Seeing Milk where it Happened
Last Tuesday, we went and checked out the premiere of Milk at the Castro Theatre. I mean, if you're going to see a movie that documents such a hefty chunk of San Francisco history and you happen to live in San Francisco, then you should go see it where it happened.
The scene was to be expected, although it was interesting to see that the 19:00 showing was much more massively packed with gay couples than the 22:00 showing, which seemed to be a lot more mixed and mostly straight couples, unless it was a lot of single girls with their gay male friends. I don't know. My Homometer ain't really all the fine tuned.
Once seeing the film, it was indeed fun to sit there with a highly reactive crowd. When those who were loathed came on screen such as Anita Brown. People even laughed heartily at jokes that they surely had seen many a time in the previews for the film.
As to how was the film? It's good. It's one of the rare occasions where I agree with the otherwise 100% ass, Mick LaSalle in saying that it portrays Harvey Milk as an American Hero, which is not something that most folks would ever want to believe. It also shows him and all the gays in the Castro as leading relatively normal lives despite the circumstances and the fact that they have a sexual preference different than 90% of the population. Of course, it does get in to the fact that a lot of them have a lot of baggage that they have to deal with because of those back home not accepting them. But, while LaSalle, gives the film the little jumping man (basically a 5 out of 5), I would probably give it a 4 out of 5 or a 8.5 out of 10. It's a well made film that tells a good story, but I had trouble really getting engrossed in it. Of course, maybe this was due to a boisterous crowd in the theater, but I think that would only help one to delve in to it. Oh, Sean Penn will most likely get an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Milk. His is actually acting in this film and not just phoning it in.
28 11 2008 0 comments
Tags: film, gays, history, san francisco
The Lacking of Balance
On November 21 at 21:00, Radio Okapi journalist Didace Namujimbo was shot and killed in Bukavu, Congo DRC. It's not only a tragic affront to freedom of the press (DRC is in the lower 15% of the world) but sad to me as I had met Didace on my trip to DRC this year. I can't speak French, so our conversation was quite brief, but he was one of those people who exuded a warmth from him. He was also a father and sadly whomever shot him leaves behind a wife and three children.
Of course, I could on about this. I could eulogize and wax about how sad this is. I'm not going to though because the real crime in all of this is the complete lack of balance in media when it comes to DRC and Sub-Saharan Africa at large. Yes, Reuters picked the story and of course MONUC has an article, but there is nothing on BBC or CNN about it. While this may change once the reporters wake up after the weekend, it currently sits that all they're talking about is the conflict up in North Kivu. And it's not like that conflict is raging. There is currently a ceasefire, so Didace was killed on what is in reality a slow news day.
Anyone reading this is more than likely aware of the fact that news coverage in Africa is quite poor, but what irks me beyond everything else is that this is just viewed as "normal". What do you expect, they're savages there, right? Wrong. Bukavu is not Goma. It is not a violent area. It's calm, beautiful, and about as normal as any town can be. This assassination has just come up from nowhere, much as the previous one a year ago. But again, in Western eyes, this is normal.
Congolese have every right to be affronted by such an assumption. If they keep up with European media, they too could assume that Europe is a violent place full of "savages". I bring to light, Ivo Pukanić who I wrote about here and here. He was a journalist killed by a car bomb last month in Croatia. No matter how you want to argue it, these two murders are exactly the same. Ivo and Didace were both journalist, both killed by others trying to silence them, and more importantly both human beings. Yet, for Ivo there was news coverage all over Europe as well as in the US because it was viewed as "shocking". For Didace, nothing. A couple of minor blips on some blogs here and there. Just a normal day in the Heart of Darkness. Is it time for another trip to Panzi?
We have to stop viewing Africa as a less-than continent where killing is expected given the circumstances. We have to understand that foreign journalists are not serving the citizens of Africa. They are serving Western media conglomerates who work to glorify the violence and not tell the stories. Lastly, we have to understand that we are directly responsible for all of this. There are great swaths of minerals in central Africa that everyone wants to control and profit from. This want causes conflict which then causes a good person like Didace Namujimbo who was just doing his job to be killed all in the name of our being able to buy the next iPhone.
This article is cross posted on Subsaharska
24 11 2008 0 comments
Tags: dr congo, freedom of speech, in to africa, media
Looking Like you Care the Affleck Way
Ben Affleck is in Congo again. He was already there a few months ago and ended up creating a short piece that was aired on American primetime television. Affleck is definitely one of the least annoying celebrities to hit Africa this year, especially when compared to that jaunty Rankin fellow as he keeps going back. But even still, what is he doing there? He claims to be trying to draw attention to the region; a region that if anything, is not lacking for attention, as opposed to clean drinking water which they could use just a dash more of. So what is it? Simply put, Affleck is obviously embarking on Celebrity Humanitarian Fashion Education.
While not the best acronym, CHFE is incredibly crucial to all celebrities that want to journey to a crisis-stricken region and have it be known that they do indeed care as you can see in the way they dress that they're ready for anything. It is critical not to make a fashion faux pas like she did. Those sunglasses may block the equatorial sun that is indeed strong (I got knocked down for three days with sunstroke after being an idiot) but they're just too fancy and out of touch. They're not a classic Ray Ban or other "rugged" travel sunglasses. No, Affleck is on to something here and he's going to get a lot of recognition for it. All the Paris Hiltons will never be caught offguard again and for that, the celebrity world will be ever so thankful. The actual people living in Africa? Well, there is so much hope and they're such survivors, that they'll probably just manage.
Cross posted on Subsaharska
21 11 2008 1 comment
Tags: celebrities, dr congo, media
The Best Croissants Outside of France Part 1
To be honest, I have no idea if there will ever be anymore parts to this series, but I just wanted to leave the door open to it, since I have a lot of world yet to see. I mean, let's face it, if you had a croissant in a Parisian cafe and then you return home to have whatever croissant might be available, you'll most likely want to spit out this foul piece of un-croissant you've just attempted to eat. There are any number of reasons why foreign croissants suck as bad as they do. In Spain, it's because they obviously hate the French and to spite them, they make croissants using pork fat instead of butter. Why they don't just go the rest of the way and try to use olive oil to completely shit upon all that is holy about the croissant is beyond me, but they suck in Spain. It's much the same in the US where, instead of pork fat, we use some mutated series of chemicals instead of real butter and end up with a very similar, Spanish-like derivation of the croissant. Blarg.
So, what follows is an extremely short list of where to find good croissants when you are not within French borders. I hope it somehow proves useful.
Kinshasa, Congo: Hands down, it's Patisserie Nouvelle. That link is my previous article on them and while I doubt many sane folks will be hopping a jet anytime soon just to "kick it" in Kinshasa, they have fanatically good croissants as well as pain au chocolat in that little shop.
Catalonia, Spain: I've tried many a croissant in this region and come to the sordid conclusion that pork fat does not a good croissant make. They're always dry and make me wonder as to why I just don't eat bread instead of these croissants as it would be a lot less painful. The exception are the croissants that they serve at La Plaça in Madremanya. The chef there is a smart guy who says, "If you have a good, fresh orange juice and a good croissant, your breakfast is pretty much done." The croissants are delectable and perfect, even better than some I've had in France. Chef Vicenç isn't too forthcoming about where he gets said croissants, but they are indeed made in Spain and are unsurprisingly made with butter, not pork fat. Molt bons!
San Francisco, California, USA: The immediate choice by many would be one of the many Boulange shops, but it is not to be. Boulange is okay, but it does drift in to being rather bland, flat, and if you ask for a pain au chocolat, the staff have no idea what that is. Sure, they're better than Costco croissants (as is huffing paint), but they sure ain't better than Pâtisserie Philippe. Unsurprisingly, Phillipe is French, which goes a long way in ensuring that not only his croissants are the best in SF, but also his pain au chocolat and quiche. It's not a huge surprise that he was originally a chef for Boulange, who have obviously ignored all that he did there. His location down on Townsend and 7th is really out of the way, yet the fact he sells out of everything by 14:00 shows that people don't seem to mind and find him everyday.
That's about it for this initial list. We'll see if I have more to write on this someday. If I make it to Haiti or Tahiti, where I heard the bread is great, it will make me wonder if the croissants follow suit and show that heavy handed colonizing overloads aren't all that bad; at least in croissant-based endeavors.
19 11 2008 2 comments
Tags: croissants, food, travel
Why Yelp's Reviews Mean Nothing
Most folks would agree that the two secrets behind any successful website are: funding and trust. Or maybe that's just my opinion, but I've ridden the wave of two dot-com surges here in San Francisco and this is the main lesson that I've learned from it. It's the reason why Craigslist is so insanely successful with such a small staff. It's also the reason why FaceBook damned near jumped the shark when they tried to push out their beacon service that told the users they and their privacy were really just the chum needed to lure said shark to jump.
But what this tells me is that I respect Google a bit more. What does this have to do with trust and funding? Well, Google is well-funded and they seem to try to stick to their, "Don't be Evil" corporate motto as much as they can. That ties in to my pondering some time ago as to why they don't buy Yelp.com. As I said in that article, it seems like a natural fit, but then again, I've recently found out that Yelp would go a long way to poke Google's corporate mantra hard where the sun don't shine.
Yelp is doing nasty things to make a dollar. I assume they must be running low on cash reserves these days, since they can't seem to turn a profit and prefer to bicker with rational magazine articles as opposed to creating a proper business model. It appears that number one on this list of the nasty bits is that for a fee they will do a business owner a big huge favor and remove all the one and two star reviews in counting towards the overall rating of their business. This explains why it seems like everything on Yelp has between a 3.5 and a 4.5 for overall reviews. It's particularly nasty and I would call it criminal blackmail because Yelp has managed to get themselves placed very, very high in search results for many businesses. Whether they bought this SEO placement or actually earned it, the painful fact for business owners is that if they don't want the initial internet impression of their business (which in San Francisco is very important) to be a negative one from hipsters who couldn't find parking and thus gave a one star, they need to pay up to Yelp to "trim the dead wood". I was rather shocked to hear this as while I haven't taken Yelp's reviews seriously for at least two years now, there are a number of people who do. To blatantly betray any semblance of authority to the scores makes the whole site a pile of worthless ones and zeroes.
Next on the list of nasty bits is that if you go and review a site on Yelp and give it a low score, you could very easily be hearing from the owner of the business. Preying on the fact that new business owners are terrified that Yelp reviews will sink their business before it even really starts, Yelp offers a "helpful" service that allows a business owner to buy all the emails of reviewers for $150. From that point forward, the business owner is free to do whatever they want with the information, your information.
Now, I'm sure that this is all legal from the point of the TOS that Yelp reviewers sign upon joining. But, it's not legal from a user trust standpoint. Are you really going to be honest about your review knowing that the business owner will know exactly who you are and potentially bully/bribe you in to changing your review? I doubt it. Hell, it makes me not want to even submit any new reviews because if they're low they'll either a) not count or b) open me up to unwarranted invasion of my privacy.
In case you're wondering where I learned about this information, a friend of mine who works as a server at a new restaurant passed it on to me. Apparently the owner contacted a number of reviewers who had given low reviews only to get a very bad reaction due to people being unaware that their personal information was part of a highest bidder marketplace on Yelp. Now, more than just being annoyed that Yelp is pretty much just reviews by hipsters who don't share the likes/dislikes as me, I really hope that the damned thing folds because it is bankrupt in being an entity that any sane user can never hope to trust. Take a look at my profile [now dead] while you can. I'm going to be deleting it (if Yelp allows me) in the near future. I don't want to be part of this anymore and no one else should either.
Yes, I did kill off my profile. Exactly three years after starting it, I'm done with these losers, especially after reading this and this. I hope they tank, since there is no way anyone would ever want to buy them out given their desperation to fund the company.
16 11 2008 9 comments
Tags: fraud, information, san francisco, yelp
Google Maps Loves Italy. Balkans, not so much.
I've driven around the Balkans a bit. Probably the craziest driving is in Belgrade. The easiest is in rural Slovenia. People generally always drive fast. They love it, like this moron who I assume is on the A1.
Driving fast is fine when you know where you're going. When you're a tourist, things get dicey. A map is necessary. I always had mine from Freytag & Berndt when I was driving and I was thankful for it. There are those who think that Google Maps technology trumps the age-old paper map though. For those interested in using it, you might want to think again as shown here and here for going between Dubrovnik and Mostar and Split and Dubrovnik. I know I like a ferry to Italy, how about you?
Cross posted on Čevapija
14 11 2008 0 comments
Tags: google, maps, the balkans, transportation
Hudin Oil has its First Harvest
My brother recently bought his first home, which is up in my hometown of Oroville. The place is fine and he's done a lot of work to improve it. But what's really great is that he's got about two hectares of land on which about 70 or more olive trees are growing.
It just so happens that while helping him move in last weekend, I took a look at the trees and saw that they were really ready for picking. Thankfully, a short stone's throw from his land is Butte View Olive Oil who, in addition to selling their own oil, also press (or actually "spin" as it's a centrifugal system) others' at a cost of about $0.10 a kilogram. So, steeling myself for the pain that is picking olives, I got a crate, headed out in the truck and spent most of a day picking getting scratched up as well as some color in this first week of November.
In the end this netted only 50 kilos of olives. The owner over at Butte View laughed and asked if I "Got tired". No, I didn't. Because these trees haven't been properly irrigated for god knows how long, the yield per tree was quite sad. Also, I was picking just a bit past the prime point and so a lot of ripe olives had already fallen. Despite all this, that 50kg of olives pressed in to eight liters of oil. This isn't much, but it's an excellent trial of the trees to see if they're a) worth watering for next year and b) worth planting more of.
Most all of the trees are Mission olives which stand the harsh shift from hot, hot summers to cold, freezing winters. While a smaller olive that not ideal for canning, they are great for oil. The oil content is 22% of the olive, which you can see in the ratio of 50kg of olives to eight liters of oil. Well, actually, this is a bit less than 22% though because of the lack of water. But my brother just picked up the oil today and said that it's a super dark green. Much darker than any of the other oils we've seen in the area. We're not sure if this is because of less water that has made a more intense oil or just because these olives go that way. The aroma is bright and crisp, full of woody olive aromas. The taste is deep with a full bouquet of olives to it. My brother says it tastes like grass, but that's because he hasn't had proper oil before. It's good stuff and it will be interesting to see what just a little bit of water next year will do for the crop.
13 11 2008 1 comment
Tags: food, hudin, olives, oroville
You Are Freakin' Kidding Me
This shot below was at an event at TechSoup in SF. Those nasty, dangling, hideous locks on this pudgy white guy were straying mighty close to my plate of hummus that I had sat on the floor.
I know there are those out there who think these things are beautiful. I worked with a guy who thought they were beautifully amazing, but in reality, they're disgusting. I've butchered farm animals and had to move things that have been dead for two weeks out in a field. My stomach is strong, but when this kind of crap comes casually swaying towards me, I just can't eat. Knock it off whiteys! Caucasian hair is not meant to do this.
12 11 2008 2 comments
Tags: hair, san francisco
Misworded Mondays: Web 3.0
Defintion: One of the terms used to describe the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0. Given that technical and social possibilities identified in this latter term are yet to be fully realized the nature of defining Web 3.0 is highly speculative. In general it refers to aspects of the internet which, though potentially possible, are not technically or practically feasible at this time.
Usage: "Colm has been developing a new Web 3.0 application that we're ever so excited about. It will revolutionize the field of ass kissing!"
Reality: Web 2.0 was a painful term to hear, bandied about by many a marketing whore. The fact that any next iteration of the web could possibly be called Web 3.0 infects my soul with pain. Sure, if you want to think about what is next in the web, a 3.0 moniker might apply, but the problem is that these things become buzzwords for moron-speak. People run around say, "Oh wow, nice web 2.0." or "Hey, let me buy you a drink for going web 2.0." Nobody in this circle really knows what they mean, so saying that a site is Web 3.0 is ludicrous. No website is currently a 3.0 website. It's true. Point one out to me and I'll buy you a beer if it's true. Hell, I'll even give you an awkward lap dance in front of (or to) your grandma if it were true. That's how sure I am of no Web 3.0 applications existing. Let's just keep in mind that we're still just kind of finishing up the whole web 2.0 thing as the 2.0 social websites start merging/folding with one another.
It may be true that Web 3.0 will have something to do with mobile technology as Android and the iPhone have started to take off, but we'll know if this is the next generation of the web when we see it and it probably won't be until 2010. As it is now, all these mobile features are just outgrowths of 2.0 business. Cry "Fie!" on all those who would be Web 3.0 in this day and age and make sure to light their marketing people on fire just out of principle.
09 11 2008 2 comments
Tags: internet, language, misworded mondays
Sadly Remembering a Better Los Angeles
Last weekend, I went and saw Changeling which was a good film. It wasn't mind-blowing and Angelina Jolie's performance mostly consisted of a lot of crying and emotion that's bound to at least get her an Oscar nomination because that's what they like at the Academy. The toughest part of the film though, was seeing Los Angeles in the 1920's and 30's.
The movie production does a wonderful job in recreating the LA that once was with street cars that went everywhere, cozy neighborhoods, and a vibrant downtown center. It's hard to imagine that LA was once a much more sensible town, a lot like San Francisco. Realizing that it is now an endless, mindless sprawl is disheartening and it's no surprise that what was once the depot for the Red Car line that is featured so prominently in the film has been converted in to lofts with a ridiculous parking garage taking the place of where the trolleys once pulled in.
Of course LA has reached the same point San Francisco reached 50 years ago in that they've run out of space. Building new freeways is no longer and option as it would require ripping out endless tracts of residential housing and it most likely wouldn't increase the average 20kph speed of traffic on the highways anyways. LA is again turning to public transportation and since 1990, the Metro has been steadily expanded in operation. This will not immediately return LA back to its former days as a sensible city, but in time, one can hope that public transit centers will mold the town in to a shape that is livable sans automobile.
08 11 2008 0 comments
Tags: california, film, los angeles, transportation
