 Welcome to German East Bay's third anniversary. So I think we will be in this conference in about three years and that was basically because of Bay Area Science Class School. The Bay Area Science Class School is actually next week and Rebecca and I can't thank you for showing up a week early. We had some really great talks. I didn't have an intro for the library, but my titles life and my intro for the Microsoft works. The open public library has been joining us for over a year now. They're on that back table. If you don't have a library card, you should get one. We should also talk to them about all the awesome events they have. For example, on Thursday at the 22nd, they have a librarian that likes to tell you how old your house is and the history, so they'll dig through all the tax records and tell you why the government knows as much about your house as it does. We also have the real cheese guy. We have some great tropical drinks and cheap beer at the bar so we can fill this up. So our first speaker is going to tell us a little about dams and especially some of the dumb ways we build dams. That's not the only dumb thing we do. Does anyone know who this is? Anyone from UCS? So this is Charles Hatfield. He was famous as a rain maker. He supposedly successfully made rain at many places. So in 1915, San Diego, which had the marina dam that looked like this, said there's not nearly enough water in our reservoir so we'll pay you $10,000 which will give us 40 to 50 inches of rain. In January, it worked. So this is a sweet water dam in the family. This is a bridge. This was after only 30 feet of rain. So this is San Diego. Obviously the rain maker probably didn't do this in science there. They didn't stop him from trying to collapse his $10,000. And the city refused to pay him. Not because they didn't think he made the rain. They said, well, if you did make the rain, you're liable for all of this damage, which is way more than $10,000. And apparently this traveled through the courts many times until finally some judge said, look, this was an act of God. You're not liable for the damage that we're also not paying you. I didn't want to tell a tale of a slightly more successful dam. So this is the Hoover Dam built only 15 years after that big flame. The Hoover Dam is responsible for generating between three or ten a terawatt hours of electricity a year. Quite a bit of electricity. It actually has four million cubic yards of concrete. If they had poured it all at once, it would have taken 125 years for it to cool. So instead, they carved these squares and filled it through each square with concrete. They also had cool water from the river, Colorado River, running through it to help solidify faster. They're expecting this dam to last 10,000 years and actually have a star chart at the base of this dam that's lost the last 14,000 years and accurately tell people in the future why exactly the dam was constructed. That means that a lot of the dams that we have are not built so brilliantly and tell you a little bit about that here is Henry Benz. This damnation. What happens at the end-life of dams? What happens when we construct something large, when we do a lot of engineering near the dams? I'm not going to go into the how, when, why of dams, why they're built, where they're built so much, and the things like hydropower, electricity, all the ways that we use them because we get into a lot of politics and that just gets along that spot at the end. But why me? Mostly because I'm a river person. I like rivers. I've spent more than a decade restoring rivers throughout the Southwest in areas where often our rivers have no water and sometimes our national forests have no trees. But I like all things rivers and dams. Generally, they've been rivers. Jason's known. But beyond that, I like big, apocalyptic movies. I like movies where the volcano explodes or where we get the big earthquake and dams kind of fall into that pyramid. Often dams are big, apocalyptic things when they end, which makes the in-light a lot more fascinating. So I need your help on this part, the project on the dams suck section. So we're going to read this together and the dams suck what the fuck is your line each time. So I wanted you to put, so let's try it once, dams suck what the fuck, okay? Are you ready? We're actually out there, sir. Looks anyway. It's kind of good for something after all. So this is what I get from a liberal arts education. I went to Prescott College. Liberal arts for arts and the environment being pay-friendly. 75,000 and 84,000 dams that are large enough for us to track them. Nobody really knows how many. It depends on what lists you with what you look at nationally. And this is going to include all dams. Really knows how many or exactly where all of them are at this point. Out of those 75 to 84,000 dams we have approximately 14,000 that are considered high hazard dams. So high hazard dams aren't necessarily the size of the dam. It means that it should something happen to the dam. It's going to kill people and take out large economic resources. It will take out towns. It will take out houses. It will take out cars. It will take out women. There's something wrong with these dams. And in that subset of both of those we have 2,000 deficient high hazard dams. There are approximately 2,000 dams that we know are likely to fail and should they fail are going to kill people. And they're the ones that are still up. Also, not generally a known list. So dams are busts. We started in 1902 with the National Reclamation Act. And the National Reclamation Act was meant to help us settle the west. To bring water to the arid regions of the western U.S. to help us settle and become the red basket of America in the world. So in 1903 we had 5 projects. In 1904 we had 6 projects. We went like that for a couple of years running. And then toward the end of World War II all the way through the end of the 60s where we had 5 to 6 large dam projects finishing each day. We went from having 5 or 6 a year to having 5 or 6 a day. And that's how we got up to 200,000 dams in this area. And they're still building them. They're still building big dams. I heard somebody say tonight that they're not building dams anymore but it's not really true. We just don't hear about them. They're building a large one on the People River in New Mexico. So we build all these dams. We semi-keep track of them kind of. And then what happens to all these dams at their end like? Yeah, everything dies. Including not so great engineering. So dams do two things at the end of their lives. Dams fall down and dams fill up. So what happens when dams fall down? And by fall down we mean they explode catastrophically and occasionally take out people and resources and towns. These are just an idea. Dam started falling down kind of as soon as we as a country started building them. This isn't something new. We've known it happens. And we end up with things like the Johnstown flood. 1889, one of the largest disasters in the country associated with dams, over 2,200 people killed. Whole towns taken out. And this is a tree going through somebody's house at the house's tumble downstream. And they rebuilt the Johnstown dam and it went out again in the 1970s. And it kept happening into the 1900s. We start getting more dams and it continues to happen. We get better engineering and it continues to happen. The St. Francis Dam, this is down towards L.A. Mulholland that brought all the water from Owens Valley and helped L.A. to grow. Mulholland who engineered dams and wasn't actually an engineer. So he built, he got kind of a type of dam you like and then he scaled it up for this project. And almost immediately it started leaking. It started exfiltrating there were wet spots. People were a little concerned. He kept getting called out to look at it and he kept saying, yeah, that's what the inspect, that's expected for this side of dam. This side leaks, that side leaks. Eventually the center of it starts to leak and the dam keeper calls him out. He takes a look and he decides, yeah, that's an expected variation that's within spec for this side of a dam. And on that same day somewhere right before midnight it became not within spec for that side of a dam. And a 150 foot wall of water goes rushing down the cannon and it starts taking out the dam keeper and his family. It takes out a construction crew that's camped downstream and all of their people. And then this 150 foot wall of water starts rushing town through town through Ventura County all the way to the ocean. Oops. And it keeps happening. The 1970s. This is within my lifetime now. I don't know how many of you were my age, maybe not everyone. But this is semi recent history. The Teton Dam collapse. The largest earthen dam collapse in our country's history. So we have this giant lake of water. We have lots and lots of water that goes back with dirt. We put a lot of dirt in front of it. We put up a big plug and it starts to leak. And right before this picture, not too long before it, there's a picture of a caterpillar, a bulldozer. You'll hear more about caterpillars in the talk later. This is the different kind. This is the big yellow machine kind. And it's this little tiny tongue toy looking thing in front of this giant wall of dirt. And the giant wall of dirt eventually succumbs to all of the water behind it. And the water pushes through and there's this all the dirt and all the water rushing down. This is in Montana. It takes out 3,000 head of cattle and it keeps happening into the 80s into the 2000s. And we're not only holding back big sets of water with it. We're not only putting recreation or hydropower behind dams. We're putting mighty waste. We're putting coal sleds. We're putting this. And we all heard about the Animas River recently. Colorado's had it. West Virginia has it regularly. When you get toxic sludge running through your town and washing your house downstream. This was in 2000. Does anybody remember hearing about this on the news? Yeah. Not so much. Not unless you read the particular news. But we keep going into the 2000s. This is fairly recent. And these are only the big explosions that take out loss of life and limb and property in towns. You know, your car, maybe even you attach the vehicle not running up a tree. And it continues to happen all the way until this month. This month in the storms in South Carolina, 11 dams burst in a week. In less than a week. 11 dams in what was originally thought to be a thousand-year flood, which sounds big and impressive. A thousand-year flood is now the 100-year flood. And 100-year floods kind of happen about every 10 years. So this month, 11 dams in this country in one state, in one small region in just a few days. And these are the big ones. These are the ones that actually make news when the people pay attention to. These aren't the one in West Virginia or Wisconsin or, you know, a local small piece, relatively small one, burst through. But what happens to the ones that don't fall down? Well, dams, the lot. My background is really in rivers. And rivers move sediment. It's part of what they do. It's part of their life cycle. They tend to move back and forth through the dirt, through sediment. And they move the sediment with them. It's part of what they're supposed to do. When you put something in the way, the sediment fills up behind them. They start filling in. So the second option for dams, if they don't fall down, is that they fill up. Even the big ones. Glen Canyon. The second largest impoundment in the U.S. One of the most apocalyptic sets of numbers has it built in 1966 and filling in within 55 years. Can anybody do the math on that one? 1966 plus 55. What is that? Yeah, that's like tomorrow, almost. Yeah, it's 2021. But realistically, in terms of, this is a huge project. Yeah, this is a big canyon. This is a lot of money. And it fills in potentially really, really quick. So there's another option. Dams fall down, dams fill up, or we choose to take dams down. We plan for this. Let's see if this works. I was told girls can't make good noises when we do these things. This is the White Salmon in Idaho. It's also happening on the Elwa twice in Washington State. There are some great videos, particularly if you look at American Rivers on YouTube. We have the option to choose the dams and to take them out. So here, from back on, this one you probably can't see it very well. On the side, it's a little easier. We'll take out dams in the U.S. This is a map of the dams that have been taken out. Compared to the approximately 200,000 that we have, it's not a whole lot of dams. But we started taking them out. We take out one every couple of years. Then we start taking out one a year. Now we're taking out tens per year. And it doesn't need to be every dam. Some dams are doing their job. There's a reason that we build dams. There's a reason we might want them there. Some of them that we know might come down unexpectedly and kill people. Or ones that are feeling nervous, we should plan for how and when this happens instead of just kind of letting them take out dams. And there are dams nearby. So we don't want them to take out all the dams. The other part when dams come down, when we choose to take them out, is that it's kind of a lot of fun. When we get the apocalyptic piece where we choose to take out the dams, they're no longer meeting our needs. They're no longer functional before they kill people. Because what goes up must eventually come down. So that's the end of our dams talk. With the Sam Committee. The Sam Committee dam in the Bay Area, I don't know that one in particular, due to the Bay Area, I do know there's one on the campus of one of our local colleges that might not be meeting its needs and could perhaps be blocking salmon rent. That they should come out in the Bay Area. There are some great groups working on them in the Google Dam. There are local groups and local people working on the dams that perhaps aren't meeting our needs. That's destructive for dams when we blow them up with dynamite. Which is kind of a lot of fun as opposed to letting them burst. It's because we can plan for it. It's not unexpected. We can put the measures in place. We can blow parts of it. We can blow sections and not have the whole thing catastrophically fail at once. We can put measures in place to protect the areas that are most vulnerable. Oh, that's actually pretty well known. When can you dam might have been put in as a silk trap for the dam just downstream? We're very protective of our Colorado River water in California and various other southern Southwest states. It's silting pretty rapidly. Throughout the world, the average is 0.8% a year depending on, you know, what type of rockets going through. It's actually silting in fairly quickly. And also just for the first time recently with below it's ability to perhaps produce power. Came back up after rains, but yeah, as it's rising we are losing the ability to do what it's needing to do. Yeah, that's a big question. After they've built them with silt then what? The Elba River in Washington state is actually a really great example of that. It was pretty well filled in. Glyne's Canyon Dam and there was a second one on the Elba if you look them up. They're fairly well silted in. Within a year they start meandering as a river. They not only flow but they start moving back and forth. When we look at things like Hedge Henshey the projections are I believe, and I haven't worked with the groups that are particularly involved with them, that if we take out dams that are pretty well silted in then within a decade they'll start moving and start functioning as regular rivers again. Then we will see natural restoration starting to happen even if we don't go back in and start replanting. So we as humans we like to mess with things. It's kind of our thing. We're really semi-good at it and that we keep doing it. But if you take them out they actually will restore themselves within a fairly short period of time. They will start moving as a river again. One more? Anyone? I think we're good. So thanks so much for being here to give a quick ten minute break. So we'll go and talk to the open public library and grab a drink, grab some grilled cheese. If you are wearing a stylish alomot t-shirt like this or have brought a teahe mug and you did not get one of these cards you should go talk to the people on the front table because they're also judging you how you get a prize that's much much cooler than this card. We'll be back in ten. So right now I have a slight confession. I work for The Man but kind of if I didn't I'm not personally a big fan of Reed. This is my real personal choice so I love having to talk about a technology closer. I love Ron. I'm surprised about some of the history of Ron. First of all, Ron is essentially a byproduct of this. When we take sugar pain and make sugar we end up with a whole bunch of almost toxic stuff. In addition to how cool is used to harvest all this we get a whole bunch of molasses. By 1540 there were nearly 3,000 share mills in Brazil and yet there was essentially no Ron. We didn't have Ron by then. Molasses is gross and nasty at least with stuff like this. This is the 1919 in Boston and the molasses fled. Ron was discovered on this ship. It was at 1628. This is the Flassa. Ron and the Navy go quite well together. The Brits used to actually give it out as a parcel so they had a daily ration of Ron. We get the term proof because the way that soldiers checked if the Ron was good enough was that they doused gunpowder in this alcoholic beverage with no longer light. In Britain 100 proof means 57% ABV whereas here it's 50% ABV so make sure you buy some British liquor. We used to put beer on ships. Beer doesn't travel well. In the 1700s Ron essentially replaced it. Eventually they used to get half a pint of Ron a day. This is extremely high proof stuff because it looked like white sugar getting something to collapse. Edward Vernon called Old Grog because of an outfit he liked to wear ordered that it be diluted one to four but he still got that whole half a pint which is now distributed to you in a court or so. The U.S. Navy was the first Navy to finally say you know what maybe we don't need soldiers drinking all this Ron so we cancelled the ritual in 1862. It actually stayed in the UK until 1970 and I was surprised to learn that apparently the Canadian Navy and the New Zealand Navy both like to drink a lot and the New Zealand Navy didn't actually cancel their Ron rations until 1970. Ron goes with Tiki beverages quite well as well. It's often combined with fruit juice, citrus juice, you know, wards off the sturdy so it's a vitamin C deficiency. There's an interesting word to that as well so lemons actually have a ton of vitamin C they have over twice as much vitamin C as limes but there's a sort of linguistic ambiguity where limes and lemons the words are often used interchangeably for very different plants and limes tend to be very acidic so they're very tart and the limes will work better unfortunately that doesn't come due to the vitamin C if you're storing lime juice in copper kilns like this or if you're heating it up or if it's exposed to light all that causes the vitamin C to evaporate as well so there's actually relative leaps and pieces including the Scott expedition and Antarctica where people with lots of lime juice contracted surgery so it's kind of interesting but yeah here to tell you a little bit about the art that is probably what's keeping me in Ah, thanks sir I was listening to you and learning and I'm not going to say anything about rum I'm just going to talk about who we're looking at and if you're in the contest like if you wore a Hawaiian shirt or you brought a mug there will be a contest oh that's about something like that this is a clicker the prizes will be given only after my speech so you have to stay for my speech anyways so thank you Rick thank you Rebecca for your work thank you to the other speakers I'm Aldo Von Strohlein I published a zine cultique news back in the 90s if anybody was alive then and now I do an event called tiki oasis with my wife and so and that's my soundtrack thank you Zane you can get rid of you can disregard this slide because tiki is not about being quiet I don't know why I mean this is a lodge so they want you to be quiet that's very un-tiki to be quiet so if you have any questions or want me to stop I can just yell it out and I'll just stop so anyways how many people here have heard the word tiki and think they know what tiki means that's pretty good so let's do a little pop quiz here what is that and what is that and what is that tiki for now okay if you answered tiki to all of these things you're correct because they're all pretty different from each other so what is tiki the tiki is I'm going to be referring to tiki as tiki style or Polynesian pop it's an art movement that ran from the early 30s to the late 1970s in America and then it was revived in the mid 1990s again here in America so what I'm going to do is cover approximately 40-60 years of tiki history and then approximately 25 years of tiki revival in the next 20 minutes so the dictionary definition of tiki is a wooden or stone image of the Polynesian god but that's not how I'm probably going to be referring to the word tiki as you can see the term tiki is applied very liberally to all kinds of things and has become common vernacular for tiki torches tiki that's tiki act I'm going to be referring to it as tiki style so tiki didn't just pop up out of the ground there were waves of infatuation with different things that were Hawaiian there was these trauma throughout the 20s and 30s so there was a strong base for the tiki movement to actually happen obviously there was a Hawaiian shirt craze there's Gary Truman Elvis and a really super nice picture shirt that's almost tiki because it's got tiki mods on it and also much further before that a hundred years before that a lot of writers romanticized and created this for the general public in America so our appetites were wedded by that and by these vaguely exotic clubs that existed across the nation but had a high density in the LA area so things like the 70s club holly this one's called the caravan room it's just vaguely exotic it doesn't really say where it's from that was in Brooklyn again, it's not specifically tiki and Zambolanga I don't know what that means so the tiki craze essentially is credited to this one guy Don Beach according to the book of tiki he is the guy who started the tiki movement there was other beach covers in the Hollywood area like this guy Eli Headlake he came up to the right and he also worked for Disneyland and furnished tiki's for them around the frontier line and stuff and he worked in Hollywood and he gave me four bond beach but Don wrote to the top quickly because Don opened a cafe in 1933 and then turned it into a bar in 1937 I'm not sure exactly what the transition is but he moved across the street in 37 and made it a little bit nicer the main thing about Don's Bar is that it was in the middle of Hollywood and his drink menu had approximately 80 rum drinks on it which was unheard of if you went into a cocktail lounge of that day if they had a bar menu at all it would have about five or six drinks it would have a Manhattan martini, etc so that's Don's Bar about 20 years later once it really got popular and here's Don the version of Don sitting on the beach and kind of a hyper cooler version of Don like from the 70's still on the beach with a full head of hair so once Don set this example and kind of was very successful you can see at this point in the 70's or actually I guess that would be the mid 60's he's got like five restaurants and then the chain later grew to about 30 locations which of course spawned a lot of imitators his success you know these guys said hey that guy can do it we can do it too but his most famous imitator is Trader Dick who had a little restaurant called Hinky Dinks in the mid 30's and after he visited Don and saw his success he changed his Hinky Dinks to Trader Dick's there and it's at 6500 San Pablo which is now an empty lot and you can see he's got kind of the same motif as Don there sitting on the beach but he's more of a trader he's got the goods and then that's actually the current menu but it's from the 50's you can go to Trader Dick's today in Emeryville and they're still using that same menu which is pretty cool and that menu spawned lots of imitators also Trader Dick had his own imitators from Phoenix, Arizona and there were many others that stole that motif from Trader Dick to have this party sort of atmosphere on your menu but this one really went a lot the guy passed out and more topless women than they could cram on it is a little bit more debauched seen there and then these are some of the people that copied Trader Dick anymore but you can see they go across the nation Canada you can find them everywhere copiers of Don and Vic so Don and Vic fueled the Tiki movement with their success and their imitators another person that fueled the Tiki movement was Thor Hyrule who in 1947 sailed his raft across the Pacific and then wrote books about it they're so popular they're number one sellers around the world translated into 20-30 languages they're all over Europe there were even textbooks in the US and in some European countries so they were required reading for children so people that would maybe live up older than me actually read these in school another person that fueled the Tiki craze in a big way and this is where people get the myth of the military being an important aspect to the Tiki craze is James Michener he was obviously in the military he came back he wrote Tales of the South Pacific 1948 Pulitzer Prize winning novel then in 1949 he became a musical and then in 59 he became a movie and he also had a return to paradise in 1953 so James Michener and the soundtrack to the musical and the musical and the movie really fueled the South Pacific craze and also fueled the myth that the Tiki craze is a military thing somebody who also fueled the Tiki craze in a big way is the Bishop Museum that's me at the Bishop Museum and this is their star artifact it's one of the few surviving Hawaiian Tiki's of its size it looks like it's about 9 feet tall but it's really only about 6 feet tall it's on a pedestal and so United Airlines was using that image and the Bishop Museum was using that image in their promotions United Airlines for jet travel in the 50s and 60s and then of course the US government was using it in the state of 1959 so between like say 55 and 59 this guy whose name is Kuka Ili Mogu but we know him as just Kuu he's probably the most famous Tiki outside of the Easter Island moans so kind of the last big thing that fueled the Tiki craze and you wouldn't know from those fans is Disneyland and Walt Disney I mean Disneyland was huge Walt Disney was very respected his films were taken off and in 1963 he put in the Tiki Room June of 1963 so that was kind of the last thing that propelled the Tiki movement obviously it has the word Tiki it has the image of a Tiki and so that's what kind of created and fueled the Tiki craze in America and then of course this is an American movement it's an international movement obviously Thor Heidergall being from Europe and all these big trade expanded to Europe so basically all countries in every city across America had Tiki bars they were people asked me sometimes how many Tiki bars were there that would be like saying but not only are there Tiki bars in the Tiki movement the cool thing about the Tiki movement is it produced a lot of artifacts so Tiki was applied to almost every day like any imaginable product you can imagine lights and condiment dispensers table lamps mugs soap on the row what other trend or artifact has soap on the row of course Tiki covers the gamut of all the arts there's Tiki music Martin Denny and his number one record Quiet Village Tiki music is also known as Exotica named after Martin Denny's first record Tiki also covers architecture of course and the social sciences geography and ethnology fashion of course I try to get a couple of obscure fashion things here a rayon ad and a sketch for a hostess outfit for the Luau in Beverly Hills of course Tiki covers the culinary arts that's Trader Vic putting on the Luau and then a pineapple dish that is not made by Trader Vic that's unrelated but I gotta throw some pineapple in there and of course mixology is important over there is the Tiki serving the coffee diablo or coffee grog and this is Domino Beach cover making up some of his concussions there of course Tiki supports the fine arts like velvet painting that's a v-tag and Tiki supports the graphic arts you know all Tiki parts have really nice menus and that was kind of a calling card right? I chose these menus because these particular ones actually won art director awards or some kind of award for the art director's club in Los Angeles so they were actually award winning graphics because they were just awesome graphics and of course Tiki covered sex I just gotta throw that in there I don't know if you caught this cover of the magazine and then you open it up and it's like her clothes disappeared same Tiki okay so where are we so anyway the Tiki style and the Polynesia Pop movement lasted from 1934 until around 1955 here it is in the 70s you can see it's starting to degenerate a little bit over here with Domino Beach cover serving a cheap buffet and billboarding the site I was building instead of having a really great facade like we saw earlier but then the 60s came around and people became a little more self-aware you know the next generation was into Eastern religion they didn't want to go to some fake Tiki bar and then of course the 70s with the the me generation and disco and new wave you know the 80s Tiki bar because people didn't want to go to a Tiki bar and be square they wanted to be new and they wanted something different they didn't have the kind of respect for a Tiki bar that their elders did they didn't want to be square sitting in some fake environment they didn't want to drink alcohol they didn't want to take drugs at the bottom we have Richard Nixon at the Trader Vicks in Washington DC I believe so we have the devolution of Tiki then so here's Kalbo's before and after it's a I don't know if you can tell on the right you live too much later I don't know if it's still open but that's Fantasy Island's showroom it's a strip club now a really low and kind of strip club is it still a strip club? okay good I'm glad I didn't get it entertainment Kalbo's always had entertainment and dancing all night this is the Hanalei Hotel on the left which is now the Crown Plaza on the right you can see they remodeled it very nicely into something very generic that everybody will love they did keep their Outrigger though if you look underneath the logo and the pork crochet in there that's an Outrigger hanging out there but this is their original 1963 remodel when they changed from just a roadside hotel to a Tiki hotel and it was extremely well done and well respected and now it's not so much so if your build theme wasn't getting completely remodeled and de-fasotted and your bar still stayed open maybe your drinks were going from something really nice and classy like this which is Stephen Crane's Blue Out which was kind of a pinnacle of Tiki drinks and peaked in the late 50's and then we had cheap imitators so you can see the difference in quality here versus here you see the mint and the crushed ice and the custom ice cones and stuff and here it just looks like a bunch of Kool-Aid in different colors they do have an ice cone, they do have a lot but you see what I mean so this is kind of the end of the first era of Tiki you can see it got so cheap and so devolved that even the original people that went there kind of stopped going there so a lot of the old places died and that kind of set the stage for the Tiki Revolution which so the cool thing about the Tiki Revolution is that we have a template before us and the people that are in college in Tiki style now we have people that have done it right before us and so that's Sven Kirsten that's why we're dressed like that new Tiki movement and every movement needs a manifesto so in Tiki news everybody could follow it and be good well I can't actually read what it says