One nice side effect of getting around on foot or by bike instead of in a car is that you notice and discover things that you would not have seen if you had cruised by at 30 miles an hour in a box of glass and steel. For example, if I hadn’t been on a […]
I said a week or two ago that I was on the lookout for ways that our economic troubles were affecting the look and feel of our cities, but that can be a depressing project, so I’m trying to keep an eye out for hopeful signs too. A surprising number of new bars and restaurants […]
This is on Fruitvale Avenue, near the BART station. I’m not the only person who likes this sign: a local artist made a painting of it as part of a whole series on Oakland signage.
So there I was yesterday, riding my bike home through some neighborhoods that I have rarely, if ever, visited before. The ride itself was routine: one eye on the cars to my right, alert for the sudden opening of a door, the other eye monitoring my left flank, where cars were passing with an uncomfortably […]
I worked a short day today (an hour! talk about part time!), so I used a very roundabout route to get home and took a bunch of pictures on the way. You can probably tell by the unmolested dollar bill that this Buddha is in Alameda, not Oakland: The bird of paradise qualifies that photo […]
If you’ve set foot in an American city in the past few decades, then you are probably familiar with hipster T-shirts. They might be regular old T-shirts, but instead of having earnest logos such as “Dysart’s Truck Stop, Bangor, ME,” they have ironic logos such as “Dysart’s Truck Stop, Bangor, ME.” The sensibility is what […]