Blogs
I was recently riding down Powell Street towards Emeryville and noticed a ghost bike on the corner of Vallejo Street. This is one of the first ghost bikes I’ve seen in Oakland. I did some research and found out it was for Matthew Sperry, a musician who was killed by a distracted driver while riding his bicycle to work on June 5, 2003. When Matthew was killed there was a public outpouring of grief. There were protests, memorial concerts and…
Please forgive yet another news blog/article/tidbit about how ____ is doing in the current economy by reading to the bottom of this paragraph. It’s all I read about too, but while traveling this past week, I’ve been involved in debates with friends about the slow food movement in San Francisco, New York and DC. Between the recent Times article on the food revolution’s day in the sun (please see White House Victory Garden, etc), and Alice Waters’s appearance on 60…
My friend Chris McNally is an illustrator who lives in San Francisco and loves riding, racing, fixing and collecting bikes. (It’s almost bordering on obsession.) Lately, he has been making these screen prints of vintage bicycles and bicycle parts. They are big, around 15″ x 20″, and really beautiful. You can check out more prints on his website and even buy them at Bicycle Odyssey in Sausalito. These are a few of my favorites:
Recently, I stopped by the Edible Schoolyard, a garden and kitchen classroom at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. Here, students learn how to garden and find out about where we get our daily food. As part of this project, they’ve built a wheat-grinder out of an exercise bicycle. Kids can get on and ride while grinding the wheat for their homemade pizza crust at the same time. Here are some photos I took:
We’ll have more on this soon, but for now I just wanted to draw your attention to a few new details about the police shooting that took place over the weekend. According to the Oakland Tribune, the suspect in the shootings was a recent parolee trying to navigate a broken system. Last week we profiled some people who are making it through this system, but it’s not easy for them or for anyone else. I’ll be keeping an eye on…
After a couple of hearty endorsements in the comments section, I’m ready to sign on for the CSA experiment. I’m heading to New York and D.C. next week for a business trip (okay, okay field trip–I like to pretend I have a job) but will sign up as soon as I’m back. If you have creative suggestions for ways to make a CSA membership work–recipes or whatever–I’m all ears, and pretty excited. Also, hooray for the White House victory garden.
I was driving down Shattuck Ave this afternoon – the 6th anniversary of the Iraq war – and out of the corner of my eye I noticed quite a commotion out front of the Marine recruiting center. I circled around to get a better look, and saw the huge windows at the front of the Center being replaced. There were baseball-sized holes in the windows, and dripping red paint. Read an article about the vandalism from the Oakland Tribune.
Good morning! It looks like it’s getting a little more crowded here in Oakland. The population in every Bay Area county grew last year for the first time since 2000 according to estimates released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. Alameda County added an estimated 20,722 residents. An Oakland man who is a member of the Surenos street gang is accused of raping a 13-year-old girl, according to police. He sent her threatening text messages while she was undergoing…
It looks like we’ve officially arrived at the “anger” stage of our economy-related grief; between AIG bailouts and takedowns of Jim Cramer, there’s a lot of rage out there. But come on, folks, isn’t there a little room for laughter in our angry, angry hearts? For your online reading pleasure, I submit to you: Stuff Unemployed People Like (sound familiar?) Now our soaring unemployment rates are most definitely not funny, but even gallows humor has its place, and I have…