So-called social investing -- where soft-edged sharpies stay out of tobacco, blood diamonds, and the like -- has come under fire for producing substandard returns. Such critiques of do-well-by-doing-good investment-picking carry the implicit moral that one might do better by doing bad.
Into the the promising field of anti-social investment offerings steps the city of Half Moon Bay, a municipality 30 miles south of here. The city's manager recently told the publication Bond Buyer that it has obtained approval to sell $18 million worth of municipal debt -- which we term vampire bonds -- designed to pay off an apparently bloodsucking Woodside land speculator who has crippled a small town by simply purchasing land nearby, then going to court. The speculator, Charles Keenan, bought a piece of land outside town in 1993 for $1 million, and subsequently claimed Half Moon Bay had nine years earlier harmed the land's value by constructing storm drain improvements. The drain work created swampy conditions on part of the land, meaning it qualified as a "wetlands" -- so environmental laws kept Keenan from building a subdivision there.
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A Friday afternoon argument at the Dalt Hotel in the Tenderloin resulted in a police call, Andre Fluker bleeding on the ground with multiple stab wounds, and his alleged attacker being arrested. Fluker, a 41-year-old black man of an "unknown city of residence" according to the San Francisco Medical Examiner, died en route to General Hospital.
Fluker is the city's 17th homicide victim of 2009 and the first since a pair of San Francisco men were killed on April 18 in separate incidents.
UPDATE, 1 p.m.: The identity of the suspect arrested for Fluker's murder is Mikel Harris, a 43-year-old San Francisco resident.
Don't get us wrong: We love soccer of all sorts. The final match of the 2006 World Cup haunts us to this day. We'd love to see flourishing men's and women's pro leagues and strong U.S. national teams. But we're also realists.
So when the Women's Professional Soccer league's Bay Area team, FC Gold Pride, announced last week it was slashing ticket prices -- and halving the capacity of its home stadium -- only three home matches into the league's existence, we took it for what it was: A very bad omen.
With unusual forthrightness -- in the sporting world it's still de rigeur to claim you resigned to spend more time with your family after leading the team to a 1-15 season -- the announcement from Gold Pride general manager Ilisa Kessler admitted they were charging too damn much for tickets: "As a business, we cannot ignore the state of the national and local economy and recognize that we are all making decisions on where to spend our entertainment dollars."
If you're willing to -- definitely -- grant others "a royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide right to copy, crop, edit, publish, display, distribute, sublicense or otherwise use" your photographs, and -- very remotely -- have a chance of winning 100 bucks, boy do we have the contest for you!
The Web site SFtravel.com -- which we've never heard of -- has announced a San Francisco photo contest. And, since the art illustrating this article also illustrates their announcement, maybe you don't need to be Ansel Adams, Pirkle Jones, or Dorothea Lange to win this thing.
Incidentally, this Web site immediately won points with us by referring to Fisherman's Wharf as "a vicious tourist trap." I don't know how many times I've been asked for directions to Pier 39; I always give them accurately, but inside it tears me up. Tourists heading to Fisherman's Wharf strikes us as akin to going out to eat and ordering a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
