The eyes have it at planned museum in S.F.
The news flash from the 122nd annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, Oct. 27 to 30 in Chicago, was local: The world’s first public museum dedicated to vision and eye health is coming to San Francisco.
The 3,500-square-foot museum will be a permanent part of the headquarters of the Academy on Beach Street, near Fisherman’s Wharf. This project, begun with a $4 million gift from ophthalmologist Stanley
Truhlsen, will “highlight the rich history of medical and surgical eye care,” said a release, and will showcase the Academy’s 38,000 artifacts, books and instruments.
The museum is planned for 2020. Admission will be free.
Former Examiner, then Chronicle columnist Stephanie Salter says she was hiking around a reservoir in Indianapolis, wearing “an ancient gray” Giants hoodie. “A tall, lovely young woman and her appaloosa-colored dog passed me. She smiled, then turned around and yelled, ‘Our dog’s name is Buster Posey! My husband is a big Giants fan.’ ” She looked at the dog, which she says was sweet-faced, and told the woman, “He does kind of look like Buster!”
Were there love notes hidden in the piano? Did the paddles bear DNA samples? Sign spotted by Beth Eiselman on a walking/biking trail in Lafayette: “Home sellers are seeking the buyers of PIANO and PING PONG TABLE on 8/25 garage sale. Please leave message at ...”
Albert Einstein, who lived before the era of Snapchat and Instagram, seems nonetheless to have been a prolific correspondent. A front-page Chronicle story by Steve Rubenstein on Oct. 25 described the sale (for $32,000) of a 1952 Einstein letter defending his theory of relativity.
In New York on Dec. 4, Einstein’s “The God Letter” is to be auctioned by Christie’s. In preparation for that, the letter was on public view at the Pace Gallery in Palo Alto on Oct. 25; on Friday, Nov. 2, Christie’s invited guests to the Battery Club for a panel discussion and to view the letter.
This letter was written in 1954 to author Eric Gutkind, who’d sent Einstein a copy of his book, “Choose Life,” described in the Christie’s catalog as presenting “the Bible as a call to arms, and Judaism and Israel as incorruptible.”
Einstein agrees with the author about the need for “an ideal that goes beyond selfinterest,” but as to his main point, he disagrees vehemently. The language of the book “is inaccessible to me,” he wrote to Gutkind. “The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends.”
Furthermore, “the unadulterated Jewish religion is, like all other religions, an incarnation of primitive superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and in whose mentality I feel profoundly anchored, still for me does not have any different kind of dignity from all other peoples.”
P.S.: As to (peripherally) God and Einstein, a reader called last week to note that there’s a Grace Cathedral window, one in a series about people whose contributions have changed civilization, dedicated to Einstein. (Other honorees include Frank Lloyd Wright and Robert Frost.) Elsewhere in the church are images of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and Rabbi Joseph Asher of Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. Are these the only Jewish people depicted in the Cathedral? “We wouldn’t put it that way,” said Lynn Aylward, “since our stained glass windows heavily feature Jesus, Mary, Old Testament prophets, etc . ... all Jewish.”
The Women’s Building in San Francisco has received a $160,000 grant for retrofitting the 108-year-old site. When it opened in 1979 as a community center run by and for women, it was the first such facility for women in the country. The grant is a Partners in Preservation: Main Street Award, financed by American Express, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Main Street America, and selected by votes. The Building, which received 96,120 votes, was in second place, behind the Tabor Opera House in Leadville, Colo.
On the weekend beginning Friday, Nov. 9, it will be the site of artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s installation “Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy.” (Tickets are necessary but free; register at www.eventbrite.com.)
And getting ready for election day, two San Francisco State University faculty members were talking about a candidate facing a vote, as overheard by Mitch Turitz: “He is the evil of two lessers.”
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “I usually like what you wear, I just wouldn’t wear it. But with that one, I don’t like it and I wouldn’t wear it.” Woman to woman, overheard shopping at the Alameda Antiques Faire by Karen Mead