| Bleh. |
In their recent, highly scientific survey of manliness in the 50 largest cities in America, Combos, in partnership with some sell-out who apparently has experience with the "Best Places to Live" survey, found that San Francisco ranked 48, ahead of only Los Angeles and New York. The cities were ranked based on absurd criteria, including the number of professional major league sports teams and barbecue joints, the popularity of tools and hardware, and the frequency of monster truck rallies. Cities also lost points for having many home furnishing stores, high mini-van sales, and subscription rates to beauty mags.
Nashville, Charlotte, and Oklahoma City came in first, second, and third, apparently for their overwhelming enthusiasm for hunting, fishing, NASCAR, and salty snacks. Yep, salty snacks. As in, Combos. While I'll admit that men generally eat a bit more salt than women, women also eat a helluva lotta salt. So why would Combos want to ignore (and annoy) half of its potential market by calling attention to exaggerated gender differences that reasonable people dismissed as stupid and sexist long ago?
Here's one good reason: free publicity. Every city on that list has a newspaper (at least for now) that will publish some dumb story about where it ranks in manliness. Google news is already showing 115 news articles on the subject, and though I haven't read them all, I bet the majority take an uncritical approach, simply and humorously "educating" the readers about the manliness rank of their city.
Daily newspapers: Please stop giving the public even more reasons that you shouldn't exist.
management. Nor does our committee recommend passage of the 'final
proposal' before us. We can only say this: No option at this point
looks favorable. The proposal before us may be the 'least bad' choice.
In any case, we chose to put the question to our members to decide."
Hearst, according to the union, came to the table with its offer in hand and acquiesced very little to any input:
"Management came in with a complete package of proposals and a warning
that at least 150 jobs out of the Guild's jurisdiction were to be
eliminated EVEN IF WE AGREED to the cost cuts and contractual changes
the company demanded. ... But if we could not reach agreement, the layoffs would
number perhaps 225, with virtually no severance (other than 60 days as
legally required, and two weeks' pay and two months' health care as
provided in the current contract.)"
The union additionally reported that its demands to examine company books and receive detailed estimates of the cost savings to be supposedly derived from Hearst's proposed slashes were both rebuffed.
So, in short, the prognosis is dire, the remedy is draconian, and it's being forced down the union's throat. Now everybody gets to vote on it.
In the faded English coastal resort town of Blackpool, there's a restaurant three blocks off the shore called West Coast Rock that specializes in California cuisine as a blinkered Brit might imagine.
When my wife and I visited a few years ago the house specialty consisted of a platter of tacos and chicken wings that tasted as if they'd been in the freezer since the time William the Conquerer.
According to the British political magazine The Spectator, that poor island nation now stands at risk of this sort of Bowdlerized California blight, Thanks to an infatuation with the San Francisco Bay Area suffered by the leaders of the Conservative Party, that whole country may soon become Fisherman's Wharf II.
The Conservative Party's chief strategist, Steve Hilton, has come to view the Bay Area as a piece of Conservative paradise, and he's infected party leader David Cameron with his delusion. Hilton's wife works at Google, and during the past few months he's apparently spent his house-husband trips here to soak in a 1999 version of Silicon Valley hype.
This is the place on Earth which fuses everything the Cameroons most like in life, where hardheaded businessmen drink fruit smoothies and walk around in recycled trainers. It is where a dynamic economy meets the family-friendly workplace. And it is here, to an extent that is greatly underestimated, that the Conservative government-in-waiting is looking to find a new blueprint for Britain.
Perhaps nobody told them that California doesn't have a dynamic economy anymore, and that we're among America's worst sufferers of the post 2000 and post 2007 hangovers. Maybe they didn't notice that our politics, as evinced by the recent budget battle, is some of the most dysfunctional this side of Naples, or that California's zenith came and went in 1977, the year before Proposition 13, the Libertarian anti-tax initiative that made us near-last in education, first in sprawl and environmental degradation.
With the Conservatives ahead in recent polls, I can't wait to see West Coast Rock's take on that.
The Virgin megastore died? Drag.
The plaintive statements from city officials when the Virgin megastore announced it was closing shop seemed slightly un-San Francisco. Isn't this the city that hates big box stores with such a vengeance that they're blocked from taking root by anti-corporate NIMBY mobs?
More specifically, aren't the San Francisco counterparts of John Cusack and Jack Black in High Fidelity performing air-guitar riffs of exhilaration upon hearing the corporate Man was leaving town?
Turns out, no. A couple of calls to city mom-and-pop record stores revealed them to think less like passive-aggressive hipsters than market analysts when discussing the implications of Virgin's impending demise. In the Mission, Aquarius Records assistant manager Jim Haynes says any loss to the local record scene is usually a bad sign. "The more record stores, the better, I would say. Each individual store fills a particular niche and they also buttress each other in an interconnected market so that if one leaves it doesn't mean the other ones are going to get an increase of market share....We haven't noticed a huge influx of people swarming the two aisles of Aquarius where Virgin had left off."
The stores say they play to different demographics, and they doubt they'll see an influx of new customers once Virgin closes. "Their main market was tourists because they didn't mind paying exorbitant prices because the exchange rate was so good," says Andrew Shadgett, the manager of Streetlight Records, which just closed its 24th Street Noe Valley location at the end of January when the owner decided to rent the spot out instead. Shadgett says the bigger hit to the local mom-and-pop record store scene was when Amoeba Music moved onto Haight Street in 1997, and several smaller shops closed within months. "It's like being a corner market and all of a suddenly having a Whole Foods open next to you. It did shut down a lot of people."
Amoeba, predictably, challenged that interpretation of the city's record store history, and said it's sad to see any record store go. "When Streetlight closed, there was a collective groan in the store," says Tony Green, the product manager at the San Francisco Amoeba store. "We just don't like to see any record stores bite the the dust at this point. I think the industry suffers when another record store goes bust, Virgin included." He said a few tourists might figure out how to use the N-Judah from downtown to get out to Amoeba, "but I don't think it's gonna be a huge 25 percent increase in business."
The bigger question that looms is if iTunes will kill the record store. Who buys c.d.s anymore anyway?
The stores insist they won't be run out of business by music downloading anytime soon. "They said the same thing about movie theaters when VHS came around, or book stores," Shadgett from Streetlight says. "Some people still do like to go to record stores. We're very neighborhoody oriented, so we have our regulars."
Whether an orchestrated campaign to spur the general public to call or write their city councilmen is benevolent or nefarious depends upon the cause at hand. But to argue that such a campaign doesn't constitute "lobbying" is to take up a losing battle with the good folks at Merriam-Webster.
The ad to the right appeared Thursday on the San Francisco Chronicle's Web page; clicking on it took one to a site called "Save Our Neighborhood Firehouses." You won't find out who wants you to save the firehouses by calling your supervisor anywhere on the site, but if you dial the number provided, the firefighter union picks up.
Clearly, the firefighter union is engaged in a direct lobbying pitch. And yet, they are not listed among the city's registered lobbyists (though we've been promised that status will soon change -- and we'll get to that).
In fact, not a single union registered with the city in all of 2008 as engaging in lobbying activity. This presents two scenarios: Unions have not engaged in any lobbying whatsoever -- or are simply not reporting it. Current and former members of the Ethics Commission SF Weekly spoke with are inclined to believe the latter.
This is a timely incident, as the Commission meets Monday to discuss what changes, if any, to make to its lobbyist ordinance. And, in recent weeks, a lengthy open letter sent to the Commission by five of its former longtime members contained this eerily prescient passage:
While most lobbying laws exclude reporting on negotiation of collective bargaining agreements, this exclusion does not extend to such activities as lobbying by the firefighters over closing fire stations, or city workers over cuts to the budget. This is an issue that has repeatedly come before the commission, been the subject of news articles faulting the Commission for its record, and several times resulted in the Commission's educational outreach to unions but with no success."Everyone knows that unions lobby. It's done among friends ... behind the scenes," says Joe Lynn, a former Ethics Commissioner and the principal author of the aforementioned letter. Unless a union registers with the city as a lobbyist, then, "If it's not directly about wages and hours, it's not permissible lobbying." Unions get around this, Lynn continued, by arguing that everything they're lobbying about deals with wages and hours -- even if to do so requires long chains of interrelated actions that sound like descriptions of Chaos Theory. Lynn referred to the Chronicle ad as "a smoking gun."
