Puns and Rotters - plus a little something-something from the Hippodrome
The most horrible horrors strike when you least expect them, and then strike again and again until you succumb to their sheer eeevilosity.  They hit you when you’re not looking, and then they kick you when you’re down.  Thus it is with scientology, re-runs, and bad pizza.  You’re not finished with them till they’re finished with you.  In this vein, I had some hideous things come into my brain over the past few weeks.  So hideous, I can’t forget them.  So hideous, they haunt my days and blacken my nights.  So hideous, indeed, that I am going to share them with you.  For truly they are among the worst examples

The GooBUgly
I have a record album, Ennio Morricone’s Colonia Sonopa Originale del Film “Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (which you would know if you were reading carefully), which is just the fancy euro way of saying “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” It’s an album, a soundtrack, a movie, and a way of life.  You know what I mean.  Let’s be honest, we all have our Clint Eastwood (early phase) days, our Lee Van Cleef days, and even our Eli Wallach days, god save us.  Well, I’m having them all at once.  I

Opinion Leadership
As a life-long unaffiliated voter who regrettably missed the most recent election here in San Fran, I was naturally honored and flummoxed in equal measure to have received an official-looking missive from Mike Steele’s office in today’s mail.  It’s got a four-page cover letter in which he notes that I am an “identified opinion leader” in this town, thereby putting me in line to receive a registered and numbered survey; “with our limited resources we could only afford to contact citizens in San Francisco who have demonstrated a high level of political involvement and commitment to the Republican Party.” (This must have been the result of my

Bootstrapping 101
In these days of economic strife and in this world so full of people expecting to be handed everything on a platter for the asking, I’m always encouraged to see a hardworking entrepreneur who takes his future into his own hands and works hard to make a place for himself.  So you can imagine how much it warmed my heartcockles (now with more cockle! but reduced heart....) to see as follows: It was a Friday morning, 8:25 by the clock.  I had disembarked from my bus downtown and was walking down Bush street, having reached the corner at Sansome.  It’s a very busy, businessy part of downtown, with tall stone buildings and high-end clothiers and a general fe

Echoes of Genius and the Bird on the Left-Hand Side
I’ve had the pleasure of possessing a decent set of brains for some time now, but the best thing they’ve ever done for me was to alert me to the presence of actual genius in others.  There have not been too many of them - true geniuses I’ve met - but the handful I’ve encountered have made quite an impact on me.  Of these, one man in particular impressed me both as a genius and as an exceptional human being.  My dad had prepared me at a tender age for a meeting with him, explaining that this was his best and hardest teacher, who had held one of the most esteemed professorships in Oxford.  It was said of him that, though he was seated as Regius P