I’m sitting in the Mecca of San Francisco hipster coffee shops -  Ritual Roasters - waiting to meet a friend for dinner. Among the assorted specimens of over-educated white irony is a a skinny dude with a mop of blonde hair, tight tight black jeans, and dark-rimmed glasses. He and his low profile digital watch have both been carefully vetted as authentic nerdy.

Unexceptional, you say, until I tell you that his hands are busy knitting a light blue scarf. Between his deft needlework he dips into some vegan bean ‘n rice concoction that’s sitting next to his ball of yarn. I didn’t know hipster men knit.

Not that I think they’re sexist or that men shouldn’t knit. But hipster masculinity is already a delicate balancing act.  Their witty unconnectedness, apathy, and coke-soaked frailty already stretches traditional archetypes of manhood. Knitting?

Funny enough, I think the knitting works for this fellow. Maybe I should knit.

or not.

I’m by no means alone in being a fan of the NPR show This American Life. Its a finely crafted production, that at its best comes off as a little magical. Last night I listened to their Peabody Award winning episode “Habeas Schmabeas“, about the Bush administration’s misadventures in denying Gitmo detainees the right of habeas corpus- a bedrock principle of the western civilization they are trying to protect. It moved me.
Assumption of innocence and fairness are expectations of American society that I take for granted. It’s unacknowledged piece of mind that I won’t be accused of wrong-doing without evidence. The choices I make, in what I write and read, where I go, and who I meet are done so without fear that they will draw the wrath of my government or my neighbor.
Many people in the rest of the world don’t share the luxury of predictable consequences faith in fairness that I have, and it sickens me that my government is playing a role in perpetuating that deficit.
Listen to the show. It’s good.

Technorati Tags: Habeas Corpus, puppy

… Both the President of Iran and a speaker at the AIPAC conference vilify it within days of each other.

First John Hagee, an evangelical pastor speaking at the AIPAC conference a couple days ago, called the United Nations a “political brothel”. Salon has an excellent recap of this event that epitomizes the how moneyed interests, and the Israel lobby in particular, are shaping the American political landscape into an absurd farce even Gogol couldn’t make up. John “I-know-a-brothel-when-I-see-one” Hagee shared his love of AIPAC with Hillary and Obama who held competing dessert events at the conference. Disgusting.

Meanwhile, Mahoud “people-can-finally-say-my-name” Ahmadinejad called the UN a bully for discussing sanctions, and suggested that new sanctions would serve to speed up nuclear development. Hopefully the Iranian people are smarter than their American counterparts and will vote out/overthrow this blowhard before his brother from another mother, GW Bush, has another urge to put on a flight suit and bring violent devastation to an oil-rich Muslim country for the second time.

Technorati Tags: AIPAC, Iran, Israel

Bill Gates has been repainted in the last couple years from evil genius businessman to a model of modern philanthropy. There was definitely a time in my life where he would have been high on my list of consequential assholes, but he fell off that list sometime after he stepped down as CEO of Microsoft and began devoting his impressive wealth and brain power to solving all kinds of public health and education issues around the world.

Well in the words of D’Angelo Barksdale (yes, I’m obsessed with The Wire) “It don’t matter that some fool say he different…“- Gates is as much of a porcupine as ever.
Check out the attitude Bill gives Advertising Age Magazine when interviewer Bob Garfield asks his about the Mac ads:

GARFIELD: I want to ask you one more thing: Those Mac ads — how do you feel about the John Hodgman character?

GATES: I can’t comment on someone else’s ad.

GARFIELD: OK … but he’s you.

GATES: Yeah, I’m not gonna comment on someone else’s ad.

GARFIELD: OK, well, Bill Gates, thank you so much for joining us.

(Silence)

GARFIELD: Can I just have a clean goodbye?

(Silence)

GARFIELD: OK, can you just say goodbye? Thank you or goodbye or something like that?

GATES: Goodbye.

(Listen to the audio from Advertising Age)

Bob Garfield isn’t just some schmuck. He has co-hosted one of NPR’s most acclaimed shows, On the Media, for years. No interviewer, least of all one with such an impressive background, should be treated so. Getting interviewed doesn’t mean that you get to talk about what you want, and then turn around and be an ass when the interviewer asks you an uncomfortable but fair question that is entirely relevant to the publication.

Bill must be bitter he didn’t crush Apple when he had the chance in the mid-late 90’s.

(Via Gizmodo)

Technorati Tags: Bill Gates, Advertising

Not that the weather isn’t amazing out here, but the likes of Suphala and Vijay Iyer playing together only happens in New York:

Vijay Iyer in Duets: Rudresh Mahanthappa / Suphala / Amina Claudine Myers
Mon. 03.19.07 at 8PM

A bold innovator, thinker and pianist Vijay Iyer composes music for string quartets, orchestras and various jazz combos, which are informed by his advanced studies in cognitive science. In this intimate setting, he is set loose in a series of duets with the brazen alto saxophone of Rudresh Mahanthappa, the beautifully textured tabla of Suphala and the soulful voice and piano of Amina Claudine Myers. “A boundless and deeply important young star” (LA Weekly).

Technorati Tags: New York

I just felt my second SF earthquake. It was like a car crashed into my house. A Pinto, or Geo Metro maybe.

Technorati Tags: Earthquake, San Francisco

I’m not normally a sucker for stories that revel in their own irony or encourage meaning where there is just coincidence.
This one is an exception.

Since Bush’s speech advocating a 21,000 troop surge in Iraq, I’ve read more than a fair share of pieces opining the immorality of putting more troops in harms way for a fight seen as hopeless. Being isolated from anyone who is actually in the armed forces, these arguments resonate with me at an abstract level, but not in the visceral way that precipitates the stomach-churning disgust they should produce. If anything, my knee-jerk reaction to complaints about mounting US deaths is a questioning of the invariably withheld numbers on Iraqi dead (which the UN put at 34,000 this year alone).
This video churned something. It’s soldiers being stupid, but for me, powerfully humanizing. It is just wrong to send more US troops to Iraq for the sake of saving face.

(via IraqSlogger)

Technorati Tags: Iraq

Adopting a Policy calling for the Impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney
Yeah, that’s how they (we?) roll in SF.
I actually laughed out loud at the polling station this afternoon when I got to City Ballot Measure J. I won’t divulge where I came down on impeachment, but after going through all the candidates for representative office, judges, school board, state proposition, etc, etc, my decisions on the local propositions seemed emotional at best. A more exhaustive exhausting process couldn’t have been devised.
And I am already regretting one vote: Phil Angelides for Governor. It’s not that I’ve sudden found Arnold. But I did find this picture in the bowels of the gray lady-

What the hell is he (Angelides) doing taking Cornell West to a high school days before the election? I don’t know, but this picture freaks me out. Especially Cornell’s outfit. He’s either a vampire, or is hiding hickeys from one of the chicks he’s eyeing in the picture.