The film of the Michael Lewis book Moneyball, which is about the machinations of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, has been cancelled just days before shooting was to begin. The New York Times reported that the cancellation is a sign of a new level of nervousness in Hollywood; in this case even the casting of Brad Pitt to play the baseball brainiac, much less the fact that over $10 million had been spent on development, location scouting, costumes and other preparations, was not enough to keep the project going.

Previously: Book on A’s GM to lens; Brad Pitt will play Billy Beane

Karl Malden, who played the utterly square middle-aged detective to young Micheal Douglas’s hipper character on “The Streets of San Francisco,” is dead at age 97.

Last year there was some talk of reviving the “Streets of San Franicsco” franchise. But it’s hard to imagine it without Malden.

The California governor’s race is the subject of an upcoming article in the NYT Magazine, listing San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom as “among the colorful candidates.”

From Nov. last year, but posted recently as a NASA image of the day we bring you a killer 3D view of the San Andreas Fault running up the peninsula and out to see north of Pacifica. This project is about mapping which parts of the fault are creeping past each other with little “stickiness,” and which parts appear to be locked together—places where pent-up stress may be released suddenly in a major earthquake.

To read more about NASA’s mission to map the San Andreas and related faults with radar imagery, please read Scientists Search for a Pulse in Skies Above Earthquake Country.

Chris Carlsson has a fantastic post about walking around Bernal Heights and encountering an Edenic enclave of gardens, stairways, fruit trees and wildlife.

Funny to think of San Francisco as a windswept, barren, sandy and flea-ridden peninsula. These days it’s starting to look like a garden oasis, and if you spend time walking on the hills, behind Noe or Eureka Valleys, on Telegraph Hill or Russian Hill, Bernal or Potrero, you are in for a treat!

His Nowtopian blog is solid on my RSS feed.

The Chronicle’s C.W. Nevius writes about a woman with a four-year-old son begging on the street in the Financial District. Nearby office workers, led by a sympathetic woman named Anna Samovol, got the woman and her child winter coats and Christmas gifts and eventually paid for them to go live with relatives in Pennsylvania.

Feel-good story? Not anymore. The woman and her kid are back. Samoval said, “I saw her at the BART station. I was pissed off.”
 
I’ve felt frustrated by beggars too. When I worked downtown I would encounter the same beggars on the same corners literally for years on end. When a familiar face was replaced by another mendicant, only to return a day or two later and reclaim his spot, I joked with co-workers that the unfamiliar guy must have been a temp. On another day, I passed a beggar with an amusing sign, then encountered another beggar a little farther on.

Me: You should have a sign like that guy back there.
Second beggar, unamused: The other day he had a kitten.

But generally I found them not a source of amusement but a pain in the ass. I told myself that they were lazy, that it was their fault they were there, that if it wasn’t their fault then they probably had something wrong with them that couldn’t be helped by my small donation. A story like the one about the woman and her son who were shipped to Pennsylvania only to return to the streets of San Francisco seems to reinforce that idea. If a ticket back home to relatives won’t help, then what good can I do by giving a dollar, or even a hundred dollars?

Finally I realized that all these projections on my part were futile. If I give someone a quarter, or a plane ticket, they don’t owe me anything in return. They don’t owe me improved behavior, or recovery from whatever is oppressing them, or disappearance from my sight. They don’t owe me anything. A gift is just that.

If I want to be pissed off by the fact there are beggars on the streets, there are plenty of good targets for my anger: start with Proposition 13 and the war on drugs, and go from there.

Eight hundred City College classes are being cancelled during the next school year due to the California budget disaster and the generally crappy economy, but you can save a class and have it named after you by donating $6000 to the school.

Just find the cancelled classes in their online schedule — the Music Department, for example, looks like this, with the cancelled classes highlighted in red:

As a late Father’s Day present, how about choosing something your Dad loves, and naming a City College class in the subject after him? For example, The A.E. Pritchard class in electric organ. (I don’t think they have a class in electric organ, but you get the idea.) Does the $6000 sound a little pricy in this economy? How about getting your friends to chip in? Maybe your writing group would like to sponsor a “Basic Writing” class. Because it’s time to stop making fun of people who can’t write and do something about it.

This San Francisco blogger on Open Salon writes of a “disturbing” police takedown of a fleeing suspect who was, judging from her account, pretty much not fleeing when they tackled him.

He was practically standing still when they tackled him. There was no shout, no order. The first cop hit him squarely from the back, another hit him from the side. They knocked him face down on the pavement, hitting his head on the neighbor’s motorcycle fender. More cops jumped on top. There was no resistance from the guy at all. Now there was a lot of hollering, which seemed to be about handcuffing the guy. It sounded like the cops were saying to each other to get the cuffs on him. There were so many of them — five cops — on the guy, I’m sure it was difficult to do even the simple task of handcuffing an immobilized, unresisting suspect. The guy must have had an even harder time breathing.

The man survived the arrest.

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Looking for something to do tonight after work? Why not head on out to the Park Chalet, it’s kind of foggy so wear something warm. There will be live music and fish tacos, cold beer. All the best of the park chalet has to offer.

When: Happy hour 6pm - 9pm (but open late)
What: Donate $5 to our organization and enjoy drinks and appetizers at happy hour prices; $3 pints and $5 apps for extended happy hour (till 9pm). Also enjoy the musical stylings of Polemo.

Lebowski Fest returns to the Bay Area on July 24th with the Bowling Party at the Classic Bowling Center and the Movie Party on July 25th at The Fox Theater. Two parties, two tickets… $28 for Bowling (includes shoes) and $22.50 for movie showing. More info…

Oakland businesses and city agencies will hold an event tomorrow called the Uptown Unveiled Street Fair to draw attention to the north side of downtown, an area including the renovated Fox Theatre, arts school, ice rink and other attractions. Among other events, the new branch of the Piedmont Piano Company will be open 5-10 pm with free music, food and drink.

Click here to see the above poster full-sized. CLick here for a PDF map of the event.

Just to show Writers With Drinks still rocks the San Francisco literary scene, here are last night’s tweets from novelist Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Into the Beautiful North, who ended his national book tour at the Makeout Room last night. The reference to the Chronicle refers to a negative review the paper is about to give his novel.

Musical guest Thao Nguyen, pictured at right at an Austin gig in 2008, heads the lineup Monday at the first monthly live event sponsored by The Rumpus, writer and editor Stephen Elliott’s website.

The evening also features readings from authors Peter Orner, Andrew Greer, Damion Searls, and poet Barbara Jane Reyes, performance by Word for Word Performing Arts Company, films by Wholphin, and music by The Yellow Dress.

The show starts at 8:00 pm Monday at the Makeout Room (map). Get information and advance tickets.

I went yesterday to ConspiracyCon, which is exactly what you’d guess it is: a convention of conspiracy theorists. UFO chasers, 9-11 deniers, tax protesters and this year’s big favorite, explainers of the current economic crisis.

Here are some of the things I learned:

• Obama and his administration are pawns of the international banking conspiracy, and it’s all led by former Jimmy Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and the many “secret societies” from the Trilateral Commission to the Bohemian Grove.
• The reason Ron Paul supporters also have UFO conspiracy DVDs at their booth is because if the government let us know about and learn alien technology, it could go a long way toward solving our country’s energy problems.
• No plane actually struck the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001; the damage was the result of planted explosives. This was vouchsafed to me by an extremely energetic and dedicated young man who was giving his DVDs away for free. He had a very elaborate set of xeroxed photographs with the “real” flight path of the airliner, a professionally-produced series of animated graphics which showed the difference between the fake flight path and the real one, and so on.
• If you experience sudden headaches or body heating as you walk down the street, this is called “electronic harassment” and is the work of the NSA, which can read your driver’s license from space.

This last was given to me by a very sane-appearing man, who said it in the same tones you might use to explain how Twitter works for someone who’s never used it. Everyone was very nice, and very talkative. All I had to do was say to someone, “You seem to have a lot of literature here,” and they’d talk for five minutes without taking a breath.

The best moment was during a presentation by one Webster Tarpley, an animated gent who made a presentation on the conspiracy between Obama and the bankers. At one point he showed pictures of the heads of Citigroup, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs. When no one in the audience could identify all three, he began ranting, “These are the people who rule the world! Never mind the politicians, these are the real rulers! Maybe if you put down your UFO book and paid attention we’d be better off!”

ConspiracyCon continues today at the Santa Clara Marriott.

Here are some blog accounts of people who got arrested at yesterday’s Prop 8 protests in San Francisco:
- Will Scott
- David Nahmod
- David somebody.

The Public Press has a straightforward account here (Thanks, Darren). Also, here’s an account from San Diego of a sit-in at the county clerk’s office. Arrests were threatened but everybody decided to leave quietly instead.

If you blogged about getting arrested or being at the demonstrations in San Francisco, email me at prop8protests at yahoo.com and I’ll add a link to your entry.