Commentary

This holiday season I ask you to be thankful for what you have, and give a little kindness to those who are surviving domestic violence. I recently reached out to La Casa de las Madres, a San Francisco domestic violence nonprofit that provides intervention and prevention services to women and their children.  All their services…

August 7, 2009 Dear Rep. Speier, I am very happy to see that you have come out strong for a public option in healthcare.  Thank you for doing the right thing.  If you don't read the rest of this letter (it is long) please know that you have my support in pushing for universal healthcare,…

I signed up for OneCause, a group that claims to capture rewards from your purchases and give them to the school of your choice, in order to support my preschool.  Sadly, they don't even pretend to be obeying my email preferences, and are now spamming me for their new toolbar. I recently got this e-mail:…

I’ve moved to a place where I have dozens of friends.  This wasn’t unintentional.  It’s the main reason Sarah chose this for "her turn" to move us, and ironically enough, researchers have found that happiness and longevity is linked to spending time with friends.  But it’s definately a new experience.  In DC I would have…

This was my first year at Burning Man as a San Franciscan.  I had great visions of how much better my art project would be due to my not having to haul crap across the country.  I also had developed a larger set of friends here and was excited to spend some time out on…

Katie is a really excellent poker colleague of mine.  She profitably plays 10/20 Limit hold’em online, and she and I have developed a good rapport that allows us to discuss hands without one of us having to be right.  I’ve known poker players that would have made excellent poker colleagues except for their ego problems. …

A dispute between the Office of Tax and Revenue and several communities in DC over property tax rates had another small milestone today. "I describe a lot of what’s going on around the country as sticker shock," said Wayne A. Tenenbaum, a property tax lawyer and former assessor from Kansas City, Mo., who sits on…

For years people have been telling me to take echinacea when I felt a cold coming on.  Reluctantly I would do it.  One particular unreliable acquaintance in New York used to distill her own echinacea.  So pathological was she, that I imagined her in Central Park just grabbing a handful of weeds, boiling them down and selling them with the malicious thought, "they’ll never know the difference".

As I turned on the Today show this morning,  I was struck by the poor journalistic standards their producer used in presenting a story about "Take Our Daughters and Sons To Work Day".   Apart from allowing people on the show that are paid to hawk technology goods, "Today" thinks that journalism involves presenting two sides of any issue without a lot of thought as to what obligation they owe the viewers.