Tuesday, January 13, 2009
To a lot of people, the words “East Oakland” conjure up thoughts of poverty and crime, liquor stores and drugs, sideshows and Raiders fans, hyphy and scraper bikes. And indeed, you can find all these things in East Oakland, some of them in larger quantities than you might like. What many people in Oakland (and […]
Today I woke up early and went out to walk the dog and get some coffee. When I’m out walking, I often listen to KALX, the Berkeley student radio station, but the first thing I heard when I turned it on this morning on was “Anarchy in the UK” by the Sex Pistols. Don’t get […]
Why go to a march when you can let the march come to you? I was eating lunch at home this afternoon when I started hearing chants of “Fuck the Police” getting louder outside the window. I went down to see what was going on, and it turned out to be a small protest march […]
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
I feel like I’ve seen this in different form somewhere before, but this is a cool visualization of the uncool spread of Walmart across the United States, from FlowingData. Store count is in upper left, year is in lower right. I’ve been riding right past Oakland’s very own Walmart this week on my commute. (“Right […]
To get a dramatic sense of how technological changes have affected journalism over the past 150 years, compare this amazing 1864 photograph showing a New York Herald encampment during the civil war, and this San Francisco Chronicle article about how several bystander videos have allowed anyone in the world to watch the fatal shooting of […]
Every time I talk to someone who works in newspapers, or who used to work in newspapers, the conversation inevitably turns to the fate of the industry. Someone here in Oakland seems to be doing their best to keep newspapers alive: Or maybe no papers get delivered to this address at all. Those colorful boxes […]
I’ve been informed by several people that the page does not fully load when they visit the blog. They see the top few inches, but then everything below that gets cut off. So far it seems to be only people who are using Internet Explorer Version 6 who are having the problems, so I’ll blame […]
Like something out of Lewis Carroll, in Oakland’s chinatown: I couldn’t buy any misfortunes because the fortune cookie factory was closed that day, but I peeked inside and discovered that misfortunes go for a buck fifty a bag — cheaper than kettle corn, and less fattening!
Saturday, January 3, 2009
The New York Times had an article a few weeks ago with the headline “Bad Times Draw Bigger Crowds to Churches.” Slate’s press critic, Jack Shafer, who has never met a trend story that he didn’t want to debunk, posted a rebuttal a week later, citing Gallup research suggesting that church attendance did not increase […]
Thursday, January 1, 2009
A front gate in Berkeley. Photo taken with my cell phone, of course.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
New year. New blog. New me? We’ll see.