Happy Election Day

I am proud to say that I have voted against Dianne Feinstein in every one of her runs for office since the 1970s, and I will be happy to do so again today. Though this is a primary election, you can now vote for anyone from any party that you want, and my friend Matt Hubbard is recommending Orly Taitz above, the crazed Queen of the Birther Movement, for the sheer anarchic comedy value of watching her run (click here). The inimitable Princess Sparkle Pony is also urging Californians to do the same thing (click here):

"If you aren't familiar with the multi-hyphenated Ms. Taitz, all you really need to know is this: she has incredible hair, she is profoundly ridiculous, and she is incapable of uttering more than two consecutive words and still making sense. I can't think of anything more entertaining than a Feinstein/Taitz debate. OMG, please let it happen."

In other recommendations, Yes on State Prop 28 because of the crazy people who are pouring in money to oppose it, No on State Prop 29 because a cigarette tax is essentially just another tax on mostly poor people. In San Francisco, I'm voting Yes on A after reading this rather frightening article at Fog City Journal about Recology (click here), and Yes on B just because the opposition is all coming from Willie Brown, Jr. and cronies.

As for the Democratic Central Communist Committee or whatever they are calling themselves, I'm voting for anyone who isn't already in office or working for the government, which culls the list down pretty quickly.

Happy election day.

The Black and White Ball

Every couple of years the San Francisco Symphony throws an upscale block party in my front yard called the Black and White Ball.



Until recently, the event had a more public street fair atmosphere, where if you were wearing black and white clothing, you simply fit in. You needed special handstamps and/or wristbands to enter buildings where they were offering free food and alcohol, but that wasn't something that was particularly tempting on account of the many people going at the food and booze dispensaries with an all-you-can-eat-and-drink frenzy, trying to justify the benefit prices they had paid for a fancy night out in San Francisco.



Sometime in the last decade, the Black and White Ball became literally gated with temporary chain link fencing and admission guards. Its footprint has also became smaller, with only Van Ness Avenue closed from McAllister to Grove rather than using the entire Civic Center neighborhood.



As is traditional in late May and early June when this affair is always held, the wind and the fog were howling on Saturday evening by the time the sun went down, creating conditions so frigid that I shivered with happiness everytime I looked out the window and knew I was safe and warm at home instead of out there. It was also delightful taking a sleeping pill which took me to slumberland as I happily listened to Cyndi Lauper sing live from a block away.

Tiger Woods Kitty Porn

In honor of Tiger Woods being on the leaderboard at the Memorial Tournament in Columbus, Ohio this weekend, here is a kitty porn photo of his feline namesake. This cat is almost too much fun.

Update: This feline photo icon must have worked because Tiger Woods the golfer won in historic fashion Sunday afternoon.

Making Mothers Invisible at the Library

Three weeks ago a series of large, striking, black-and-white photos of women appeared plastered around the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library.



I followed the website address on one of the posters (click here) to the Inside Out art project, a global initiative spearheaded by the Paris-based Tunisian photographer JR with a $100,000 TED Prize grant. Here's a description from the site:

"INSIDE OUT is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Everyone is challenged to use black and white photographic portraits to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world. These digitally uploaded images will be made into posters and sent back to the project’s co-creators for them to exhibit in their own communities. People can participate as an individual or in a group; posters can be placed anywhere, from a solitary image in an office window to a wall of portraits on an abandoned building or a full stadium. These exhibitions will be documented, archived and viewable virtually."

There was an interesting article on JR in The New Yorker in November last year (click here for an abstract):

In the spring, JR launched a million-dollar global participatory project called “Inside Out,” for which he will not take a single picture. Instead, he is encouraging people to take their own portraits, which they can send to him with a statement of purpose; he will print the photos on a large scale and return them, so that participants can paste them wherever they choose. “The idea is that you have to stand for what you care about,” he explained on Al Jazeera.

This San Francisco Main Branch library wasn't on the project website, so I went to the library and asked if anybody knew who had sponsored this particular installation and why was it all women? Nobody at the information desk in the lobby could tell me a thing, and the installations and public relations office on the sixth floor was mostly empty, and the few people who were there didn't seem to know anything about it either.



I finally received the information from library curator Everett Erlandson who told me that the photos had been installed by something called the International Museum of Women. On their website (click here), they explain that the installation is called Making Mothers Visible San Francisco, but they haven't been very good at getting the word out. I was hoping that the exhibit was simply pictures of my Civic Center neighbors, and the fact that it was supposed to be about making mothers "visible" never crossed my mind.