September 2010
2 posts
“If you get (permission), you go and march. If you don’t—you have no right...”
– Vladimir Putin, offering a simple rule of thumb for political dissent in Russia
“Having lived in LA and D.C., I’d have to say that differences are few and...”
– Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason.tv, answering Lisa De Pasquale’s questions in Human Events; read the whole thing here
August 2010
1 post
Strangers on a phone
So nearly one in five Americans thinks President Obama is a Muslim.
Predictably, hands began to wring. There are people who make their living wringing their hands about the State of the Nation, and sure enough, they showed up and played their part, showed their concern, and, uh, then the next thing on NPR came on. For others, it was a chance to squawk about the ignorance of the right, which...
July 2010
4 posts
What liberal media? →
“According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had...
Bill Murray is ready to see you now →
“The very thing that makes Bill Murray, well, Bill Murray is what makes sitting down with him such an unpredictable enterprise. Bill Murray crashes parties, ditches promotional appearances, clashes with his friends, his collaborators, and his enemies. If you—movie director, journalist, dentist—want to speak to him, you don’t go through any gatekeeper. You leave a message on an 800...
San Francisco considers banning all pet sales... →
Is there no limit to the desire of San Francisco’s many-tentacled government to control every aspect of human behavior? None at all?
So let’s walk through the logic here: I shouldn’t be allowed to buy a rat because, hey, I might not know what I’m getting into and the rat might thereby suffer ill treatment. On the other hand, if mice infest my home, I’m (still)...
November 2009
5 posts
Letter addressed to an entity unlikely to respond
Dear Switzerland,
It’s been quite some time since my last visit, but I enjoyed myself in your country. What’s not to love about beautiful mountains, freakishly reliable trains, and a wide variety of chocolate? But I regret to inform you that, well, you officially fail as a country.
In a 57%-43% vote, your people amended your constitution to ban the construction of minarets. Your...
Thanksgiving, a day late
On a Wednesday afternoon in 1924, President Coolidge’s two sons—John, 17, and Calvin, 16—played a game of tennis on the south lawn of the White House. Wearing shoes without socks was something of a fashion among teenage boys of the era, a fashion trend that has come and gone repeatedly in the decades since, probably because it dovetails neatly with the laziness and studied slovenliness of...
Obsolete
Earlier this year, a photo developing store in my neighborhood posted this notice in its window:
With equanimity uncharacteristic of San Francisco—a city obsessed with keeping everything exactly the same as it is now, while also fancying itself the most forward-looking “progressive” place on earth—the owner accepted that there’s not as much use for film developing anymore,...
Friday Night List #1
Pixar’s ten feature films, ranked in order of my enjoyment of them:
The Incredibles
Up
Ratatouille
Finding Nemo
Wall-E
A Bug’s Life
Toy Story 2
Toy Story
Monsters, Inc.
Cars
Henderson, Nevada
Both of my parents turned 80 this year. It’s hard to get my head around that.
My mother has taken good care of herself, hasn’t aged visibly since her fifties, and has no serious health problems, so it’s hard to think of her as 80. My father is more physically infirmed, but that traces back to severe injuries suffered in a car accident that occurred on my 16th birthday in 1983,...
Careful, now
A friend who voted for Obama wrote, before the election:
Maybe this feeling is still true, and the zeitgeist is still against ‘us’. It’s possible that if Obama wins, it will have been a mix of tactics, luck, and exasperation with the Bush years: a vote against Republicans rather than for Democrats. But it’s also possible that the country isn’t so inimically hostile,...
Some thoughts on Proposition 8
The narrow (52.4% to 47.6%) passage of Proposition 8 is a real heartbreaker. I was cautiously optimistic about it, but seeing it pass, in a very liberal state, in a high-turnout election, where a lot of liberals felt particularly motivated to vote, is certainly a little demoralizing. A number of thoughts about this are running through my head, both relating to my line of work (political polling...
August 2008
1 post
The Spider
I overshot my desired bus stop, so I found myself walking along Geary Boulevard. Somehow my my mental map of San Francisco got corrupted and I placed OfficeMax about six blocks west of its actual location, which I was making up on foot. I noticed this sign on the front gate of a building on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Geary:
The Spider, Inc., sounds like the perfect front for a low-rent...
July 2008
7 posts
Siskel & Ebert & Roeper & Phillips
I spend much of my childhood living in a small, rural town. Because my parents didn’t even have the good sense to live in town, where you could get cable, we got exactly three TV stations: the local PBS, ABC, and CBS affiliates. And bringing in the CBS affiliate involved using a control knob in the living room to activate a servomotor on the roof which spun our antenna southward.
At a...
Three to Read #1
In Slate, Christopher Hitchens writes an unsparing, unsentimental remembrance of Jesse Helms, who died earlier this month at the age of 86: It seemed somehow profane that Sen. Jesse Helms should have managed to depart this life on the 232nd anniversary of the declaration of American independence. To die on the Fourth of July, one can perhaps be forgiven for feeling, is or ought to be a privilege...
Cool Wikipedia Article: David S. Terry
David S. Terry was a notoriously short-tempered California politician in the 19th century, best known for having killed US Senator David Broderick in an 1859 duel. Both were Democrats, but Terry was a member of the party’s pro-slavery faction, while Broderick was a Free Soil Democrat who didn’t want slavery extended into California.
There’s something so very quintessentially...
Marx Realty
In another online discussion, someone said they’d like a picture of Marx Realty. Since I live nearby, and was having a late lunch right near it, I snapped a picture:
I assume the plethora of American flags (three, counting the tiny, faded sticker below the big flag) is to disclaim any connection to that Marx. In most places, that wouldn’t be necessary—they’d think Groucho,...
Dot remnant
I lived pretty close to the epicenter of the Dot Com Boom™ (v. 1.0). My partner worked (as he still does) for a Major Technology Company and our neighborhood was popular among the dot-com nouveau-upper-middle-class. We saw the upscale restaurants displace the cheap dives. We ate in the cheap dives, like the splendid Pot & Pan, which offered tasty food (the Won Ton Soup was to die for) in...
About me
Since I’m new around here, I thought I’d post a little bit about myself.
I live—as I have for almost my entire adult life—in the city of San Francisco, a place as frustrating as it is beautiful. I live with my partner of 22 years; we celebrated our anniversary just a few nights ago. I’m 41 and he’s 39, so you can do the math and figure out we were young and crazy when we...
Happiness
You know why I’m glad I took calculus? Because now I can understand Rem Koolhaas’s formula for happiness:
And to think the other kids called me a nerd. Looks like I’m getting the last laugh.
April 2008
1 post
Crêpes we can believe in
It’s not enough to say I don’t get Barack Obama. But I don’t.
I do not believe mine is a jaundiced heart, immune to soaring rhetoric, flightless under the weight of cynicism. I do not believe I am so hidebound by my (considerable) ideological differences with Obama that I’d be deaf to the music in a good speech, unable to appreciate it for its sonority. But I don’t...