the parrishioner

You can call it Coronado all you want, but it will always be 3rd Avenue

If you have ever wondered ...

• Why is there no 1st Avenue?
• Anza, Balboa, Cabrillo - Is that just a coincidence? Ok, so why is it called Fulton Street and not something starting with D?
• How did Irving, Judah, Kirkham and Lawton get stuck in with all those Spanish-sounding names?

... then I guarantee you will enjoy this brief history of San Francisco's street naming controversy of 1909. It's a great tale about xenophobia, political clout and neighborhood solidarity. And about how Bayview, which had been calling itself South San Francisco until a little community south of San Bruno Mountain snapped up the name (and put up that ghastly sign), also lost mighty Irving and Judah streets to the Sunset, and in return got stuck with the somewhat wussy-sounding Ingalls and Jennings streets.

Of course, Judah was almost called Jay Street...

The Most Serene Republic

Thinking about Broken Social Scene this morning got me thinking about their label, Arts & Crafts, and then I read on pop77 about A&C's recently signed band The Most Serene Republic.

I got their Underwater Cinematographer LP from the iTunes store, and it is excellent! Loud, raw, poppy, cheeky, guitar-y, and ocasionally electronic-loopy. Plus they've got dueling male-female vocals - one of my favorite attributes in a band.

And oh my, the song titles...

01. Prologue
02. Content Was Always My Favourite Colour
03. (Oh) God
04. The Protagonist Suddenly Realizes What He Must Do In The Middle Of Downtown Traffic
05. Proposition 61
06. Where Cedar Nouns and Adverbs Walk
07. In Places, Empty Spaces
08. Relative Eyes
09. King Of No One
10. You're A Loose Cannon McCarthur, But You Get The Job Done
11. Epilogue

So much nerditude all in one little Canadian package! (Did I mention that their website has a Flash-y thing that lets you drag photos around on the screen?)

Park that car, drop that phone

Broken Social Scene's new, self-titled LP will be released on October 4. For those of you who have not heard the previous BSS missive, You Forgot It In People, now would be a great time to snap it up pop it in plug in the headphones and go!

Vanilla frozen yogurt

It was good yesterday, and it is good again today.

Here's an idea: the moon is made of swiss cheese

The Discovery Institute is a conservative thinktank peddling the idea that intelligent design ought to be taught alongside evolution in public schools. Here's how one of its principal members framed the current controversy:

"All ideas go through three stages - first they're ignored, then they're attacked, then they're accepted," said Jay W. Richards, a philosopher and the institute's vice president. "We're kind of beyond the ignored stage. We're somewhere in the attack." (link)

This philosopher was likely paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer, who famously remarked:

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." (emphasis mine)

See the difference?

Hat tip: Political Animal

I love it when my friends become successful. And if they're western, that makes it even better.

A friend of mine is leaving her crummy job to take a new job that she is very excited about. Go friend go!

It's gonna rain. Actually come to think of it it is raining.

The roof above my cubicle at work has been leaking for the last six years. Every time it rains, it rains inside my cubicle. The management at my office building has always sworn that nothing could be done about this, and their solution has been to install a rain-collection device on my windowsill.

But today is a new day, and I cannot believe I am saying this, but yes, today they are creating artificial rain on my window in an attempt to isolate the source of the leak. For the last 20 minutes, a guy has been standing on a window-washer's rig spraying water from a garden hose onto my 17th floor window. They've got caution tape set up downstairs! It is awesome!

You dropped me, and you dropped me like a bastard

Tonight I did my first-ever Tuesday night pack ride in Golden Gate Park. Up until now I've been riding either by myself or with small groups of friends, and I have absolutely no experience riding fast in a tight group of bikes. But lately I've been curious what it would be like to really *race* on my bike.

The Tuesday ride is a semi-organized (ok, not really organized) thing in which a group of 30 or so riders does lots of laps around a 3-mile course at high speed. I was a little nervous about whether I'd be able to ride steady in a fast pack, but I figured I would start at the back and see how things went. And ideally not get into (or cause) any crashes.

Getting it

There's some interesting discussion going on at Political Animal about why Average Joe does not "get" the concept of blogging.

I've already commented on this over on Kevin's blog, thusly:

(1) Blogging is a new tool, but a very simple one. You can describe how it works in about 30 seconds.

(2) This new tool is used for something that has never been done before.

It's easy enough to explain #1 to a person who has never experienced blogging firsthand. But it's #2 that fazes people - What's the point? Why would you want to do that? You have to actually visit a blog to understand it - it's not enough to have someone explain it to you.

Take on the other hand the iPod, which is much easier for people to understand. This is because it takes a task that people are already used to doing (carrying music around with you) and simply makes it more convenient.

UPDATE: Here's a very interesting usability study about blogs. The test group was very small, but the results are pretty revealing.

In the red zone

Journalist Steven Vincent has been murdered in Iraq, most likely because of a story he wrote about police corruption in Basra. The piece ran in Sunday's New York Times, and on Tuesday Vincent was found shot dead after being abducted by armed men driving a police car.

For those like me who only learned of Vincent's work after his death, may I recommend checking out his blog, In the Red Zone, from which he wrote colorful, often witty dispatches on life in a changing Iraq.