It’s always exciting posting to HA, so when preparing notes for this entry last night I felt a slight roll and jolt, I figured it was just Goldy and the gang egging me on. Turns out there was a mild 4.0 earthquake on the peninsula at 10:18 p.m., and if you did not feel it, you probably weren’t sitting in front of your computer and have a lot more interesting life than I do. O the sacrifices we endure to supply you with your morning fiber. Turns out there has been a passel of teeny quakes in recent days, which you can read as a buildup to The Big One or minor ventings so as to avert The Big One. I prefer the latter, it being loads easier to prepare for The Little One (get in front of the computer and wait till the coffee mug stops shaking).
Maybe Mother Nature was trying to nudge me to say something positive, like Dick Cheney’s irregular heartbeat being fixed. Now if they could just do something about his irregular heart. Or how about this: The mayor’s war on the homeless being put on hold. Our friends at Real Change have been all over this like…well, like cops on an encampment, with Rev. Rich Lang issuing a
Be the first mayor to be bluntly honest, and plainly practical in ending the problem of homelessness.
Forget about these half measured machete attacks.
Stand up to the problem, and implement the final solution.
Be bold Greg. Just kill the poor.
Rich may be facetious, but you have to wonder if Nickels isn’t just spreading holiday cheer while waiting for the spirit of Christmas to recede before going back to his same old ways. What exactly is a “more uniform protocol for dismantling the camps,” as one of his lackeys put it, if not cop talk for clearin’ ’em out.
Or perhaps some will find glad tidings in a proposal to defer up to 25 percent of property taxes, supposedly enabling middle-class homeowners to keep the roofs over their head. And this at a time when property values are actually going down? Is there another election coming up already? We saw this movie in California with Prop 13, and it weren’t pretty. Maybe one of our enterprising media will look at the detritus of tax deferral down there and ask, Could it happen here?? D’ya think?
And of course, for all us Mac users, the best news is that Windows Vista has been declared the worst software in the world, apologies to Keith Olbermann (double apologies if he’s a Windoze user).
Try as I might, though, I could not come up with the positive spin on the stock market tanking (down more than 10 percent in six weeks), the worsening recession, or the fact that the Seattle Marathon doesn’t actually give money to charity, which has The Times mad as heck and not going to take it much longer! But let’s close on a cheerful note: Writer Stephen King has suggested that Jenna Bush be waterboarded so Dad and his henchman can have a first-hand, trusted-source determination of whether it constitutes torture. Perhaps no image can better inform our preparations for this season of goodwill to men.