mastodon 4.7.3Lawyer, writer.
Los Angeles City Attorney candidate John McKinney reportedly sees his homeless constituents (or their inevitable offenses that result from living outdoors) as "an albatross around the neck of this city." I wonder if he has read any of the original Coleridge? (His opponent in the runoff is Marissa Roy.)
https://boltsmag.org/los-angeles-city-attorney-election-roy-mckinney-feldstein-soto/
This finds especially direct connections among advocates and investors seeking more anti-homeless laws, more private prisons, and more forced labor and/or "treatment": https://homelesslaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Cicero-Research-Memo.pdf
A volunteer chia plant started growing in a pot on our porch in San Francisco a few years ago. This year's stalks produced a half-teaspoon of chia seed, shown in that first photo below. Second image is a closeup of our same homegrown chia seeds using a GoMicro lens clip for phones that they used to sell at the Exploratorium. Third image is commercial chia seed from the package for comparison. Stunning how many plants' whole yield we eat for breakfast every morning.
San Francisco looking more Besźel than usual this evening.
The site of Compton's Cafeteria joined the National Register of Historic Places on January 27, 2025.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sf-transgender-historic-landmark-20154723.php
Worth remembering what happened in Hood River, Oregon in 1944 and the public shock and amends that followed.
https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Hood_River_incident/
Because all the news is terrible, can anybody help identify this moth seen laying eggs on a window near San Francisco?
Image: broad-bodied moth photographed from inside a glass window. It has folded wings patterned in kind of grayscale leopard spots. Next to it is a cluster of about 100 fresh-looking white eggs placed side by side, each adhering to the window.
Golden Gate Park Panhandle: someone has planted daffodils (or similar) in the hollow of a sawn-limb scar on a very old eucalyptus. #hellascape
@lydiaschoch@mastodon.social
The generated image at this link is still my personal image of John Mastodon.
Or maybe the "Rainbird" guy in Jonathan Raban's *Passage to Juneau*.
@MBridegam@mastodon.social
Freelon Street
Kind of love this wildstyle grisaille on Freelon Street, South of Market.
Thanks! Yes, the wings do look reddish toward the back but I haven't seen them open.
This is a better picture taken later -- with increased number of eggs and more translucent eggs under the abdomen.
Closing a National Archives branch isn't "only" like closing a branch library. It's more like closing an academic department at a university. Because every local branch of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration has a different collection.
The San Francisco NARA branch (actually in San Bruno, just across El Camino Real from the former Tanforan concentration camp site) has unique collections of West Coast immigration and genealogy records, and a lot more. https://www.nichibei.org/2026/09/lawmakers-demand-justification-for-proposal-to-close-regional-archives/
Awake late at night and got around to reading JoeEsk's bemused yet shuddery tour of the mysterious pink building on 13th Street -- former headquarters of permit expediter Walter Wong.
This story is both utterly San Francisco and utterly batshit.
Thinking how "computer" long ago meant a woman who ran calculations by hand under orders. Until the women who did that work came up with other approaches.
Here in San Francisco, every time I go to Costco I'm surrounded by AI ad billboards feeding the fantasy of oddly steely yet obedient women who will take care of the awkward fiddly bits in jobs mapped out by the implied customer, a big-picture thinker.
Funny how the awkward fiddly bits are always the important part.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-computers-180972202/
That Valar Atomics name does say a lot. Worthy of Ar-Pharazôn the Golden.
"At any rate, spring is here ... and they can’t stop you enjoying it."
G. Orwell, "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad," 1946.
Today's ironic hovering ghost is James Tiptree, Jr.
https://bsky.app/profile/ryanlcooper.com/post/3mnrss6faed2r
Whereas in San Francisco, the proposed Measure D would scale back this form of popular democratic access, actually reducing the public's ability to place measures on our local ballot.
We had a municipal dignity here and some claims to leadership among cities, and then techbros started meddling in our local politics.
"DEEP THOUGHT: I speak of none, but the computer that is to come after me... whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate..."
Pelicans, Ocean Beach, San Francisco, yesterday.
Fellow San Franciscans:
This is a mayor of a major city, obviously not ours, weeping in public for the lost lives of two people who died unhoused in her city.
