April 29, 2004 – 12:00 am
In Sergio Arau’s satire A Day Without a Mexican, the state of California is plunged into crisis when an unknown agency raptures the state’s Latino population away, leaving the world’s fifth largest economy short a third of its population, and forcing anti-immigrant politicos and talk show hosts to don leaf blowers.
A billboard in LA for [...]
February 23, 2004 – 12:00 am
People taking the ACE from the San Joaquin Valley to San Jose will continue to have free wireless internet access. The University of Phoenix will pay for the cost of the service in hopes of attracting potential students to take classes online during the two hour commute.
Hopefully they’ll get training for jobs that will pay [...]
January 24, 2004 – 12:00 am
[ via Electrolite ] SciFi.com interviews Kim Stanley Robinson. The focus is on his new novel on the politics of climate change, Fourty Signs of Rain, [ thanks, PNH ] which will be called The Capital Code in the States.
December 22, 2003 – 12:00 am
This quake was 200 miles south of us, but we felt it here as a series of slow, rolling waves. Hope everyone’s okay down there.
Update: Doc reports. Power and phones are down, but no major damage or casualties.
Update 2: Spoke too soon. Reports of deaths in Paseo Robles.
December 20, 2003 – 12:00 am
Photos from Wednesday’s big wave surfing at Mavericks. Looks like people were able to paddle into the waves instead of being towed-in on a jet-ski. Still, these were big waves.
Set one
Set two
Set three
November 25, 2003 – 12:00 am
I wanted to pay my car’s registration fee online. That is if the amount shown reflected the change in fees per the Gropenfürer’s executive order.
Before I could determine if my invoice had been updated, I was stopped. Safari thinks that the DMV’s certificate is dodgy.
There’s no email to send a report to, so I have [...]
November 21, 2003 – 12:00 am
[ via Doc Searls ] This is King Canute and all that, but let us read it into the record:
News should be what affects the most people. Celebs have no impact on my life or the lives of anybody but their friends, families and co-workers. If Michael Jackson’s arrest hurts record sales, it’s a business [...]
November 21, 2003 – 12:00 am
A nice visualization of the by-county vote in the 2003 California recall election, done by the same person responsible for the analysis of the airspeed of an unladen swallow.
Here, the state map is re-calibrated by votes instead of land area, which shows the importance of small, but densely populated areas relative to large, sparsely populated [...]
October 27, 2003 – 12:00 am
Mark Davis, author of City of Quartz, on the Southern California wildfires:
Fire, as a result, is politically ironic. Right now, as I watch San Diego’s wealthiest new suburb, Scripps Ranch, in flames, I recall the Schwarzenegger fund-raising parties hosted there a few weeks ago. This was an epicenter of the recent recall and gilded voices [...]
October 9, 2003 – 12:00 am
[ via BoingBoing ] Eileen Gunn asked a few professional science fiction writers for their reactions to the 2003 California Recall election.
Read Pat Cadigan’s response, in which she realizes that Philip K. Dick has been scripting this all along.
But there is a script. It’s based on things taken from many different books and stories, all [...]
October 8, 2003 – 12:00 am
When you look at the by-county patterns in the 2003 California recall, they are similar to the 2002 election for Governor.
The urban counties, except for San Diego and Orange, voted against the recall and for Davis.
However, in the counties which went for the recall, the percentage of the yes-on-recall vote was even greater than the [...]
October 7, 2003 – 12:00 am
Download and read it. We will be doing this again in six months. [ PDF ]
October 3, 2003 – 12:00 am
My state is about to elect an Austrian movie star into the Governorship. Even if he was the right person for the office, this should still give you pause. I blame celebrity culture.
And it won’t surprise you that I’m voting against the recall, as well as both of the propositions on the ballot, and ask [...]
August 18, 2003 – 12:00 am
[ via GreenCine's Blog ] Arnold “I Will Terminate California’s Government” Schwarzenegger featured in a collection of advertisements for Japanese TV. The ad for Direct TV is prescient, while the ones for the energy drink Arinamin V are, well, strange.
August 16, 2003 – 12:00 am
Warren Buffet, advisor to California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger, denounced Proposition 13, the infamous property tax measure. This provoked a knee jerk response by California’s Republicans and Democrats. This came at the same time I was reading Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom.
Zakaria doesn’t care for government by initiative either, and holds out California as [...]
