Sorry for the low-tech rerouting, but: 

If you reached this page because of a link to a numbered item that is no longer on my main page, you can get to it by adding "#" and the number -- e.g. "#1134" -- to the end of the URL above.

A very short story from Strange de Joel:

"The bed was a Murphy, and anything that could go wrong in that bed, did."

6/12/06, 7:46 p.m. (Link here)

Deerblogging:

6/11/06, 10:33 a.m. (Link here)

Ultimate Tough Kitty Blogging:

Fifteen-pound New Jersey tabby cat trees a bear. Twice.

5/23/06, 1:34 a.m. (Link here)

Perhaps the people who think U.S. citizenship means speaking nothing but English would like to explain the existence of a venerable dialect called Pennsylvania German that is found in no other country than this one?

5/23/06, 1:15 a.m. (Link here)

Sez Strange de J, "It oughta be a crime to put five nouns in a row." The object of ire being an SF Chron "People in Business" column featuring a note that one "Cheryl Traverse" (real name apparently) "was appointed CEO and president in the San Francisco office of Xceedium Inc., a provider of information technology operations management services." Yep, "information technology operations management services." Grammar? Who needs the stuff?

5/19/06, 1:34 p.m. (Link here)

About the "F" word -- This is getting attention in liberal blogworld today.

5/18/06, 10:05 p.m. (Link here)

Catblogging:

You've heard we have cold summers in San Francisco. Hence the importance out here of maintaining a large sedentary tabby cat in each household.

5/11/06, 9:48 p.m. (Link here)

Your Tax Dollars At Work: real estate blogger Frances Flynn Thorsen catches a U.S. DOJ visitor surfing in on a search for the word "boobs."

5/11/06, 8:45 p.m. (Link here)

Strange De J., on reports that the NSA really has been logging everyone's phone calls:

"It's Watergate but against the whole country. They didn't just break into the Democratic Party headquarters, they broke into the whole country!"

5/8/06, 11:14 a.m. (Link here)

Strange de Joel is at a tech convention today:

Highlight of the day from the convention floor: the booth of the Verint co. with the motto "Powering actionable intelligence". I asked the guy if that means people can sue them, but it turns out it only means they can take security action if their video camera detects people breaking the rules. Bah!

Strange de Joel suggests it's time for a new Missouri Compromise: let one Mexican in free and the next as a slave.

5/4/06, 11:38 p.m. (Link here)

Ooh, how nice, I'm in a "demographic group" according to Social Security. Which I think is Social Security-ese for "people who make less money and more trouble than the normal population." Women, of course, are a majority. But we're still a kind of people who make less money and more trouble than the folks our system is pleased to view as normal.

5/4/06, 10:00 p.m. (Link here)

Just a little Dylan: this song feels more timely than I wish it did.

5/3/06, 7:21 p.m. (Link here)

Overclassification, cont'd.

5/2/06, 2:49 p.m. (Link here)

Hey, wanna work on a business newsletter for temp companies? "It includes a generous benefit plan, bonus opportunity, paid time off and a 401(k) plan. Compensation will be competitive." The temp jobs you'll be writing about, however, tend to include no benefits, no bonuses, no vacations, and no retirement plan. But then you won't be writing on behalf of the employees, now, will you?

5/1/06, 12:31 p.m. (Link here)

Look what I found at the foot of this SF Chron story about today's marches. What about Google's policy of refusing all ads "advocating against any organization or person"?

4/30/06, 9:06 p.m. (Link here)

There's a note in the window of a local establishment saying the kitchen staff will be off tomorrow but the place will be open and drinks and cold pastries will be served. In other words, as in many California restaurants and cafes, the kitchen staff are immigrants and the front counter staff are U.S.-born.

4/30/06, 7:51 p.m. (Link here)

On Friday the Third Circuit federal appeals court dithered through a slew of standing questions in SEIU v. Municipality of Mt. Lebanon but ultimately decided, as the Findlaw summary explains, that

A municipal ordinance requiring door-to-door canvassers who plan to "hand pamphlets or other written material" to residents or discuss with them "issues of public or religious interest" to first register with the police department violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments' guarantee that no state shall abridge the freedom of speech.

4/29/06, 1:14 p.m. (Link here)

Want to work in fundraising for U.C. Berkeley? Well, then, can you pass a criminal background check?

4/28/06, 8:29 p.m. (Link here)

This possibly shouldn't bother me. It's a scan of a promo circulated by an exhibitor in advance of an upcoming tech conference (sorry about the moire effect from scanning). Note the banner at upper right reading "Republican National Convention."

4/28/06, 8:06 p.m. (Link here)

So the next time the Castro District shopkeepers get enlisted in an anti-homeless campaign, or another rejection of a shelter for destitute young refugees from homophobia, they should maybe think about yesterday's car crash, in which a homeless guy known as Dane was the first to step forward in an attempt -- sadly unsuccessful -- to rescue the driver of a mangled BMW. Here's the story from another man who helped: "We came out with fire extinguishers to keep the fire away... We didn't realize the gas was flowing down the street. ...Dane got him halfway out, and then we had to come back with more fire extinguishers. We pulled him all the way out and got him into an alleyway." 'Nother words, the homeless guy was first to try and rescue a guy from a burning car while everyone else began by doing something that was useful but conveniently not quite so dangerous. I mean, when New York firefighters do a thing like that, the response they get is a nation on its knees. Homeless guy risks his life to try and save someone and what happens to him? Probably by now he's already been moved along and called a parasite once again.

4/27/06, 1:22 p.m. (Link here)

Great headline here: "NYC Firefighter Begins Sentence in Brawl." I bet he said, "Why, you...."

4/23/06, 10:20 a.m. (Link here)

Says here we live "at a time of unprecedented economic prosperity." Does that mean there's enough to go around?

4/18/06, 11:07 a.m. (Link here)

Fresh from filling out tax forms addressed to "you," under which I wrote my husband's name, and "your spouse," under which I wrote my own:

I wonder how much of the fury against gay marriage comes from inability to think of a partnership in which neither member is by custom or definition in charge. Heavens, we might have to rewrite the forms and conventions and name changes to admit the possibility of equal partnership. And, heavens, that's an idea that might become contagious.

4/17/06, 9:58 p.m. (Link here)

Catblogging:

4/17/06, 12:16 p.m. (Link here)

Maybe I'm the last to know, but it's nice to see they got around to naming an airport after Thurgood Marshall. One of the good guys gets something once in a while.

4/17/06, 11:33 a.m. (Link here)

Does ordering a "lockdown" at a school make it a house of detention? Is that consistent with the constitutional rights of students who have not been convicted of crime?

4/16/06, 3:53 p.m. (Link here)

About the pretended "war on" Christian holidays that's being invented out of whole cloth by right-wing commentators: the odd part is, compared to countries like Spain, our own political left is healthily non-religious -- neither loudly pious nor angrily anticlerical, but in fact composed of both religious and secular activists who come to the same issues from varying philosophical directions. Whereas the left in a place like Spain is not just in favor of separating church from state, but also given to an angry anticlericalism that is characterized not by indifference to religion but by gross, intentionally unforgivable blasphemy against it. We do not have an anticlerical party here. We never have. What worries me is, if these right-wingers keep pretending to see a nonexistent anticlerical movement, they may in fact inspire one. I don't know if it's their goal to split the remains of our left into its non-religious, Christian, and religious non-Christian components, or if they're just serving the narrower goal of giving members of the majority faith a new excuse to feel like underdogs. But it's a sad pattern and one I hope we can outgrow in a hurry.

4/16/06, 12:28 p.m. (Link here)

There's this headline quoted on Google News: "Suspect Charged In Death of Proof."

Yes, "Proof" was the stage name of a man in the Detroit music business... but it still makes one wonder a la Woody Allen if the gumshoes have reopened their files on God, The Novel, Satire, etc.

4/15/06, 3:11 p.m. (Link here)

Pronoun trouble with the Giant Rabbit of Northumberland:

..."It is a massive thing. It is a monster," local resident Jeff Smith told the Northumberland Gazette. "The first time I saw it, I said, 'What the hell is that?'" Smith claims to have seen the black-and-brown rabbit, which has one ear bigger than the other, as have other residents. The British Rabbit Council says the sightings are credible..."

4/12/06, 5:24 p.m. (Link here)

Y'know, this Guardian writer is filtering Catherine MacKinnon so heavily through his own perceptions -- including his opinions of her clothing and physical presence and his frustration at her refusal to discuss her personal love life -- that I have no idea what she has in fact been saying in her latest book.

4/12/06, 4:55 p.m. (Link here)

It's hard sometimes to quantify this talk about "the right-wing Wurlitzer" etc. Maybe it would help to read this job advertisement and consider how many liberal let alone progressive organizations would similarly be hiring for a "copy editor/fact finder" to contribute to a similar annual output of scholarly-appearing work.

4/9/06, 7:05 p.m. (Link here)

Aren't we past treating people as artifacts and not individuals? When papers print people's pictures now, don't they make at least some effort to put the subjects' names in the caption rather than treat them as typical specimens of a type?

OK, then, let's look at the back page of yesterday's SF Chron "Style" section, a feature called "On Location" consisting of brief text and a photo essay highlighting the fashion choices of young black San Franciscans waiting to enter an R&B concert.

The focus in these photos is so completely on the style of the women's jeans, shoes, jackets and purses that in several places their heads are cropped partly or fully out of the frame. Look at the headless woman in the second photo especially. Only one woman's name appears, though quite a few are pictured, with and without faces. A reporter interested in who these concertgoers were and how they chose their fashions might have learned something worth relaying about shopping habits, home sewing patterns, I dunno -- fashion isn't my business, but if the reporters found the style of the people in that concert line to be so much worth publicizing, then the people in that concert line must have also had something worth saying.

I guess the purpose of the photo essay wasn't for anyone who attended that concert to see themselves or their event in the paper. I guess it wasn't to show respect to women who had put together their personal styles creatively. No, it was so dowagers in the suburbs could see what Those Kids are wearing these days as a source of uncredited ideas for their own next trips to Magnin's.

Sometimes I really can't stand San Francisco, or the Chronicle anyway.

4/8/06, 10:56 p.m. (Link here)

Edgie, ready for anything.

4/8/06, 8:26 p.m. (Link here)

They're running "All The President's Men" on KQED tonight. The Post still has the stories posted online

4/8/06, 1:07 a.m. (Link here)

Wanted: "...Ability to adapt writing style to Old Navy voice, incorporating freshness and originality, where appropriate."

4/7/06, 12:40 p.m. (Link here)

More strange language from the Federal Register: it seems we grant some creatures "enhancement of survival permits"

4/6/06, 9:28 p.m. (Link here)

About sharing the new chair? Um, that would be a "no."

4/4/06, 10:13 p.m. (Link here)

So we get these catalogs for REI sporting goods. The one today is selling a line of backpacks including the Mars for men, the Venus for women, and the Saturn, for... unspecified. So I'm still wondering who gets the Saturn when Strange de Joel asks, "And a fanny pack called Uranus?"

4/4/06, 4:12 p.m. (Link here)

At Tenth and Folsom, South of Market, San Francisco, there is parked -- or was an hour ago -- a pickup truck with a bale of straw in the back. The bale has a pretty substantial scraggle of fresh grass all along the top of it. In other words, that straw bale has been out in the rain with the same side up, probably right there in that truck, long enough to grow four-inch blades of grass. Meaning how long? A week? Two? More? My theory is, some doofus desperate for love is trying to piggyback on "Brokeback Mountain" by cruising around pretending to be a real romantic cowboy with a real pickup truck pickin' up straw for a real horse waitin' back home in some dewy idyllic corral of the imagination. Memo to cowboy: better get yerself a real lawnmower.

4/3/06, 11:08 a.m. (Link here)

...and has it occurred to these traditionalist Republicans, the ones supporting the House version of the immigration bill, that if they genuinely were to turn 12 million immigrants into felons, together with those arrested for helping or hiding them, including members of their own "mixed-status" families who dared to continue sharing their homes, there would not be room in the prisons? We, the United States, would end up building concentration camps to hold all our prisoners. Do Republican traditionalists want to be remembered as the ones who caused them to be built?

We do, incidentally, have a history of building rural camps to imprison disfavored immigrants together with U.S.-born members of their families, many of whom had been working in agriculture with a level of success that discomfited some of their more politically powerful neighbors. Part of this history is that incentives were created within such camps for the prisoners to perform agricultural labor for artifically lowered wages.

...except I suppose this time around, the legal label of "felon" would cause us even to separate the families, and would justify requiring the prisoners to live under full-on prison conditions. Potentially for twelve million people or more.

What are we becoming?

4/2/06, 12:22 a.m. (Link here)

Isn't there something bizarre about U.S. states employing programmers and clerks in India and Mexico to administer public benefits for people who can't find jobs in the U.S.?

3/31/06, 6:50 p.m. (Link here)

Friday catblogging:

Everyone's a critic.

3/31/06, 2:32 p.m. (Link here)

From a discussion frequented by the aforementioned transportation researcher:

"I've been told that there is (or used to be) a rule at the MIT programming help desk that before you could talk to any of the techs, you had to fully describe your problem to a stuffed animal called the "problem bear". It turned out that more than half of the people's problems were solved by the bear."

3/29/06, 12:28 p.m. (Link here)

"Smile in the Face of Diversity"

The UC transportation researcher in my life was cleaning his office and found his predecessor had left behind a training document telling engineers how to deal with the press. It appears to have been generated by flacks in San Diego preparing for a 1997 event showcasing a now-defunct transportation research project. Lots of advice on mollifying reporters: give them bits of shiny "gee-whiz" information and deflect the serious questions with platitudes ("Everyone wins with better transportation technologies") and even prepackaged jokes. ("Computers do not get mad, distracted or spill their coffee.")

Predictable enough within a private corporation, but the recipient of the document was a public employee in an academic institution. From the extent of the doodling on the PowerPoint section of the packet, this highly trained scientific type -- probably a grad student -- was put through a fair amount of boredom for the sake of image maintenance.

And in the middle of the PowerPoint presentation we find the following revelatory advice:

3/28/06, 9:30 a.m. (Link here)

We are mystified by these food box cutoffs. Doesn't the party in power want the votes of old people or farmers?

3/27/06, 9:05 p.m. (Link here)

Very very odd: I just got an immodest spam message listing the sender as "Cucumber Gal." Could it be a reaction to the "pickles" already? Are spambots that smart?

3/26/06, 2:52 p.m. (Link here)

Editors Unclear on the Concept:

A blurb on the current front page of Washingtonpost.com is calling Erica Jong's Fear of Flying a "seminal feminist manifesto." No kidding.

[MORE: Welcome, Echidne readers. I think this is getting to be my all-time second-favorite Washington Post item -- after, of course, the immortal home-and-garden headline, "You Can Put Pickles Up Yourself."]

3/26/06, 12:49 p.m. (Link here)

Sorry this is a picture of a cat with no feet. There were better-framed photos to choose from but this one caught such a sweet look on her face.

Um, and for no good reason this is a picture of a bad cherry tomato that looked a little like Don King. No, we will not be auctioning this item on EBay as a devotional relic. It hit the garbage last night.

3/26/06, 12:28 p.m. (Link here)

We made it into a Modulator "Ark" post of catblogging and other critternet stuff. In honor of which, new catblog photo coming soon.

3/25/06, 9:24 p.m. (Link here)

Read Margaret Cho's essay, "Not For The Faint Of Heart." It isn't. Read it anyway.

3/23/06, 9:51 a.m. (Link here)

"In Tuesday's decision, the appeals court said the law bans asylum not only for those who inflict torture or other forms of persecution but also for those who provide active and willing assistance."

No, this time it's domestic news, but the torture in question was committed by a foreign government.

3/23/06, 12:04 a.m. (Link here)

"A characteristically puritan budget with measures to help the poor, the elderly, those in state education and anyone willing to invest in energy-saving activities...."

Yes, that would be from the foreign news.

3/22/06, 10:10 p.m. (Link here)

Catblogging:

3/20/06, 6:15 p.m. (Link here)

Look, if you don't want to subscribe to Harper's Magazine for any of the worthy reasons, here's an unworthy reason: the issue arriving today has William Kennedy's side of the story (William Kennedy as in Ironweed) about a 1960-1962 correspondence with Hunter Thompson regarding a box of Thompson's books that Kennedy never did exactly send along after Thompson jumped bail in Puerto Rico.

Oh, come on, you know you want to read that.

3/19/06, 8:57 p.m. (Link here)

You can follow the official tally of censure resolution cosponsors at this link. Two so far: Harkin and Boxer.

3/19/06, 3:38 p.m. (Link here)

Catblogging: Edgie has a new chair. Remains to be seen if she'll share it.

3/19/06, 11:01 a.m. (Link here)

Is Laura Bush still interested in the hell of being born female in Afghanistan?

3/15/06, 9:08 p.m. (Link here)

This is a link to the Holocaust History Project, as part of this bloggers' campaign to link to them in response to what I gather has been a campaign of online harassment against them supplemented by real-life physical arson. Eternal vigilance being the price of truth as well as freedom, it's a duty to help people tell the truth more prominently when this sort of thing happens to them.

3/10/06, 9:46 p.m. (Link here)

Friday catblogging: an only slightly evil side of Edgie.

3/9/06, 2:12 p.m. (Link here)

Check out this headline at PBS quick -- they'll fix it any minute. As of right now it says "President Bush Visits Golf Coast."

3/9/06, 9:30 a.m. (Link here)

Strange things turn up in the Federal Register. Did you know we have a Superfund site called the Stringfellow Acid Pits? It's probably just a funny-colored pond in the middle of nowhere (where's "near Glen Avon, California"?) but, damn, it sounds just ghoulishly awful, doesn't it?

3/7/06, 12:08 p.m. (Link here)

My day is made: Shaula Evans called me "fabulous." She's proposing an interesting discussion over at her site about name-branding and politics. I'll have more to say in her comments section over there later today.

3/5/06, 3:48 p.m. (Link here)

The major topics of spam are sex, weight loss, debts, investments, and real estate. What does that say about us?

3/5/06, 12:36 p.m. (Link here)

The front page of the San Francisco Chronicle is mildly startling today, due to this photo of a building in a simulated Iraqi village in Southern California where an actor in a headdress is assisting in the training of Bay Area reservists. See the roofline where the gold dome gives way to the plain wall below? That's where the fold of the newspaper falls. So as we all picked up our papers this morning, what faced us was the large gold dome all by itself. Which, um, gives the impression that its designer felt a certain yearning for female companionship. So I wonder, is the dome in this simulated village a faithful or an approximate copy of something overseas? Who designed that particular curve -- Iraqis or Americans? And regardless of the correct answer, isn't it strange how people express their nostalgias?

....Strange de Joel breaks into the ruminative moment: "We should be grateful that the Chronicle keeps us abreast of foreign affairs."

3/1/06, 12:54 p.m. (Link here)

I am tired of being told that anyone who disagrees with the Republican Party must therefore assume responsibility for explaining or defending neoliberals. This kind of behavior, for example, is impossible to explain or defend, and it's not a consequence of anything I have personally done or believed.

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