The apple and grape juices on these shelves contain lead

Today at the supermarket, as I was picking up my usual 2 quarts of Mott's apple juice, I was confronted with this sign.

WTF?  If it has lead in it, TAKE IT OFF THE SHELF.  Don't just put up a little sign that I'm unlikely to read anyway.  Or better yet, how about making apple juice without lead in it in the first place?

It turns out that this ridiculous warning is the product of a similarly ridiculous piece of legislation voted in by Californians in 1986.  While the intent is good - to notify people of unsafe chemicals they are exposed to - the execution is pretty poor.  The FAQ will tell you that just because a product carries a warning, doesn't mean it is unsafe.  In fact, as the FAQ points out, since there are no reporting requirements on companies the state government can't tell you why a company has chosen to make a declaration, or indeed tell you anything useful such as, for which chemical, how long, and at what level.

Take my apple juice.  A warning needs to be posted unless exposure is low enough to pose no significant risk, which (for cancer causing chemicals) is defined as:

the level of exposure that would result in not more than one excess case of cancer in 100,000 individuals exposed to the chemical over a 70-year lifetime. In other words, a person exposed to the chemical at the “no significant risk level” for 70 years would not have more than a “one in 100,000” chance of developing cancer as a result of that exposure.

This statement seems full of holes, which is probably why the law has made shady lawyers a lot of money.  What does 70 years of exposure mean for apple juice anyway?  A glass a day?  A gallon a day?

It is very common for Californian apartment garages to have a declaration due to the chemicals present in car exhaust.  This is the one on ours - scary huh?

I suspect the levels of chemicals would only be harmful if you lived in the garage for 70 years.  But who knows?  The law says the apartment owners should be able to tell you, but they just put the sign up so they don't get sued.

In any case, I'm more happy ignoring this sign on the garage than on my apple juice.  Labelling law FAIL.

Santana Row, CA: When 15 is too slow and 20 is too fast, you need

R|Evolution: where the very very recent past goes to be ogled by nerds

We took Em's dad to the Silicon Valley Computer History museum, which is a stone's throw from the Googleplex.  It is a very well presented exhibition, and covers 2000 year of computing history from the abacus to the present day.  We spent 4 hours there and I still felt like I skipped over a lot of things!

Nerds love to have conversations about the 'ancient' hardware they played games on when they were young.  I certainly wasn't around when the only reason companies could think of to have a computer at home was to store recipes:

But I did spend a lot of time playing platform games on a monochrome orange screen of an Osbourne 'portable' computer similar to this one:

And the gaming section was particularly awesome - computer progress is moving forward so fast the very recent past is now immortalised in the museum.

I hope they have plenty of room to expand...

I know why BART is so expensive

They blew all their money on cones.  Now I totally understand why San Francisco Airport to Millbrae, which is a one-stop 4 minute ride, costs $4.00.

Quintessential San Francisco

The Haight

The Alamo Square 'Painted Ladies'

The unexpected but very cool Alamo Square shoe garden

De Young museum, Golden Gate Park

Point Lobos, Carmel, Monterey

We drove Em's dad down to his conference at Monterey, and while we were there did some sightseeing.  We grabbed a coffee and a pastry at Carmel-by-the-Sea aka Rich-people-retired-with-handbag-dogs-by-the-Sea and kept going down to Pt. Lobos for some easy hiking.

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We saw some great coastal scenery, a bunch of whale spouts out on the horizon, sea lions, heaps of ropey kelp, and a huge pod of dolphins.

All the little dots in this picture are dolphins, there must have been more than 50

After delivering Tony to his conference we walked along Cannery Row, of John Steinbeck fame. The coastal scenery around Monterey is impressive, and I seem to remember the aquarium is quite good, but I'd give Cannery Row a miss. It is a nasty tourist trap - very similar to San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf.

ThinkGeek schwag

Thanks to everyone back home for my ThinkGeek voucher.  Here's what I got!

Charging grass (a bed to hide charging cords for our new android family);

a sweet T-shirt; and

a handy keyring multi-tool that slips over a key.

Angel Island: a great day out on the bay

Our second weekend in California, and already we had visitors!  We met our Baltimore peeps and hopped on the ferry from Fisherman's Wharf for an excursion to Angel Island.  When we arrived in the freezing fog we were wondering if we had made the right decision in coming - the views of the bay were nowhere to be seen.

California is doing its best to make us feel at home with all the gum trees and wattle, which is nice, and if the views weren't there at least the fog looked pretty.

Luckily the fog did lift, and Angel Island treated us to some fantastic views.  Watching a giant wall of fog roll off the ocean and hit the Golden Gate was pretty amazing.

There is a lot of history on the Island.  Amongst other things, it was the equivalent of Ellis Island for the west coast, i.e. an immigration processing centre.  There is an interesting museum on-site in the old buildings.  It chronicles the poor living conditions imposed on migrants, and the prejudiced procedures designed to keep people out that Barack Obama formally apologised for in January 2010.

You can camp on the island, and a number of people were doing that on the weekend we were there.  It would be a great place to wake up and take sunrise photos of the bay, or tell a ghost story in some of the abandoned Fort McDowell buildings.

The ferry schedule gave us 11am-3:50pm on the island, which was plenty of time to circumnavigate it on foot and wander through the buildings and museum.  Don't rely on the cafe being open - it wasn't for us and we were starving by the time we got back to Fisherman's Wharf.

"Australia's Favorite Cookie?"

We were astonished to see Tim Tams in our local Californian supermarket!  Thanks Pepperidge Farm for producing "Australia's Favorite Cookie" and saving our friends from lugging packs of chocolate biscuits around airports in their suitcases. 

They are the real deal, and taste exactly the same as far as I can tell.  I'll let you know if we do a blind taste test comparison.

Next...Vegemite?

The breast views in San Francisco

On our first weekend in San Francisco the weather was beautiful so we took advantage of the unfogginess and checked out the 360° view from the Twin Peaks, the breast-like geographic centre of San Francisco.

And since the weather was holding, we thought we'd grab some cloudless bridge photos too.