The Chron just reported the first quasi-firing from the botched Cosco Bursan oil spill response.:
Capt. William Uberti, who led the initial response after the Cosco Busan struck a bridge tower on Nov. 7 and dumped 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel, was replaced by Capt. Paul Gugg, an experienced specialist in oil disasters.
Let the purge begin!
(If you were one of the 83 percent of registered voters who passed on last week's election, let us clue you in. It happened. The mayor won, and most of the props won too. Let's look at the two that didn't.)
By Benjamin Wachs
When it comes to ballot measures, San Franciscans will vote for anything with the words “children,” “horses,” or “green” in it. And, if we’re honest with ourselves, they’ll usually vote for anything with the words “the,” “and” or “vote” in it, too.
That’s why about 3/4ths of proposed ballot measures have passed over the last 10 years, according to Ben Tulchin, Vice President and Western Region Director for the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.
“San Francisco’s a ‘yes’ city,” he said.
Exhibit A is this year’s election -- 9 out of 11 ballot measures passed, most by highly convincing margins. We now have horse stables in Golden Gate Park that nobody really wants; an expensive new small business bureaucracy that will probably be no more effective than the other 3 already on the books, and a vote of confidence in a wireless system that no one actually thinks will work.
If you give a million San Franciscans a million ballots, this is what happens.
But what about the two measures that didn’t pass? That’s the interesting question to come out of the 2007 – in a promiscuous city, what’s it take for no one to accept your proposition?
This week, The SF Weekly examines the 'Knocked Up' scenario of the loser guy and the succesful women who enable them. As a web extra, we present:
-- From Chaplin to 'Knocked Up' -- A Timeline of Cinema Slackers
-- Professions Where Women Are Making More Money Than Men. An xls.
-- Cities Where Women Have Control of the Checkbook. An xls.
-- How Women Make More than Men in New York. An xls.
Jumping onto the anticipated big online ad revenue bandwagon, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch announced Tuesday that he intends to lift subscription fees on the Wall Street Journal's website, expecting ad revenue to pick up the $50 million in slack from lost cash, from roughly one million subscribers. This follows the New York Times decision to drop premium content charges in September, in a similar attempt to boost online advertising. Free and easy, baby. That's the way to be.
-- Brian Bernbaum
It's good to know our newly-reelected mayor is on top of things. Yesterday, nearly a week after the 58,000-gallon Cosco Busan oil spill, Newsom got around to declaring a local emergency.
So, what took so long? Was he busy with new city initiatives? Rallying the troops for his second term? Oh, he was taking a post-election vacation in Hawaii? Say what?
According to Matier And Ross, Newsom decided to go ahead with his trip, even after finding out that the Coast Guard had "vastly underestimated" the size of the spill.
Well, at least he didn't have a good time:
"I don't see how my staying would have changed things," Newsom said. "I was gone all of two days, and it turned out to be one of the worst weekends of my life."
Schadenfreude, friends. Isn't it great?
Gavin Newsom from davegolden on flickr
-- Brian Bernbaum
A thought-provoking art exhibit displays disabled artists’ portrayals of superheroes
By Joe Eskenazi
The ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound or sprint a locomotive may not gibe with conventional notions of…well, anything. But Superman-like qualities certainly don’t conjure up word associations with the term “disabled.”
And yet you don’t need to be Comic Book Guy to know that there are more disabled superheroes than you can shake a fistful of kryptonite at.
Just for starters, the eponymous Professor X of the X-Men and Oracle of the Birds of Prey are wheelchair-bound. And Daredevil is blind (thanks to a tube of some radioactive cooties, not the awful Ben Affleck movie).
Yet how do real disabled people – who don’t possess the ability to control others’ minds or leap across the rooftops and eliminate mad-dog Irish terrorists with a well-flung cane – conceive of super heroes? Francis Kohler figured he’d give them brushes, paints and canvas and see for himself.
The result was...
