Announced this week by Mayor Newsom, the city of San Francisco will begin selling Carbon Offsets to local businesses. Read the full press release here: Mayor Newsom Unveils First-Ever City Carbon Offsets to Fight Global Warming.

“Globally, the market for carbon offsets is growing rapidly, estimated to top $10 billion by 2010, and there is absolutely no regulation,” said Jared Blumenfeld, director of San Francisco’s Environment Department. “However, by developing our own program and funding local projects, we have the ability to assure that the offsets actually happen, benefit the local community, and help achieve our aggressive greenhouse gas reduction goals.”

Unfortunately programs like this are largely seen as postponing the real expense and effort of transition into a more environmentally sensible practice.
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A state agency today chose the Pacheco Pass route among two possible ways bullet trains of the future might reach the Bay Area from southern California. (Click the graphic for a larger map.)

Winners: San Jose and the Peninsula, along with landowners along the east-west route across the Pacheco Pass — a route that roughly parallels State Hwy. 152. Losers: Landowners in Stockton, Tracy, and along the spurned Altamont route.
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The first Stolpa Award nomination for the winter of 2007-08 goes to Frederick Dominguez, who managed to get himself and three children lost in the snow for three days. The 38-year-old man and his teenaged kids, who went into the mountains to look for a Christmas tree, were found by rescuers this morning.

The Stolpa Award is named after the California man who, in the early 1990s, got stuck in the snow on a closed highway, thus managing to nearly kill not only himself but his whole family, before being rescued and somehow being proclaimed a hero and having a movie made about his misadventure. Only people who manage to get their whole family nearly killed out of stupidity are elligible for the Stolpa Award.

The DPW is itching to spend $3 million in federal funding they have lined up for Divisadero Street from Haight to Geary, and tonight you can see what the brilliant bureaucrats & cranky community members have in mind.

Tues Dec 18th from 7-9pm at Ida B Wells High School Auditorium at Hayes & Pierce where reps from the city and neighborhood groups will be taking feedback and sharing results of their latest dreams for dominating Divisidero into submission with their “master plan”.

The MTA, the Bike Coalition and all yer other fave special interest groups will be loving every minute of it, so why not join the flourescent lit fun?

You can attend, sit in the back and find out which side of the dividing line you wanna be on.

Either way, get ready for lots of construction in 2009, whose dust & disturbance will bring you the potential “benefits” of : less bus stops, more aesthetically pleasing lighting, wider medians and sidewalks, and numerous traffic altering concepts galore…

Businesses that have something to fear besides impaired access during construction, include the “Touchless” car wash and the ARCO station in particular, both whose “egresses” are mentioned in the latest study by name.

Comedian Michael Weiner — whose broadcast of right-wing cant is one of the highest rated talk radio shows nationally — is suing a Muslim organization for using clips from his show on their website. Weiner claims the group is using the clips, in which he says things like “take your religion and shove it up your behind,” to raise funds.

If you’d like to sample the invective and vicious ranting of the former Alan Ginsburg groupie, who uses the name “Michael Savage” on the radio, go on over to the Media Matters website for such hits as “90 percent of the people on the Nobel Committee are into child pornography and molestation, according to the latest scientific studies” and “[L]oving, kind lesbian” is “the type that stuffed ovens in Hitler’s concentration camps.”
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On Friday, the Long Now Foundation — the group devoted to thinking about things ten thousand years in the future — is sponsoring another in their series of “seminars.” This one’s with Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais, the founders of a media lab at the University of Maine and the authors of a book called At the Edge of Art.

On Tuesday night, I spoke by phone with Ippolito about one small aspect of their work.
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Some of this may not be new to anyone who reads this blog, but here is a list assembled from the Mitchell Report released today. And did you know that a dentist can prescribe HgH? This quote pulled from page 304 of the report:

“According to the article, Palm Beach Rejuvenation Center records show that on
March 9, 2002, Williams ordered $5,693 of testosterone cypionate, human growth hormone, clomiphene, Novarel, and syringes, and on May 8, 2002, Williams ordered $6,000 worth of testosterone cypionate, nandrolone, clomiphene, Novarel, and syringes. The orders reportedly were sent to Williams at a business address in Scottsdale, Arizona. The article reported that “Williams’ prescriptions were written by the same dentist who prescribed [human] growth hormone for [Paul] Byrd and [Jose] Guillen.”

A Dentist? that’s got to be a strike at plausible deniability.
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The tourists arrive prepared for winter, instead of the usual t-shirt and shorts, that fuels sales at the fleece stalls down in Fisherman’s Wharf.
People are wearing ear muffs.
The butter you left on the counter to get soft gets hard every night.
You accidentally leave your heater on and you’re really happy that it’s still on when you get home.
You’re still asking that question: do I take my jacket off in the car or leave it on?
Beer is too cold. You’re constantly searching for Irish coffees or eggnogs at bars.
Your plants outside died due to a frost.
Your thoughts are preoccupied with plans for Tahoe after Christmas.
You’re in the sunshine, and still cold.
You get out of work, and it’s dark. You wake up, and it’s dark. You wonder who dropped you in the middle of short story where the girl gets trapped in the closet on a planet where it’s never sunny.
The public pools are oddly quiet.
You consider the act of staying warm exercise.
Despite the heater, your Victorian has a million drafts and you end up taking a shower/bath to get warm.
You find yourself actually listening to the NPR weather forecast

Tonight, drop everything (maybe even your trousers) and go to the benefit for The Center for Sex and Culture, Nude Aid. Besides being a much-needed fundraiser for one of our most important local nonprofits (it’s the crossroads for SF’s sex culture), there will be all kinds of sex luminaries on hand making art with their bodies, live erotic performances, and a silent auction art available from many big-name erotic artists. Nina Hartley and Sharon Mitchell are here from LA to host the event, and admission ($20-40 sliding scale) entitles each guest to watch artists make art using nearly-nude and fetish-clad models to inspire them. Each guest can choose a piece of art to take home, and may purchase additional tickets to trade for more. Also in the silent auction: sexy items from Last Gasp Books, Bombshell Betty has a special burlesque package, a sex coaching session with Howard Bloom, music from The Wet Spots, and a mystery gift package from Good Vibrations.

So awesome! It’s tonight, Sunday December 9 at Club Mighty (119 Utah St, San Francisco); cash bar and 21+ over only; doors open at 5 and close at 8;
event ends at 9. Don’t miss it!

Also posted in more detail on Upcoming (event #350506).

Talking to these suspects day in and out, there’s a higher percentage today with no sense of right and wrong. It’s frightening, but we are creating super-criminals.

Thus saith an Oakland police sergeant, quoted in a Chronicle story about the murder rate in that city. The story goes on to say how murder is “woven into the civic consciousness” of Oakland, making it the state’s “most murderous” city, after Compton.

Probably when the Raiders were in L.A., Oakland was tops.

Lyrics: The Flaming Lips’ Waiting for a Superman
Lyrics: The Eurythmics’ I Saved the World Today
Image: Image Comics’ Invincible by Ryan Ottley