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Monthly Archives: January 2009

Melting Pot Oakland

A proudly inclusive grocery on East 12th Street in Oakland.

Back to the Future of Online Newspapers

Check out this 1981 report from a San Francisco TV station about reading newspapers on one’s home computer. I love the shot of the guy connecting his modem — probably 1200 baud at most — using his rotary dial phone. Ah, the good old days, when we worried about baud instead of broadband, and Digital […]

Criminal Injustice Systems at Home and Abroad

I finally got around to reading Samantha Power’s article on Gary Haugen in the January 19th New Yorker. Haugen is a Christian human rights lawyer whose organization represents impoverished and abused people in Cambodia, Kenya, and other countries.  Like most of Power’s work, the whole article is worth reading, but one set of statistics snared […]

“No Crime Here at All”

An awful story this evening, related to my post about speeding cars and pedestrians on Park Boulevard the other day: A pedestrian was struck and killed in a crosswalk at the intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Santiago St. in San Francisco tonight. The woman was walking westbound across Sunset when a man driving a Toyota […]

“Avis: We Try Harder” (…to push gas guzzlers on you)

This ad (slightly condensed horizontally to fit here more easily) was a banner across an article at the Oakland Tribune website today. Memo to Avis: Hummers are not “cool cars,” not even the H3 shown in the ad, described without irony at the Hummer website as “the midsize SUV” and “proof positive that good [sic] […]

Not Much is Really Sacred

From Steven Pinker’s op-ed in Thursday’s NY Times: Though the ungrammaticality of split verbs is an urban legend, it found its way into The Texas Law Review Manual on Style, which is the arbiter of usage for many law review journals. James Lindgren, a critic of the manual, has found that many lawyers have “internalized […]

Park Boulevard: the anatomy of a city street

The San Francisco Chronicle had a “Chronicle Watch” feature the other day about one of those solar-powered displays that cities put up to let drivers know how fast they are going (the Chron’s “Journalism of Action” in action!). The display in question, which briefly wasn’t working because its solar battery was dead, happens to be […]

A Pirate in the City

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” — Bill Bryson I had a visitor late last week, and I thought I […]

Anti-plywood activism?

They say that people in San Francisco will protest absolutely anything. After seeing this banner hanging on a building under renovation in North Beach, I can see what they mean.

Lux et Lex

May the light of justice shine upon Oakland: The setting sun shining through and around the Alameda County Courthouse across Lake Merritt.

SUVs on Parade

Also known as afterschool pickup at an elite private school in an elite neighborhood of the liberal and holier-than-thou city of San Francisco: While I was ranting about trucks, I thought I might as well go ahead and post this photo too. This is a line for a high school in one of the country’s […]

Illiterate? Or just selfish and lazy?

Just an hour or so after there was a rally to save a portion of bike lane on Market street in San Francisco (the lane is being removed in order to make it easier for car drivers to make an illegal right turn. Really!), I happened to come across this scene as I was riding […]