We Love San Francisco

Stephanie Spanjian found this nugget piece of vandalism in the city.

Too Good To Be True

Click here please, sweeties.


Originally I was only going to share this with Tony, but then I thought of all the poor hapless lemmings out there who might never see He-Man covering a dramatic disco-soaked version of "What's Going On" and I thought to myself how that would be sooo... unfair.

Ah, The Irony

So I have taken to walking around the city more and more these days, mostly because I feel like such a hideous environmental (and socio-political) shithead more and more every time i turn my car on. So last weekend I walked down to Petco to pick up some Advantage for Fiki (shout out to baby-daddy!). I have noticed lately these new ads about childhood obesity springing up in the mission. Most of them feature a concerned looking female doctor of color looking over her glasses at us, as if she has just informed us that she needs to scrape yet another polyp from our puffy child's burger-and-fries-ravaged colon (as if people with fat kids only see female doctors). The billboards inform us that childhood obesity is not a laughing matter. Fair enough.

Now as I walked to Petco last Sunday I came across another of these billboards somewhere along Bryant Street, only this one was in spanish and featured another disappointed-looking female doctor of hispanic origin gazing down at us, her sad eyes begging us to please eat a vegetable, or at the very least a legume of some sort. Howeverly (hey, if "resultedly" can be a word then I am claiming "howeverly" - you know who you are)... Howeverly, the sad doctor's gaze seemed to be instantly negated by another happy-looking hispanic female on the billboard poised directly above; this other young woman smiled down at me as if she just burst thru the door with great news, holding two small paper bags up next to her wide grin like dangling carrots. Her visor and uniform inform us that she works at McDonald's. She is happy, thin, and ready to see us get down with some grubbin moo chow because she knows it's the one thing in life we can depend on to make us happy.

I kind of laughed to myself, half-outraged, half-unbelieving at the absurdity of this pairing. Who is the dull-witted, drunken, asleep at the wheel ad salesman that came up with this pairing? Was it just some hilarious oversight tucked away in some obscure corner of the city? Or was the fiendish work of some evil/genius marketing strategist in a sleek corner office with round windows and shiny shoes? Some act of serendipity prompted me to point out one of the obesity ads to my friend a few days later as we drove down Divisadero. I tried explaining how funny the other obesity ad was, due to its juxtaposition with the McDonalds ad over there on Bryant Street. And then I saw it -- another McDonalds ad just a few feet above and to the right of the obesity ad right there in front of us, only this one a bit more subtle due to the staggering of the billboards. My general rule is that once is strange, twice coincidence, but three times a pattern. So I am now on the lookout for a third instance of this pairing. If the third instance of this pairing will make itself known, the next question is who... and why?

So I guess the underlying lesson of this small parable about life in the city is that the war between good and evil rages everywhere, and apparently the front line is somewhere between your mouth and your fat ass.

Update! Inventor Denies Using Dead Cats!

Earlier I posted a story about an inventor in Germany that had come up with a biodiesel made of dead cats. CNN ran the story after picking it up from a newspaper in Bild, Germany. After outraged animal rights activists in Germany threw a fit, the inventor Christian Koch has vehemently denied ever using or suggesting the use of dead cats. In a stunning act of public relations supplication, Mr. Koch has stated, "It's an alternative fuel that is friendly for the environment. But it's complete nonsense to suggest dead cats. I've never used cats and would never think of that. At most the odd toad may have jumped in." (Note to editors --New Headline should read "Odd Toads: The Alertnate Energy Source".) Anyways, Koch says the biodiesel is made of paper, plastics, textiles, and rubbish -- and that's it. Link

KPFA Archives Back Up and Running

Finally, real news online again! Some divine act of grace has brought KPFA's audio archives back to my internet portal. I don't have to scrounge through RSS feeds from the BBC or navigate the spin of questionable mainstream news outlets like CNN anymore. Some might reasonably argue that KPFA is the Fox News of liberal media, to which i say... cheers! Their new format is much more efficient and new-fangled; they upgraded the archives to a streaming media format and even have podcasting now. My personal favorite shows are Explorations, Democracy Now, and the ever new agey New Dimensions which explores such hot topics as animal communication and the alchemy of healing.

http://www.kpfa.org/archives

Power to the People!

Get Yer Meat On

Thanks, PETA.

Dead Cats: The Alternate Energy Source

No kidding, I swear! A German inventor has created a new fuel mixture that uses a blend of garbage, run-over cats and other ingredients as a proven alternative to diesel fuel (its nice of him to be so open-source about it). "Koch said around 20 dead cats added into the mix could help produce enough fuel to fill up a 50-liter (11 gallon) tank." - CNN World. Link

His company's website, the appropriately named AlphakatGmbH, claims that Christian Koch, 55, has driven his normal diesel-powered car with this mixture for 170,000 km (106,000 miles) without a problem.

Nip/Tuck Returns!

After a long hiatus, Dr.'s Troy and MacNamara return for Season 3 on the FX network starting (finally) September 20th. Originally the show was slated to start again in June, but production was delayed because the actors were all so busy doing other projects that it had to be pushed back. I've managed to suck enough of my friends into this ridiculously spellbinding tv drama that we are starting Nip/Tuck party nights again at CC's house, Tuesdays at 10pm. Lemme know if you want to come and get your fix of sex, drugs, violence and gore with us. Oh, wait, i almost forgot vampiric emotional blackmail, incest, and some pretty crafty "hands on" detective work.

I found a letter extolling the many virtues of nip/tuck storylines at the Parents Television Council website. Link

- A gang member injecting Botox into a man’s penis.
- An incredibly graphic and bloody scene of the doctors performing plastic surgery, including breaking a man’s nose with a chisel and slicing open his eyelids.

I guess they've offended some people; the show definetely offends me and will no doubt offend you at some point, but I think that's kind of the point. It is graphic and perverse, but its also an honest (if not characaturized) reflection of the society we live in. The Parents Television Council has already lynched a bunch of the show's sponsors but Sony has stepped up and chosen to be the season opener's exclusive sponsor. Yay Sony, thank you for sponsoring the dismemberment of any sense of moral decency I might have ever had. Hey, if your sense of moral decency is so shaky that a tv show could disfigure your psyche so horribly you should probably not be watching tv in the first place. And if you don't want your kids watching this crap, why don't you get your boozy ass home so you can turn off the TV and talk to them? And if you can't manage that, try a babysitter.

Yes, Mr. Cheney, Please Do That

I grabbed this precious nugget of American history offa the internets today. Some news organizations I guess didnt want you to see the real deal so it was edited down but this here is the stuff. My Grampa always says never trust a man that talks out of the side of his mouth. YeeeHaw.

Special Message For You

I dont care if you hate me. This one's for you. Turn it up real loud too. Do it Do it Do it >> Rather Good

Keep Your Beginner's Mind

I realize that I have spent the week huffing and puffing about the federal government's perverse notion that human misery is a great excuse for another Halliburton pork barrel. Has anyone else heard the news the Bush and Dick have hired - you guessed it - Halliburton, the Enron of third world "freedom-fighting" efforts, to help fix another ravaged Gulf coast? Why is it that when Bush and Dick get together the only ones that seem to get fucked are us? Yes, the world is far more sick and twisted than I could have ever imagined as a child.

So I realized that I have spent the entire week being stressed and angry about all this so I decided to take a long walk and see what treasures I could excavate from the streets of San Fran that might help brighten my mood and shift my outlook. There was a dog that reminded me of my sweet Hina that came running up to me, leash in mouth, ready to play somewhere around that new park below the Castro. There was a fascinating (I have no idea why) man who would have been well-dressed if it were 1987 that seemed to be in early negotiations with a hooker in pig-tails on a street corner. He had the disappointed face of a politician forced into early retirement by some humiliating sex scandal and shook like a leaf in the wind, yet was somehow noble and beautiful in a wierd way too.

I ended up in the other end of that park, the side of it that sticks into Hayes valley and has that Burningman-esque wooden jigsaw pagoda thingie in it that looks like it was conceived on one of those LSD trips where the walls turn into tapestries that turn into little men with golden wings that pop out of the ether and talk to you and say no when you ask them if they are real.

Anyways, the pagoda thingie has become a repository of trite zen-inspired graffiti by passers-by such as "El Turdburglar" and the like. But there was one unsigned inscription that caught my eye that simply said, "Keep Your Beginner's Mind". I decided that that inscription had been my destination, and quite satisfied, turned around and went home.

I've Decided to be Enigmatic Today

Where's the Beef?

This audio download (click here for .mp3) is of the only politician left in the United States with any real balls. New Orleans' mayor Ray Nagin begs for federal help on WWL radio on September 1. He talks about the failures of federal agencies and the political posturing going on by the president and the stymied bureaucratic machine that is allowing thousands to die in his city. He begs the public to flood the governor and president's offices with calls and emails to, "get off their asses... And put a moratorium on press conferences... Don't do another press conference until the resources are in this city, and then come down to this city and stand with us... Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming down here. They're not here."

Unforseen Tragedy?

Watching the news this morning I read that Bush said no-one could have predicted that the levees that kept New Orleans from being swallowed whole by the Gulf of Mexico would be breached. This statement strikes me as either 1) incredibly ignorant or as 2) a vile case of political spin. Even I know that those levees would only withstand a Hurricane of class 3 or less (and I live thousands of miles away from hurricane country) from watching CNN for thirty minutes during the last big hurricane a couple months ago.

"A former official in the Clinton administration, Sydney Blumenthal, has written in Der Spiegel: "In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the US, including a terrorist attack on New York City.

"But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war."

"It remains to be seen whether any extra funding would have made any difference. For example, would the money have come through in time and would it have been spent on those places which gave way? "

-Paul Reynolds, BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4204304.stm

Bush's priorities and policies have now proven disastrous at home as well as abroad. I just want to slap all the flag-humping Bushies and their red-white-and-blue bumper stickers back into last November.

So really we have 2 contributing factors the Katrina disaster in New Orleans. The first being the fact that the plug was pulled on the levee construction funding, and the second being a layer deeper, which is the underlying cause of the worsening storms that keep battering this region more and more each year - Global Warming, which is a plain result of our dependence, globally, on noxious-fume producing modes of transportation.

Climatologists all say the same thing (same article as above):

"Last year the National Geographic magazine wrote about a disaster simulation which predicted that 50,000 people might die in the city in a Category Five Hurricane, which Katrina was for a time."

"The chances of such a storm hitting New Orleans in any given year are slight, but the danger is growing," the article said. "Climatologists predict that powerful storms may occur more frequently this century, while rising sea level from global warming is putting low-lying coasts at greater risk."

Meanwhile, there were two simultaneous reports about global warming that just came out. The BBC says,

"New readings from the European satellite Envisat suggest that this year's southern hemisphere ozone hole may be one of the largest on record." -Richard Black, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4197566.stm

But the very next day CNN reported findings from US scientists that said that the Ozone layer has stopped shrinking and that ozone levels are improving: "Study: Ozone layer has stopped shrinking" -Reuters via CNN.

I argued earlier this year with a Libertarian (read: more right-leaning and gun-waving than your average cow-eating/club-toting/cro-magnon Republican) who was trying to tell me that global warming was a "liberal conspiracy" (some back-story for color: this is also the same person who gave me poison oak and then had the nerve to tell me it was "psycho-somatic"). Which resulted in a knock-down, drag out fight in our office during which each of us came up with roughly the same kinds articles about the problem as cited above; his article said the ozone layer has become thicker or at least stabilized over most of the planet, my article pointing out that the hole over Antarctica has gotten bigger.

I might agree with him insofar as psychosomatic diseases are concerned, that this phenomenon that we are experiencing is indeed mind-over-matter. Is it denial, a mass self-hypnosis that tells us we can keep going on in the same way? Is it a convenient case of selective attention? Really it boils down to this: are we too moronic to be able to pick thru this nonsense and figure out what's really going on? Or do we have to be hit over the head with obviously changing weather patterns (i.e. el Nino) and full blown disasters like New Orleans to connect the dots and figure it out and demand that our legislators take these issues head-on on the massive scale that befits an unfolding tragedy of this scale? (and if you think I'm just talking about New Orleans you need to stop and really think about it)... There's only so much that small pockets of liberals foaming at the mouth for alternate energy can do; this does nothing to change how people live in middle America, or the kinds of cars that manufacturers are allowed to put on the market. It's too late for a grassroots movement. We need to move fast and work from the top-down to patch this hole up.

So in the face of all the mounting scientific evidence about that obscure libaral conspiracy known as "Global Warming", what was one of the first things that Bush did way back in the first month of his presidency? He walked away from the Kyoto treaty that Clinton and other more remotely responsible world leaders had worked so hard to hammer out that would have gradually weaned the participating nations off of polluting, greenhouse gas-emitting energy sources. Actually I should correct that statement, because he didnt just walk away; that statement implies that he might have shown up in the first place. No, that's not what happened. Instead, Bush just ignored the summit entirely; he snubbed them like the snarky-toothed social climbing southern belle that he is.

So don't look at me - you know who to come crying to next time your house is under water.