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. "#1251" -- to the end of the URL above.

Been rereading Ulysses this week. Shocked to learn I'm older than Mr. Bloom.

12/03/07, 8:52 p.m. (Link here)

Um, there's this article of mine posted over at Shelterforce about what's wrong with supportive housing that doesn't care for people with real problems. It's the product of a difficult eight-month editorial negotiation and shows it, but maybe some of the sentiments got through.

English takes repetitive scrunching-up and flattening about as well as pie crust, don't you find?

11/11/07, 10:04 p.m. (Link here)

R.I.P. Norman Mailer. He was brilliant so long as he wrote what he knew: about American men in ethnic categories he thought similar to his own. So long as his characters were enough like himself for him to consider them human, he could see right through skulls. Motives, evasions, shamefaced virtues, endless subtle variations on brother and father dynamics, the reminder in The Naked and The Dead that everyone feels a bit different from the others and expects to do big things.

With women and other members of categories he found foreign, he was a deaf, dumb clod. But all writers have limits.

10/27/07, 10:04 p.m. (Link here)

So the SF Chron mgmt. now admit they are considering selling the paper's Fifth and Mission headquarters in downtown San Francisco. Makes sense: they obviously don't like downtown poor people nor want them as readers. Their news sections now deplore the kinds of urban knockabout variety that writers like Herb Caen once celebrated. Their advertisers clearly prefer home improvement "news" appealing to upper-class suburban trophy wives. Their paper doesn't belong South of the Slot any more. Sad to say, they can just go ahead and move to Fairfield or Burlingame and their readers won't know the difference. Far as I'm concerned they can take the glossy overpaid Giants and the bumbling '49ers with them. Harrumph.

10/20/07, 6:08 p.m. (Link here)

Good, good: The San Francisco Coalition on Homeless has started posting letters to the editor debunking the Chronicle's anti-homeless hate campaign. See especially Jason Albertson's well-informed demolition of the official lie that homeless people refuse available housing.

10/20/07, 12:15 a.m. (Link here)

Amazing: even the usually conservative SF Weekly is expressing concern about the San Francisco Chronicle's ethics, at least about a rather sinister request the Chron posted for (presumably non-homeless) readers to photograph "homeless" people and send in the pictures. As the Weekly says, the request smacks of vigilantism and sketchy ethics. Doesn't anyone in authority at the Chron know better?

10/18/07, 4:47 p.m. (Link here)

This published exchange is the best critique I've seen yet of the San Francisco Chronicle's hateful scapegoating campaign against homeless people. Here, San Francisco Bay Guardian city editor Stephen T. Jones engages the point man on the Chronicle's campaign in an actual conversation about the professional and moral defects of his anti-homeless columns.

I've also been saying what I can wherever I can about the Chronicle scapegoating problem, including guest posts c/o friends on LeftInSF and Harry's Place, but there are not enough of us who believe in homeless people's human rights, have computers, and have the time to use them in protest. Mr. Jones finally has said what needs saying, hitting the necessary buttons hard, in a publication that gets a lot of local attention. Many thanks to him.

10/6/07, 3:13 p.m. (Link here)

There's stuff now about Mitt Romney "looking presidential". Romney looks like a smiling sociopath. He looks like the bank manager in the Bukowski poem with "a face nothing had ever happened to."

Abraham Lincoln wouldn't look presidential to this crew. He'd look like a yokel earnest enough to cheat but not rich enough to yield much of a take. Come to think of it, that's how he looked to a lot of people in his own day too.

9/30/07, 10:46 p.m. (Link here)

Reader John Burke came up with some suitable art for that "Family Day" phrase.

9/29/07, 1:55 p.m. (Link here)

From the recent White House proclamation of September 24 as "Family Day," we learn that "Strong, loving families help young Americans grow into successful adults and build a Nation shining with optimism." If you don't find that phrasing creepy, try picturing art to go with it.

And tomorrow is Gold Star Mother's Day -- a strange idea, though an old one, as it implies the mothers of the dead offered them up voluntarily, like Abraham with Isaac.

9/25/07, 11:38 p.m. (Link here)

Not so bad, this new TV comedy called "Reaper". A fresh premise: a nowhere kid in a nowhere job, whose parents obviously did better than he has, discovers they long ago sold his soul to the Devil -- and the deal kicks in on his 21st birthday.

Forgive me for being dreary, but it's a timely metaphor for debt peonage in a generation that arrived too late for the good tuition rates, mortgages, and pensions.

9/22/07, 3:00 p.m. (Link here)

"Camus said that the one serious question of philosophy is whether or not to commit suicide; the one serious question of political philosophy is whether or not to get out of bed."

9/22/07, 10:28 a.m. (Link here)

Ran across a sad phrase today. It's in the SF Chron coverage of the Internet organizing group Color of Change and its recent work on the Jena Six case. It's this:

As part of a loose coalition of bloggers, black radio hosts and activists that helped rally 20,000 people to demonstrate in Jena this week, Color of Change is bridging the gap between civil rights activists and the predominantly white liberal blogosphere and mainstream media.

9/18/07, 11:18 p.m. (Link here)

Yep, it's all the fault of the bicycle riders...(c/o Cursor.org)

9/10/07, 9:09 p.m. (Link here)

So I'm reading Joan Didion's Political Fictions, and there's a bit on the Clinton scandals where Didion compares the obsessive Kenneth Starr to Captain Ahab.

Says Strange de Joel, "Thar she blowwwws!"

9/2/07, 2:52 p.m. (Link here)

Offbeat thought about the Republican and Democratic Parties: one is the party of private landlords, and the other is the party of nonprofit and government landlords. What we need is a party for tenants.

7/28/07, 9:22 p.m. (Link here)

J. found this a few days ago. Looks like Google News was getting a little ahead of the game.

7/13/07, 1:17 p.m. (Link here)

Im in ur cheez, dreamin ur dreamz

6/29/07, 7:15 p.m. (Link here)

Strange de Joel strikes again:

A suggestion being made that the Devil has reserved a special place for Dick Cheney, Mr. J. says, "Don't worry, Cheney's not gonna go to Hell. He has other priorities."

6/1/07, 7:02 p.m. (Link here)

R.I.P. Lloyd Alexander, author of the Chronicles of Prydain and other lovely adventure stories. He died May 17. I only just heard.

"I used the imaginary kingdom not as a sentimentalized fairyland, but as an opening wedge to express what I hoped would be some very hard truths," he once told an interviewer. "I never saw fairy tales as an escape or a cop-out. . . . On the contrary, speaking for myself, it is the way to understand reality."

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