Yay, me! I just caught up on eighty back posts at grapes 2.0, dating back to before we left for Jordan/Egypt in March.

bloglines lets me know just how far behind I get on the umpty ump RSS feeds I've stashed away here.

So, I go away for a while or don't hang out on the computer for a while and before you know it, a blog I track has EIGHTY POSTS I haven't read yet with more added each day.

Fine. Caught up on grapes2.0.

Next up Sara Zarr's blog: 116 posts behind on that one. ...

Labels: blog, life, people

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:04 PM|| |

Why Hillary Makes My Wife Scream:

Tom Hayden on Hillary.

Yikes.

Labels: people, politics

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:19 AM|| |

'This Is How We Lost to the White Man'

Article in the May Atlantic about Bill Cosby's activism and his path from I Spy and the Huxtables to his Pound Cake speech and on.

The Web article includes a link to a vid interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote the article. Both the article and the Coates interview are time well-spent.

Link: The Pound Cake Speech - Bill Cosby, speaking 17 May 2004 in Washington, DC, at the NAACP's 50th anniversary of Brown v Board of Education (text and audio)

Labels: causes, life, people

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:45 PM|| |

In today's Chron ... a view from the Hill

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2008/04/13/PKMADONNA.DTL

:-)

The text was influenced by the mystery I'm allegedly working on. (Nothing about people with telescopes and/or wheelchairs. Honest!)

Update: Updated link to Madonna strip. Previous link was 404.

Labels: art, life, people, San Francisco, Telegraph Hill

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:54 PM|| |

Amazing what's available on YouTube.

I'm a huge fan of Orbison. I will probably bounce from YouTube to YouTube to YouTube to ... until (not long from now) I decide I'm about ready to crash.

Claudette. Pretty Woman. Running Scared.



Blue Bayou




from Orbison to Patsy Cline


to Hank Williams



to ... well ... oddly enough there's nothing much on YouTube from Cisco Houston.

Joan Baez, however. ...



I bought a photograph of Mimi and Debbie Green, taken while Mimi lived on Alta. The two are goofing off at the corner of Union and Montgomery, with the piers and Bay as backdrop.

Thank you, John Cooke.

Cooke sold me a piece of his life. Man, I love the Web and the John Cookes of the world.

Labels: music, people, Telegraph Hill, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:21 PM|| |

[Note: Previous link went 404. New link added.]

Labels: people, politics, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:34 PM|| |

Liked this. 4:30m video. "Obama. Yes, we can" from Dipdive.com

Forwarded on to me by the younger younger Guy. Thanks.

Labels: people, politics, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:07 PM|| |

Golden Gate Fields Sees Russell Baze's 10,000th Racing Win [KCBS]

Years and years and years ago, I read horse race results at the back of the sports section in the San Jose Mercury News. Didn't take me long to discover that a bet on whatever horse Russell Baze was riding was a good bet to place.

Congrats to Baze, who won his first race in 1974 in Yakima, WA, on a horse trained by his father, Joe.

Labels: news, people

   posted by Sal Towse at  7:51 PM|| |

A Rebellion and an Awkward Embrace
By PEGGY NOONAN
February 1, 2008 / Wall Street Journal

In the most exciting and confounding election cycle of my lifetime, Rudy Giuliani, the Prince of the City, is out because he was about to lose New York, John Edwards is out, the Clintons are fighting for their historical reputations, and the stalwart conservative New York Post has come out strong and stinging for Barack Obama. If you had asked me in December if I would write that sentence in February, I would have said: Um, no.

Noonan's column continues ...

Labels: news, people, politics, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  7:00 PM|| |

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Day, I reprise a view from the Hill.

Read the post and the Letter from Birmingham Jail. (the "letter" on the blog post is 404).

Labels: biography, history, people, politics

   posted by Sal Towse at  7:38 PM|| |

The World Question Center -- 2008:
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

So far, 165 contributors, including Alan Alda, John Baez, Greg Benford, Aubrey de Grey, Ricahrd Dawkins, Ray Kurzweil, J Craig Venter ...

Interesting ...

e.g. Stewart Brand


[...]

The message finally got through. Good old stuff sucks. Sticking with the fine old whatevers is like wearing 100% cotton in the mountains; it's just stupid.

Give me 100% not-cotton clothing, genetically modified food (from a farmers' market, preferably), this-year's laptop, cutting-edge dentistry and drugs.

The Precautionary Principle tells me I should worry about everything new because it might have hidden dangers. The handwringers should worry more about the old stuff. It's mostly crap.

(New stuff is mostly crap too, of course. But the best new stuff is invariably better than the best old stuff.)

[via Mark Morford]

Labels: life, people, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:54 PM|| |

100. ... (Is that it?)

Brilliant idea.


[via Laughing Squid]

Labels: life, people, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:27 AM|| |

Monica (of Sexploration with Monica) sleeps around housesits.

Labels: life, people, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  8:25 AM|| |

Over at Grapes 2.0 the Sour One is taking a poll asking what we think is the "Most beautiful children's book".

I've answered, have you?

In my answer I mentioned both Chris Van Allsburg and Clare T (Turlay) Newberry as favorite author/illustrators (although beautiful illustration doesn't seem to be the ultimate intent of the Flemish poll that triggered all this yakyak).

I first encountered Newberry's books when I was a page at the San Jose Public Library back in the early 70s. Shelving books in the Children's Room one day, I came across Newberry's book Smudge and promptly fell in love with her cat/kitten sketches.

Check out what I'm talking about. I love the way she was able to convey the cat-ness of the cats and kittens and the texture of their fur.

Labels: art, books, people

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:26 PM|| |

Better late than never.

Last May, in honor of its one-year anniversary, The Rap Sheet organized The Rap Sheet's ONE BOOK PROJECT.

We invited more than 100 crime novelists, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel that they thought had been "most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years."

Interesting list. Steve Hockensmith, author of Holmes on the Range and On the Wrong Track, nominates THE DOORBELL RANG (1965) by Rex Stout and explains why. J.D. Rhoades, lawyer, blogger, and author of Safe and Sound nominates Katy Munger's MONEY TO BURN [1999]. Linda Fairstein, author of Bad Blood, chose Robert Traver's ANATOMY OF A MURDER.

... and the list goes on.

If you're a crime fiction fan, this list will keep you in reading material for a long, long time.

[via The Rap Sheet]

Labels: blog, books, mystery, people

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:18 PM|| |

Greenspan must really miss not having everyone hang on his every word now that he's not Fed Chair and Bernanke's doing what Bernanke thinks needs doing to offset the subprime meltdown that's happening (and all the dominos falling after) because of decisions made on Greenspan's watch.

Doesn't seem to be a week go by when I don't see "Greenspan says" "Greenspan sees" headlines.

Who really cares what Greenspan sees or says. He's outta there.

What's Bernanke going to do is the question.

Greenspan sees early signs of U.S. stagflation

Labels: people, politics

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:48 AM|| |

Damn.

I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer's, which lay behind this year's phantom "stroke".

continues ...

Labels: damn, people

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:39 AM|| |

Check out Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG: Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, Landscape Futures.

A plethora of goodies.

Geoff Manaugh has a book (BLDGBLOG) out from Chronicle Books in Spring 2009 and moved to this fair ville in September to become a senior editor at Dwell.

More about Manaugh here.

Labels: architecture, blog, books, people, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:01 PM|| |

By golly they DID IT!

Watch Daily Show Video Clips Online

Comedy Central's putting all Daily Show videos online (paired with subtle and well-thought-out advertising, natch).

1999-Now. Seven thousand one hundred twenty-eight videos so far.

The national productivity index makes a whooshing sound as it plummets by.

Labels: news, people, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:44 PM|| |

Paul Madonna Open Studio
Sat & Sun, October 20 & 21
11-6
290 Guerrero St, @ 15th (San Francisco)
(Top Buzzer)

Paul Madonna Web site

7x7 article on All Over Coffee, Paul Madonna's new(ish) collection of drawings.

Madonna's collection is a classic, the perfect gift for the San Francisco-philes of your acquaintance.

Labels: art, people, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:15 AM|| |

NYC Bride Sues Florist Over Flower Color [AP]

The florist sez he told her he probably couldn't match exactly the color she wanted. He provided pastel pink and green hydrangeas when the bride wanted dark rust and green ones.

Ruined her day, it did.

Bride is an attorney and is suing for $400K in restitution and damages.

And get this: the original flower bill was for $27,435.14!

Yikes. I hope her dear husband knows what he's getting into.

[More complete NYTimes article]

[tons of comments at the SFChronicle]

Labels: legal, news, people, yikes

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:32 PM|| |

Read/watch this lecture, billed as Randy Pausch's "last lecture."

As an intro, the article in the WSJ that talks about the lecture.

The video of the speech is an hour and three-quarters if you watch to the very end. There's also an edited five-minute video, but it doesn't capture what the full video does.

Randy Pausch's speech (and Randy Pausch), inspirational.

Labels: life, people, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:32 PM|| |

The video this post links to is dashing around the Web this week even though it was taken four years ago.



Made me cry. I'm sure the young woman singing the National Anthem still remembers that night and the kindness of Mo.

Check out this article, written not long after the video was taken in 2003.

*sniffles*

Also check out Patti Digh's blog, 37days, which is where this all came from.

Labels: blog, life, people, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:39 AM|| |

I was reading someone's blog tonight and they mentioned Brian Hyland and Gypsy Woman.

Gypsy Woman? What? I knew Gypsy Woman, of course, but had never associated it with Hyland. Why would I? I knew Hyland because of his big hit in the summer of 1962, Sealed With A Kiss. I know it was 1962 because that was the summer after fifth grade, the school year when I'd swooned over Phil Johnston, whose sister Sheila was in my older sister's class. When school ended in June, Phil'd up and moved away. Sealed With A Kiss, was my anthem that summer as I mooned about. Sealed with a kiss, if only.

Same Brian Hyland? How many Brian Hyland's singing in that time frame could there be?

So, I popped /"brian hyland" "gypsy woman" "sealed with a kiss"/ into Google and found out Hyland wasn't a one hit wonder. He was indeed the same dude and, furthermore, his first and biggest hit (recorded in 1960 when he was a sophomore in high school) was Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini, written by Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss.

Who knew?

Last, but not least, my Web searching scored me a vid of Hyland lip-synching Sealed With A Kiss on some bandstand show, probably Dick Clark's.



Check out the dancers! There's a classic nerd with black rimmed glasses and plaid jacket and a girl doing what looks like the Frug. (No, not those on the stage behind him. Later in the video. Watch! The guy she's dancing with is dressed in a buttoned cardigan sweater. No lie!)

Nostalgia hits hard tonight.

Labels: life, music, people, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:46 PM|| |

Love Kristofferson's voice.

Video of a song from last year's album: In the News

Labels: music, people

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:13 PM|| |

Interview with Elizabeth George in the June 2007 WRITER Magazine. [Caution: PDF!]

[snippet]

You talk a great deal about the craft of writing. What do you mean?

It's important for beginning writers to learn the craft, the basics, of writing. You can't teach somebody to be a creative artist, to have talent or passion, but you can teach somebody craft. Whether they can apply it in an artistic fashion, well, that's in the hands of the gods. But they can certainly learn what the craft of writing is.

Labels: books, people, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:36 PM|| |

Norman P. Canright

Faced with the need to support his family, Norman plunged into commerce at the age of 40, first working on the docks as a ship's clerk, until he was hired as a temporary clerk with a small importing company, R. Dakin & Company. When the F.B.I. called company president Roger Dakin to suggest that he might not want to hire a "Red," he reportedly told them to mind their own business. Norman quickly advanced to sales manager, then to vice president for sales, and member of the board of directors, as he helped to build R. Dakin into the second largest firm in the nation in the benign business of plush stuffed animals.

Great story of an interesting life well lived.

RIP.

Labels: obit, people, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:17 PM|| |

Labeled "THE GREATEST OBITUARY EVER" by Poor Mojo Newswire

Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.

The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany's Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women's clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous "glamour" charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly he managed only a Third in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

[... Continues]

Labels: obit, people, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:41 PM|| |

For Villaraigosa: Sex, lies and eyes that pry - commentary by Timothy Rutten in the LA Times.

Is this affair a newsworthy tidbit? Is it any business of ours? Is it the business of people who watch Salinas on Telemundo or who live in the city for which Villaraigosa is mayor?

Is it newsworthy only as relates to whether Salinas should've kept covering the news? Had she told her bosses about the relationship? Does it matter whether Salinas and Villaraigosa were "just friends" or lovers? If she told her bosses "just friends" and not "lovers," should that have affected the limits her bosses put on her reportage?

Oh, the questions, the reckless behavior, the conflict-of-interest.

Does it even matter except as a way of selling the news in an industry where the more news sold the better?

My favorite part of Rutten's commentary is his reprise of the late Abe Rosenthal's standard in such cases:

It doesn't matter if a reporter sleeps with elephants, so long as they don't cover the circus.

Labels: California, news, people, politics, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:55 PM|| |

The current issue of Northside (not available online, alas) features a cover photo and a profile of Maurice Kanbar, inventor, philanthropist, &c.

Who he? I thought.

Turns out back when he was a young man, Kanbar (who is no longer a young man) invented and patented the D-Fuzz-It sweater comb and made a packet.

Later, Kanbar patented the Safety Glide hypodermic needle protector, a cryogenic cataract remover and the Tangoes puzzle game. He also launched New York's first multiplex theatre back when and, in 1992, founded SKYY Spirits, LLC, corporate home to SKYY Vodka.

He's had his successes and also his failures. Renaissance Man or just having fun?

He doesn't work, he says. If you enjoy what you're doing, it's not work.

Kanbar has made a pocketful of change. The article profiles his passions and his philanthropy. If you can find a copy of Northside, read the article.

Labels: people, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:19 PM|| |

Baldwin sez sorry for ripping his 11-year-old daughter, but Basinger has driven me 'to the edge'

Yah yah yah. Wah wah wah. Excuses. Excuses.

sniff -- I'm so sorry for ya, Alec.

I think the most telling thing of this (yes, brutal) phone message (text here) left for Baldwin's eleven-year-old daughter is this

I don't care that you're twelve or eleven or whatever, are you pig [or so the transcript reads. maybe should be "big"?] enough to pick it up? I'm a good father, and you're a pig. I don't give a shit. Good father. You think this is abuse? You think this is abuse, you thoughtless pain in the ass?

So. Does Alec think his daughter that he loves so much is twelve? or does he think she's eleven?

Why doesn't he even know fer sure how old she is?

What a darling he is.

Labels: life, people

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:53 PM|| |

KPIX brings you thirty minutes un-cut of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom answering questions from KPIX CBS5's Hank Plante.

An exclusive and you can bet your bottom dollar Newsom's not going through this for each and every one of you newshounds out there. You could almost see Gavin draw in a breath after some questions and thinking, what is he going to ask next.

(And, sweet mercy, when will this be over?)

Plante: "Let me ask you another question. ... There are rumors that you also used cocaine and other substances..."

(The actual news spot was far shorter. That's also available at the site.)

Labels: people, San Francisco, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:25 PM|| |

Twelve minutes.

Well worth it.

Craig Ferguson's monologue from Tuesday, 20 Feb 2007.

I'd embed it for you (tried!) but CBS isn't allowing embedding.

Labels: people, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:26 AM|| |

For those who aren't living under a rock (hey, even I know about this and I haven't had the TV on since ... oh, about October), there's a brou going on over at Celebrity Big Brother (over 38K protests already logged) about the interactions between some of the other contestants and Shilpa Shetty, a Bollywood movie star.

The long time sponsor, Carphone Warehouse, has canceled their sponsorship. Tempers run high, and so do the viewer stats.

I finally clicked over to YouTube this morning to check out some clips of what's been happening.

The Economist has what I think is probably the right take on the situation.

The crap these people are throwing at Shilpa Shetty is less about racism (although the bullies do pick on Shetty's Indian face and clothes and cooking and what-all because they think that's where she's vulnerable) and more about the fact that Shetty is beautiful, poised, well-spoken, well-off and in all ways a success, a celebrity in her own right.

The contrast between her circumstances and those of her bulliers is striking.

They're jealous. They're eaten up with envy. They are showing the world less what is wrong with Shetty and her Indian background and more about what is inherently wrong with them. The more they beat up on Shetty and the more grace she shows, the less she breaks down because of the verbal battering, the more infuriated they become.

What a bunch of jerks.

Shetty is grace under pressure, a lot of pressure. She'll come out of this with her halo intact, nay even polished. Perhaps her grace is a form of passive aggression, perhaps she's classy because she knows it drives them nuts.

Maybe so, but the others? They simply come across as jealous lusers. Bullies. Cretins. Crap.

My take.

Or is it all just theater? The Age comes through with a different slant.

As feminist Germaine Greer, who appeared in a previous Big Brother, argued in The Guardian, Shetty is "a very good actress". "Everything about (Shetty) is infuriating," Greer said. "Everyone hates her because she wants them to. The problem is that most of the housemates are too dim to convey what a pain in the arse Shilpa is without appearing to persecute her."

Some papers are calling Greer's commentary a defense of Shetty.

You think? I don't. I don't think Germaine Greer much likes Shetty either.

Hm.

We now return y