'Bred Crumbs

01:27 PM SF Weekly has a print-media-criticism column that used to be written by Laurel Wellman, who had a very funny way of being scathing and self-depricating at the same time. Then her byline mysteriously disappeared, and it turned out she had gone to work for the very paper she so often took to task: the San Francisco Chronicle. It made one cluck with doubt and, nay, a little shame. (I wonder how she and once-frequent target Ken Garcia get along?)

But now that her first column for the Chron has appeared, I feel better about it all. If SF neighborhood politics, the first subject of this piece, doesn't interest you, skip down to the very-smart last bit, which muses about how, at a dot-com-themed restaurant, the stock prices of many tech companies has dwindled below the prices of the sandwiches named after them.

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01:19 AM Haven't 'blogged in four days, so look out ...

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While trying very hard not to be a pest about it, I really hope to turn more of my friends into fellow Farscape fans. (Robbie is hopelessly addicted now. Bwahahahaha!) But one hurdle has been that the storylines and background have become so complex that, without a Farscape sensei alongside, a newcomer who tried to dive in now (new episodes of the show's third season air tonight and next Friday) would be quite lost.

Ah, but -- reruns to the rescue. On Monday, Aug. 27, Sci-Fi smartly begins showing the series from the beginning, every Monday through Thursday at 8 E/P. And on Fridays, beginning in September, the channel breaks away from new eps to begin replaying the current run, starting with the aptly titled "Season of Death."

So I use this podium one more time to exhort you to give this funny, sexy, subversive, good-looking, eloquent, occasionally wacky, occasionally heart-wrenching show a try if you haven't already. I'll be catching up with you; I didn't start tuning in until the second season. I've seen the first two episodes of the first season, which are both enjoyable; and while I know the show dropped a couple of turdbombs early in its second season, it jelled for good shortly thereafter. The episode "Out of Their Minds," a brilliant and hilarious take on the ol' switched-identity plot device, was the one that made me first realize there was much, much more to this show than any of us had reason to expect.

(And, now that "jumping the shark" is in the pop-culture lexicon, shouldn't we have a term for the opposite kind of moment -- the episode that shows clearly when a previously good or OK series has blossomed into genius? My suggested name for this milestone: "dropping the turkey," in honor of WKRP in Cincinnati's transcendant Thanksgiving episode.)

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My co-worker Rachel -- whom I now am tempted to marry because of a peculiar but tropical job opportunity -- had acupuncture this week. It seems to have helped fight the pain she's been having, but I still don't see me putting myself through a procedure that contains the word puncture.

Though I guess it's better than approxipuncture.

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Favorite Canadian sights during my recent vacation:

-- Sod Outlet (St. Catharines, Ontario)
-- Lay's potato chips, Ketchup flavor
-- "Welcome to Kingston / You'll Be AMAZED!"
-- The SQUEEZE LEFT highway sign (and its frequent predecessor, LANE REDUCTION AHEAD)
-- Signs directing you to the Ontario Provincial Police by abbreviation, inevitably causing me to say, no doubt to my traveling companion's annoyance, "Yeah you know me"
-- At an Ontario service station:
-- The homoerotic milk billboard showing a hunky bare-torsoed man with milk pouring all over his back and the slogan "Milk gives"
-- The Tim Hortons fast-food chain, which has a stranglehold on the highway exits between Toronto and Montreal, and which pushes a box of "sneakable snacks" called "Timbits," which you are glad this site is not named

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Here we go again: another San Francisco journalist moving away and writing a long piece about how the evil yuppies drove him/her out. The last one of these I bothered to read was in the real San Francisco Examiner, before it merged with the Chronicle. A reporter wrote about fleeing SF for a small coastal town, and she recited the stock complaints about the yuppie dot-commers and their cell phones and their SUVs. But as you read on, she complained about the crowdedness, and the lack of parking, and the fact that she couldn't drive everywhere she wanted to and get their instantly. It was clear it wasn't The City she was fleeing. It was a city, any city. She just didn't want to have anything to do with population.

Again, in the new Salon piece, we see the pattern. Those vile dot-commers ruined it all, prices are too high, there's no parking. Which is not to say the last two aren't true; they're just not reasons enough to leave a place as beautiful and liberating as San Francisco unless you really have to. The writer would have you believe the good San Francisco is gone, but, like the previous writer, he undercuts his premise by revealing a completely different motive for moving: his wife never liked it here. Keep reading and even more suspect factors emerge; for example, it seems our émigré doesn't care for how many other men here have goatees.

I'm not denying that the dot-com gold rush did some damage to San Francisco. I know how the local music scene has been hurt, and how the dot-com collapse isn't magically healing that. With every S________ and Blockbuster that pops up, I fear The City will become just like every other city; but believe me, it's not there yet. The parking is awful; thus, I drive as little as I can beyond my nerve-grinding commute. And after having nice cheap shelter for a while, I finally ran headlong into the high real-estate prices. But rather than flee, I decided to go another way: I took a chance on sinking in more roots here by using my savings and buying a place. Because being here is worth the belt-tightening.

Maybe that's easy for me to say because maybe I've become that very yuppie scum the expatriates so conveniently hate. I don't have an SUV, oft-useless devourers of airspace and the environment that they are, but I do have a cell phone. (I resisted for a long time, but now I find it damn handy.) I do have a tech job. (For now, anyway.) I do have a nice place to live. (And my budget shrinks as a result.) And I do have a goatee. (Deal with it.)

Or maybe that's easy for me to say because I know that San Francisco still stands apart and above. Maybe because I'm a liberal, gay man who spent most of his life in the narrow-minded hinterlands, I easily see that San Francisco is still smarter and kinder and more temperate and just plain better than anyplace else in the country. And that's not even factoring in how damned pretty it is.

I didn't come here five years ago for the supposed big bucks; I had no job lined up, and I had absolutely no notion of moving into the dot-com realm. But that boom, like San Francisco itself, gave me an opportunity to find a new path for myself. Its benefits may not last, but at least I'll know there's more than one course for me to take, and I'll probably be able to see it more clearly next time. I'm still gripped by money worries and job insecurity as I never have been before. But I'm also experiencing a host of wonderful things I never saw coming. And I'm still loving San Francisco.

That's why my plan is to stay to fight for San Francisco as long as I can somehow afford to. And the more quitters that leave -- the more people that run away just because cell phones don't fit their picture of "bohemia" -- the easier that fight will get.

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11:40 AM Back by the Bay after an arduous journey. From Buffalo to Pittsburgh, I shared a row with a baby who screamed three-quarters of the way. Then, out of Pittsburgh, our departure was delayed three hours because the unsurprisingly incompetent US Airways didn't have enough people to fly the plane -- and apparently didn't discover this shortage until after herding all of us onto the aircraft. Once we finally got airborne, half the ride was through turbulence that scared me more than turbulence ever has, largely because I just didn't trust the airline I was on. I've always been wary of USScare; I know too many people who've had trouble with it, and its string of crashes in the '90s and ongoing financial losses don't reassure me. It was the first major airline I ever flew, and it immediately became the first to lose my luggage. Still, I was willing to give it another chance -- mainly because I got tickets too late and nothing else was available at a decent rate -- and the company blew it big-time. "Thank you for your patience"? It's shot. "Thank you for choosing US Airways"? If I can help it, never again.

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This in no way mitigates my travel ordeal, but: Jim Kelly was on my flight from Buffalo to Pittsburgh. And it always reassures me about the world when a celebrity behaves or is treated like a regular person. On the plane and in the airport, a lot of people gawked and buzzed about Kelly, but very few people bothered him. And when he got off the plane, the four-time Super Bowl quarterback did what most of us do; he wandered over and stared at monitors awhile trying to find the gate for his connecting flight, then went to the gate and slumped into an uncomfortable plastic chair. No special treatment (beyond the perks of first class) and no entourage; just a big guy in shorts and baseball cap traveling solo with two carry-ons.

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While vacationing, I read a funny column in the National Post above Al Gore's facial overhaul. Best part: "Al has returned from his European vacation with an attractive beard. No, no, I don't mean he's dating Nicole Kidman."

I liked all the Canadian papers I read better than maybe any U.S. one. They look good and are well-organized (except that the Post occasionally hides the Sports section inside another one), and the writing is clear, informative and short. Look north, American press.

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Go, Cavvies!

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