Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond
A. E. Housman (who once deliciously referred to poetry as a “morbid secretion”) said, “Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure. ” And as John McWhorter so ably demonstrates, Sarah Palin’s words — or at least the art of parsing them — can be extremely pleasurable:
“This reminds me of toddlers who speak from inside their own experience in a related way: they will come up to you and comment about something said by a neighbor you’ve never met, or recount to you the plot of an episode of a TV show they have no way of knowing you’ve ever heard of. Palin strings her words together as if she were doing it for herself — meanings float by, and she translates them into syntax in whatever way works, regardless of how other people making public statements do it.”
She’s no delicate petal-pusher. How pretty are the state’s highway medians at this time of year? Check the Desert Wildflower report for daily updates.
No it’s not clip art. That twilight landscape on your iPad desktop was actually shot by a local. (h/t to Boing Boing)
“A San Francisco eatery has convinced some customers to get tattoos in exchange for free food for life.” Hint: It’s not Michael Mina — but possibly a replay of the great burrito tattoo “disaster” of 1999.
This was supposed to be worth $5.8 million at the time. Like Gezundheit.com
An addendum to yesterday’s esteemed guest columnist: the New York Times’ Bay Area blog (the nerve!) ran a profile yesterday of Glendon Hyde, aka our favorite punk rock dragtavist, Anna Conda. She knows from first hand experience what gets lost – and more importantly, who gets displaced — when a gayborhood becomes just a neighborhood. Granted, Polk Street’s de-gayification has been happening for decades now (the pink flight to the Castro began around the mid-to-late 60s), and is just one part of the long, ongoing story of gentrification in the TL. Still, Anna/Glendon’s efforts to “Take back the Polk,” and now, her current campaign for the District 6 supervisor’s seat, should serve as rebukes to Katz’s patronizing mourning of communities that he was only superficially invested in.
Finally, in honor of Lady Day would have been 95 today I’ll leave you with this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs