Sayonara, CRTs

Today they asked everyone to put out their dead -- their old CRT-style monitors which have been replaced by flat-screen monitors. The aisles were quickly littered with them.

On the way to work

Commuters at 4th and Folsom this morning. The sky, contaminated with smoke from wildfires, is extremely hazy.

Overheard in SSF

Coming out of the men's room at the office, I passed the little alcove where a door leads to the fire stair. Standing in this alcove was one of the women who works here, standing with her face turned away from passers-by, saying urgently into a cell phone:

"It could happen anywhere!"

What small potential tragedy was she relaying, I wondered. But I went on and overheard nothing more. There are many little alcoves in our office where we seek privacy to deal with the outside world. No longer taking personal calls on our desk phones, because our cubicles offer only a little visual privacy but no audial privacy, we take our cell phones away to these little corners and vacant conference rooms, there to have furtive conversations with spouses, kindergarten teachers, doctors' offices, or the company we're secretly interviewing at.

I once shared a large office with three other people in the days before everyone had a cell phone. One of my co-workers received regular calls from her child's preschool. Once she picked up the phone for one such call, listened for a moment, and then asked: "Was it projectile?"

technorati: overheard

Weekend the last

The cool air returned on Saturday night. Sunday was the usual San Francisco summery cool sunny breezy. Now, Monday morning started very foggy, but I already see a patch of blue sky directly overhead.

Hotter than a match head

It's the third day of a heat wave, the day when people start to crack. By this afternoon I expect to be lying on my back on the floor of the house, along with the cats, with a cold washcloth on my forehead.

Yesterday Cris wanted to go to a furniture clearance sale because the advertisement showed some dining room chairs like the ones she's been stalking for years. We drove out to the Bayview district, to a neighborhood of warehouses, and turned onto the street shown in the advertisement. It was choked with u-hauls and pickup trucks. Evidently people in the cheap furniture trade had shown up ready, as Cris said, to acquire mass quantities. We almost immediately got sandwiched in between two large pickup trucks trying to squeeze their way along the choked street. As it was 95 degrees outside, we would have had to park two blocks away, and Cris is using a cane, we simply fled without even getting out of the car. I don't even want to think about what it was like inside the warehouse.

In the evening I went over to Berkeley, which was slightly cooler than the city, and when I came home the house was just as hot as it was during the daytime, judging by the thermometer on the thermostat. It cools off fine when there's a breeze, but there wasn't any breeze. We slept all night with nothing but a sheet, that's how warm it was.

Now at 8:30 it's already 78 inside the house, and it'll be another hot day; I'm not so sure about the forecast fog coming in. In the sky is a strange sight: a clear blue sky with little smog and white fluffy clouds, as if this were Illinois.

technorati: San Francisco, heat wave

Our anniversary

Today's the 22nd anniversary of me and Cris first meeting, the day we celebrate as our anniversary. There she is graduating from law school last year.

We met as high school teachers in summer school, in the cafeteria at Mission High in SF, waiting for students to come and register. They never did come and register that day, as the school administration had (typically) screwed up: they told the students to come on one day, the teachers on another. That gave me and Cris all morning to flirt, then we had lunch together, and the rest is history. Happy anniversary, darling.

Writing report

I spent the day working on my Bangalore novel. By my count this is something like the fourth draft. As most writers know, writing is like playing the accordian: sometimes you're expanding what you have, sometimes you're contracting, or cutting. The idea is to write as much as you need to in order to fully express your theme and let your characters develop, then cut it down to essentials, and then give it more space in case something else new and beautiful pops up, then cut again. Do this until it's as good as you can possibly make it. I failed to make it as good as I possibly could, and gave it to my agent last year and she gave it right back, telling me to try again. This is trying again. It's difficult, though, because another thing that happens in the course of a long project like this is that you gain and lose enthusiasm as time goes on, and that too is a pendulum that swings back and forth. And now is a time when enthusiasm for the story and the characters is somewhat lacking. But you keep on, because writing is not just pure inspiration but also craft. And you learn that lesson over and over again.

technorati: writing, novel writing

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- smoky edition

Environmental activists in the U.K. stopped a train carrying coal to a power plant and are prepared to occupy it for several days. They're offloading the coal shovelful by shovelful, which doesn't sound like a really fun way to spend your summer.

A woman who wrote a memoir about growing up in a dysfunctional family is a liar, say her parents, who published their claims on the amazon.com page for her book, and who went to a TV show where she was being interviewed and passed out leaflets "about what a 'tramp' their daughter is as the audience made their way to their seats."

In Colorado, a prison guard shot by his wife is one of ten guards accused of organizing attacks on inmates at a state prison in the mid 90s. And... this is from March, but it's too good to miss. A Missouri man killed his wife by firing through a wall in order to make a hole so he could install a satellite TV system. Watch a YouTube posting of a local news report. Local authorities decided not to charge the man.

Courtesy Wonkette, a former chairman of the Clark County (Ken.) GOP pled guilty to sex charges in a case where he woke up a friend by sucking his cock. "In addition to his position as Clark County chairman, he was chairman of the Young Republican National Federation." Hottt!

L.A. is just one of the cities where post-riot grrl feminism has expressed it self in a newly popular Roller Derby scene.

A 61-year-old American was deported from Cuba to face sex and pornography charges. Authorities in the affluent San Francisco suburb of Orinda say they found evidence in his home that he traveled to Costa Rica over three dozen times to have sex with minors. And in Sana'a, Yemen, a 10-year-old girl was granted a divorce from a man "three times her age" who beat her and forced her to have sex. Now that she is free from the abusive situation, the girl says she would like to become a lawyer.

In Minnesota, 40 cleaning supplies salesmen were kicked out of a hotel for being loud, rude assholes. Video caught a mugger in New York. One of the operators of the escort service that had Eliot Spitzer as "Client 9" pled guilty without "cooperating" and got three years in prison.

In the affluent SF suburb of Danville, a woman delivering newspapers ran over two 15-year-old boys who were lying in the middle of a residential street under a blanket in the middle of the night. No word on what they were doing there -- my guess is stargazing. (Update: sure enough.) The woman was not charged.

Welcome back, Anna

A friend's coming back to the Bay Area from the hot-as-hell East Coast today. This weather report, showing the departure and arrival weather, was on the airline's website, showing the 30 degree difference:

Nail, meet Mr. Hammer

A man whose skull was penetrated by a nail from a nail gun was saved by doctors wielding a common claw hammer.

"'Does anybody have a hammer, a claw hammer.' I thought he was teasing at first, but then he says, 'No. It went in like that. We can pull it out like that,'" Chandler said.

No word on whether the victim, a carpenter whose nail gun's hose had become tangled, shouted "Oohhh! Oohhh! Moe!!" during the procedure.

Pilates godfather: Yur doin it wrong

Ron Fletcher, the man who is responsible for passing on the Pilates bodywork technique, says it shouldn't be thought of as an exercise regimen but as "an art, a science." Millions of grim-faced twenty- and thirty-somethings disagree.

No one ever points out that the regimen, or whatever it is, is named after the Roman administrator who famously washed his hands of guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus, and how fitting it is that such a strenuous exercise should be named for a torturer. Coming soon: the Torquemada.

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Munchausen Syndrome By Internet edition

You may have heard of the mental disorders Munchausen Syndrome, and the even more nauseating Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy. In the former, a personality disordered person deliberately injures themselves to gain attention and sympathy; in the latter, they injure a loved one, usually their child, so that they can appear to everyone as a loving and selfless caretaker of their poor hurt little darling. The phenomenon experienced by the writer Armistead Maupin, in which an insane woman built up a phone relationship with him based on a supposedly seriously ill but actually non-existent child, was written up by him in the novel "The Night Listener." The J.T. LeRoy hoax, which was carried out primarily on the telephone by a manipulative former phone sex worker, also had a whiff of this.

With the internet, we have a new version of this illness. There are two websites called Dogster and Catster -- run by the same company -- which are social networking sites for pet owners. The conceit of these sites is that the pet owners don't post as themselves, but in the personas of their pets. My wife Cris has been a member of Catster for several months in the persona of our cat Milagrito. She is essentially writing tongue-in-cheek blog entries about current events; right now Milagrito is running for president.

Of course, pets do get sick and die. When this happens, the other users in their network -- their cat's "friends" -- naturally post sympathetic messages and condolences. One of the users, I mean cats, makes little "angel wings" graphics to bestow on the departed kitty.

By now you may be able to see where this is going. According to a post from the wing-bestowing user, someone is going to elaborate lengths to create fake users, complete with pictures taken from cat adoption websites; after their cat has acquired several "friends," it begins to suffer a series of illnesses and accidents and eventually "dies," all accompanied by an outpouring of sympathy from their "friends." The wing-building user realized this was going on when she sensed something strange about a request for wings for a newly dead cat. I'll let this user, Krishna, take it from here:

A couple months ago I was contacted by a member of our community with a request for wings. The person asking for wings had recently lost their cat to a degenerative health problem that they did not name on their profile.

Something about the request set the hairs on the back of my neck up. As I read the pmail and looked at the picture I had a sense of deja vu. I had seen the writing style before and had seen the same picture on the profile somewhere else on the internet.

After spending about an hour or so searching google images using countless search strings I came across the picture of the departed kitty same cat same picture of a garden in the background same everything. The cat was alive and up for adoption on petfinder. The petfinder entry was a new one too. I was infuriated! I started searching for pictures of the persons other cats and dogs and found them on google. Some were stolen from kittenwar some from petfinder and some from independent breeder sites.

I was so angry I confronted the person. They first tried telling me that they travelled extensively and picked up animals from all over the world. I asked them for the pets pre-adopted names, they couldn't. They told me to go to hell and stop being so nosy. That I was cruel for doubting them and their pain. Then they dissappeared off of dogster and catster completely. I breathed a sigh of relief.

But a day later I was asked to make wings for a new member. After reading the profile outlining their rapidly declining health and final death; my suspicions arose again. I went to google and again found the profile pictures mocking me. Mocking the pain I felt at the death of my beloved pets. I couldn't understand it at all. Why would someone fake a death? Is it the attention, is it the rosettes [virtual presents given from one user to another -- ed.], is it the wings, or something else?

Honestly I couldn't figure it out. Anyway as the weeks passed I started noticing more and more profiles using the same writing style, same flash toys on the pages, same backgrounds from the same site, and the same types of dramatic deaths. It was amazing to see the unbelievable events that lead to the deaths of these pet profiles.

It has prevented me from enjoying this site. Following the new profiles that come on, the insurgence of users that only join for the free giveaways, it's overwhelming. Understanding the freebees was easy. The fakes sickness and deaths is dumbfounding.

So, that's pretty pathetic, faking the death of a pet to get people's attention and sympathy. I suppose it's better than actually hurting yourself or, worse, a child or pet, but really, how gross.

technorati: Munchausen Syndrome, pets, catster, internet

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- social climber edition

Two men climbed the 43-story New York Times building yesterday -- an experienced French daredevil who's performed such stunts many times before -- and some Brooklyn dude who saw all the commotion and decided he wanted some attention too. Despite his lack of training and preparation, the second guy made it, too, despite visibly tiring toward the top.

Less agile were two heroin addicts who jumped off a ninth floor balcony during a drug raid in the Bronx.

Courtesy SFist: a lunatic in the San Francisco suburb of Danville who set fire to a Starbucks and two gas stations using fireplace logs -- anybody remember the character on Twin Peaks known as the Log Lady (pictured at right)? -- claimed she did it to protest high gas prices.

Why does it need to make sense? Climbing a skyscraper to protest global warming doesn't make all that much sense either.

A former Silicon Valley executive is facing hundreds of years in jail for criminal charges stemming from his out-of-control behavior while CEO of a network equipment firm. Among other more boring charges, "he slipped ecstasy into the drinks of business associates, maintained a drug warehouse and concealed his illegal conduct with bribes and death threats." He financed "drug parties in airplanes and luxury homes and (built) a secret tunnel and room beneath his mansion" in which he lured people -- call girls, I presume, though he may have snared some high-fliers with the drugs -- to have group sex with him."

And there's more! At one point:

In 2001, Nicholas smoked so much marijuana during a flight on a private jet between Orange County and Las Vegas that the pilot had to put on an oxygen mask, the indictment states.

Dude! Talk about a dot-com bubble!

In a small Georgia town, a high school science teacher resigned after threatening to rip out a student's eyeballs. The story says he resigned on the last day of school -- a week and a half after the incident. Where's the cellphone video??

In San Jose, 17 members of a huge shoplifting ring were arrested, charged with building "a criminal Costco" in which they fenced the work of "freelance shoplifters" to flea markets, the internet and other retail outlets to the tune of over $5 million.

Parents indulging adolescent insecurities with $$$$$ procedures

Middle-class parents are catering to the insecurities of their teenage girls with beautifying procedures that cost tens of thousands, says this article. Of course, this has always gone on: nose jobs, ear jobs and the like. It's the scale and detail that have changed, along with technological solutions.

In 2007, teenagers got 67,523 (laser surgery) procedures -- more than double the number that age group had in 2000, according to the society, which surveyed its members and board-certified dermatologists but not aestheticians or other doctors.

Many children seek to be denuded because excess fuzz embarrasses them. Others want to avoid a lifetime of battling hair. For Christine Furman, of Greenwich, Conn., getting laser treatment for the unibrow of her 16-year-old daughter Teresa was a celebratory event, not unlike ear piercing. Classmates had also nicknamed Teresa "Uno Brow."

Ms. Furman was wary of electrolysis because it had left pockmarks on her chin. But she wanted to give her daughter the gift of never having to maintain her eyebrows again. "She got the first treatment the day after she got off her braces," she said. "It hurt a little bit, so she squeezed my hand. Then we went to Bloomingdale's."

More writers than readers: more evidence

Writing about a publishing industry convention, the annual Book Expo America, Salon's Laura Miller recounts the general pessimism about whether or not people are still reading books. Nevertheless:

Publishers complained that they received more pitches than they had a chance to deliver. "It's relentless," one sales rep sighed ... "Every time you turn around, someone's shoving a manuscript into your hands. I keep telling them I'm not an editor, but they don't seem to understand the difference." Aspiring writers planted themselves in autograph lines in a bid to pass unpublished manuscripts to established authors or to beg celebrities to plug their book on TV. (Apparently, all those Americans who claim to be too busy to buy or read books can still find plenty of time to write them.)

Previously: literary agent says "There are more writers than readers"

Back to writing

I must be back in one of those periods where I have thoughts to spare only for my work. I can report that I'm finally back to actually writing on a new draft of my India novel, Bangalored, as opposed to just making notes for a new draft as I did throughout April and May -- or rather, the weekends of April and May.

I thought that rewriting would involve rewriting from scratch, but so far I've just been reworking the novel's first section, which is set in San Francisco before my protagonist goes to Bangalore. When I get this nailed down, I really will start rewriting the Bangalore section, which is 80% of the book.