photo by Tiffany Woods

Brandy Martell

I am a woman of Hispanic descent. My parents came here from Colombia and Cuba. Throughout my life, I never really faced discrimination as a Hispanic. I've faced more adversity for being female. During the 2008 election, I picketed against Proposition 8, in San Luis Obispo (where I lived at the time) during a Thursday night farmer's market. One night, a man approached me in a hostile and aggressive way, getting right up in my face. I don't remember what his line of reasoning was, but I do remember him yelling "you people."

"You people are what's wrong with this country!" he yelled.

I realized what he hated about me: He thought I was one of them -- one of the gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, or transgender people who have filled my life since I was a child. At that moment I realized what a hate crime was and just how ugly ignorance makes people. I bring this up because a hate crime recently happened and I have to talk about it.

More >>

photo by Mark Richards

Marilyn Wann

Today our nation relapses into what might be our worst case of fat fearmongering yet. The current source of our infection with pseudoscientific sensationalism is something called Weight of the Nation, a highly contagious conference/book/series/website onslaught backed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and delivered tonight and Tuesday (May 14-15) via ocular injection on HBO.

I attended the first, government-sponsored Weight of the Nation conference in 2009. I didn't pay or anything self-defeating like that. I just walked in (with a brave friend or two) and delivered plastic-wrapped fortune cookies to the fancy luncheon tables where major stakeholders were about to chew on the alleged "obesity" problem. If the professional food scolds took a cookie, they got messages like these:

• The war on "obesity" is a war on PEOPLE!

More >>

Jeffrey Beall / Flickr

"No one pays any attention to it, of course," wrote the man who photographed this light in Denver last year.

Welcome to The Spokesman, our weekly bicycle column written by French Clements, a San Francisco resident and distance cyclist who considers it pretty routine to ride his bike to Marin County or San Jose and back. He belongs to a club, the SF Randonneurs, and is active in numerous aspects of the cycling community. For those of you wondering, the title of this column is a slightly tongue-in-cheek merging of bicycling and blogging terms, not a claim that Clements speaks for anyone but himself.

--Keith Bowers

In the wake of the tragic Castro bike crash in March, you'd be hard-pressed to find cyclists or pedestrians who don't feel some twinge of connection to the case. Sutchi Hui, a Daly City resident, was crossing Castro Street at Market on foot, just behind his wife, when he was struck by a rider, Chris Bucchere, who's suspected of speeding and being out of control. Hui, 71, died four days later. Bucchere, meanwhile, could face a felony vehicular manslaughter charge from the District Attorney's Office

Everything about this case just plain sucks. Even by the morbid standard of fatal bike collisions, which can be as sensationalized as they are rare, this one sticks out. People try to pin a lot of cartoonish BS on cyclists -- scan the comments of most any blog post or story on the subject -- and most of it we can shrug off. But this case is un-shruggable. There's so much to learn and too much at stake.

Many riders are lucky not to have caused a Bucchere-style crash, yet in their hubris -- going fast does feel awesome -- they see themselves not as lucky but as skilled. At least one video exists of Bucchere in the intersection, effectively showing his luck running out. In an online forum following the crash, Bucchere, probably woozy and dull with medication and adrenaline, wrote, "the light turned yellow as I was approaching the intersection, but I was already way too committed to stop." Those are the words of someone who didn't realize until far too late that he wasn't the rider he thought he was.

More >>

Jason Doiy

The San Francisco Public Library's Park Branch

Jessa Crispin arrived at the 2012 Public Library Association Conference in Philadelphia in March with high expectations. And by high, we mean abysmal.
 
"Secure in the knowledge that libraries are now permanently fucked," wrote the editor-in-Chief of the popular "litblog" Bookslut. Surely librarians would crumble before her, the harsh fiscal realities having reduced the bibliognosts into heaps of despair, wailing about furloughs and nonexistent arts grants.

But Crispin is not a librarian. Once a publishing outsider, she launched Bookslut in 2002 while working at a Planned Parenthood in Texas. She now enjoys insider status, and she contributes to likes of NPR, PBS, and the Washington Post on all things books. The conference falls within the realm of the "book world," so Crispin, donning black garb, traveled all the way from Berlin in search of heavyhearted roundtable discussions and forsaken vendor booths.

But the whole affair seemed rather ... hopeful. 

"I was not sensing any anxiety that day, and it was pissing me off," Crispin says.
 
So she offered bait. How many more budget cuts can libraries sustain? What about evil e-books?

More >>

I remember the first time I saw Brent Weinbach on stage. He was a new (at least to me) comedian. And it was at the Punch Line in San Francisco. It was a Sunday night, and I was supposed to follow him. I had heard he was funny, but I didn't have much hope for him to have a good set. Why? Because he was a new comic and they usually don't.

Well, I was wrong. Brent KILLED. DESTROYED. He destroyed in the way that you occasionally see new comics destroy a room, as if to say, "I'm here and I am a force to be reckoned with. No waiting patiently in line for me. FOLLOW THAT!"

I immediately knew I had to recapture the audience's attention. It wasn't going to be easy. And in large part it wasn't going to be easy because Brent had done something that I had historically hated.

More >>

Men, please dress like this more often. Actually, please dress like this all the time. Thank you.

I could go on about what great clothing people wore to the Art Deco Society of California's Art Deco Preservation Ball on Saturday night, or what an appropriate venue the glitzy and historic Bimbo's 365 Club is for any vintage-themed event, or how people should be throwing money at the Deco society so it can continue its noble efforts to preserve the architectural and artistic masterpieces of that dazzling era. I could, and yes, people looked spectacular and showed off a variety of fascinating period dance moves to the era's tunes, many sung by Frederick Hodges, a true '20's style light tenor. But more interesting than the event itself for someone who wasn't there might be that it highlights what we've lost as a culture in terms of the way we "party" -- what we talk about when we talk about clubbing. More >>

​"Though she was a tiger lady, our hero didn't have to fire a shot to floor her. After one look at his Mr. Leggs slacks, she was ready to have him walk all over her. "

So reads a 1970 ad for Mr. Leggs. Its glaring grammatical error aside (hello, dangling modifier), the ad is so revolting it almost seems laughable. As does the one for Chase & Sanborn coffee: "If your husband ever finds out ..."

It makes us (as a society) wince, or at least I hope it does, but it can also produce a shrug. "Oh that's just Mad-Men-ish retro kitsch and no longer our problem." We can feel smug, thinking we have achieved something in the past 40 years. We might continue, "No one would dare print something like that now."

Right? Wrong.

This ad below for Belvedere Vodka came out last month with the accompanying Twitter post that read, "Unlike some people......Belvedere goes down smoothly."

Because of public outrage, the company apologized and made a donation to RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network). Okay, groovy, but the image has already done its damage. It exists.

More >>

Rhi Neuroptik

Is this the face of someone you'd mess with?

Facebook can be big brother, let's just be honest about that. How many people do you know who have been fired, fought with a partner, or gotten into trouble of some kind because of a post on Facebook? If I did not make my living the way I do, Facebook would cease to exist for me. While I personally couldn't give a flying fuck what people think about my posts, there are those who take Facebook seriously. Which brings us to nightmare dating experience number two. (Read about my first nightmare date here, "Sex and Romance in the New World: Four Nightmare Dates."

I had been on a few dates with this man, who was very funny, smart, and fun. He was quite helpful and eager to please. But it wasn't long before it became clear that he wanted to be daddy. In the dating world, I've come to realize that a lot of men try to be daddy, whether or not they realize it.

Let me make it clear: Not all women are looking for a daddy. I might quickly embrace you, but the second you insult me, undermine me, or essentially pat me on the head and call me pretty, nothing good will come of it.

Part of this man's daddy tendency came out in his dating history, which was interesting, and which he readily shared. While I believe people should share past dating experiences, at times it can be a bit overwhelming. I find that those conversations should happen over time, not all in one sitting. He pointed out how he made life better for a lot of girls. (I found it interesting that he called all women girls.) Part of his seduction is his whole "I want to help make girls lives a better place" schtick. He also pointed out how much money he spent on each "girl" in order to help her make her life better.

More >>

James D. Schwartz / Flickr

UPDATE: We now know this sign is in Toronto. We wonder whether things are any different there?

Welcome to The Spokesman, our weekly bicycle column written by French Clements, a San Francisco resident and distance cyclist who considers it pretty routine to ride his bike to Marin County or San Jose and back. He belongs to a club, the SF Randonneurs, and is active in numerous aspects of the cycling community. For those of you wondering, the title of this column is a slightly tongue-in-cheek merging of bicycling and blogging terms, not a claim that Clements speaks for anyone but himself.

--Keith Bowers

The bike scene in San Francisco feels bipolar lately. There's nice stuff -- more bike shops, more bike lanes, more riders -- but there's some nasty stuff too.

Two-wheeled scofflaws compel police to go on a ticketing binge, a spree that's as sudden as it is misdirected. Deadly bike accidents on the Embarcadero and in the Castro gain a sensationalized aura that disguises their rarity. Victimization posts in comments-sections online ricochet across the web and spill into intersections and crosswalks.

And there's so much YELLING!

The Spokesman hereby offers a communitywide talk-down. I appeal to my fellow cyclists (and hope my distant motorist-cousins will take our efforts to heart). Dudes, dudettes, let's step up our game. The only figure that's rising faster than San Francisco's bike-ridership is its bike-accident rate, and studies show we cause more accidents than we might realize.

More >>

Cameron Adams / Flickr

This didn't make the cut.

At its best, public sculpture is stirring and inspiring. At its worst, it's an assault on the senses -- a visual blight that prompts passers-by to avoid eye contact or (in extreme cases) attack the art with invective, graffiti, or even legal threats of removal. San Francisco has its share of divisive sculpture. Consider Cupid's Span, the giant red bow and arrow on the Embarcadero, which is a classic case of good intentions gone awry. Done in 2002 by the New York-based team of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, the sculpture -- "inspired by San Francisco's reputation as the home port of Eros" -- is whimsical but way too trivial for its size and placement. Life is too short to stand in front of works like Cupid's Span. Instead, visit these free public sculptures, which should resonate with art lovers of all tastes.

More >>