Gregory Lee Giusti

After the FBI hauled him away from his Tenderloin (of course!) subsidized housing building (of course!), his neighbors told TV reporters things like, “He was not one of my favorite people. He had a real attitude problem… I personally was afraid of him.”

He was even kicked out of a local church a few years ago for being “menacing while angry” and a general asshole. Apparently a tech geek (of course!), he rigged a system to make continuous harassing calls to church members.

But that photo gets me. It’s like a picture staged by The Onion to show a generic Tea Party protester all hot under the collar about Obama’s birth certificate, the New World Order, and the secret internment camps at Fort Irwin* for a story headlined “Local man can’t stand it when people won’t engage him in heated political discussion.”

*If this seems unnecessarily detailed, it’s because I’ve been reading up on right-wing paranoid drivel lately.

San Francisco Giants utility man Eugenio Velez played the last three innings of today’s game in Houston before anyone told him he was wearing a jersey with the name of the city misspelled.

Benjamin Bratt Maverick Spirit Award

It was a thrill to be front row when Cinequest presented Benjamin Bratt with the Maverick Spirit Award. We, the audience, were also entertained with a screening of “La Mission”. Benjamin and his brother worked together on “La Mission”. The film, set in the San Francisco Mission district, tells a story of intolerance and the love of family.

La Mission will be showing at the Kabuki April 16th

Tickets and Info.

Trailer “La Mission”

facebook La MISSION

Also check out the Metreon for show times.

California’s High Speed Rail Commission, the agency tasked with getting bullet trains running up and down the state sometime this century, says CalTrain’s “staggering deficit” and possible collapse will not keep it from proceeding with its plans.

Just because the local transit agency, which runs trains from San Francisco to San Jose (and Gilroy, at commute times), is facing drastic cuts to its schedule, even a possible shutdown, doesn’t mean the bullet train project can’t go forward. High speed rail would share the CalTrain right-of-way from Gilroy north (click for a Google map overlay of the bullet train route), and if CalTrain can’t hold it together in the decade or two before the bullet trains arrive, the High Speed Rail Commission might just take over CalTrain. At least that was the idea “floated” by HSR board member Rod Diridon, long-time transit mandarin. After all, they’re both essentially state agencies.

The map shows some details of the HSR plan on the Peninsula, where some sections would be in a trench, some on an elevated way, some at grade level.

Meanwhile, the threat of a lawsuit forced the CalTrain board to put on hold the long-planned electrification of the line. Inexplicably, the lawsuit is from an environmental group, even though electrification would make the line less polluting. Right now it seems CalTrain can’t do anything right.