Brown Bag Dating

A truly unique idea that I propose be taken to the world of online dating.

No profile pictures, no "body type" check boxes. Let's see how many of us are really interested "in the person" not the package.

I suppose there could be brown paper bodybags covering everything. Maybe you could decorate or color the surfaces with your best qualities or inscribe with favorite quotations.

Perhaps just a head bag would be sufficient. I mean I would date the woman below, as long as she was open-minded, liberal and made me laugh.

Oh, she can't be allergic to cats or sarcasm.

And a sense of humor would be good.

Too bad she smokes. We could have been so happy.

Golden Nostalgia

I took this photograph of the setting sun behind the Golden Gate Bridge two years ago this week.

The sun is progressing on its northward path, setting behind the bridge for several days this week.

Fortunately for our drought conditions this week has been overcast and wet. However, no opportunities for a Bridge + Sunset snapshot, the evening overcast blotted out the bridge view.

My time here at the Berkeley Townhouse, with the beautiful panorama, is coming to an end after five years. Time to move on. Regrets I'll have a few, including not being able to lift my head from this screen and see San Francisco Bay in a kaleidoscope of weather, light and color.

Here are a few more shots from my window on the Bay.

Super (Bowl) Sucks

Hope you all enjoyed the game. I know a lot of people in San Francisco who didn't.

Every year the billionaires of the National Football League take over a metropolitan area for two weeks in the winter. Here in the Bay Area that meant:

-- homeless evicted from the downtown area and around Levi Stadium which is in Santa Clara 40 miles South of San Francisco.

When homeless advocates suggested the "tent city" set up for the homeless could be made permanent, they were met with silence from the city and county officials. When they attempted to march on Super Bowl City in protest, suddenly hundreds of riot geared police were marshaled from some hidden National Guard armory.

-- Super Bowl City is in San Francisco, not Santa Clara. Six blocks of downtown are closed off for the better part of two weeks. Kind of okay for the restaurants but the regular shops, dry cleaners and postal box places are basically out of business for the big game. No parking and everyone coming anywhere near Super Bowl City is subject to search, not just those entering the fenced off SBC.

To celebrate the big event, a dozen or more Super Bowl idols were erected throughout the City.

Several had to be removed after they were repeatedly defaced by residents who apparently are not all in on the Super Spew of the NFL invading their neighborhood.

-- But the darkest side of the Super Bowl is sex trafficking. The media has been saturated with a NFL led blitz of "news" pieces that seek to demonstrate that Super Sex is an urban myth. Yet studies have shown as much as a 300% increase in online sex services in the cities that have previously hosted the Super Bowl. 

-- Ticket prices for the game have now reach $4,000 but those in the know tell us that if you waited until the day before the game, you could score decent seats for less than three grand.

Did I mention the private airports around the Bay Area added acres of tarmac to park the influx of private jets for the weekend?

But weren't those puppy commercials cute?

For more see: The Super Bowl and a Broken San Francisco in The Atlantic and

The Host City Always Loses the Super Bowl.

Finally, a really brilliant summary of how most of the Bay Area residents felt about the Super Invasion.

" . . . the Super Bowl did not serve SF at all well. And if all reports are accurate, San Francisco did not serve the event well. We were, apparently a lousy host; the City failed in numbers ways to make space for all the ridiculousness the NFL's cavalcade of orchestrated brutality hurls forth."

Full article here from SGate.

Iowa or Not

Am I happy about the caucus results from Iowa? Let's call it a tie.

BUT . . . let us also be consistent or contrarian, you chose.

Why the hell are 180,000 frozen Iowans in February determining who gets to plow on in the presidential race? Why are they using a coin flip to award delegates? Why was turnout on the democrat side down 33% from 2008?

Our election system makes no sense. None, zero, nil.

George W. Bush was president for eight years, even though he lost the election.

Sixteen states have effectively blocked between four and ten million voters from even registering. How are those DMV closures working for you white folks in Alabama?

Gerrymandering has rigged the congress for one party over the other for over 12 years. [See Florida Congressional District redrawing by rabid ferrets]

Not to mention, billionaires buy hundreds of hours of media time to spew out lies, fabrications and racist, bigoted, vicious venom. It all started with The Big Bribe.

This is how we determine who will be "The Leader of the Free World" with the power to send militarized drones to any place in that free world? Which is why staffers don't stand too close to the candidates.

Anyway, nicely done Iowa. Oh, and by the way, if you work the evening shift, let's say in a restaurant, a hospital or a police cruiser -- you don't get to caucus. You have to be present at 7 PM on a Monday evening in February or you are disenfranchised.

God Bless Vespucci Land.