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 Mid-Market
weekly report. The city continues to
rearrange the furniture. First, it removes the benches from U.N.
Plaza. Then, it removes Food Not Bombs from the same place. Now the
minions of DPW have wandered around the corner to McAllister and
Larkin, where a sunny grassy space has long provided a place of
leisure to people with no other place to go. The grassy space
remains, but it is now off limits, guarded by a tall, uninviting
cast-iron fence. The last person I saw hanging out there was truly a
dangerous-looking character, as he lay upon his sleeping bag,
engrossed in a novel. Makes you wonder where they’ll hit next. The
library?
Boys and girls, can you say nucular? Homesick
for the fine Mr. Rogers cardigan that Jimmy Carter wore? That may be
just what the Republican folks in Washington are counting on,
according to a May
16 article by Ben White in Grist Magazine. Mind you, he’s only
working from a reliably leaked memo, but White suggests that “the
Bushies will try to change the terms of the debate and, in the words
of the memo, attempt to ‘Carterize the Democrats.’ They will let
you know that detractors in the Democratic Party and the
environmental movement would like nothing more than to plop you back
in the middle of the 1970s energy crisis when lines for gas snaked
through neighborhoods and a besweatered Jimmy Carter pursed his lips
and told you to flip off the lights, turn down the air conditioner,
and eat your peas.” The energy crisis? It’s really a lifestyle
problem, and “whoever captures the quality-of-life argument wins.”
The next nexus. The
Place-To-Be this Friday is the Luggage Store, at 1007 Market, where
a plethora of poets and politicians will do what they do best —
string words together in the service of serious subjects. Among the
speakers: Supervisor Matt Gonzalez, and poets Jack Hirschman and
Agneta Falk. The time, 7:00 p.m. For more information, call 415
255-5971.
When pesti-cide becomes people-cide. According
to a BBC
report on May 9, the human beings of this earth have outdone
themselves in ridding their towns and farm of unwanted vermin —
and in the process, they’ve very nearly done themselves in. It’s
not just what’s sprayed on your veggies that’ll get you. It’s
what’s been left behind after the job is completed. The U.N. Food
and Agriculture Organization says the amount of pesticide waste that
has been left lying around, particularly in the developing world,
amounts to some 500,000 tons, at least five times the amount it
estimated just two years ago. The FAO is urging to pesticide
companies to help clean up the mess that created this “lethal
legacy of obsolete pesticides.”
More on the poetry front. A
computer haiku, courtesy of Peter Strauss:
Your file is so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.
B.C.
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