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Category Archives: California

They say it’s the journey that counts, right?

I rode my bike (and ferried a bit, since there’s no bike path over the Bay Bridge—yet!) from Oakland to Ross and back today, yet somehow I managed not to take a single picture along the way. In lieu of any photos of, say, the cute mama and baby deer that I saw grazing next […]

Under the Freeway and Through the Parking Lot, to Amtrak’s House We Go

If you want to walk from historic (and tourist-oriented) Old Town Sacramento to the train station, you are directed across a parking area, under two or three freeway ramps, and then through another parking lot. (The yellow sign says “TO AMTRAK STATION” and the sign on the parking lot booth behind it says “PAY HERE.” […]

Debacle on 34th St.

This is the view to the north as you pass down 34th Street in Oakland between Telegraph and MLK, which I finally got around to photographing today: If you look at aerial photos of Oakland from the 40’s or 50’s, before these freeways and BART tracks were built, then you will find that the land […]

Department of Dubious Distinctions

Is Gavin Newsom the first gubernatorial candidate in history to livetweet the birth of his child?

Lessons from the Obama Campaign for Prop 8 Opponents?

Today’s New York Times has an article about the debate among supporters of marriage rights over whether to pursue a reversal of Proposition 8 in 2010, or to wait until 2012 when there will have been more time to recruit large donors, shift public support, build a broader grassroots movement, and so on: Marc Solomon, […]

Hunger in America

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 […]

The Ongoing Legacy of the New Deal

As someone with a casual interest in local history, I was interested to learn from another Oakland blog about the Living New Deal Project at UC Berkeley. In addition to producing a book and collecting testimonials from people who worked on (or witnessed) New Deal projects, the Berkeley scholars are compiling a searchable database of […]

State of Emergency

California’s official motto is “Eureka.” Our official nickname is “The Golden State.” Has any thought has been given to changing one of these to “State of Emergency”? The most recent state of emergency was proclaimed by Governor Schwarzenegger on Friday, regarding the ongoing drought. (Our current heavy rains, although helpful, have only been a drop […]