In the recent San Francisco District Attorney recall election, we found out many San Franciscans thought the D.A. has a lot more leeway than was true. And then there's this guy:

screen shot of tweet by @SFStandard: "The son of Hill Bros. coffee dynasty filed to run for San Francisco DA this week... But the run failed as he did not realize he needed to be an attorney to be DA."

San Francisco is getting new public trash bin enclosures. There are a few designs up for consideration. I visited one design today. It just plain didn't work. When folks tried to throw out their trash, it fell outside the bin (but inside the enclosure).

bottom of a trash enclosure with labeled trash: cups lids bags

You might wonder: How did this design make it so far through the approval process? This is under the purview of one of the city departments under FBI investigation for bribery and corruption. So… I guess that this enclosure's manufacturer hoped to bribe the right people; sell the city these shiny-but-broken-by-design things; then make even more money selling the city some kind of retrofit-trash-funnel in a few years.

Silver lining: I got to exercise my old-school image meme skills labeling this picture for the city's trash enclosure survey. (Yes, I installed the Microsoft Impact font on my Linux machine, and it was so I could make images like this.)

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I'm filling in my ballot, scrolling through the California Voter Information Guide and got distracted by the candidate statements for California's Board of Equalization, 4^th District (southern Cal). They were almost all revering Jarvis and protecting Prop 13; Democrat and Republican reaching across the aisle to agree that we mustn't tax rich property owners.

I was just trying to scroll down to the Superintendant of Public Instruction; I didn't mean to get distracted; I live in a totally different district from these bozos. Like, people say it's good to take a break from social media because social media thrives on outrage. But maybe outrage is just the normal effect of being informed?

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Wow, that's the fifth email from the San Francisco Department of Elections asking me if I'll volunteer at the polls June 7th. Usually they email me just once per election. When someone from the department called me to ask about my June 7th availability (called on the phone, also unusual), I said I was willing to work just one election this year and asked which would be more helpful: June or November. The guy said November. So… are they anticipating being even more ~~despera~~ eager for November poll workers?

Anyhow, if you're in San Francisco and want to volunteer at the June 7th election, some nice folks would love to hear from you soon.

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It's election day in San Francisco again, the second of four this year.* I wore my "I Voted" sticker today. I didn't see anyone else with a sticker. Now that California's a 100% vote-by-mail state, maybe the stickers are kind of silly; although today is election day, I sent in my ballot weeks ago.

*Maybe half the city only has three? Today's election was a run-off for a state assembly district that covers roughly half of San Francisco; I don't know that the other half has an election today.

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As I headed out on my exercise walk this morning, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. In a house garage that hosted a polling place for last week's election, there was still voting equipment piled up. That seemed strange—shouldn't the Department of Elections have picked it up by now?

Later, I walked past the library on Page Street. There was still a ballot drop box outside; but now it was covered by a padlock-secured bag.

In the past, the Department of Elections has removed ballot drop boxes between elections. But this time, they left the box there. Is it because San Francisco is holding four(!) elections this year? Maybe in such a year, it's too much hassle to un-bolt and re-bolt the boxes each time. Or maybe they wanted to leave the ballot boxes out in the past, but it took until now to sew up enough giant lockable bags?

Now I wonder the Department of Elections is just going to leave all that equipment in my neighbor's garage between elections.

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Today's an election day in San Francisco. I wore my "I Voted!" sticker. On my morning exercise walk, I saw zero (0) other people wearing such stickers. I saw one (1) polling place volunteer wearing a polling place volunteer sticker. Maybe the stickers aren't so popular now that California's a 100% vote-by-mail state?

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Book Report: America, Inc.

America, Inc is speculative fiction; but instead of the usual technology-speculation, it's organization-speculation. In the USA nowadays, corporations are people with free speech rights. This novel extrapolates: What if some folks formed a corporation to run for president of the USA? This sounds like the premise for some cyberpunk dystopia. As it happens, the USA's current political reality has sunk so low, dystopic-wise, that a corporate candidate is an improvement. This novel's a fun read so long as you concentrate on the novel and don't think too much about our actual situation.

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Book Report: On the Plain of Snakes

The author traveled from the USA to Mexico. A famous author, he could access places you or I could not: Local writers gave him letters of introduction; but nobody knew what he looked like,* so he could go places looking like "just another old gringo."

He traveled along the USA-Mexico border, talking to migrant folks. In Mexico's interior, he visited a sort of sanctuary where migrants from the south and beyond Mexico could rest. And as he visited not-migrant Mexicans, he asked if they'd ever traveled to the USA to work (and a surprising-to-me fraction of them had). America's then-president was bleating that everyone crossing that border were thieves and rapists. But that then-president was a racist asshole grabbing at votes from America's most gullible racist assholes. This book gives a clearer picture of border-crossers: a few thieves and rapists; many upstanding people seeking work to send money home to their families; some people fleeing places taken over by bandits; some people fleeing countries taken over by USA-sponsored death squad bandits. Folks from the same town tend to migrate to the same far-away place, using connections established by previous migrants; folks from some towns might not migrate to the USA, but instead to Mexico City, which might seem about as foreign, depending.

But this book's author didn't just learn about migrant folks. He's an author. He talked to and about Mexican authors and artists. He taught a writing seminar in Mexico City and this gave him an "in" for meeting other artist/academic types around the country. So he did that. (I didn't pay so much attention to these parts of the book. The author really really doesn't like magical realism; I don't like it so much either, but don't have a professional obligation to read it and thus wasn't so interested to read a long explanation of why I needn't like it…) The author was more impressed with Francisco Toledo an artist who boosted his community.

Mexico's federal government is a mess that helps nobody. Whenever the author drove in Mexico City, some corrupt cop would pull him over to shake him down for a bribe. (When driving around the rest of the country, he encountered another kind of driving hazard: anti-government protests that blocked the road. But by the time he encountered those, he'd seen enough government corruption to know those protests were warranted.) Eventually, he made his way down to Chiapas in the south of Mexico. This area was (and is) under the control of the Zapatistas, not the federal government. This area is having a rough time; but its pretty clear that their government is, while not perfect, doing a much much better job than the Mexican feds.

Anyhow, it was an interesting read. Check it out.

*This is not 100% true; one person recognized him.

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oh gee whiz this recruiting mail …We at the [San Francisco] Department of Elections thank you for your past service and hope you will be available to serve as a poll worker again in all four...