Ashland, Oregon at the Oregon Shakespeare FestivalUP by Bridget Carpenter After Larry Walters had his 15 minutes of fame flying a balloon-lifted lawn chair from his LA-area home in 1982, he dropped from the cultural radar. After the talk shows and the one-trick motivational speeches were over, the man still had a life to live. But, he lived back down on the ground and he didn’t surface again in the public stratosphere. So, what happened? […]
Kids filled Ashland’s North Mountain Park to celebrate Earth Day this afternoon. There were lots of children-accessible hands-on activities focused on the environment and eco-friendly ways of living. […]
Real life is too full of happiness and fun for me to want to see most comedies and other frivolous stuff on stage. Anne Frank is a perfect topic for a theater production: the horror is tightly wound and is inescapable, and it looms from the opening moments. The dread in Anne’s saga lends itself to melodrama, and the play version of the diary dips into the genre fulsomely. The grinding of events and the knowledge of the bad end coming control the two-hours-plus production. […]
On April 19, 1906 this fire hydrant at 20th and Church was one of the few in the city with water. The people fighting the fires ran hose lines hundreds of feet from this corner to buildings threatened by the conflagration. The fire line stood. The Mission was saved. Each year The City honors the 1906 firefighters by giving this hydrant a new coat of gold paint. redozdachs and I went out at 7 this morning to watch the ceremonies headlined by Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White (pictured below).
We got up to the sound of church bells and fire sirens sounding a 100th anniversary commemoration of the great fire and earthquake. The City uses all occasions as an excuse for a party. Mayor Gavin Newsom spoke of the city's ability to celebrate the tenacity of human spirit. Then the Major interviewed all of the 100-year-old earthquake survivors on live television. Great reality TV. My favorite was the woman who talked about being raised by prostitutes after the fire... her mother and father were busy reviving the family's bar business and the ladies "were always home" and able to look [...]
TiVo won a $73+ million patent judgment from EchoStar (Dish Network) today. (See TiVo story in Bloomberg.com or in Reuters) TiVo has lost hundreds of millions of dollars while delivering a wonderful product. Their competition just took their research and ideas and treated it like it was in the public domain. Today's jury decision gives TiVo life, since it can now license its technology to EchoStar and the many other cable/satellite companies who have appropriated the intellectual property. Who knows, maybe some day TiVo will make a profit! The decision reassures our dachshund pack that its TiVo service will likely remain [...]
The Members of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco this afternoon issued a call to the Reverend Gregory L. Stewart to serve the Society as its Senior Minister! The vote on calling Greg was 216 to 6, or 95% yes. Great stuff by me. He'll start working with us August 1st, and his first sermon as minister will be September 10. More details.
"Cooking the Cosmic Muffin", "Fashions in Anti-War Protests", and "SF Cures Family's Dorian Gray Syndrome" are the featured articles in today's church's newsletter. If you've ever been curious about what Unitarian Universalists dis-believe...
After ten months of working on the Search Committee, we're down to the final 8 days! Yesterday I greeted the minister and his family as they arrived after a soggy six-hour drive from Reno. Now the Congregation gets to meet, talk with, and grill Greg and make its decision whether or not he's a keeper. This family photo is the best answer I know to the Catholic Archbishop's comment on the unsuitability of gay people as adoptive parents. The kids would be better off in foster care being shuttled from residence to residence. Right. Sure thing. More (and larger) photos [...]
Yesterday afternoon the Commonwealth Club phoned to tell me that next Wednesday's scheduled address by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had been canceled. The speech had just been added to the calendar, so the change was sudden. I figured that government officials have flexible schedules, and didn't think much about it. redozdachs heard about the change and came up with a great idea. Maybe Rumsfeld is going to follow Andy Card out of Washington. Rumsfeld has arrogantly and badly misjudged the Iraq war. He continues to give no public sign of understanding ground-level truth. He's an architect of a dangerous and unsuccessful [...]