If you’re on the sidewalk and someone pulls out in a car with no lights on and it’s night time, you know how signal them to turn on their lights – you flick your fingers at them like you’re trying to fling water at a bad cat who scratched the couch, right?
Seems to be cultural thing. Chiraag and Sophia had no idea what it meant.
Here’s another. When you want the check from the waiter, you air sign the credit card receipt, right? Just fake scribble in the air, and the waiter brings the bill.
In the Philippines, you stick your thumb and pointer finger out like making the letter L, which if you look at it, could also look like a check mark. As in checking off an item on a to-do list. That is how you ask for the check over there.
There is no photo to accompany this today.
March 31, 2010
March 30, 2010
March 29, 2010
March 28, 2010
March 27, 2010
wedding wish for aileen and tony
Went to a wedding, then the reception in Chinatown. The day before that the Flagpoles played a not terribly bad show. Oggy and Lyle wrote their paragraphs. Everyone is so busy these days! Even taggers stayed up late drinking beer in the back of my pickup and then wrote all over it.
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March 24, 2010
what i meant by yesterday’s thing
For example, I cleaned out the big chief’s grandmother’s garage today and it was a time warp. The newest thing was the coffee percolator. Things were metal or wood. Or cloth. Cottons not nylon. Easily recycled or reused. Able to be fixed up because you can put nails or screws in them.
If I cleaned out a modern garage, it would be mostly plastic and particle board. Hard to reuse, hard to recycle.
Not sure if this is a liberal or conservative statement.
I don’t want to be a cowboy, I want to be a mythology. I like the trucks and freedom of working for myself, the digging through the garbage for treasure, the freedom that comes with choosing my jobs and my hours.
With two suitcases in hand I got on a train in Boston and rode across country heading down the steel rails into the west. It was 2001. That was part of the myth. If I can become a successful business man running a company I created I will have completed my mythology. Leave home, head west, become successful in business.
This journey I want for myself is the same journey our country took. It left home, it went west, it became extremely successful in business.
It’s the success I fear because it goes from a journey of personal freedom to a story of domination over others. Is that the highest stage of freedom – strength over others?
It’s the 4th of July birthday I have I think that makes me want to be America’s myth lived out in person. Had I been born in June or August perhaps I wouldn’t obsessed with independence and America and freedom.
Recently I was told my blog should be more political. I feel like my life choices are a political statement. I left a conservative place for a liberal place. I moved to be in a community where leaders represented my ideals. I’m supporting the beacon of hope that is San Francisco’s myth to the rest of the nation: all are welcome. People are more important than corporations. We’re trying new ideas, letting humans be more self determining.
A pal says San Francisco has become a sanctuary city for the rich. He’s leaving for the East Bay where the melting pot is boiling and not a tenancy in common that got it’s start by evicting a poor family.
So it’s time to get more political after all. I want more from my new home and I want it to lead the rest of the country. Let’s not see it become a soulless tech lab reaping profits from patented gene therapy and technology that takes farther away from human touch.
I’ll tell ya what I’d like to see. A ban on consumer plastic. Leave it for medical devices, space travel, military use, and the like. Have it tracked and disposed of as vigilantly as nuclear waste. The stuff is making consumption too easy, outsourcing cheap, and destroying the environment.
Illegal immigration is a hard one. For the most part they are working hard doing jobs most Americans won’t do. But isn’t that because they’ll do it
for less than a living wage? If all ditch diggers got paid a Union wage, a lot of people I know would do a day laborers work. Cheap labor devalues it to the point you’re better off collecting unemployment.
Health care? I’m not sure why socialism is such a bad word to Republicans. The police force is a socialist institution. How about the military? It has a nearly Communist structure. You are told where you’ll live, and what work you’ll be doing. You shouldn’t question their orders. If a Communist institution can protect freedom, why can’t a socialist institution care for the health of a democratic society?
Then there is religion. I don’t understand why Christians are so often Republicans. Would Jesus want universal health care or would he argue that the rich shouldn’t pay for the poor’s problems?
Republicans and corporations are so intertwined and if they are also so fundamentally Christian, it seems like a paradox. Wouldn’t preachers preaching the good news for modern men be chastising corporate leaders for their greed? So why do Christian Republicans celebrate their successes? Why do they want corporations to have so much freedom to make profit when the Bible warns about the evil of money, the sin of avarice and greed? Don’t they believe
it’s so hard for rich men to get into heaven and so easy for camels to get through the eye of a needle?
Democrats? the most terrible politicians there are. Double agents, liars and turn coats. A type of slum lord on the national level. Abolitionists with slaves. They claim to represent the worker, the immigrant. They stand up for nothing.
I’m waiting for the Green Revolution, where we stop being a consumer oriented society and work on becoming a sustainable species.
March 23, 2010
the burden of choice
This fine example of why city life is so confusing is brought to you by the City of San Francisco and Chiraag.
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March 21, 2010
March 20, 2010
She came to the yard sale with an armload of unsleeved records and asked “Do you take cash?”
Yes I do.
“Will you trade records for a pair of slacks?”
That I can’t.
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March 18, 2010
not smart for work
Flagpoles are playing on the 26th. Here’s a bit of Doug in case you can’t wait.
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