My friend Sasha Abramsky has just come out with a book about hunger in the United States, called Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It. I picked up a copy yesterday, and while I’m only about 50 pages into it so far, I can already highly recommend it to […]
As I feared and warned about just two weeks ago, BART’s profligate board of directors just voted to raise fares six months earlier than planned, citing budget deficits. See, it’s okay to waste money, because you can always get transit-dependent citizens (along with BART employees) to pay for it. Never mind that those citizens are […]
BART is considering adding 2 to 3 dollars more to fares going to San Francisco Airport, in order alleviate the pressure to raise regular fares (there is already $1.50 extra tacked on to BART fares when your ride starts or stops at SFO). Here is what BART director Lynette Sweet told the Contra Costa Times […]
An excerpt from the city’s estimate of how proposed budget cuts would affect the Public Works Department’s ability to provide services (“FTE” stands for “full-time equivalent”): Key Impacts and Mitigations • Park Maintenance: No routine maintenance at 212 locations (mini-parks, neighborhood parks, special use parks, parking lots, plazas, medians and streetscapes) Remaining 60.27 FTE will […]
I’m not sure what was going on with me today, but a lot of the photos I took on the way home from work tended toward the abstract. Here are four, and I collected a handful of other new shots (plus two older ones) together at a new set on Flickr called “Abstraction.”
If you’ve ever taken AirBART from the Coliseum BART Station to the Oakland airport, then you know the service is pretty slow and unimpressive, especially considering the $3 fare each way. So you might think that public transit advocates in and around Oakland would be delighted by BART’s proposal to build a faster connection between […]
El Gato Negro, one of my favorite bars that I’ve never set foot in. Two horsemen. Nine and a half headless clothehorsewomen. And a newly discovered bird! I thought my little bird project might have run its course, and I nearly missed this one today since it wasn’t immediately obvious that there is a bird […]
Now that Washington Mutual has been fully digested by Chase, Chase has blanketed the West Coast with billboards in order to introduce itself to us. Apparently I’m too dense to understand this one. As a cyclist, should I be flattered, or offended?
In a review of Milk in the New York Review of Books (yes, it’s from March, and yes, I’m a little behind in my reading), Hilton Als asks the following question: One may find oneself powerfully moved by the images of candles flickering on that cold November night in San Francisco, and the close-ups of […]
A small tree near my apartment. The small print says, “what are you grateful for today?” Sharpie and hangable paper tags provided.