Happy New Year!

Go Kings!

The Sacramento Kings nba basketball team won in the last second, literally, last night in their game against the Grizzlies, 100-98, with a halfcourt prayer shot at the buzzer by Tyreke Evans. Memphis and Sacramento are apparently the last place teams, but it was still an exciting game to watch.

I was going back and forth between the nailbiter and an interview on Larry King with the world's richest person (over Bill Gates and Warren Buffett), Mexico's Carlos Slim, who strikes me as a really good, stand-up person. So maybe the Simpson's caricature of capitalists as being loathsome Montgomery Burns types is unrepresentative. I think he has 53.5 billion or something, if I remember correctly. The only thing I can say that I don't like about him is that he has invested in tobacco, which kills someone every 6 seconds, the commercials say.

I just finished listening to all the lectures by Richard A. Walker in this last semester at Cal's Economic Geography of the Industrial World. Good stuff. Despite not seeing any of the visuals, I would still say I learned a fair amount.

I bought an Amtrak ticket to Berkeley, where Sara works, for Sunday, when we will celebrate Christmas with my family in San Francisco. A one-way fare costs 27 bucks from Roseville. I used to take Amtrak alot to the Bay Area from Davis when I was a student there. The Veil Between Heaven and Earth is now open for business! (before the students have returned from break). I read the Tao Te Ching the other day, which they sell there.

Part 5 (there are 81 small chapters) says (in part):

Between Heaven and Earth,
There seems to be a Bellows:
It is empty, and yet it is inexhaustible;
The more it works, the more comes out of it.
No amount of words can fathom it:
Better look for it within you.

Now you can also look for it on 1862 Euclid, in Berkeley, 94709