I love this city

How many other newspapers in the U.S. -- never mind the approx. 2.5 million pop. of the S.F. metropolitan area and the fact that there's another major newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News -- still have a regular radio columnist and give him 20 column inches on Sunday? From today's Ben Fong Torres column is this great moment in a profile of a local DJ in which the guy glances at his watch, gives the station identification and the time at the top of the hour, then:

Music comes on over his headphones, he's off the air, and he looks at his wrist and laughs.

"Fifteen-dollar watch," he says. "Fifteen dollar watch, and it hits that thing exactly!"

I love that line. I think I'll steal it.

In other news, a powerful local politician has joined forces with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights Bookstore, in a campaign to add a statue of St. Francis, the city's patron saint, to Washington Square. The square is also the site of the statue of Ben Franklin shown on the cover of Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America -- an image I gazed at longingly throughout my early teen years, wondering if I would ever be in such a fantastic place as San Francisco.

Speaking of City Lights and Brautigan, check the photo in a recent entry by my friend Christine. That photo seems to be another image from the photo session that produced this more famous photo of the Beat writers of America posing outside City Lights. In each picture, Brautigan wears the same white cowboy hat he is seen in on the cover of Trout Fishing.