Touristic creations like the Barcelona Bus Turistic are dreamy. They're a public bus line aimed at serving the needs of the tourist so that they don't crowd the other public lines that people commute on, the tourists pay properly for transportation that they don't pay taxes to support, and most importantly, they stop tourists from driving all over the city. It's a genius system and I was constantly pounding my fist on my desk about the fact we don't have this in San Francisco.       Well, it turns out that I bruised up my fist over nothing because apparently, we do have a touristic bus, the SF Culture Bus or otherwise known at the 74X. You can read all about it on their FAQ and while it may read a great deal like Chuck Norris Facts, you can get the general idea.       Reading through all of that, I quickly realized that this bus is screwed. First off, the route that it covers is quite well served by the 7 or the N Judah. These lines are a mere $4 (oh yeah, celebrate the 33% fare raise today. yay...) round trip as opposed to the $7 for the 74X. The bus runs every 60 minutes which is a joke. Also, it doesn't take credit cards, Translink or even give change, so you better have a five and two ones to pay for it on board.       Also, this route is not a popular route. Museums are fine and I like them, but the typical tourist doesn't give a rat's ass about these things. They want that "curvy street", "bridge", "pointed building", and the "Italian place". There is no touristic bus to these areas, but there are a great deal of taxis and other private operators who work to service these areas like all the taxis at Coit Tower waiting to prey of taking people to Fisherman's Wharf which is about a 10 minute walk--downhill. Can't step on their toes, can we now? I mean, just even stretching the 28 to go to Fisherman's Wharf instead of having it fart out at Fort Mason would be an improvement, but no, we get the 74X and that's it.       It reeks of people going to City Hall, showing how touristic routes would be a great idea, Mayor Prettyboy going along with it, but making sure not to touch the private operators, establishing this route in this way thus dooming it to failure as shown by the buses always being empty despite plenty of tourists being in town right now. This way, after they shut it down, they can point to it and say, "See, we had a touristic bus and it failed, so why you wanna go down that road again? Now, on to handing out more taxi medallions..."

Someday, as we work to pass legislation around the world that will hopefully save the world, there will be an exhibit (preferably in the George W. Bush Presidential Library) to all the asses of history that tried to stop this legislation. It would be hard to discern one from the other as these (generally) Republicans all say pretty much the same things:       "But Rep. John Boehner, the House Republican leader, used an extraordinary one-hour speech shortly before the final vote to warn of unintended consequences in what he said was a "defining bill." He called it a "bureaucratic nightmare" that would cost jobs, depress real estate prices and put the government into parts of the economy where it now has no role."       From this article in The Chronicle. Dear lord I hope that some day US Americans understand that energy and general existence on this planet actually costs something.

Alright, so the truth is that the best granola out there is the stuff you make yourself and Bittman agrees. This has nothing to do with being cheap and more to do with making what is going to be a whole lot tastier granola.       Prior to actually making it myself, I was buying it at Whole Foods. Theirs granola selection is great, but Whole Foods is not. I enjoyed the "Rainforest Granola" the most and I thought that its mystical combination of ingredients would be impossible to copy. Turns out I was wrong and it's actually pretty easy to make once deconstructing all the flavors. Giving yourself one and a half kilograms of good breakfast material takes around an hour of time which is not bad when you work it all out. So, without further ado, here is the recipe (in metric of course) for "Rainforest Granola":       1kg rolled oats (not steel cut)       250g well-chopped cashews       100g all purpose white flour       10g salt       75g puffed rice (more if you like puffy, crunchy stuff)       350ml canola oil       350ml maple syrup or honey       15ml vanilla extract (more or less depending on your preference)       Mix all the dry ingredients together. Then mix in the oil, syrup/honey, and vanilla. Toss it all together well and make sure that everything is coated with the liquid ingredients. If not, your oats will burn and suck a good deal.       Preheat your oven to 150C (300F). Get out two nonstick cookie trays and spread the mixture over them evenly. Put them in the over once it's to temperature. Pull out the trays and flip the mixture every 10-15 minutes. If you have a proper convection oven, total cook time is 30 minutes. If you don't, give it 40 minutes and alternate the sheets for even cooking. Bittman says to use 175C (350F) for heat and cook it for 30 minutes, but I have yet to try this. Basically, you want that thin layer of sugars and oil on the dry ingredients to caramelize and by melted when you pull it out.       Take it out and let it cool very thoroughly and the melted quality will harden up quite fast. Chunk it up and store it making sure to devour damned near half of it in the process as fresh-out-of-the-oven granola is most likely in the buffet in heaven. Store it in a sealed container and it will probably keep long enough to last a nuclear winter.       Obviously, you can substitute in a good number of other things for the nuts, puffed rice, and vanilla to make whatever you'd like to have.

An amusing apartment swap that I saw on Craigslist. In prowling through all of this for the last couple of weeks (due to wanting to do a swap with my place in SF), I have to say that that has to be the most enjoyable one I've seen due to the frank honesty.

I wasn't really aware of it, but apparently a Spanish version of homedepot.com came and went while I was off doing other things that required more giving and a shit. They gave it something like four months before declaring it a failure. This goes to show that Home Depot will probably go bankrupt in the next year as they are full of monolingual MBA-ful idiots running the place. First, Spanish is incredibly important to them. There are countless migrant workers from Mexico and the rest of Central America working in construction. In fact, it seems like these are the only guys working in construction these days and for those who don't know, their first language is usually Spanish. Second, who the hell launches a website to cancel it in four months?!! I've worked on complete loser sites that stick around for years. Hell, this site has been around six years and it's just me blathering and posting pictures! Third, um, it's a recession that's hitting construction incredibly hard, so a) why launch the site now and b) again, why kill just after you do?       All of this is business idiocy at its best, but what really got me was the comment you see below. I can't believe that one comment can have so many offensive parts to it, but this Dennis Mccabe is obviously in a league of morons that has yet to be charted. Beyond the fact that he misspells "kowtowing" and is so belligerent towards anyone who doesn't speak his idea of Americanian, he just had to go and say that we're trying to, "Balkanize the US with different languages" I'm sure he felt really, really smart tossing in that word; almost BBC smart I'm assuming. He probably also didn't read this article either. My blogging reach is small I see, but this article talks about the whole issue of localization for companies in a much more professional manner. For starters, it doesn't tell a commenter to punch himself and only goes up from there.