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. "#1220" -- to the end of the URL above.

Fascinating job ads, continued:

These folks want to hire a shill -- 'scuse me, a "news blogger" -- to promote their site in weblog comments.

"Key Responsibilities:

• Write an average of 30-60 blog comments on outside blogs per week.
• Document all blog comments daily and weekly.
• Elicit and maintain communication with bloggers.
• Keep abreast of shifting trends within the blogosphere and citizen journalism.
• Assist in reporting and documentation of news on TheNewsRoom distributor sites.

Compensation: Payment is $2.50 per blog comment (Minimum 20 / Maximum 100 comments per week). Blog comments must be at least 20 words each; additional guidelines will be discussed at start of employment."

5/16/07, 10:32 p.m. (Link here)

Our highly educated Edgie cat reads Harper's Magazine.

4/22/07, 8:57 p.m. (Link here)

"Gated communities?" The proper word is "ghettoes."

4/16/07, 8:39 p.m. (Link here)

Strange de Joel sees an ad for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Something called the "Boneless Variety Bucket."

"Oh," he says, "it's the Democratic presidential candidates."

Yep, parts is parts.

4/12/07, 12:28 a.m. (Link here)

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut.

4/4/07, 8:45 p.m. (Link here)

Strange de Joel was remarking the other day on the tendency of drug names to sound like words out of Tolkien. He wonders if Big Pharma should just plain start naming pills after elves and hobbits. He recommends starting with "Bilbo, the drug that makes you feel small, insignificant, and invisible."

4/1/07, 10:47 a.m. (Link here)

Why is TASER International hiring?

This is not a joke, I wish it were. TASER International, maker of the electric zappers that may or may not sometimes stop people's hearts, has a quarter-page ad on the front of the San Francisco Chronicle Career Section today. It's seeking software and electrical engineers, number unspecified, to work in Scottsdale, Arizona "in a dynamic environment as part of the R&D team." Scary words in the engineers' description: "Power supply design experience is highly desirable and experience with microprocessors and digital systems is a plus." What on earth do they have in mind?

3/29/07, 7:25 p.m. (Link here)

Another sad sign-o'-the-times job ad: "Volunteer Coordinator Intern." Tenderloin Health, the group advertising this unpaid internship "job," is a perfectly useful organization -- but, really, two layers of volunteer status before they'll pay any part of your rent? And yet the (paid) managers probably wonder why Today's Youth Are So Materialistic...

[P.S. Then there's "Part Time Chair Massage Position Available."

To whom it may concern: I am willing to assume any position wished in a massage chair either part-time or full-time, provided my neck and shoulders are continuously massaged. What I don't understand is why the city wants to pay me for it.]

3/20/07, 9:12 p.m. (Link here)

This job ad is just exceptionally depressing:

"Grow a Healthy Democracy! $12/hour"

3/18/07, 5:58 p.m. (Link here)

Yikes, creepycrawlies.

I have a client with a bedbug problem and that's not even the problem. The problem is I went to get him some crates and boxes to store things during the spraying. It's spring in San Francisco and I was driving the car for the first time in several days. When I opened the back there was a black widow spider letting herself down from the corner of the hatch. Yes, I'm sure. Black marble-shaped body, scraggly web.

I must have looked demented from across the parking lot: woman waving big plastic bin lid at invisible enemy.

Anyway I got the spider on the ground and stomped her (sorry). Then I had to decide what to do with the stuff on my shoe. I finally dipped it in ammonia and hosed it off. Overkill, maybe, but it's not every day you see Ms. Lactrodectus her very own self.

3/10/07, 9:23 p.m. (Link here)

The Persistence of Edgie, cont'd.:

3/7/07, 9:03 a.m. (Link here)

The French have banned everyone except "professional journalists" from filming violence. Not a good move for civil liberties.

2/28/07, 11:11 p.m. (Link here)

Strange de Joel is back.

Re: news of the tragic "colony collapse disorder," he suggests we should give bees a chance.

He also notes that given recent news of Canadian border police turning away U.S. citizens with DUI convictions, G.W. Bush may have trouble going there too.

2/27/07, 11:28 p.m. (Link here)

Regarding today's stock market plunge, get this:

"My suspicion is that it won't last very long," said James Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis. The market has not been volatile lately, he said, so many traders were primed for that to change. "So many people were waiting on (increased volatility) that it magnifies it somewhat," he said. "They're waiting for any bad news so they can dump."
Paulsen said he didn't think there has been a significant negative change in fundamental economic factors.
"It's a feeding frenzy of fear," he said. "I don't see anything fundamentally horrible or wrong in the world anywhere at the moment. It's not like there has been a default or currency collapse so I think it could be fairly quickly resolved."

2/6/07, 10:09 a.m. (Link here)

Bet you didn't know we live in a country where the government decides who is allowed to be a journalist. Josh Wolf, independent videographer and blogger, has set a record for the journalist longest imprisoned on contempt charges because he refuses to release footage he took of a San Francisco political protest that turned ugly. Except the federal prosecuting attorney says Wolf only thinks he's a journalist:

Wolf's "resolve to remain confined rather than comply with the grand jury subpoena is apparently fueled by his anointment as a journalistic martyr," Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Finigan said in a Jan. 29 court filing. He called Wolf "delusional" and said additional time in prison might help him realize that he was not a genuine journalist, but "simply a person with a video camera who happened to record some public events."

[P.S. That label "delusional" keeps coming back to me in odd moments. It's too close to the old Soviet imputations of political insanity.]

1/24/07, 7:26 p.m. (Link here)

Habeas cattus. Well, I don't know about you but anyway habemus cattus. We're apparently not safe from detention without trial. Our own national attorney general says the Constitution doesn't preserve the fundamental democratic right of Anglo-American jurisprudence without which the rest of it is no use whatever. But at least for the time being we do have a small fuzzy house monster.

Here's our small cat traveling with us at Christmastime, feeling a little better about long-haul driving on the second try:

She liked Grandma's house a lot better this time.

Much better.

In fact she almost didn't want to go home.

1/24/07, 7:14 p.m. (Link here)

Dear Speaker Pelosi: can we have habeas corpus back yet?

1/23/07, 8:03 p.m. (Link here)

Isn't this typical San Francisco: Letter-writer Lisa Fagundes in the SF Chron preferring pornographers to "vagrants" as neighbors in the former San Francisco Armory. Actually it would be nice if we could beat more of our swords into, um, submission similarly, but what's aggravating here is the uniquely San Francisco combination of broad-mindedness about lifestyle with coldhearted, closed-minded venom toward the poor. Anything is a great addition to the neighborhood so long as it makes money. Welcome to Mahagonny, folks.

1/22/07, 4:51 p.m. (Link here)

Viral marketing -- how it's done:

Check out this unusually frank job advertisement desperately seeking shills for an online discussion site.

1/12/07, 9:20 p.m. (Link here)

"...and when he cried..." (see below).

1/09/07, 1:23 p.m. (Link here)

The famous Fish and Wildlife proposed rule declaring the Polar Bear to be "threatened throughout its range" -- and thereby admitting to the existence of global warming -- is formally published in today's Federal Register. (If the jargon looks daunting, run a text search for "sea ice" to get to the good stuff.) I'm posting this here in case people want to send in formal comments, which it is everyone's right to do. You can follow the instructions in the Proposed Rule or go to Regulations.Gov and look it up under "Fish and Wildlife Service."

1/06/07, 9:39 p.m. (Link here)

...and a little Dylan seems necessary too.

12/31/06, 11:00 p.m. (Link here)

Someone may as well quote Auden's "Epitaph on a Tyrant."

12/26/06, 10:46 p.m. (Link here)

Yesterday, returning from a walk on a beach, we saw a householder couple driving a very large and heavy SUV on a lawn far too close to the edge of a sand bluff that has crumbled considerably in recent decades. (A warning sign on the nearby footpath reads, "Bluff May Collapse At Any Time!") So I said to the man driving, "You scared us a little, driving around there. That's not the most stable cliff in the world." He answered, "Well, it's my cliff." A more friendly and sensible conversation followed, but that opening line stuck in my head. It's evidence of a certain kind of superstition about the security provided by ownership.

12/19/06, 1:51 p.m. (Link here)

An intriguing bit of news from the heartland: last week in the case of Jones v. Gale, the federal Eighth Circuit overturned a 1982 ballot initiative that for nearly 25 years would appear to have given Nebraska farmlands some protection against impersonal corporate ownership.

It sounds like sad news that the Initiative 300 measure was overturned, but what's fascinating to me is the huge, varied list of organizations shown as having filed amicus briefs on behalf of the state officials defending Initiative 300: it's an American cornucopia of groups representing what you'd think would be extremely different political perspectives, including many state farmers' unions, the Oregon Livestock Producers Association, the American Corn Growers of Nebraska, the Sierra Club, The Great Plains Environmental Law Center and even Nebraskans for Peace.

In the winning corner were: six individual plaintiff property owners, the Nebraska Bankers Association, the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Nebraska Realtors association and the South Dakota Farm Bureau... and the "United States of America" as represented by the current federal executive branch. That's it.

Further evidence, just maybe, that although heartland people may vote along socially conservative lines, that doesn't mean they love big business.

12/18/06, 2:34 p.m. (Link here)

Large, unpersuasive sign at small family restaurant: "Have You Tried Our New And Improved Soup?"

12/14/06, 10:03 a.m. (Link here)

Guess what? Tomorrow is Bill of Rights Day. Hey, why not exercise a right tomorrow in celebration?

It also would appear to have been Human Rights Week since Sunday. I do hope that means somebody we are keeping in a cage will be let out of one. Too much to hope, but one does hope.

12/09/06, 9:01 p.m. (Link here)

Someone has to get a little work done around here...
Edgie, designated programmer, forges ahead.

12/08/06, 12:48 a.m. (Link here)

Travel catblogging:

Traveling nearly a thousand miles to grandma's house is not easily undertaken with or by a cat. Our Edgie learned after a while to handle fast smooth highway driving but when we slowed down she got nervous and whenever we stopped she looked for somewhere to hide. Under the seats in the car, under the mattress in every hotel room. At grandma's house she figured out how to burrow under bed blankets by herself. Here she is hiding under the quilt.

Edgie seemed to like grandma's gas fire, so much more interesting than the wall heater at home.

Traveling, however, wasn't so picturesque. It meant eating in odd places, which she didn't like.

For us it meant digging her out from under the box spring every single morning. She seemed especially afraid in a "pet-friendly" room at a Motel 6 where other pets had stayed. Scary-smelling ones, it seemed. The management had put a metal frame under the bed that looked like it would keep a small cat from crawling underneath. In fact, the frame didn't extend as far as the foot of the box spring, and the underside of the box spring was uncovered, so there was a cat-sized gap where she could climb behind the frame.

When we picked up the bed to get her out she climbed up into the box spring. We found orangey fur under the bed -- other cats must have done the same thing. Finally, having extracted our cat, we rolled up the quilt to cover the gap.

We had to sleep under just the sheet and one blanket, and poor restless Edgie kept jumping on and off the bed all night.

She had some cheerful moments in the car sitting in the lap of whoever wasn't driving, but then she spent a fair amount of time being a little scared creature wanting to go home.

We're trying to decide whether to take her on our next car trip. That last picture is a pretty strong argument against.

12/7/06, 7:00 p.m. (Link here)

Had it with tax-deductible charity organizations? Jon Carroll, who the SF Chron has lately been banishing to an interior, non-comics page of the Datebook section, recommends The Untied Way.

12/1/06, 11:03 p.m. (Link here)

So there will be discipline and maybe firings for some of the SF police officers involved in last year's "comedy" party video -- the one that among other things shows policemen running over a homeless black woman. Our police chief and our mayor have managed to call the video racist and sexist -- which I'm sure it is. But I wish they could also manage to see that it exemplifies the one unreasoning prejudice that can be expressed with impunity in San Francisco public discourse, which is contempt and hatred for the visibly poor.

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