Last night at about 20:00 PDT, on my way to David's Coffee Place, I glanced into the Brass Rail, a San Diego night club. On a Friday night, there were no customers. That had changed by the time that I headed homeward, but it still wasn't particularly busy. Nor was it yester-day. David's Coffee Place has also been slow the last few days. Carlos, one of i baristi, suggested that this is largely an artefact of the increased price of gasoline. I think that he's correct. I also think, as I told him, that current petroleum prices are a bubble; but I don't know when the bubble will collapse, nor what will trigger the collapse.

Locally, there are various store-front locations in Hillcrest that have been vacant for months. It's an inescapable that there is some price at which someone would be willing to rent any given one of these sites; but landlords are evidently unwilling to drop rents to such levels. This refusal might seem simply unreasonable, and perhaps in some cases it truly is, but all landlords (reasonable or unreasonable, renting or refusing) are unavoidably gambling. Any who enter into an arrangement at the market-clearing price of to-day is gambling that those prices won't rise to-morrow enough to off-set revenue forgone by waiting. At the same time, those who are refusing to lower their prices are hanging tough on a theory that prices will rise in such manner, or that they'll connect with someone who'll pay their price in spite of generally prevailing prices.

I don't know what the national economy is doing right now.

Apparently, growth figures for the first quarter were revised upward; I read mention of a 0.9% annualized rate (rather than 0.6%) yester-day. This is still low — one normally expects growth of about 3%. Some respected economists are predicting that the annualized rate of growth in the second quarter will be about 0.4%, followed by 2.2% in the third quarter. Since that would suggest that we would avoid a recession altogether, I can safely predict that present efforts by pundits to redefine recession will intensify.

There has been some yammering about consumer confidence, which has dropped to levels not seen since the economic down-turn during the Presidential administration of GHW Bush. The consumer confidence measure seems to be a garbage statistic to many economists, including me. Further, it hit that previous minimum at the end of a down-turn, rather than leading a worsening of conditions. (And the down-turn in question didn't even qualify as a recession proper, as it did not last for two quarters.) If the statistic means much of anything, it doesn't mean what journalists seem to think that it means, nor what they want their readers to think that it means.

Conventional wisdom seems to be that the worst of the credit-crunch has passed. That means, however, that the Federal Reserve System will counter-act the pressure on prices creäted by the measures that it took to loosen credit; those counteractives are, unsurprisingly, things that will re-tighten credit — the hope being that a credit crunch doesn't resume. I don't think that they'll get to have their cake and eat it too; prices will rise, or the economy will go into recession, or both.

David's Coffee Place, transitioning to Babycakes (or perhaps to Babycakes @ David's Coffee Place), now has a notice posted on the entrance door, quoting local health regulations, and declaring that companion animals other than service animals will no longer be permitted in the building or on the patio.

Any reasonable response to this change must turn upon how one feels about the more general change of the business. There is little question that local officials will be more zealous about enforcing such things as the quoted regulations if that general change is made.

And I don't know whether David's Coffee Place as I first knew it could have survived. (Certainly no one has shown the accounting books to me.)

David's Coffee Place in Hillcrest has a rear patio and some sort of back room which have long provided meeting places for chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous and similar organizations. Yester-day, I learned that the new owners have applied or will be applying for a license to sell beer and wine. To-day I saw a notice on the front door declaring that, beginning on 1 May, the patio and back-room will be remodelled and no longer available for such meetings.

The notice also indicates that Babycakes is imagined as a bakery and bistro.

David's Coffee Place has been around for about 15 years, but it has only been a few weeks since I started hanging-out here. Now it is apparently to be gentrified. Perhaps I should be glad that I didn't have more time to get attached to it.

Up-Date (2018:01/30): Someone informed me of a change of the domain name for Alcoholics Anonymous, and I've editted the entry to reflect that change. That same someone asked me to include a link to a resource hyperlist from Comlumbus Recovery Center for those dealing with alcohol addiction. That's a bit tangential to the original purpose of this entry, but….

Yester-day I received an old Haldeman-Julius catalogue that contains a picture of David Oliver Cauldwell. He looked like some cross between a stereotypical Marine and Beaker.

The mail to-day brought four tickets from Television Preview:

You have been selected to participate in a survey whose findings will directly influence what you see on television in the future.

The thing is written to make it seem that the audience will be evaluating a show or shows (and my gut reäction was to be appalled that any of us in SoCal should be asked, it being bad enough that the thinking in Los Angeles has such a disproportionate and otherwise perverse effect). But I did a quick check on the WWWeb, and what I've learned is that the audience will really be used to test commercials, and otherwise be surveyed for their reäctions to consumer products. The shows presented will be old-and-probably-failed pilots or series.

I stopped at La Vache for lunch, and ate too much food. I entered planning to eat a salmon sandwich, and found carrot soup on the menu. I ordered a bowl (rather than a cup), and this in itself was a good choice; but I should then have forgone the sandwich (and its side of mashed potatoes), in spite of the anti-depressant virtues of salmon. I am now parked at David's Coffee Place, attempting to remain relatively inert.

Speaking — well, writing — of David's Coffee Place, my understanding is that the new owners are going to change the name to Babycakes. I think that this new name is a generally bad idea. First, David's Coffee Place (AKA just David's Place) is something of a neighborhood institution — a well-regarded institution — and a wholesale name-change will make people feel as if that institution is gone. Second, I see the particular name Babycakes as the sort of thing associated with something at best briefly fashionable.

Someone in my apartment complex reports his or her lap-top computer having been stolen from his or her apartment.  They ask that we be alert to someone who seems inappropriately to have an lap-top computer.  Since there are cameræ at all of the entrances and exits, the strong suggestion is that is was stolen by or with the complicity of one of the other residents. I have been used to feeling that I could leave my door unlocked when making a quick trip out, and otherwise feeling that my things needn't be locked away in my apartment. I regret the change.

On a sidewalk along Washington Street this morning, I spotted a belly-ring sans the little screw-ball that would keep it attached to the big screw-ball. I imagined it falling free from someone's navel, though it might instead have escaped a pocket or hand-bag.

As I was passing Club San Diego on Fourth Avenue, the sounds of men giggling were escaping through an open door. I resisted the urge to cry Christ is risen! into the tiled entrance-way. There would have been a good chance of a reply asking just what part of Him had risen.

I breakfasted at the San Tropez Bistro on Fifth Avenue. Now I am parked in David's Coffee Place, until I feel that I must go home and get some sleep.

Last night, at David's Coffee Place, a large, odd fellow came and sat near the pianist. He began aggressively coaxing the pianist to play this-or-that in particular manners, paused in doing this to talk loudly for a while over his cell phone (it perhaps did not occur to him that the he could step outside for a while, and that the rest of us might not want to hear his part of the conversation), and then returned to the dominating of the pianist. The large fellow did put some money in the pianist’s tip jar. But his manner was still odd and very pushy. I tentatively mapped-out how to forcibly intervene if things got clearly out-of-hand.

After the fellow left, the pianist noted that the interaction had been difficult. I noted that I'd been wondering whether I might have to bail-in, but hadn't seen real signals of impending violence. I suggested that the pianist work-out a signal that regulars would recognize as a call for assistance. He tried to think of an appropriate tune. Since he plays a lot of show-tunes — yeah, it’s Hillcrest — and indeed songs from West Side Story, I suggested Jet Song. He liked that.

I don't know whether he understands that I would, indeed, bail-in.

As I left David's Coffee Place to-night, there was a group of men out front, hugging and talking. Across the street, a drunk yelled impotently at them that they were disrespecting the male gender. At the time, I was amused enough that I laughed aloud for a while.

But it does irk me that many people think that they are entitled to invoke respect as a justification for oppression.