Works Cited

I have just started reading Shepard Krech's The Ecological Indian Myth and History , It seem like it will be an interesting book, but one annoying quality leaps right out at the beginning. While it has very thorough endnotes, with discussion even, it has no bibliography. This is more than just a minor inconvenience. I have been told that this sort of thing is often the result of production costs but is this really acceptable? The whole point of a bibliography is to help the reader identify the writer's sources and that becomes much more difficult when searching an endnote. Especially one that cites 8 different sources, and this is hardly an exceptional one.

Planning commission

Today I went down to the San Francisco Planning Commission meeting. It was pretty interesting there was not much controversy but on one item, the extension of a house on Belgrave Avenue in the Twin Peaks area, there was quite the conflict. I have to say I felt bad for the complainant, i.e., the people trying to bring it before discretionary review, but they were so incredibly wrong and so badly served by their attorney, at least in my personal and inexpert opinion that they really had no case to stand on. My favorite part, an opinion I appear to share with the Planning Commission's staff representative had to be when the attorney openly admitted that they had no objection to the construction, the real matter being an unfiled civil dispute over a variance from the early 70s. The whole business was just awful, the self indulgent and utterly disgustingly hypocritical expressions of love from the party complained against, the architect who made my skin crawl and the supposed artistic merits of a laughably ugly house. I must say I am very curious about the 1976 architectural survey that noted this house's importance.

Area Code Overlays.

This LA Times (registration required) article is pretty fascinating. It is about beginning ten digit dialing in Santa Monica, and it treats the whole thing as a horrible imposition, right down to the requisite local activist opposing it.

What is really fascinating about this though is that aside from what the story says about "guinea pigs" and "if the experiment works," ten digit dialing is actually pretty common in the US. Houston and Minneapolis/St. Paul have been doing it for years. It is pretty amazing that California has resisted it all this time.

I don't know how related this is but one thing that always amazed me about San Francisco is that calling the City from Oakland, or vice versa is a long distance call. But calling San Rael in Marin is not, the same goes for LA where calling across town is long distance. In Houston, where I grew up, nothing even remotely in the city was a long distance call.

Ah well, another California oddity like no mileage posts, which I am weirdly getting used to.

The Foggy Avenues of my Mind

Publishing something on the internet is a pretty narcissistic activity, but it also forces one to actually commit to opinion, to publish a statement than can only be reinterpreted but not replaced. It commits you to actually saying what you are saying.

In a way this is the purpose of "Roy's Foggy Avenues," to force myself to stop reinventing my words from scratch and instead give them the concrete foundation of my previous words. This of course means that this post is the foundation of everything I write after, but I think it would be best to consider this just the first pier of that foundation.

Anyway, it's a start...