'Bred Crumbs

01:23 PM Euphemism of the Week: On Sunday night, San Jose PBS affiliate KTEH (great Klingon name, isn't it?), referred to yet another Red Dwarf-based pledge drive as a "membership opportunity."

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01:13 PM Time to 'fess up: recent entries here linking to comforting or empowering writings about facing fear in the wake of, you know, have been aimed at myself as much as readers. Lately, I've let fear get the best of me a couple of times, and I'm trying to figure out how to stop that -- something I had trouble doing even back in more innocent times, such as, oh, the first half of 2001.

Like many others, I seek information now more then ever, but reading or watching the news accomplishes nothing but triggering dread. Wednesday morning, the disconcerting irony hit me: I majored in journalism and spent 16-plus years working for newspapers -- as the famed too-smart-for-network-TV reporter and anchor Linda Ellerbee cagily put it, "committing journalism" -- yet now there is no news source that I trust.

The American mass media -- TV, newspapers, and newsmagazines -- have become terrorists themselves, painting nightmare scenarios with absolutely no context or guidance, accomplishing nothing but scaring the populace. The "alternative" weeklies are too likely to put an increasingly untrustworthy überleftist spin on it all. Online, the portals spew the mass offerings with their priorities set by automatic feeds and whomever their content partners happen to be, and Salon positions itself as an independent voice worthy of your subscription dollars but follows the scattershot model of the newspapers and magazines that spawned its staff -- again, grave speculation and little information.

But there are options. First, weblogs themselves, which can become a reliable filter of what's out there. And my friend Jack has directed me to NPR, a time and ear commitment I'm not yet up to, and BBC News. The latter is becoming my new primary news source, even for U.S. matters. That's right -- it seems a British service can cover and present American news better than American news agencies. The BBC relays the vast range of world and national events with clarity and balance, concentrating on what is actually happening instead of what could happen and considering the background to everything. How refreshing.

Not only that, turns out the BBC site has a pretty good Farscape section. Yeah, the Brits are a half-season behind, but still it's a fine resource for further exploration of the Uncharted Territories. (My god, I sound like a Sci-Fi Channel commercial.)

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06:41 PM One who knows from fear, Salman Rushdie, offers a potent pep talk on staring it down, and shames those "sections of the left" who blame America for what happened last month, reminding them that fundamentalist terrorists seek to destroy what most of them claim to fight for.

Whatever the killers were trying to achieve, it seems improbable that building a better world was part of it. ... Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex.

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12:03 AM Overheard from a guy on a cell phone in Safeway:

"You know I like my men like I like my bread. It has to have a big penis."

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01:34 PM On this, the digital cousin of the 'Bred Crumbs launch date, I hand over a little site control to you, the user. Ordinarily, the links on this site do not pop up a new window, which I think is OK by most people. But if you do want pop-ups, you can have them by clicking the button on the right side of this page. And if you want to change back to non-pop-ups, you can hit the button again. Plus, if you always want pop-ups, you can bookmark this link and always enter the site through it.

Thanks to Jennie for urging me to do this. It's been in the back of my mind for a while, and JavaScript for it was readily available, but it had to wait until I found the time and code chops to figure it out via PHP.

Two caveats: (1) The pop-up option applies only to links within the text of the Crumbs; navigational links on the top, sides, and bottom of pages will still appear in the same window. (2) Pop-ups work only on Crumbs from September 2001 onward.

And as always, if it isn't quite working right, please let me know.

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08:38 PM Ah, what a welcome treat, the Folsom Street Fair. The kind of celebration of life only San Francisco can throw. The sometimes appealing, sometimes alarming mix of leather and nudity. The pounding of generic disco music punctuated by the occasional crack of a whip. The "spankings for charity." The heat, the crowd, the restraint vendors, the corn-dog stands, the twisted joy.

Two snapshots:

-- A woman in one sales booth displayed and explained to potential customers the finer details of a chain-mail whip. Then she raised over her head a dainty Japanese parasol.

-- Outside a booth with a sign saying YOU MUST BE OVER 21 TO ENTER and a long line waiting, someone quipped, "This is like the state fair. Is there a two-headed cow in there?"

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Late in the afternoon yesterday, I did stop by Dolores Park and saw the fragmenting remains of the peace rally. I had forgotten how all the causes of the left cling together; among the first things I saw was a Greenpeace booth pushing upcoming energy initiatives, and publicity for that ultimate liberal grandstander, Ralph Nader, who's coming to town to heighten the discord.

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Walking the lively neighborhood streets on Folsom Eve, we passed by a window through which we saw a middle-aged man sitting in the dark playing computer solitaire. It struck me as kinda sad -- a computer-age upgrade to "Eleanor Rigby."

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Ever vigilant, Jane alerts me to "The Net's First 'Enterprise' Slash Fiction". Seems my friends and I weren't the only ones scarred by the "blue room" scene.

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