dogtown commons

Forget baseball. Shopping is the real national pastime. Thanksgiving is no longer a holiday so much as an excuse to increase our personal debts buying redundant electronics. The traditional thanksgiving meal is now mere preparation, like a marathoner having a big bowl of pasta the day before the race, or like a family fueling up the ol’ SUV before making the long drive to Disneyland. And camping out in a mall’s parking lot for a 4 am opening just isn’t going to cut it anymore (that’s so 2005):

For shoppers looking to get a jumpstart on Black Friday, CompUSA stores will open their doors on Thanksgiving from 9 p.m. to midnight.

The stores are offering shoppers early deals and a slice of pumpkin pie. Also new this year are the expanded deals on CompUSA.com. Beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Thursday, CompUSA.com will have a one-day, online only sale with special deals not available in stores and free shipping on select products.

Not to be outdone, however, some clever consumers have realized that there’s no reason for the traditional thanksgiving meal to be a pre-marathon pile of pasta when it can be more like a nutrition bar wolfed down during a pit stop in a NASCAR race:

Hoping to bring shoppers out early and get a jump on the holiday shopping season, many stores ran pre-Thanksgiving sales. Target had a four-day sale Sunday through Wednesday. Best Buy, HH Gregg and Michaels ran similar promotions.

It’s not that I’m ungrateful. There is still a lot to be thankful for. For example, this year I am thankful that there will still be plenty of cheap crap left for me to buy after the long weekend is over, so I can sleep in as late as I want on Friday morning, still satiated and content from the traditional thanksgiving meal.

I wasn’t planning to take note of the recent “news” that Oakland is dangerous, until V Smoothe at A Better Oakland flagged some comments that are a staggering display of incompetence and insensitivity:

In Oakland, police Chief Wayne Tucker said people might be misled by the report.

The department is always interested in how we’re being rated,” he said, “but I think a rating can be very deceptive.”

He said being ranked fourth on the list of dangerous cities could easily lead people to believe the whole city is under siege from crime. Tucker said the reality is that crime is concentrated in “two reasonably small areas” in East and West Oakland.

V Smoothe hits the main points here — first, Tucker is dangerously close to implying that the high-crime neighborhoods aren’t worth worrying about, and second, the “two reasonably small areas” are in fact most of Oakland. It would be just as accurate, if not more so, to say that “two reasonably small areas” (everything East of highway 13 and the neighborhoods Northeast of Lake Merritt) have relatively low concentrations of crime.

All I would add is that even if you accept Tucker’s characterization that Oakland has a wider range of high-crime and low-crime areas than other cities, that means that Oakland’s high-crime areas are even more violent and crime-plagued than the ranking shows, since the ranking represents city-wide statistics that average out low-crime and high-crime areas. So by arguing that some parts of Oakland are actually quite safe, Tucker is also admitting that the unsafe parts are even less safe than the ranking reflects. That may well be true, but is it really something a Police Chief wants to brag about?

This comment from Paul Rose, a spokesman for Mayor Dellums, was also disappointing:

“The FBI questions the use of the statistics, which forces many to question the validity of such a poll,” he said.

So if Oakland is actually the 5th or 6th most dangerous city in the nation instead of the 4th, that would make a big difference? In a defense of the list that CQ Press put out in response to the criticism, they acknowledge that these rankings are broad-brush generalizations that will inevitably omit all sorts of variables and differences between cities or neighborhoods, but they imply that if they are making city officials defensive, then that alone is a good reason for publishing the list:

We agree, of course, that crime-ranking information contains many variables and that all must be considered carefully. But as journalists, we take very seriously our responsibility to keep Americans informed — even if the news is not good. So we publish such data, even if it causes cities and officials to feel aggrieved.

I can understand the frustration of city officials who are suddenly barraged with questions about a list that doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know, but instead of bragging that Oakland is actually pretty safe if you’re rich, and quibbling about whether the statistics are perfectly calibrated, wouldn’t a more appropriate response be to acknowledge that Oakland’s crime is too high, and explain their plans to reduce it?

You may have heard that the New Oxford American Dictionary has named ‘locavore,’ meaning a person who only eats food grown or raised locally, as its word of the year. These sorts of awards from dictionary publishers, or the American Dialect Society, seem to pop up a few times a year, and they usually get some attention in the news for about a day before people forget all about them. So it would be silly to make a big deal out of it, but if these word awards mean anything, they’re a sign that a phenomenon has reached a tipping point and gone from marginal to mainstream. As the Oxford University Press’s blog notes in the announcement:

The past year saw the popularization of a trend in using locally grown ingredients, taking advantage of seasonally available foodstuffs that can be bought and prepared without the need for extra preservatives.

The “locavore” movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.

“The word ‘locavore’ shows how food-lovers can enjoy what they eat while still appreciating the impact they have on the environment,” said Ben Zimmer, editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press. “It’s significant in that it brings together eating and ecology in a new way.”

Along with the word ‘locavore,’ of course, another sign of the times is the success of recent books such as Michael Pollan’s great Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which extol the virtues –environmental, social, and health-related — of eating local. The bay area, with its year-round growing season, its environmental activism, and its love of food, is naturally in the vanguard. They say that all politics is local, but in most American supermarkets, all food is global. As the environmental movement works to make people aware of how individual choices about food and transportation are connected to global problems of climate change and energy supplies, people need to realize that in one sense, eating locally is eating globally. because eating locally can be a piece of the solution to global problems.

I have to admit that I’m not very fond of the word ‘locavore’. To me, a locavore sounds more like a train-eating monster than a shopper at the neighborhood farmer’s market, but if the brief attention paid to this announcement makes more people aware of the growing local food movement, then who am I to complain about the aesthetics of the word? The irony in all this, of course, is that “eating local” is nothing new — it’s how the overwhelming majority of people have eaten for most of human history. Eating food from across the country, or across the world, is what should seem bizarre.

Behold the geniuses keeping us safe from terrorism:

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails.

Full story here.

This is good news:

The Berkeley City Council has given the green light on a new green initiative: a solar power loan program that would be the first of its kind in the nation.

The council unanimously approved a concept put forth by the mayor’s office that would loan individual property owners the up-front cost of installing solar panels; a fee that costs $20,000-30,000 depending on the size of the home.

Solar power isn’t a solution to all our energy problems, but programs like Berkeley’s are a step in the right direction — that is to say, programs like Berkeley’s are a step away from coal and petroleum as our main energy sources. Yes, solar panels are expensive, but we need to re-think what we mean when we talk about the cost of energy. Cost comparisons shouldn’t just involve the price of solar panels versus the price of one’s regular monthly electric bill. There are other costs associated with coal-based electricity that don’t appear on a monthly bill — such as the costs of dealing with air pollution, global warming, and other consequences of our carbon-based power sources. These are long-term costs that are shared widely among the population and future generations, and therefore these costs aren’t included in monthly bills, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Berkeley’s proposal isn’t only good policy because low-interest loans will enable some environmentally-minded homeowners to install solar panels who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford the upfront costs. It’s also good policy because it recognizes that individual homeowners making personal cost-benefit analyses have little incentive to shell out a lot of money for solar panels. The cost of solar panels is borne by individuals, while the true costs of coal and oil are borne by all of us, and future generations. By fronting the money for solar panels with low-interest loans, Berkeley would be giving its residents an incentive to make cost-benefit analyses that include long-term, shared costs which will never be reflected in one homeowner’s monthly electric bill.

The reality is that almost all individuals will make decisions based on rational economic self-interest. Who can blame them? That’s why it is so important for politicians — whose job it is to look out for the community at large — to think beyond the daily price of gasoline and electricity, and start implementing innovative policies that will help deal with ALL the costs — present and future — of our marriage to fossil fuels.

I happened to stumble upon the photos of a Flickr user called hey mr glen, and they are so good that I feel compelled to re-post some of them here (as permitted by his creative commons license at Flickr). His sensitivities to color, geometry and serendipity are wonderful. His photographs cause viewers to see the world afresh, which is one hallmark of a good artist:

Some of hey mr glen’s photos are candid street shots that show an exceptional alertness to fleeting moments in the life of a city. Here are two taken in San Francisco:

Other photos are nicely-framed shots of architecture that offer a new perspective on buildings that have been photographed a million times before, like this shot of the Transamerica pyramid:

(More photos below) (more…)