My blog has migrated to a new host and is being painstakingly reconstructed here. Please bear with me as I iron out wrinkles, hammer out the dents, and apply enough spit and duct tape to hold it all together.— Karen
The day is an open road stretching out before you. Roll down the windows, Step into your life, as if it were a fast car. —From Barbara Crooker’s Promise Along with strong black coffee, a bracing poem is one of my favorite ways to start the day. By the time I reach the breakfast table,…
I don’t know if you’ve firmed up your plans for entering the afterlife, but until recently I favored the viewpoint popularized by that old reprobate Woody Allen: “I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Now I’ve learned this is an old-fashioned attitude that has failed to keep…
“One day if I do go to heaven,” wrote columnist Herb Caen, “I’ll look around and say, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.’” I don’t know if he’d be pleased or outraged by the headline, “ Much-Maligned San Francisco Ranked 7th Best City in the World . ” Clearly Mr. Caen would vote…
So Rich and I are racing back to the San Francisco Ferry Building in hopes of catching the early boat home when we are stopped by an old, shaggy curmudgeon who wants to pick a fight with our Waymo driverless taxi. First he stands in its path, glaring furiously at the empty driver’s seat. Strict…
No matter how often you see it on TV, it’s still shocking to come home IRL (in real life) to find your street blocked off by cop cars and crime scene tape. When it happened to us the other day, I craned my neck searching for clues while Rich drove slowly past our street and…
When I first heard about the Short Story Vending Machine I was horrified. “Is this AI? Are robots plagiarizing published works by legitimate authors to compose cookie-cutter mini-novels while you wait? What fresh hell is this?” But no; I was charmed to be proven completely wrong. It turns out these stories are composed by actual…
“The Tenderloin isn’t always easy on the eyes,” says the museum poster, in a massive understatement. “But what the neighborhood is missing in polish, it makes up for in grit and soul.” Thrill-seekers that we are, Rich and I decided to take a walk on the wild side this week and visit San Francisco’s most…
Waymo’s driverless taxis move through traffic like my high school driver’s ed teacher: maintaining the exact speed limit, meticulously obeying all laws, showing an excess of caution and courtesy at all times. Unlike some human cabbies I’ve known, my invisible robot drivers are never drunk, stoned, lecherous, lost, or seething with road rage. They never…
“It was crazytown here,” recalls one San Francisco resident. I know what you’re thinking: isn’t that always true of San Francisco? Yes, of course it is. But things got much nuttier than usual during the jittery aftermath of the 1989 earthquake, when hundreds of 800-pound sea lions began swarming the city’s docks, sending boat owners,…
Remember how good it felt when the Berlin Wall came down, the Iron Curtain lifted, and the Cold War melted away? For younger readers, 1991 marked the official, peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union, which meant we could finally go to bed at night without worrying about nuclear war breaking out before breakfast. It was…
CELEBRATING GOOD NEIGHBORS These days I’m writing about Good Neighbors, exploring how the people around me are working to help each other get through these challenging times. My weekly posts appear on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on my travel and research schedule.
THIS BLOG IS A PROMOTION-FREE ZONE. As my regular readers know, I never get free or discounted goods or services for mentioning anything on this blog (or anywhere else). I only write about things I find interesting and/or useful.
