Bubba Bamboo

I found myself this warm October morning wandering the bamboo garden at Foothill College, and then I snapped these four pictures as souvenirs. A lot has changed at Foothil since the last cluster of classes to which I was availed, from Lydia Oey, Janis Stevenson and Mike Sult about eight years ago. I was actually, sadly, on academic probation then because I had registered for some classes but had to go on the road with some clients and the teachers were obliged to grade me accordingly. Today I took the semi-humbling step of registering again, at the relatively new cccapply.org.

My old friend Brian Evans is teaching a course on macroeconomics and said I could enroll. I’ve been involved in a semi-serious self-improvement regiment of learning some economics. I have bought maybe 12 issues of The Economist, for example, plus a book by a guy named Siglitz. When I ran for Palo Alto City Council and was semi-queried about economics I claimed to be a devotee of Arrow and Fuchs more than John Taylor, mainly because their sons Andy (a manager) and Ken (a guard) were involved in the Gunn basketball program in my day (whereas Professor Taylor’s son I met years later was a baseball player and managed a local rock band I once booked called Wikkit). Now I say I am a Keynesian.

My dad and brother like to pretend I don’t know squat about the economy so maybe Professor Evans course will give me verbal or social scientific spitballs to toss back in retaliation at family gatherings.

When I went by campus to register, a retired counselor named Mary Lou (I think) told me Mr.Evans was well-liked and was the subject of a profile by student Lisa Na, in The Loop magazine, a student publication, under the title “Evanomics”. Very cool!

Brian, who I still call “Bub”,  short for, I presume “Bubba”, was my teammate on the famous SCVAL league champion Gunn Titans basketball team in 1981. Actually, we played various sports and boyish kid activities quite frequently between 1974 (fifth grade) and the end of high school, 1982. At my 25th Gunn reunion, in 2007, I was invited back into a fantasy football league he and I founded in 1979 that he had kept going (and now features two other high school classmates Gregs Zlotnick and Nerland) all these years. The article in the student publication, although glowing in praise and admiration, called Bub a former "vagabond".

 With the recent passing of Bubba Smith, of Michigan State, Buffalo Bills, Lite Beer commercials and Police Academy, my reflective walk thru the bamboo grove was made that much more poignant.

 It turns out there is also a Bubba Bamboo brand of children’s products, in Victoria, New South Wales. It turns out even further that that parent company Bubba Blue is located less than 20 minutes from our high school star Kent Lockhart, who is in Dandenong – it would be quicker for Lockhart to buy Bubba Bamboo direct from Bubba Blue headquarters than it was for me to get from University North, where I walked my girlfriend’s cocker spaniel Frida this morning (and most days, as much as three times) to Foothill.

Economics, bamboo, basketball, Lite Beer commercials on Youtube -- It’s a big world, full of splendors, surprises near and far, the familiar, the foreign, it rolls, sometimes bounces, bends, breaks and gives up its secrets. Some times. There are some rules, like in science, but overall it’s as much art as anything. The whole farrago. Big 77, gone at 66. The continuum hypothesis and misty mountain hop.

Good luck to Professor Brian Evans and his students at Foothill and please don’t flunk me. I will give it the old college or even better the Gunn Titans “titensity” try.