friend of the built environment

A new bakery/coffeehouse opened in my San Francisco neighborhood. When I visited, they were out of most of their baked goods but the kitchen staff were rushing frantically to prepare more bagels and pastries.

They apologized and said they’d have lots more in another hour. I chuckled and commented that hopefully this means they’re doing better than they expected. The girl at the counter said they were doing better than anyone expected (which seemed to imply that potential funding sources were included there).

The dire economy does not seem to exclude people from enjoying life - specifically enjoying simple basics like staple foods and neighbors and community. Little coffeehouses and bakeries do this much better than upscale bars and bistros, let alone vacations to the Galapagos.

Maybe my dream of opening a bakery/coffeehouse on Butler in Arsenal is a little closer today… Hmmm…

Conservatives are often boisterous in their opposition to healthcare reform. Specifically, most conservatives are opposed to a single-payer national government insurer or provider.

Personally, I don’t think the legislation currently on the block goes far enough. From what I’ve been able to glean so far it seems mainly to compete with current state-regulated insurance plans to create a subsidized plan for the poor and those who are routinely turned down for affordable coverage due to health conditions.

Fine, good go, let’s get people covered. But we can do better.

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Just in case it gets yanked (Florida fans dislike debate over their idol):

I’ve often gotten carried away with my scathing hatred for Richard Florida, but I think that’s mainly because I’ve spent so many years being a fabulous homosexual living in Ueber-Creative San Francisco, and seen the casualties of creative cities - namely drug addiction, AIDS, and dead-end careers that will do nothing for people when total social collapse comes in the next decade or so.

Florida seems to have no original ideas: his philosophy is basically “attract the hottest new businesses and have lots of distractions for young people who don’t care about their future” - pretty much the same thing civic leaders of hot cities have at least paid lip service to since the dawn of settled humanity. The specific priorities have just changed.

I tried debating Jim Russell over Florida a couple times on his blog, but every time Russell would accuse me of being some xenophobic, racist, non-cosmopolitan, religious bigot to shut-down the discussion - ILLYRIAS did the same thing; it’s too bad people aren’t allowed to criticize Florida from a liberal urbanist perspective. It’s automatically assumed that if you don’t like him, you don’t like cities or hate homos or something.

Richard Florida himself even has a paranoia that every American critic he has is a right-wing conservative, so it’s not hard to see why all his boosters immediately ignore what I actually write about him and simply conclude that I’m a right-wing homophobe for not fawning over the man.

Yes, it was very normal.

Some people, including me at times, have argued that homo culture is a sort of dissent, and succumbing to normalcy is a bad thing. But normal in this context was so much different than normal as seen in its dark light by certain authors.

This sort of normal was amazingly diverse, celebratory and empowering. Seeing families with kids and all manner of parental combinations, and all manner of people of ambiguous sexuality enjoying the perfect normalcy of ambiguity was quite touching. The commerce taking place was pretty hardcore too; if this many people can work this hard to put on a festival dedicated essentially to sex that only 10%-20% of the population has, then no amount of economic doom will destroy us.

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Latin hiphop gayboys

Chase. For those times when you need a cheap, half-assed, hack-job bank. When only crap will do.

Five years ago, I decided to stop hacking my brain.

Over those five years I’ve become ever more convinced at what a good decision this was. It’s coincided with my witnessing of some severe chemical dependency struggles on the part of someone very close to me, and made me quite happy that my own lack thereof was a low-maintenance lifestyle decision.

Thank you to all those friends who don’t complain that I don’t go to clubs or bars with them, and who make an effort to accommodate for me a social life outside such a setting even if it’s a large part of their own social life. Thank you to those friends who don’t think twice when I want to toast with iced tea or water in my champaign glass. Most of all, thank you to those friends who’ve stuck around longer than the past five years and not even thought much of the fact that a major change happened in my life and who I was in that time.

Goths Nationwide Raid Head Shops for Last Clove Cigarettes.

Whilst I no longer hold the hardcore anti-regulation view I once held on cigarettes, I really can’t understand regulating cigarette flavors. The idea just seem silly.

Yes, we should protect workers who are clinging to their jobs from having to sacrifice their health for their job. I agree that tobacco products should have big fat warnings so that there is no ambiguity about their safety, regardless of which type of product they are (hello, cigars!).

But regulating flavors? Really?!

I haven’t chimed in on world affairs much lately - thankfully the economic crisis has seemed to make foreign adventures seem less appealing to most Americans.

But I do have a few opinions on the events taking place in Iran. Take them for the views of a person with limited education on the situation that they are.

The opposition frontrunner is not some liberal reformer who will bring an immediate toppling of the Ayatollah and the pouring of bikini-clad girls into the streets of Tehran. He’s just got some substantially different conservative domestic views than the current president. The Iran the West would see under his stewardship would not be discernibly different.

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One lesson we should all learn from the current economic crisis is to live within our means and know when to quit. The past decade was a story of lost opportunities, wasted energy, over-investment and wasted money. Let’s stop wasting local government cash and abandon this Ballpark. Even if this Ballpark is finished (which still isn’t a sure thing when a swindler is building it), no one will ever be able to afford to attend events at it, so we will default on these loans anyway.

We need to write off our losses now, not later. I doubt our city government has the courage to admit these realities (otherwise they would not have announced this at the last minute on a Friday), but
it’s not their place to be rational, independent thinkers, I suppose - otherwise they’d get real jobs (oh, wait - there aren’t any).

Like the Trillions of dollars that went into housing stock that is now idle or massively devalued, that money is gone - it’s not coming back. Let it go, but stop adding to it.