning out consistently offbeat and excellent work say it brings the point home.

Number 3? Well, that came when I was introduced to Payne before the event (I was there representing Sanford Winery, and at Payne's request we were providing wines for a post-conversation tasting). "This is Pete Danko. Pete does PR for Sanford Winery," Payne was told. To which he replied: "No,I do PR for Sanford Winery." And he's right, of course; Sideways is the best thing to happen to our winery in years.

Four More Years
One of the standing talking heads asked a bunch of his sitting talking heads if the closeness of the election will inspire the re-elected president to reach across the aisle. By then I'd lost my zeal to get into arguments with the television, so instead of yelling, I just muttered, "You fuckers are so stupid," and walked away.

C'mon. Last time the guy "won" he didn't even carry the popular vote -- and then the only reaching across the aisle he did in four years was to give the Dems the finger.

I don't know. All I really ask of the guy is that he start being honest with us. He's a conservative. I'm a moderate liberal. He's not going to do much that I like and he's going to do quite a bit that I find objectionable. But quit the bullshit when it comes to Iraq and the rest of the foreign policy. Get some straight-shooters in there. Hell, start listening to McCain and Hagel and even Lugar. They're on your side. They support the war. But they aren't afraid to tell the truth about it all.

Time to step up, Mr. President.

Exercising My Right
It's about the only exercising I've done lately, what with this lingering cold. Anyway, I voted. At 7:10 a.m. I was voter No. 14 in our precinct. We've gone touch-screen here in Napa and it was quick and painless.

The Halloween Report: Sick Duck
Niko's nearly two-week-old cold took a surprising turn for the worse Saturday and he was no better Sunday. But we did rouse ourselves late in the afternoon to sacrifice one of our pumpkins at the altar of Jack O'Lantern, don the duck suit and hit about 10 houses here on South Montgomery. By the time we got back the lad was looking weak and the temperature checked in at 102.4F. Today, a visit to the doctor revealed the second ear infection of his life. Antibiotics to the rescue! It'll be great to have him back at full strength and I hope he gets a good long stretch of sniffle-, cough- and ache-free days before the next bug rolls through Sunrise Montessori School. He deserves it -- and so does his mom, who handled the vast bulk of the caregiving through it all.

Night Swimming
Oh, OK. Late-afternoon swimming. Cool REM song, though, eh?

After being on the shelf for a full week with a nasty cold, I finally got in the pool again today. Usually I sneak a swim in during my lunch break (and then eat at my desk); today I never could pull away from the office so the swim came afterward. Ever spent much time at a gym (or health club, or spa, or whatever)? One of the interesting things about your modern American exercise venues is that they can have a radically different feel depending on what time of the day you typically go. I'm at Healthquest around 2 p.m. most days, along with a bunch of retired farts who behave really sweetly toward each other, always saying hello and striking up good-natured conversations that veer off in strange and wonderful directions and which I take great pleasure in listening in on. Those old guys: Another cool thing is, you'll be sitting there getting dressed and some wacky song will come over the gym's stereo system, like that "Nasty Girl" tune done to the old sugar-sugar pop hit. The graybeards don't usually say anything about it, but you can just feel them thinking, "What the fuck?"

Mid-afternoon, the pool crowd tends to be made up of non-swimmer swimmers, old ladies in funny swim caps floating back and forth with random flutters of their arms, maybe a few folks doing a lap of crawl followed by a lap of bad breaststroke followed by a lengthy rest while clinging to the wall. I'm not saying I never see any good swimmers in the afternoon. I do. There's an Asian chick who wears a jammer top and never swims without some sort of device -- flippers, the little buoy thing that goes between the legs, the paddles on the hands, something. She's a very good swimmer and I usually see her once a week. And Mr. Swimmer Stud, a guy about my age who has your classic inverted isosceles triangle swimmer body and races sprints in national-level master's meets -- he makes rare appearances. Often, though, I'm the fastest guy in the pool, which tells you everything you need to know.

So anyway, today, as I mentioned, I couldn't get away until work was over. Around 5:30 on Friday evening, the locker room was full of middle-aged guys getting ready to pump iron. Conversations were sharper, less lyrical, predictable. At the pool, there were three swimmers, two long, lean young guys and a burly gal. All doing flip turns, all clearly keeping track of their lap splits. Nothing wrong with that, just different.

Different, too, of course, was the angle of the sun. Obviously. Over the course of the summer and early fall I became accustomed to the high, hot sun and I usually plastered sunscreen on my exposed pate. And it always took me a lap or two to transition from the warm air to the chilly water, but working hard, the temp was just right, cool and refreshing.

Today, the sun was low in the west, lower than I was ready for. There was only a half-hour of full sun to go. The light, looking across the length of the pool and out toward the sunset, was beautiful. The water seemed to move differently, slower, pulsing instead of pitching and splashing. Getting in out of the mild but cooling air, the water was warm, enveloping.

So with all of that, it felt great to swim. I kept it short, just about 1200 yards, half my usual swim. I was surprised at how comfortable I felt in the water. It took a few laps, but that's all. I guess this is the payoff for swimming four or five days a week for the past three months, and three or four days a week in the four months preceding that. Now I actually kind of understand what the swimming coaches say when they talk about "feel," about moving fishlike in the water. I felt good in the water, at home. Then again, maybe it was just some trick of the time of day, some inexplicable fleeting experience. I'll be curious to see how it goes on Monday afternoon, when I'm back at the usual time.

Those Remarkable Sox
My old college roommate and longtime pal Steve Kettmann, author of One Day at Fenway, had a piece in the Times yesterday. An interesting take on how the seeds for this remarkable Red Sox season were planted in the ashes of last year's loss to the Yankees. Ball fans, check it out.

Sideways
I went down to LA earlier this week for a special showing of Sideways, the movie that makes Alexander Payne 4-for-4, may win Paul Giamatti an Oscar nomination, and will probably transform Santa Barbara wine country forever. The movie is excellent (see David Edelstein's review in Slate, a right-on take on the film even if he pushes a bit too hard on the alcoholism theme). Sideways has a fun and easy pace and a warm sweetness without at all being saccharine. It's hilarious, true, but there's a deep desperation to both men that yields truly harrowing moments. I left the theater thinking a lot about the search for love and other transcendent experiences.

It should also be said that this is the wine movie of all time. Payne uses the characters beautifully to capture both the glory and folly of wine geekdom. Of course, the best thing about Sideways is that one of the wineries I do public relations for comes off well in the film. It's Sanford Winery, the first tasting room that Miles and Jack hit on their adventure. Miles introduces it as one of the best producers of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in Santa Barbara County. Yes, we've already obtained the clip from Fox Searchlight!

P.S.: David Denby loves Sideways, too. Here's his review in The New Yorker.