Politics Archives, page 3

I wish this category did not exist.

New street name hastily commemorated in San Francisco

This morning Stephanie offered to take me into work on her Vespa (I usually walk down Pine) to catch the inauguration—they were going to be projecting it in one of the bigger conference rooms at work. Half asleep, and hanging onto her as she wove through city traffic, I noticed that someone had plastered “OBAMA” over a street sign, and it looked like a city worker was about to take it down. “That’s so San Francisco” I thought. Mostly I appreciated that they’d used the right font.

Then, stopped at a light somewhere down in the Financial District, I saw another street sign had been renamed “OBAMA”. No way! Somehow I had enough time to pull out my cellphone and snap this picture before Stephanie took off.

San Francisco's Bush Street renamed OBAMA

During the day, I noticed that Boing Boing had posted about it, but I didn’t really read the post, I was kind of busy. At least I figured there’d be better pics than mine. All I really read was that it was “changed along its entire length” and I thought, “Wow, that must have taken some serious advanced planning,” and “How did they not get caught?!”

It wasn’t until we were scooting back home that it finally hit me:

OMG, THEY RENAMED BUSH STREET TO OBAMA!!! BRILLIANT!

So glad it’s over

What a weird day. I’d set aside the morning to prepare to vote, to vote, and to run an errand. Preparing to vote consisted of comparing the Guardian’s proposition endorsements with the Chronicle’s endorsements, and then going over where they differed. To be honest I probably should have spent a little more time preparing beforehand, but for me this election was all about two things: the President and Proposition 8. The former is in the bag. The latter, I’m embarrassed to say, not so much.

With our cheatsheets in hand, we went to vote. We literally walked around the block. Yay cities. No lines, no pressure, and I got a sticker.

From there Stephanie caught a cab to work, while I walked a few blocks to check on some custom framing work I was having done. Actually I’d started it back in early September, but it took a while, and I haven’t had a chance to stop by during their normal business hours. I had to redesign a piece whose mat was out of stock, and then I discovered one of the three other pieces that I’d had framed came out the wrong size, so they had to redo it. Alas I returned home empty-handed.

So I went off to work, where I spent most of the day working on improving the performance of some code for generating a specific report. Like I spent all day on that one thing. And I felt so exhausted by 6 o’clock. I blame daylight savings time.

Stephanie and I scooted home together (a rare occurrence these days) and had some snacks before heading over to Ivan and Erini’s place for an impromptu election party.

They have a TV, which is important for such parties. We were eating pizza and drinking beer and watching Comedy Central when all of a sudden Jon Stewart said Barack Obama is your president-elect. I would have just passed it off as a strange Daily Show non-sequitur, but Ivan immediately started flipping channels to scenes of jumping and crying people. In Kenya. And Chicago.

And that was it. Over. Finally.

Historic, in 2008

2008 vote for president: Barack Obama and Joe Biden

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This image stopped me in my tracks

What an incredible piece of photojournalism by Shiho Fukada:

Shiho Fukada's photo of Jiang Guohua for the New York Times
Shiho Fukada’s photo of Jiang Guohua for the New York Times

This photo appeared on the front page of Wednesday’s New York Times (May 28, 2008) alongside the article Parents’ Grief Turns to Rage at Chinese Officials by Andrew Jacobs. The equally enraging caption for the photo read:

Jiang Guohua, the Communist Party boss of Mianzhu, knelt Sunday to ask parents of earthquake victims to abandon their protest.

War is over! If you want it

WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT
Powerful and appropriate, 38 years later.

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Source: imaginepeace.com

Update, December 8, 2009: WAR IS OVER! Multilingual posters / postcards
WAR IS OVER! Multilingual posters / postcards