Glen Park Street Fair

Today on a beautiful Sunday here in SF, my fiance and I drove around the Mission looking for various garage sales. She is on the lookout for flower pots (if you have any you’re looking to unload and live in SF, leave an email addy for me to contact you). We didn’t have much success and went over to the Glen Park area to find an ATM.

Turns out there was a street fair going on that we checked out. One of the exhibits was about bees. This in my opinion was a good thing, the worldwide population of bees has been declining in recent years, which is NOT a good thing. They had some literature about bees, where I found out threre are three basic kind of bees in a hive:

Your queen bee (no king bees, however. So much for that old blues song “I’m a King Bee” that the Blues Bros popularized 3 decades ago), the drones and the worker bees.

Drone bees apparently don’t do much except fertilize the queen bee and get tossed aside. Do they fly around singing “drone, drone, drone” all day when the queen isn’t calling? Inquiring minds wanna know.

The worker bees are the ones in the hive doing the work of creating the honey I suppose. The queen bee among other things is responsible for maintaining hive morale. This got me to thinking. Does she fly around always threatening to pull out a whip if some worker bee gets out of line? What if all of them decide to unionize and then go on strike for higher wages and better working conditions?

I keep thinking of those old Ren Faire shirts that say “The floggings will continue unless morale improves.” I know some people that think those shirts should instead say, “The floggings will stop unless morale improves.” 😉

Signs, signs, everywhere a sign

I went over to a local Safeway earlier today to grab lunch and I saw a true sign of the times at the corner of the mall. “20 to 50% Off Going out of Business Wolf Camera.” Wolf Camera, a long time SF Bay camera chain has joined the throng of businesses going out of business due to the bad economy. I look at those signs I see at various corners and I wonder if they’ve been recycled lots over the last year. I mean, all you have to do is replace the name of the store closing and voila use those signs over and over again. Of course if you have any money to spend on whatever goods a going out of business store has, you’re in luck. If not, join the crowd!

I always seem to miss all those bargains. By the time I find out a place is going out of business, the goods have usually been picked over pretty well. It’s always interesting in a macabre way to go in a closing store on their last day of business. The shelves are empty for the most part, all that’s left is the stuff no one really wants. I always feel somewhat like a vulture at those stores, picking over what’s left of the dead carcass.

I did luck out in a sense when Stacey’s, a long time bookstore in downtown SF closed. I found a Network Security “cheat sheet” book at 40% off. I’d been looking for a book on Security, since I’m taking a class on that right now and this book contained a lot of reference information I’d been looking for. There wasn’t much else left, so I thanked the deities there was something left and trotted to the cash register. After buying it, I wished the employee well and left.

All the business closings of course are one of many sad results of a recession. And that doesn’t take into account of course the store employees left without a job. The mall where Wolf Camera is closing has already seen a Shoe Pavillion store close earlier this year. I doubt there’ll be many more empty storefronts there. An AAA office, Ross, Chase Bank, Jamba Juice among others. All of those seem reasonably stable. But who really knows?

Comments You Wish You Could Take Back

Once upon a time I was a DJ, both in college and then professionally. Even though my DJ career crashed and burned in rural Oregon 2 or 3 decades ago now, I still retain my interest in FM radio and its history. There’s a book out that was co-written by Micheal C Keith (an author of numerous books about radio broadcasting) about the history of FM radio that I hope to read at some point soon.

There’s a now out-of-print CD that captures a little bit of the “underground FM radio” of the 1960s. Simply titled “The Golden Age of Underground Radio, Volume 2,” it features a guy named B Mitchell Reed. BMR as he was more popularly known started out as a “top 40-screamer DJ” in the early to mid 1960s, which he eventually got tired of and became one of the pioneers of the “underground radio” scene of the late 1960s. BMR like a lot of those pioneering DJ’s died while still relatively young in the early 1980s.

I used to listen to him on an “underground AM station” that was around briefly in the early 1970s. So when I discovered this CD, I finally realized I’d have to fork out a little bit of extra $ to have a copy of this and listen one more time to BMR. I haven’t listened to all of it yet, but what I have heard so far is pretty good. A slice of American broadcast history on this CD. I just about fell over when I heard BMR quoting Mick Jagger from 4 decades ago. “I’d rather be dead than sing Satisfaction at 45,” says ol Mick. Hmmm.

Mick I believe is now in his mid 60s and as far as I know has sung Satisfaction during a Rolling Stones show at least once in the last 20 years (since he turned 45.) 🙂 I’m sure he has long since forgotten the quote (or wishes he could!). I’ve always been wary of making comments like that because almost always they will come back and bite you in you know where.

I can think of a few times where people I’ve known over the years made comments like that only to try and retract them many years later. Or claim they didn’t really say them. I guess what helps me in reminding them of their remarks is having a very long memory. That memory I suppose could get me into trouble if I’m not careful. 😉

I’m sure Mick wishes now he’d never said that. I’m reminded of the late, great guitarist Bo Diddley who once said “Don’t let your mouth cash no checks that your ass can’t cover.” 🙂

The Washington Natinals??

There was a story on Yahoo yesterday about two members of the Washington Nationals baseball team who received uniforms that were misspelled (missing the “O” in Nationals). It somehow figures that one of the most dysfunctional (at least as of now) major league baseball teams would have this happen. In the last three months or so, the Natinals..er I mean Nationals have:

• Had to deal with the story about the age of one of their prospects having previously been falsified. This led to the Nationals’ GM resigning.
• Had one of their players fined for being five minutes late to a game..after speaking with a bunch of Little Leaguers at an event that the team authorized him to take part in.
• Gotten off to a 1-9 start in their first 10 games.

The Nationals used to be known as the Expos when they were in Montreal and before they moved to Washington DC. Things got so bad for them there that the National League had to step in and run the team for a couple seasons. They wound up playing a number of home games in Puerto Rico because so few fans in Montreal were willing to attend games.

Even now that they again have an owner (which they didn’t have for their last couple seasons in Montreal), they still clearly are a team in chaos. The thing about any professional sports team down on their luck is that it takes time to turn a losing culture around. It also seems that whatever luck they do get is bad. So it figures that at least a couple of their uniforms would be misspelled.

Reminds me of that old Snickers candy bar ad with the Kansas City Chiefs’ groundskeeper suddenly realizing he misspelled Chiefs to Chefs in the end zone and mutters “Great..googly moogly” as the ad ends.

Except this incident was real, not an ad.

I imagine by now, some enterprising soul has offered the Nationals a good sum of money for those unis and will then sell them to the highest bidder on Ebay. if the Nationals have any brains, they’ll take the money. Who knows? Maybe they can use it on new uniforms.

My first post *g*

OK, I’ll take a DEEP breath and begin. I’ve played around with WordPress for about a year now, maintaining the STC Silicon Valley Chapter site. I’ve pondered getting a blog all these months, but indecision and laziness (heh!) got in my way. So now I join the 222,345,900 or so others with blogs. I worry that since I’m always among the last to join a trend that I’ll cause WordPress to go down the tubes. However, my friend DJ Cline, a noted blogger and WP devotee assures me this is absolutely NOT the case! I will trust DJ’s good judgment on this. 🙂

Hmm, two links to other blogs already. Well they’re both WordPress blogs, so it’s fine.

What will this blog be about? Who knows? it’s whatever I feel like blogging about! As DJ noted in one of his recent posts, folk who blog about a specific topic all the time tend to be narrow-minded. Best to look at the big picture in my book.

I’ve blogged on other platforms. I have an account on Tribe.net. It’s a social network that at one time had some popularity and relevance. Alas, in this ever-changing Internet highway it has now fallen by the side of the road. It may yet join Archie, Veronica, Gopher, WAIS, newsgroups as gone but not totally forgotten Internet artifacts. But I digress. Since no one seems to read Tribe anymore, I needed to find another platform to blog on. Why not WordPress? I know how to use it, it’s fun and LOTS of folk blog here too. Including my friend DJ. 🙂

I’ll have more later..once I find a cool theme and some widgets to tweak.