After the San Francisco Zen Center ordained three new priests last month, Zen Center blogger Greg Fain pointed out that a University of Chicago survey found that clergy had a very high job satisfaction rate, even better than firefighters. “We beat firefighters! Whoo-hoo!!!” he exulted.

The well-supported thesis of this book is that all art is remixed art. Where would Shakespeare be without all those plot lines he cribbed from older sources? And imagine if independent artists in Renaissance Italy were barred from using Christian imagery in their work for private patrons because it would have been the “intellectual property” of the Catholic Church?

Well, you get the point: the subject of this book is relevant to you even if you didn’t read Free Culture on a laptop you refurbished yourself, running Ubuntu. (Yes, that was a geek brag.)

Lessig will be at the store at 7:30 PM tonight.

Just once I’d like a travel writer to visit our “unspoiled” Excelsior district.

Bill O’Reilly Smear from Huffington Post.

Great quotes that have been getting attention on some discussion groups:

“You wouldn’t go to the Presidio at night, I wouldn’t” – Bill
“Every city has a tenderloin, and North Beach is San Francisco’s” – Bill
“Lots of dopes everywhere. Those clinics are everywhere.” – Bill

They come in here, 15 or 20 at a time. They look around, take a picture, and then they walk out. In the last three months I’ve sold one bottle of water. It is not worth having so much traffic.

Supervisor Bevan Dufty says the plague can be exorcised by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. But let’s not forget the famous response of the Summer of Love hippies on Haight St, as recalled by Mick Sinclair in his book San Francisco: A Cultural and Literary History:

On Haight St. some hippies responded to the busloads of gawping tourists by holding up mirrors, inviting the “straights” to look at themselves.

Among the several radical changes:

• Bryant Street is totally out of luck. No more service in the Mission District or South of Market. That means that if you wanted to take a bus to or from the Hall of Justice — like if your car was towed and you wanted to get it back — you have to catch a bus on Folsom and then walk two blocks.

• The 22-Fillmore will no longer climb Potrero Hill, but go all the way down 16th St. to Third St and turn around in the biotech district. If you want to go to Potrero Hill, you’d have to transfer to the 33.
• The 7-Haight would be no more. The 6-Parnassus would take over the route and go all the way down Haight St — meaning no more service to Masonic and Frederick and Clayton. That neighborhood is just fucked. Also, buses would no longer go on Page St. inbound; Haight St. would be two-way all the way.

Those are just a few of the changes, and there are many small ones. To find out, you have to browse the Flickr set.

For more on Muni’s proposals, which could be implemented by July 2009, see the Muni TEP page. I think TEP stands for Transportation Elimination Project.

The Haight Ashbury Improvement Association is taking a much more progressive stance and is in favor of the project. Long story short, if you live anywhere close and have a point of view, the time to speak up is now, and the person to talk to is Ross Mirkarimi. Email him at ross.mirkarimi@sfgov.org .

Statement to HAIA from property owner and developer of 690 Stanyan St. :

On July 17, 2008, at a meeting of the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association, we informed those members in attendance that the chances of moving forward with the 690 Stanyan St. Project (proposed are 62 residential units above a full-service grocery store – Whole Foods Market, currently undergoing environmental review by the City and the public) were at best “50 – 50″ and that it is quite likely that this project is on its deathbed. The unreasonable delays in environmental review by the City are causing both the project sponsor and the proposed tenant, Whole Foods Market, to think seriously about whether it is all worth it. We would like to elaborate on our earlier remarks.

A weak economy is coming around to affect San Francisco and there have been huge increases in construction costs over the last 12 months. National grocery chains, like almost all public companies, are re-evaluating the risks of expanding into new markets. The Project’s planning application has been under environmental review by the City for nearly 2 ½ years now, without any sort of schedule for an approval hearing with the Planning Commission and certainly no end to the City planning process in sight.

We have spent nearly $1 Million to date on planning for the project, largely on City fees and consultants chosen by the City to analyze the environmental effects of the project: we have to little to show for it except a stack of heavy draft documents. Thanks mostly to a vocal minority of opponents of the project, we have encountered long delays in publication of a Final EIR and the City has called for new environmental studies to be undertaken involving new data collection, analysis and writing-up (the new studies confirm the conclusions of the original draft EIR). For example, an 18-page letter from the Sierra Club has cost weeks of schedule and thousands of dollars in re-analysis by the City’s highly-paid consultants. This and delays sought by HANC have pushed back any hope of obtaining an approval hearing before the Fall of this year, perhaps even conveniently beyond the November elections. Given this, the earliest that the supermarket could now open for business would be 2011 or 2012. This leads to a likely conclusion that, unless there is a hearing before the Planning Commission soon, there will be no market tenant, no housing and no development of that site in the foreseeable future. The parking lot, of course, would stay open for business.

All the while, our District 5 Supervisor, Ross Mirkarimi, has expressed little or no interest in pushing this project forward. He denies being in opposition to the project although the warmth of his feelings depend greatly on the audience for his remarks. Instead he queries other grocery vendors regarding their interest in occupying the old Cala Foods building; while his allies more actively work in opposition to the project. If the Supervisor is opposed to the project, that is his prerogative, but he should clearly articulate his reasons why, particularly in an election season, in order to convince his constituents that his position is the right one. If he is supportive of having a full-service grocery store for the area then he needs to take a leadership role in carrying the project forward, lobbying city staff and prominent people, pushing them along a little in order to get the project ready for its approval hearing as quickly as possible: this is the essence of the role of a District Supervisor. The Supervisor’s inaction and lack of leadership on this issue serves the same result as actively opposing it. Unfortunately it appears that he has cast his lot with HANC and the handful of opponents to the project but does not have the integrity to admit this to his constituents.

We ask only that you make your feelings known to our District Supervisor and ask that he provide leadership for our community, that trying to hide in the shadows is not an acceptable way for him to represent our opinions.

Thank you.
Mark J. Brennan for 690 Stanyan St. LLC

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In addition to selling and promoting the work of DIY publishers, Root’s stores provided employment for a succession of hundreds of artists, musicians, and other bohemians, as well as providing many teenagers their first jobs.

Here’s DC Comics President Paul Levitz with a tribute, and here’s just one of many other blog tributes to Root.