Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning agreed today to allow emergency measures providing unemployment benefits to over a million jobless workers to go to a vote — and to participate in a new study which compares the IQ’s of elected Republicans with those of flatworms.

In exchange for his cooperation in the IQ testing, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science has promised Bunning a DVD recording of the last week’s men’s basketball game pitting the Kentucky Wildcats against the South Carolina Gamecocks. Senator Bunning was visibly annoyed at missing the blowout simply to do his part in keeping food off the tables of thousands of fellow Kentuckians. When confronted by a Senate colleague who warned that Bunning’s actions could mean foreclosure, bankruptcy, divorce, mental depression and/or suicide for untold numbers of former workers, Bunning replied: “Tough shit.”

Bunning is a Hall of Fame former major league pitcher whose curious disposition is legend. He’s especially well remembered by a pantheon of batters whose heads he once hunted on the ball field.

Republican leadership has now joined in the IQ study with Bunning. They are encouraging fellow members of both houses to participate as well. Rumors are that Republicans expect the flatworms to register dramatically higher IQ’s than them, thus providing ammunition for further tax cuts to wealthy Republican patrons controlling the elected Republican officials.

“It all makes perfect sense,” said one Republican staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity, “Jim may be mean, misinformed and stupid, but what’s not to love about the guy?”

Tonight’s Chinese New Year parade ushers in the Year of the Tiger. It’s been 162 years since the first Chinese immigrants – a woman and two men – arrived in San Francisco on the Brig Eagle.

Today one-in-five San Franciscans boasts Chinese heritage. The community has and continues to play a critical role in virtually every institution in town. While San Francisco’s old Chinatown is the colorful must-see for anyone visiting The City, it’s just one of at least three neighborhoods here that can justifiably be called “Chinatown.” While the Richmond and Sunset neighborhoods each have their “New” Chinatowns, Chinese Americans today live in every district in San Francisco. This sure wasn’t always the case.

In fact, San Francisco’s Chinese community endured discriminatory laws aimed exclusively at them. They suffered unprovoked violence and blatant bigotry from almost the moment those first three “Celestials” stepped ashore. But their storied skills, tenacity and work ethic have paid off. The community’s unwavering emphasis on higher education, business acumen and the arts have nurtured its identity while its members seamlessly integrated into San Francisco’s social and political framework. But it wasn’t easy. Here’s just a few examples why:

• 1848—The first three Chinese arrive aboard the Eagle.

• 1852—In perhaps the first labor action in San Francisco history Chinese construction workers strike for higher wages. [8 June]

• 1862—An “Anti-Coolie Club” is formed in San Francisco. Their aim: to harass Chinese and prevent further Chinese immigration.

• 1863—In an act of blatant hypocrisy California Governor Leland Stanford tells constituents he wants Chinese immigration halted, while his Big Four business partners begin recruiting thousands of mainland Chinese to toil on their portion of the transcontinental railroad.

• 1868—A Chinese crab fisherman is attacked by a gang of toughs who slit his tongue and his ears; beat, burn and rob him.

• 
  

  1869—The Golden Spike is driven, signifying the completion of the transcontinental railroad in Promontory Summit, Utah. Not one Chinese laborer is allowed to pose for the official photo, though hundreds had sacrificed their lives to build it.

• 1870—San Francisco passes a law prohibiting the use of a pole in order to carry two baskets. Chinese are the only group who employ this transport method—so the ordinance applies exclusively to them.

• 1871—The City cuts off Chinese school funding, effectively eliminating educational opportunities for well over a decade.

• 1876—In yet another policy directed solely at the Chinese, jailers cut queues (Chinese pigtails) off inmates.

• 1877—“Sandlot riots” led by anti-Chinese agitator Denis Kearney include burning Chinatown businesses.

• 1878—U.S. District Court say Chinese not eligible for citizenship.

• 1881—Angel Island becomes a holding prison for Chinese immigrants arriving in San Francisco.

• 1882—Chinese Exclusion Act is passed, halting Chinese worker immigration for 10 years.

• 1892—The Exclusion Act is renewed, extending Chinese immigration prohibitions for another decade.

• 1895—Arnold Genthe begins photographing Chinatown.

• 1900—Nine people die of the Bubonic plague in Chinatown.

• 1903—Dr. Rupert Blue reports that Chinatown is now plague-free.

These days, when talking San Francisco jazz we likely think of Fillmore’s Jazz District. It’s an official designation rising up from the sad ashes of the old Fillmore. That storied black neighborhood got leveled by the Justin Herman-led Redevelopment Agency in the late 1940’s.

“Negros playing it. Eye shades, sleeves up, cigars in mouth. Gin and liquor and smoke and filth. But music!”

But San Francisco jazz precedes the Fillmore scene. It begins in old San Francisco’s most rowdy, dangerous and licentious district – The Barbary Coast – birthplace of American jazz.

Musical Beginnings

Before jazz came into being the music on “the Coast” could be Spanish ballads or sea shanties; strains of celestial strings or polkas; minstrel tunes, marches, mazurkas, operettas or folk tunes. With gold discovered in 1848 San Francisco mushroomed like no other city in the history of America. Soon music became much in demand. It was played in saloons, dance halls, performance auditoriums, melodeons and “sporting” houses. Many of the earliest performers were women.

Here’s how Herbert Ashbury describes one such pre-jazz performer in his classic book, The Barbary Coast:

The Waddling Duck was a singer, sinfully fat, who was advertised as the only female who could sing in two keys at one and the same time. As a matter of fact, she sang in none; she simply opened her mouth and screeched what she called scales, along which her voice bounded like a frightened mountain goat. She was, perhaps, the first crooner in San Francisco.

Brawling & Bawdy

San Francisco’s Barbary Coast was one tough place. How tough? It’s where the word “hoodlum” originates, for starters. But what would you expect from a neighborhood whose other name was Devil’s Acre?

The Barbary Coast boasted the murderous Battle Row, a Chinese slave girl auction, tong wars, a municipal whorehouse and Ragpicker’s Alley. Two of its better known businesses were The Slaughterhouse and The Morgue. These were set amidst hundreds of deadfalls, opium dens, creep joints, gin mills, blind pigs, wine dumps, dives, bagnios, cow yards, shanghai dens and clip joints. Constantly roaming through the Barbary Coast were plagues of sharp-eyed vermin — thieves, thugs, crimps, Rangers, pickpockets, con men, hoppies, Hounds and hookers who preyed on one and all—and, on each other.

Art Hickman and “Scoop” Gleason

Small wonder San Francisco was called “the wickedest place on earth.” But no matter its gutter breeding the Barbary Coast, deadly playground of the 19th and early 20th centuries, has this boast—it’s the birthplace of American jazz music. Though you might argue that jazz got its start in New Orleans, Tom Stoddard, in his highly recommended romp-of-a-read Jazz on the Barbary Coast, writes:

The first use, in print, of the word “jazz” in connection with music occurred in San Francisco on March 6, 1913. the term “jazz music” was possibly used earlier in the black dives of the Barbary Coast.

Gary Giddens and Scott DeVeaux back up Stoddard in their recently published book, Jazz:

(Art) Hickman (1886-1930), a pianist, drummer, and songwriter, encountered jazz in the honky-tonks of the Barbary Coast, where he believed jazz originated: “Negros playing it. Eye shades, sleeves up, cigars in mouth. Gin and liquor and smoke and filth. But music!”

Tom Stoddard cites journalist E.T. “Scoop” Gleason’s multiple uses of the term jazz, quoting Gleason’s seminal 1913 San Francisco Bulletin article describing his jaunt to Sonoma Valley’s Boyes Hot Springs. Art Hickman’s band had traveled the 50 miles north of The City to hold dances for the San Francisco Seals baseball team. Gleason called Hickman’s group “the jazziest tune tooters in all the Valley of the Moon.”

Stoddard bolsters his case for jazz originating on the Barbary Coast by pointing out that New Orleans ragtime musicians’ first encounter with the word “jazz” came later, in Chicago. Art Hickman’s “Jazz Band” had come to the Windy City to tear the place up. Nailing down his argument for the Barbary Coast Stoddard writes:

From what has been said, several things are clear. One is that a black band from San Francisco’s Barbary Coast called itself a “jazz band” before any other black band…we know know that Art Hickman, whose name was that first to be associated with the term “jazz music,” visited Purcell’s on the Barbary Coast and picked up some musical ideas there. Fourth, on the first occasion that the word “jazz” appears in print in connection with music, we also find a reference to the “Texas Tommy,” a black dance popularized and nominally originated at Purcell’s, a black saloon with black musicians and entertainers on San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. It was then borrowed by white musicians, along with some musical ideas, and thus found its way into print. One of the San Francisco musicians went to Chicago and used the term in his band’s name: Bert Kelly’s Jazz Band. It was such a good word for the music that it was borrowed by Tom Brown to describe his band: Brown’s Dixieland Jass Band. The the Original Dixieland Jass Band adopted “jazz” and spread the name to the world.

• 1939—Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch a gold mine on Treasure Island

• 1880—Big Bertha outweighs Oofty Goofty in Romeo and Juliet

• 1910—Chinese fortune cookie invented by Japanese visionary

• 1969—American Indians barter beads return of Rock

• 2003—Gavin gushes green from Getty gobs

• 1880—Cobweb Palace features smut, simians & plastered parrots

• 1913—Raker Act makes Muir mad

• 1966—Trips Festival Dead on

• 2002—Giants felled by higher power

• 

A NEWZ FUTURE TO LIVE FOR
Dateline: February 21, 2040

SUNNYVALE — Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of The Bloom Box, a segment aired on the old CBS network show, 60 Minutes. In an era awash in unsightly power lines, oil derricks, coal burning power plants and nuclear reactors this short news documentary is remembered for signaling their demise.

Correspondent Leslie Stahl, still active today at age 99, interviewed the now celebrated inventor of the Bloom Box – Silicon Valley scientist and entrepreneur K.R. Sridhar. The Bloom Box went on to become the world’s first mass produced fuel cell. It led an energy tsunami that swept away monopolistic power providers like PG&E and SCE.

The Sridhar Foundation and Energy Indepependence

With the Bloom Box returning enormous profits, Sridhar poured his earnings into a visionary program. The Sridhar Foundation has since provided free electrical generating units to more than a billion homes in the poorest parts of Asia, Africa, South America and the United States. Combined with revolutionary developments in solar, wind, hydrogen and other renewables, most everyone on the planet today enjoys a virtually unlimited supply of clean energy. These technologies made obsolete not only massive power suppliers – but oil, gas and coal extraction companies, too. Nuclear power plants became footnotes in history. Accepted notions that centralized electrical generation would provide for our energy needs ad infinitum came abruptly to an end.

“It’s about seeing the world as what it can be, and not what it is.” —K.R. Sridhar
February 21, 2010

The new green energy rollouts of 2010 helped spark a movement that has cleansed the environment and empowered billions of impoverished people. Many feel that those technologies set the stage for peace, democracy and freedom in regions of the world long suppressed and contested simply because they harbor carbon resources. But peaceful consequences elsewhere on the planet meant revolutionary upheaval here in America.

Just how did all this happen?

The flood of innovative energy technologies introduced in 2010 proved key to breaking overarching multinational corporate power. Many of these technologies were created by individuals and small startups right here in the Bay Area.

It’s argued that by empowering individual citizens with the capacity to generate clean energy the top-down dynamic imposed by power conglomerates was crushed. Wage slavery ended as renewable-based cooperative economic models emerged. Ideals of freedom, liberty and the democracy first spelled out in the founding documents of our republic came to be realized. More than two centuries of near-continual military exploits ended. Wars for energy resources were made meaningless.

But that’s not all. 2010 was a watershed year in politics as well. Just as progressive change seemed least likely to occur, along came the perfect storm.

The Politics of 2010

The year did not begin well. President Barrack Obama retained and defended a host of Bush Administration policies and political holdovers. His economic team was packed with Wall Street insiders and advisers with proven track records of failure and bad judgement. Unemployment was in double digits, and yet the nation continued to lose jobs. Health care reform appeared dead. Congress, particularly the Senate, remained gridlocked by Republican obstructionism. It was made all the worse by majority Democrats equivocating instead of passing the progressive legislation voters had given them the mandate to enact. Meanwhile, the President stuck fast to delusions of bipartisanship.

That January the Supreme Court handed corporations the right to buy our election system outright. The Afghan War accelerated. Then Obama gave a moribund nuclear industry eight billion dollars to build new reactors.

A misinformed, overestimated, though legitimately angry “Tea Party” movement was relentlessly promoted on the now defunct Fox News propaganda network. Serious crimes committed by members of the previous Bush Administration were either ignored or given short shrift by Obama’s Justice Department. Convicted war criminal and former Vice President Dick Cheney was attacking Obama with impunity. The entire Republican Party had moved so far to the right that civil discourse between the two parties had ended.

Congressional Democrats were in utter disarray. They retreated — corrupted and neutralized by corporate money and by internal strife. Though in control of the White House as well as both houses of Congress, these Democrats exhibited neither the clear vision nor the backbone to do the work of The People.

Change Comes

Hanging fire over everything was growing discontent from a citizenry watching the very banksters who caused their economy to collapse growing fatter than ever on the backs of the working class. While workers saw their jobs, homes, savings and retirement plans vanish, the banksters who had robbed them were using The Peoples’ tax dollars to fight off any and all regulation of a corrupt banking industry.

Americans would take no more. Tens of millions swarmed the streets. Marches were held in practically every city, town and village in the Union. Working Americans of all political stripes found common ground. Non-violent general strikes, protests and work stoppages continued throughout the summer of 2010. The size and number of protests grew to surpass anything yet seen in the history of this nation. Mounting pressure finally forced President Obama and his Democratic Congress to act comprehensively on behalf of the citizenry, and for the nation as a whole.

30 Years Later

Today, corporations are no longer considered persons. Moreover, when a corporation has been found to engage in actions detrimental to the citizenry or to the planet their charter is revoked. Top corporate executives and board members are held criminally responsible for the actions of corporations they head. Today, small businesses generate more than 90% of all goods and services worldwide. Safe and nutritious food, housing, higher education and quality health care are the universal rights of every human being – and clean energy is as free as it is abundant.

Both 60 Minutes and that little Bloom Box played their small parts, catalysts bringing a corporate empire to its knees and returning a republic to its people.

In broader strokes there’s Mayor Gavin’s Newsom’s Care Not Cash program. While Care Not Cash has preserved SRO housing stock and provided many folks a place indoors to lay their head, there’s still no consensus in San Francisco’s progressive community concerning the extent of its successes. On the other hand, homelessness is every bit as much a national problem as war, pollution or SCOTUS. And it’s been made increasingly worse by this Great Recession. Yet what proposals do we hear from Washington? Not one damn thing. And, with the newly enhanced corporuption of government at all levels don’t expect to hear anything soon.

After reading the Times article I was surprised to see just one comment posted — and what a festering carbuncle of a comment it was:

“The INSANE are running the government. Most of these people are NOT homeless, they are HOBOS. As a lifelong Bay Area resident, I can attest that the majority of the so-called Homeless are willing participants in their homelessness. It is a fad, a clique, a way of life for them, as it is with runaway “street kids”. The SANE leaders used to have the police hassle HOBOS making it uncomfortable for them to squat, which was a great deterrent to vagrancy. Now partially thanks to dirtbag trial lawyers, and the mental disease of liberalism, they are coddled while decent working citizens rights a to clean, safe living environment are ignored. How many homeless is Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein or Barbara Boxer putting up in their million dollar mansions in the SF Bay?”
TheSavageNation (02/20/2010, 9:56 AM )

Now, this commenter probably isn’t Michael Savage. Having endured more than a few Savage tantrums via the airwaves over the years I’ll say this, though — whoever wrote it has the silly savage’s cruel cant down cold.

Of course, we all know what savage means, but here’s a reminder:

sav·age (sāv’ĭj)
adj. 1. Not domesticated or cultivated; wild: savage beasts of the jungle.
2. Not civilized; barbaric: a people living in a savage state.
3. Ferocious; fierce: in a savage temper.
4. Vicious or merciless; brutal: a savage attack on a political rival. See Synonyms at cruel.
5. Lacking polish or manners; rude.

n. 1.A person regarded as primitive or uncivilized.
2.A person regarded as brutal, fierce, or vicious.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

I made numerous attempts to respond to TheSavageNation comment with no luck. Judging that TheSavageNation’s was a lone response, posted almost 11 hours before I wrote mine, it seems the Time’s was experiencing on-line technical difficulties.

So I’ll print my comment here:

RE: TheSavageNation

Reading comments like yours I’m reminding just how cruel, selfish and inhumane growing numbers of Americans can be. There is a bitterness to your right wing puffery that has devolved into frightening spectacle. Sure, your style of ranting makes for entertaining radio rabble-rousing. It’s mimicked by other mad white guys who haven’t the least grasp of history, justice or a comprehension of what civilization entails. But you and your ilk, so utterly consumed by your hatred and fear, contribute nothing more than those dark things to our society.

Sadly, you haven’t a clue who’s really controlling the levers of power. You may work hard and accomplish small things benefiting you and yours, but your venom contributes not one good thing to the general good or to the welfare of this nation. Worst of all, your hateful white noise drowns out humane discourse leading to real problem solving. Your responses and “solutions” to social ills are limited to striking out at growing minorities different or less fortunate in material wealth than yourself, or at progressives and liberals who still hold the notion that we are all in this nation and on this earth together.

If the wealthiest nation in the history of humanity can’t humanely resolve homelessness, then ours portends a frightening Mad Max future. Would that suit you? Of course, if you really are a “savage,” then you by definition belong to no society, nor to any nation. You are uncivilized and proud of it. You cannot pretend, therefore, to be a good citizen, since to do so would require a civility to engage with your fellows that you find abhorrent.

There are, of course, hundreds of thousands of mentally ill persons on the streets. Furthermore, almost a quarter of the United States’ homeless population TheSavageNation would like to see “police hassle” – those “willing participants in their homelessness,” who TheSavageNation attests engage in “a fad, a clique, a way of life for them” – served their nation in the military.

The following is from the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans website:

How many homeless veterans are there?

“Although accurate numbers are impossible to come by — no one keeps national records on homeless veterans — the VA estimates that 131,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. And approximately twice that many experience homelessness over the course of a year. Conservatively, one out of every three homeless men who is sleeping in a doorway, alley or box in our cities and rural communities has put on a uniform and served this country. According to the National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients (U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness and the Urban Institute, 1999), veterans account for 23 percent of all homeless people in America.”

This year marks the 65th anniversary of the United Nations Conference of International Organization. San Francisco was told it would host the U.N. Charter draft proceedings on February 12, 1945. It’s said San Francisco received the nod because the official making the decision dreamed of The City before making his choice.

Representatives from fifty nations came to town for the big ta-do. Conventional history texts record U.N. proceedings and dealings taking place in the War Memorial Veterans Building and inside select Nob Hill and Union Square hotel suites. But famed San Francisco columnist Herb Caen knew better. According to Caen (he truly THE man with all seven senses set to the pulse of The City):

“the United Nations was founded at Sally Stanford’s whorehouse.”

Not to be outdone, Life Magazine had this to say: “Miss Stanford and her specially selected hostesses entertained princes and shahs, movie stars, state and national dignitaries; some of her customers even brought their wives.”

Sally Stanford was the most colorfully prosperous San Francisco madam of her era. She is known for her countless aliases, many bordellos, seven husbands and 17 arrests for running bawdy houses. But Sally is even far better know for her latter-day stints as mayor and “vice” mayor of Sausalito (that pricey less foggy hamlet directly across the Golden Gate from San Francisco), for her restaurant, her philanthropy, her parrot, Loretta – and for her steely resolve, (she even threw Bogie out of her place); and for her scalpel-sharp wit.

For years Stanford was dogged by one Sergeant Jack Dyer, who long made it his personal crusade to bust Sally and her girls in her most luxurious bagnio, aptly named “The Fortress,”at 1144 Pine Street on Nob Hill.

By all accounts Sally showed delegates to the United Nations the very best time in town. But unlike Pacific Heights matrons mounting lavish soirees to bolster their high society credentials, Sally provided services to the U.N. delegates with extraordinary remuneration in mind. In her paperback autobiography “The Lady Of The House,” first published in 1966, but now out of print, Sally had this to say about the global gathering of diplomatic titans:

“We were getting the real international lechers now, in the spring of ‘45. The United Nations delegates were very large stuff in San Francisco. Prominent society hostess types were feverish in attempts to outdo each other with the foreign sauce and spice these imports inspired. It was a romp, let me tell you!

Since these boys were very large and juicy items with the State Department, we worked overtime to keep the foreign relations department in sweet rapport.”

Rutherford Hayes was the first U.S president to visit San Francisco. Since that 1880 trip most presidents have made it a point to come here at least once. Some, like Bill Clinton, come often. But not every president has had the time of his life here, nor have they always been treated with the respect one holding our nation’s highest office might feel they deserve. A few cases in point are:

Warren G. Harding

Darling of the Teapot Dome scandal, Republican Warren G. Harding is often ranked as the worst president of all time (but let’s give W a few years). Harding died on August 2, 1923 in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. He was 57 years old. While it’s likely a heart attack got him, speculation over the years has run rampant. Food poisoning, stroke, pneumonia, cardiogenic pulmonary edema and even assassination by wife or mistress have been bandied about.

But hands down the most entertaining speculation into Harding’s death is a report by The Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency. The report claims that Harding was first bitten by a vampire on a boat ride on the San Francisco Bay and then poisoned to put him out of his misery.

William McKinley

Nothing bad happened to Republican President William McKinley here in San Francisco, but Yellow Pressman William Randolph Hearst took a bit of heat for having published a darkly suggestive ditty written by famed curmudgeon Ambrose Bierce. Riffing off the assassination of Kentucky Governor William Goebel in 1900, Bierce wrote:

“The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast
Can not be found in all the West;
Good reason, it is speeding here
To stretch McKinley on his bier.”

The following year McKinley, too, was gunned down.

Gerald Ford

It’s a pretty safe bet that California wasn’t President Gerald Ford’s favorite state — particularly after his double-whammy Sacramento and San Francisco greetings in September of 1975. On September 5, 1975 Manson Family member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to ventilate Ford in Sacramento. A couple weeks later Sara Jane Moore did the same outside the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square.

Both Fromme and Moore received life sentences for their efforts, and both were released following Ford’s death (from natural causes) in 2006. Interestingly, Moore was less than entirely contrite over her failed assassination attempt. In a 2009 NBC Today Show interview she told anchorman Matt Lauer, “I am glad that I didn’t kill [Ford], but I don’t regret trying.”

Barack Obama

Barack Obama’s San Francisco misadventure occurred at a Gold-Coaster Getty Mansion fundraiser in the heat of his campaign for the presidency. It wasn’t of the physical injury sort, but was an unexpected political guffaw, nonetheless.

Amidst champagne and beluga hand-gladding with donor billionaires, centimillionaires and old fashion heirs and heiresses, Obama was recorded making remarks construed to lack sensitivity to rednecks:

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Personally, I think he pretty much nailed it, but Fox and Limbaugh had a field day with his remarks.

With this winter’s raining and complaining time’s come to place everything in perspective—global climate change, notwithstanding. In his sensational 1933 romp The Barbary Coast, subtitled An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld, author Herbert Asbury writes about a wet winter exactly 160 years ago:

“Several times during the rainy season of 1849-50 horses, mules, and carts were sucked down into the mud, and the animals were drowned; and many men, trying to cross the streets while drunk, narrowly escaped similar deaths.”

Several streets were marked out along the foot of the sand-hills behind Yerba Buena Cove (today’s Financial District) as soon as it had become evident that the town was destined to thrive like a veritable municipal mushroom, and a few were cut through the hills. But they were neither paved nor properly graded, and in consequence were extraordinarily uneven and irregular. One man’s habitation might be on the same street as that of his nearest neighbor and still be twenty to fifty feet higher or lower. Or it might perch on the side of a hill nearly thirty feet above the rim of a gulch that necessity had made an important thoroughfare. The continual passage of men, animals, and wagons soon cut up these makeshift highways until they were little more than gigantic mud-holes. Several times during the rainy season of 1849-50 horses, mules, and carts were sucked down into the mud, and the animals were drowned; and many men, trying to cross the streets while drunk, narrowly escaped similar deaths. In a vain attempt to improve conditions the city authorities purchased a great quantity of brushwood and dumped it into the streets, but it soon sank from sight, as did the boxes, barrels, and other refuse thrown out by the citizens. The mud at Clay and Kearny streets, in the heart of town, at length became so deep and thick that a wag posted this sign:

THIS STREET IS IMPASSABLE;
NOT EVEN JACKASSABLE

“What do you mean by ‘Frisco’?” asked Judge Mogan.

“No one refers to San Francisco by that title except people from Los Angeles,” said the court. “I am the chairman of the County Council of Defense, and I warn you that you stand in danger of being interned as an alien enemy. Don’t do it again.”

—San Francisco Examiner, April 3, 1918

**************************************************************************************
Have a listen to this 1915 ditty, “Hello, Frisco” by Elida Morris & Sam Ash while perusing these “Frisco” movies
**************************************************************************************

• 1924—Hello Frisco

• 1927—Frisco Sally Levy

• 1927—Hello Frisco

• 1932—Frisco Jenny (trailer)

• 1934—Fog Over Frisco

  Fog Over Frisco (trailer)

• 1935—Frisco Kid

• 1935—Frisco Waterfront

• 1942—Frisco Lil

• 1943—Hello, Frisco, Hello

• 1944—Man from Frisco

• 1945—Frisco Sal

• 1955—Hell on Frisco Bay

• 1979— The Frisco Kid

  The Frisco Kid (trailer)

• 1937—Golden Gate Bridge opens – suicides celebrate

• 1998—SF’s 2,000 year old vampire hungers homeless

• 1875—William Sharon backstab’s bud, grabs Palace Hotel

• 1921—Fatty Arbuckle cited smooshing siren – proves untrue

• 1880—“Mammy” Pleasant said to pull brains from cracked nut in House of Mystery

• 1977—Chinatown’s Golden Dragon breathes hot lead – five killed, 11 wounded

• 1934—Bloody Thursday a mess

• 1926—Pisco Punch thought dead with Duncan Nichol. Drunkards distraught

• 1978—Elivis imitator Jim Jones botches big batch of Kool Aid

-BREAKING-

WASHINGTON — In a move Fox News is calling “brilliant statesmanship” and “the best use of their time,” Senate Republicans early Wednesday dropped a political bombshell and resurrected the ghost of Lewis Carroll. Republicans launched their “Patriotic American Patriots Filibustering to Filibuster the Filibuster” campaign, along with their new slogan, “No, not never!”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced the moves at a Fox News exclusive event, flanked by all 40 Senate Republican comrades. Three members of the Republican wing of the Senate’s Democratic caucus added their support. “Fox News’ Filibuster Super Special Report” was ably hosted by the positively glowing former Alaska Governor, Sarah Palin. The “spontaneous event,” sponsored by Astroturf Tea Inc., featured an Idaho militia band, two solemn prayers and an old fashion confetti send-off.

independent Republicans acting independently

Unconfirmed reports say Reid has temporarily shelved full-time campaign fundraising, and has sought consul from noted linguist Ryan “Writ” Large. Aids say Reid’s asked Large to tell him precisely what a “filibuster to filibuster filibustering” will mean — to traditional Senate etiquette and decorum. Holding firm to the Democrat’s own “Make like Gummy Worms” strategy, sources say Reid expects to take no countermeasures against Republican filibusters. “We’re sticking with what works best for us,” a Reid spokesperson is quoted as saying.

Minutes after the report aired President Barack Obama gave a short unscheduled press briefing at the White House. The President told reporters that he’s taking the Republican filibuster brouhaha in stride. “Lookit,’ the President said, ‘this move by the Republicans can mean only one thing… It tells me they’re ready to work together with us on bipartisan legislation.”

Obama went on to say, ” Do we have honest differences? Of course we do. But know this—Republicans want to help working persons out every bit as much as I do. To that end I’ve scheduled a breakfast get-together tomorrow, where I’ll lay out my agenda. Once there I’ll forcefully impress upon the Senators that absolutely nothing I propose, suggest or demand need actually be accomplished, if they’ll only meet me half way.”

Sarah's helping the President

Early reports are that as the President gave his press statement Republican Senators began reading the New York metropolitan phone book from the Senate floor.

Our world’s all topsy-turvy. Take, for example, the nerd. Though once shunned, ridiculed and made the butt of jokes, he is today’s celebrated and oft Midas-touch Digital Conquistador.

This multitasking 21st Century Diginaut straddles and comfortably interchanges fantastic virtualities with our familiar, if mundane, “real” world. It’s suggested that discovering, exploring and laying claim to new digital places provides cyber-pathfinders with emotional palates as deeply felt, vibrant and colorful as humans are capable of experiencing. With these tools are painted worlds that are seductive and fun, hyper-exciting, orgasmic and intellectually stimulating. They may also be addictive.

But wait! Even this newest Matrix-merging bifurcated “reality” is already as dead as the slide rule – and as barren as sterile rock. Yet from these merged-world ashes hydra-headed galaxies spring forth, tunneling into the imagination’s cornucopia of deep-shaft psychological wounds, fevered hallucinations, mythic visions and outbounded notions not yet even whispered or hinted at. While traditional realities recede our virtualness metamorphs into timeless universes waiting to be imagined.

Which leads to the recent PBS Frontline docu, Digital Nation.

Highlights include:

1)     …the MIT student who can’t recall having last read a book…

2)     …collegiates thinking and composing in paragraphs – they disjointed – one..from…each…of…the…others…

3)     …video game addiction…

4)     …a U.S. Army recruitment cyberland designed to lure young teens…

5)     …a Christian drone fighter pilot killing Pakistanis while safely seated in Nevada…

6)     …young adults convinced chronic multi-tasking enhances information handling, while testing shows it “creates people who aren’t able to think clearly.”

7)     …how high brain scan activity associated with media multi-tasking may be much ado about mumbo jumbo…

8)    …that no one is looking into real and on-going effects of online exposure…

9)     …that texting while driving is more dangerous than driving drunk…

10)   …a curriculum designed to cyberwash South Korean 2nd graders…

11)   …a school principal’s claim that “Technology is like oxygen”

12)   ….internet ethics and etiquette espoused…

13)   …instant gratification education “teaching you should have every urge satisfied the moment the urge occurs.”

14)    …how “our kids are going to need different skills five years from now then they need today.”

15)   …profs, by a 2-1 margin say students are less prepared for college than students 10 years ago. But does our educational system recognize, or is it even capable of keeping pace with the onslaught of technowizardry beach-heading the consumer marketplace daily? Are these “old school” teachers equipped to digest profound and continual change demanded for facilitating effective learning experiences?

16)   …is this “dumbest generation” actually advancing human evolutionary development?

17)   …an educator, noting knowledge passed from the oral tradition on through to the Gutenberg Galaxy to our present digital universe, says “I don’t know if the book, which has been the mode for the last couple centuries is  the best way to transfer information today.”

18)   …“Cooking with Bubbie,” a popular online show starring an 83 year old cyber queen…

19)   …the World of Warcraft providing meaningful, and emotionally and intellectually satisfying lives…for some…

20)   …cyberguilds reframing the familial unit, friendship, the clan, community and nationhood…

21)   …a couple enthuse that their “first date was when he broke into a castle to save me online. It was so romantic.”

22)   …the program Virtual World destroys teleconferencing…

23)   …3D virtual realities so enhanced they are judged preferable to “real” life…

Mikki Bingo’s Omni San Fransexualis #4

Dear Mikki,

I’m head over heels in love with my car. It’s all I can think about. My heart pounds and I’m all atwitter each time I walk into the garage. I’m sure these feelings are mutual. Do you have a problem with that?

— Mega-Reverend Red Rodman
Orange County, California

No problem here, Red. Not unless you’re a Republican preacher planning to have a church wedding and a run for Congress. Judging from your title and place of residence that seems plausible. If so, consider finding an understanding and tolerant human partner, too. Republicans love the swingers scene. Look there first. Republican swingers are far less judgmental about their mates engaging in outside affairs than your average uptight conservative, for obvious reasons. Once your human mate is on-board draw up an iron clad prenupt that each of you can live with, just to be safe.

“I can appreciate the seductive flash, dash and glamour a throbbing hot hunk of glistening hell-on-wheels provides you; but trust me, in both church and politics appearances are everything.”

Your human mate may never be your number one, and I can appreciate the seductive flash, dash and glamour a throbbing hot hunk of glistening hell-on-wheels provides you; but trust me, in both church and politics appearances are everything. Besides, you might be surprised how many freaks just like you are still cowering in those institutional closets. Some have actually been booted from the closet, but are still hiding. Do the names Craig, Swaggart, Haggard, Hargis, Baker, Allen, Murphy, Vitter, Sanford and Foley ring any bells?

I’m a little puzzled by the tenor of your inquiry. Is it a challenge? And regarding the love thing: I don’t deal in love, per se, unless it’s all hot, steamy, wet and gooey. This being a sex column and not a lonely hearts club, I’ll assume you’re seeking creative advice to make jolly with your hot rod. My guess is that you’re a man. Still, I have two girlfriends named Red, so let’s open this up for the benefit of everyone, no matter one’s software.

It would help to know your lover’s year, make, model and condition – and just how you and your partner interact with one another. But since you’ve not provided that information we’ll start with a few Universal Definite Don’ts when engaging in auto sex:

• Never attempt coitus with your mate lying flat on top of you.
• Unlike foreplay, which heats up consenting adults, make certain your beloved is entirely cooled down before fondling or otherwise engaging it’s tail pipe.

And above all remember:

• Even in the afterglow a long, steamy sex session – never, under any circumstance light your lover’s cigarette.

As for creative ways for you and yours to seek pleasure, consider:

• On-board video. A car show or formula one race tape might loosen things up and put both of you in a romantic mood.
• Are any Drive-In theaters still operating down in Orange County? I’m sure you know what they’re designed for.
• If you’re mechanically minded, Red, give your lover a tune-up and a lube job. Follow that with a slow-handed erotic wash and wax job. This should be as pleasurable to your partner as a day in the spa capped with a deep hot oil body massage would be to you. It’s the golden rule. We only get as good as we give.

And finally:

• Try complimenting your lover’s apparel by wearing a rubber outfit to your next tryst. Concentrate that evening’s play activities on each of the four tires. The next night don leather or vinyl and have at it with the seats. Plastic-wear compliments certain portions of the auto body, particularly if you’re fortunate enough to be in love with one of those old classics with the pointy-coned tail lights. But if you really want to make a lasting impression, find or fashion a get-up akin to the Tin Man’s in the Wizard of Oz. I guarantee it—you open the garage door dressed in metal drag and it will melt even the steeliest of steel hearts.

Bubba's stuffed, er...full

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Sharky, back in the day

Though weak and nearly friendless amidst a creaky Old World of monarchies, autocracies and subjugated masses, America, it is said, lit the first beacon of liberty and freedom since the brilliancy of Athenian democracy was extinguished. Those 13 original states, constitutionally joined as one—that mythic United States of America, is said to have been a rarified union, where justice was blind and balanced, and talent fairly rewarded no matter one’s humble origins.

Here, personal initiative and willpower, when pushed nose-to-grindstone, provided each citizen tools to master his own destiny. In exchange for allegiance to our infant republic we granted ourselves the limited freedoms put forth in our Constitution; a representative voice in governing, peace when not at war, and implied financial stability to the thrifty and prudent. These privileges were accorded every land owning citizen, assuming that citizen was both male and Caucasian. And thus our grand bump-and-stumble experiment began.

Those statesmen who were convinced our budding republic’s survival demanded its grand expansion soon triumphed. The Manifest Destiny of our young nation would stretch it from one ocean to the next. Few suspected the seeds we planted would grow into a global empire.

Having arched across the vast continental rainbow, our nation’s territorial quest temporarily dead-ended upon the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Out here western pioneers no longer identified as mere citizens devoted to some pie-in-the-sky national commonwealth for all, turning instead to obsessing their very own Midas-like fortunes.

Most claim the madness erupted in 1848 with the discovery of our fabled Eldorado. Depthless pots of gold lay, they said, free for the pickin’s out West in Californy—out there, out at the end of the emigrant rainbow. Here lay humanity’s eternally quested cornucopia, from which sprang, in time, not only the shiny and metallic, but likewise mineral, liquid, and vegetable gold; human, industrial, high tech and just plain ol’ garden variety dirt patch gold. With native peoples dispatched and/or disposed of, the pillage and plunder continued unchallenged, and the eager creation of the Great Western American Myth would challenge even those of ancient Greece and Rome.

A self-anointed aristocracy had already emerged back East. These robber barons laid the hereditary foundation for latter day corporate imperialism. Still, even their enormous depredations paled in myth and legend compared to those of the glittering, kaleidoscopic Wild, Wild West.

Out here on the razor edge of the rainbow anything goes hedonism; every filthy, amoral, treacherous, two-faced, lyin’, cheatin’, connivin’, thievin’, violent and just plain no-good dastardly behavior was finely honed to a near art form. Siren songs blared out hot and loud from every Barbary Coast dive, creep joint, deadfall, cow-yard and crib; from each and every winedump, gambling and dance hall, shanghai and opium den in the city of terminal romance, roulette luck and twenty-four hour depravity—the one and unmatched City of San Francisco.

A Preramble to Our Evolution

But we can’t stop with the City. So on we push, on into this entire present day post modern pre-apocalyptic San Francisco Bay Area. Here, nature’s sublime perfection is re-imagined into Pixars and Lucasfilms, into oil refineries, cargo ports, nuclear arms and biotech labs, into obscenely expensive “affordable” housing and gated golf course communities; re-imagined into freeways and collapsing bridges, into internet communes and staid financial houses built on mud; re-imagined into Masserati dealerships, underground sewers and cable systems, faux Victorian mixed-use malls, into Apples and Oracles and Suns—and into thousands of acres of world class vineyards providing ego-nectar for the endless bacchanalia our pantheon of provincial gods host to fete their own growing fortunes and the fortunes of their kind.

Tallied together and we SF Bay Area folk constitute the haves, the have mores, the hope-to-haves and the desperately impoverished. But in contrast to good ol’ fashion salt of the earth rebel & Yankee cornpone sodbusters, we out here in weirdo-land proudly power those fraternal twin engines named Genius and Madness, in total and in tandem. Of course, many of us landed here from elsewhere, so we’re lickety-split to re-imagine our boring and checkered pasts, puzzling each new moment as it arises, and flinging ourselves dead-on into myriad optimisms and the fantastic possibilities of tomorrow.

San Francisco’s storied fog-enshrouded nooks and film noir crannies interweave into the larger tapestry of our Beemer & Brie Left Coast environs. Six successive flags covered the patriotic butts of those many who “developed” and decimated this Eden. Audacious schemes and Utopian dreams heaped high hill upon golden hill their inventions, art and broken corpses. Out from these shifting sand-hills emerged our nation’s first instant metropolis. Starry-eyed Argonauts, atom bombers, cannibal emigrants, Beats, Raiders, Hounds, Silicon Valley vandals, Bohemians, Hippies, shrewd madames, Queers, Panthers, Diggers, Dot Com-bustants, Vigilantes, labor unionists, Paint Eaters and greasy Barbary Coast Rangers mixed with countless ethnic, religious, artistic and political groups pouring through our Golden Gate: dream-laden malcontents, misfits and human refuse, from each and every corner on earth. Each soul came to create and/or to take every good thing here, or else to pawn off failures to the next poor mark in line. “Sodom!” charged the critics. “Gomorrah!” added choruses of pious distant cowards.

Yes, the San Francisco Bay Area is just another seismically doomed chunk of this tiny, fragile planet—though we who actually live here ponder inevitable annihilation less than, say, whether to go with the round loaf sour or the baguette. Our San Francisco Bay Area is that perfect unholy place of things best and worst, ever strange, shocking, shifting, timeless and new.

Listen now—the ancient redwoods whisper. Listen closely for ghetto yearnings in a thousand foreign tongues. Brace for paradise in hell, where Nobel laureates ponder abstractions aloud while shuffling among our homeless. Here, in this microcosmic chip on planet earth millions live, die and suffer the exquisite, excruciating pain of euphoric mundanity. Ultimately, none of us survive, but while we are here we continue on this saga….

NEWZ FUTURES

DATELINE: January 10, 2046 — In a surprise move, famed architect Joanna Borek-Clement has teamed with aqua-ag pioneer and Sausalito Hydrofield boss, Kwan Tumleep. They’ve dusted off Borek-Clement’s blueprints for her classic Tafoni Prefab Floating House, promising to revamp the design in order to satisfy critical housing needs of tens of thousands of labor hopefuls.

Estimates are that 95 percent of surviving SF Bay Area residents are vying for work on the vast Tumleep-managed GMO Aqua-Ag reservation. The farm covers the entire stretch of sea once comprising San Francisco Bay’s metro area. It’s owned, as is everything else on Earth, by former Goldman Sachs chief, the mysterious Mr. Mung.

Tumleep doesn’t expect improvements on the stylish design, other than asking Borek-Clement to expand the 960 square foot original one thousand fold. “We intend to provide space to roll out at least 50,000 sleeping bags per unit,” says Tumleep. ” We’ll be building a dozen of these floaters, situating them strategically throughout the former Bay Area.”

The original Tafoni Prefab Floating House was a revolution in single family houseboat design. Its post-modern contours were inspired by the curving honeycomb-like features tunneled out over time by natural elements including surf and cementation. The floating home was specifically designed for houseboat communities like Sausalito, but could be towed via waterways elsewhere throughout one’s chosen aqua district. It provided exceptional light sourcing, spacial comfort and architectural tics pointing toward more pleasing futures.

The Great San Francisco Tsunami of 2031 destroyed most of the San Francisco Bay Area. Sausalito’s houseboat community was not spared. No original Tafoni Floating Home survived the disaster. Fortunately, Borek-Clement’s blueprints were preserved via the internet.

Today is January 8, 2010—the 120th anniversary of the death of a San Francisco legend. We begin our story two decades earlier.

On Saturday, September 17, 1859 Joshua Abraham Norton walked into the San Francisco Bulletin newspaper office. He handed the editor a document. This screed proclaimed that he, Joshua Norton, was henceforth Emperor of the United States.

Emperor Norton, in concert with Bummer and Lazarus—his beloved and loyal imperial curs, are oft referred to as “The Three Bummers.” While this moniker seems to reference the trio’s sum worth, inclination and trade, the true tale behind the Three Bummers regrettably mirrors too often repeated headlines in both local and national news.

“it’s one of San Francisco’s most endearing legends. It’s a sweet, wonderful and heartwarming story—but it’s a pack of lies.”

Picture two cherished, if mangy flea bitten mongrels, together with their mad imperial master, frolicking about the city, not a care in the world between them; sharing free saloon buffet meals, free-ticketed to each gala theatrical opening, front row center, and, in general having their happy-go-lucky run of the city.

This account of the Three Bummers, popularly depicted in 1860s caricatures drawn by Edward Jump, and later fleshed out by the writer Theodor Kirchhoff, is one of San Francisco’s most endearing legends. It’s a sweet, wonderful and heartwarming story.

But it’s a pack of lies.

That’s right: the tale of the Three Bummers is entirely fabricated, a confection – pure unadulterated fantasy. However, the actual historic truth behind the Three Bummers teaches a far more timely and vital lesson than any saccharine romance possibly could.

Joshua Abraham Norton, as many of you know, is far and away the most celebrated in an unending bounty of eccentrics our Bay Area is both exalted and damned for. Born and raised in England, a reputedly sane Joshua Norton sailed into Gold Rush San Francisco from South Africa. He toted a substantial grubstake along with him. The would-be commodity baron proceeded to lose his every last penny in a vain attempt to corner the city’s rice market. Norton left town for a time, and upon returning, the now screw-loose speculator proclaimed himself “Norton I, Emperor of North America and, (two years later) Protector of Mexico.”

Over the next two decades Emperor Norton was widely quoted, mock-lauded and occasionally upbraided for his imperial proclamations and his flamboyant public persona. Mark Twain even patterned a character in Huckleberry Finn on the Emperor.

Emperor Norton’s purported pooches were of questionable parentage. In his book Bummer & Lazarus, Malcolm E. Barker describes Bummer as a “Newfoundland, with protruding teeth, a permanent grin, and a clumsy walk.” The Daily Evening Bulletin on Saturday, October 3, 1863 wrote “Lazarus was supposed to be a cross between a cur and a hound, with a dash of the terrier… In color he was of a yellowish black—and proudest of the black.” The two dogs achieved local renown, while the Civil War raged back east, for their unusually close bond with one another, and because they killed lots of rats.

They, like Norton I, garnered reams of newspaper attention, but the facts are the facts: Bummer and Lazarus didn’t give one guttural growl about Joshua Norton.

As for the Emperor – it’s clear any suggestion that he associated with rat eating mongrels was grounds for violent retort. In fact, according to February 14, 1863’s edition of the Alta California, Norton, passing a store window displaying the Edward Jump lithograph depicting the Three Bummers dining together, became so incensed by it he, “let fly his walking stick at the window pane and smashed—his stick.”

Despite fuzzy-wuzzy legend, both Bummer and Lazarus lived the cruel existence of homeless strays. While accorded high-minded accolades in the press and by city government, they each survived for wont of shelter, food, care and protection. Each died horribly painful, neglected deaths.

Lazarus was born a stray. He never learned to behave around humans. In October of 1863 Lazarus bit a child. In response, the child’s father fed Lazarus meat saturated in rat bane. Lazarus suffered an excruciating poisoned death.

Bummer’s was a prolonged, wretched demise. According to the September 14, 1865 edition of the Daily Alta California, a mean drunkard “kicked poor old ‘Bummer’ down a stairway… His body is now swollen to twice its usual size, and the poor fellow appears at death’s door.” Bummer managed to hang to life for three agonizing, neglected months before he, too, succumbed, two years after his friend, Lazarus.

While the Emperor Norton and the two celebrated mutts never comprised a triumvirate, I’ll submit that the Three REAL LIFE Bummers are actually we humans who: abuse, ignore or abandon our animals; don’t spay or neuter our pets; and those of us who adopt pets we don’t, won’t or can’t care for, protect and give the love they so richly deserve.

On Sunday, November 5, 1865 the Daily Alta published its Elegy On Bummer:

“He, who was faithful to the end,
The noble Bummer sleeps;
Gone hence to join his better friend,
Where doggy never weeps.”

Batboy’s long been pitched onto tabloid history’s scrap heap. So today we billion bored shoppers, standing in a million supermarket check-outs, stare blankly at our eggs and our lettuce. Why? Because our wacky and beloved Weekly World News (“The World’s Only Reliable Newspaper”), and with it Batboy, Ed Anger and Hillary’s Alien Offspring—have long since vanished from our supermarket news racks.

“The sticky tentacles of media consolidation reach deep into virtually every American media resource..”

Elsewhere, Rupert Murdoch, the grand poobah of agenda news, gobbles down the Wall Street Journal, sending investors, who require objective, truthful financial reports, into mass hysteria.

But that’s not all.

Deregulation sweeps locally owned radio and television stations into vacuuming maws of rapacious media conglomerates. News agencies, like UPI, vanish. Newspapers, magazines, film studios and publishing houses are subsumed into honeycombed bowels of multi-national corporations. They’re then downsized, or liquidated. The sticky tentacles of media consolidation reach deep into virtually every American media resource.

If all this seems to run contrary to an American democracy conceived, created, nurtured and taught to speak its many minds freely, via an vast array of media outlets—you’re damn right, er…I mean you’re correct! Today’s once proud and fiercely independent national media sound more and more like the monotone dirge of the right wing authoritarian propagandist.

Yet long before Rupert Murdoch’s quest for media hegemony spawned Fox; long before some fantasy rag called the Weekly World News was birthed from old National Enquirer presses, and yes, even long before the words media and consolidation were first paired together—our nation marveled at a vast media empire built by San Francisco’s own prodigal son—William Randolph Hearst.

Of course, it’s a terrible cliche, but history seems rather inclined to repeat itself. William Randolph Hearst’s “yellow press” publications made zany claims and invented bizarre stories, ala the Weekly World News. His drive to acquire still more media outlets, in much the way Clear Channel stuffed itself on hundreds of radio stations following media deregulation, was only halted with financial collapse forced upon Hearst by the Great Depression. And as for pre-dating Rupert Murdoch, well, as Hearst’s youthful populist/progressive sentiments faded, he turned ever more reactionary. Ultimately, Hearst espoused national policies any fascist could live with.

Hearst entered the media game, gifted with the failing San Francisco Examiner when he was just twenty-four years old. At his pinnacle Hearst owned 28 newspapers in cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston. He published scads of magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Harper’s Bazaar. Hearst owned a Hollywood film company, two news services and the King Features Syndicate. These media holdings provided him a platform with which to launch his own political career, and to promote his many other ambitions.

Let’s face it—unimaginable wealth fascinates us. With wealth comes power, and the ability to mold one’s life into legend, whether it be true or not. William Randolph Hearst was one such wealthy man of distorted legend. Hearst’s legend stands largely at odds with who he really was and what he set out to accomplish.

William Randolph Hearst inherited vast tracks of land not only in the United States, but in Mexico and Central and South America as well. While his quarter million-acre San Simeon property remains impressive, “the ranch” was dwarfed by Hearst’s seven-plus million acres in Mexico, alone. Add to this his Central and South American holdings. Then there were the diversified stocks, innumerable gold, silver and other mines, including the Comstock Ophir and Montana’s Anaconda, vast stretches of timber, oil, and uncounted properties in major U.S. metropolitan areas from San Francisco to Manhattan.

While William Randolph Hearst never realized his dream to make the White House his own, he took credit for his media-muscle creating bogus wars with Spain and in the Philippines. Hearst sent author Stephen Crane and famed illustrator Frederick Remington to Cuba shortly after the U.S. Maine sank in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. When Remington informed Hearst that there was no war to record, Hearst reportedly wired back “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”

“The interests of (Hearst), his mother, and his nation were, in his own mind, identical, and he believed that he knew how to motivate his fellow citizens to realize those ends. His policy of America First…effectively erased distinctions between national defense and offense…he employed a limited palette of proven adjectives and a liberal application of the nouns ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty. A child could understand him; Hearst’s enemies often caricatured the publisher as a spoiled brat,” wrote Gray Brechin in his superlative book Imperial San Francisco.

A most egregious example of Hearst’s using his press power to promote his own self interest was in urging our nation to mount a second war with Mexico. The first war with Mexico, according to Ulysses S. Grant, was “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Hearst’s reprise was meant to be more of the same. It’s particularly instructive considering our country’s ongoing immigration debate.

Hearst once relegated Mexicans to “that mongrel mixture of Aztec, Indian and Spanish buccaneer.” Hearst’s aim was to both protect his own Mexican financial interests, and in doing so to grab the entire nation for “The Greater United States.”

Hearst didn’t stop there. According to him:

“If we have no right in Mexico we have no right in California or in Texas, which we redeemed from Mexico. If we have no right in Mexico we have no right anywhere in the U.S., for this whole country from ocean to ocean, has been rescued from savagery and redeemed for civilization….”

If he’d had his way William Randolph Hearst would have been president. He’d have trumped up wars with Mexico, Japan (he hated the Japanese), and who knows who else. He’d have swept up every mass media outlet he could afford in order to shape and frame our shared national perceptions—to suit his own opinions and self interests. Something eerily similar is happening to our media and our country today.

That’s why you might well appreciate that precious few truly independent locally owned news sources remain today. Would but they flower and seed, growing endless fields of new voices sprouting up to challenge wealth, privilege and power in the grand tradition of independent journalism. Celebrate these voices and hold them to task, a cornucopia of tiny news outlets and opinionists playing the exquisite cacophonic symphony that is our inspired, messy, brutal and fragile American style democracy.

Pete Bingo dosed in White's lair

Weird, twisted and bizarre tales about the SF Bay Area are so numerous some merely make us yawn. But if any one story stands out for its sheer audacity, moral depravity and utter madness—this is it. Years ago I came across a magazine article about something called Operation Midnight Climax. I knew it had to be a joke. The CIA, with the blessing and full cooperation of both the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the SFPD sets up and runs an LSD brothel in San Francisco for ten solid years? Who do you think you’re kidding? Still, I dutifully dug for corroborative facts concerning this alleged operation.

“White was a son of a bitch, but he was a great cop. He made that fruitcake Hoover look like Nancy Drew. The LSD, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Write this down. Espionage. Assassinations. Dirty tricks…”—Ira “Ike” Feldman

Turns out Operation Midnight Climax was no joke. Back in the 1950’s and ’60’s CIA experiments aimed at obtaining information and controlling human behavior gravitated to covertly dispensing numerous powerful psychotropic drugs. The CIA’s original charter prohibited it from engaging in any domestic operations. Yet many of these drugs were given to U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil without their knowledge or consent. Anyone interested in this unseemly labyrinth can trot down to the the library or just google MK-ULTRA.

If ever there was a reason to inform ourselves and hold political feet to the fire concerning our inalienable rights it’s MK-ULTRA. Its many programs had no external oversight and no accounting. For years fully 6% of the CIA’s entire budget went into MK-ULTRA programs that even Congress knew nothing about. But I’m wandering from the story at hand, namely: Operation Midnight Climax—a Bay Area baby born of MK-ULTRA.

*****

He was a tough, fat, bald guy—a character right out of Hollywood central casting. Back in the early 1950’s an itinerant San Francisco journalist, former OSS operative and then Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent named George Hunter White, aka Morgan Hall, was assigned by his boss Harry Anslinger to team up with the CIA. Together they created Operation Midnight Climax. White’s assignment: explore and record how a new drug called LSD affects behavior when consumed by unsuspecting male johns in the company of drug addicted hookers. A great comedy scenario, if it weren’t so damn perverse.

By day George Hunter White continued to work the streets of San Francisco, ferreting out drug deals and drug dealers, setting them up and taking them down. By night he’d repair to the portable toilet his friend Leo Jones had provided him behind the two way mirror set into a wall of “the pad’s” Telegraph Hill bedroom.

The L-shaped Chestnut Street duplex featured fantastic views of the San Francisco Bay. It was festooned with Toulouse-Lautrec posters, hidden microphones, tape recorders and a refrigerator stocked with pitchers of martinis. White was a notorious booze hound. He’d knock back a quart or more of gin nightly perched on the seat of his toilet scribbling notes on concurrent activities in the adjacent bedroom.

But dosing unwitting johns produced, well, wildly inconsistent results. White observed innumerable men behave in ways that suggested insanity. So White gave LSD the pet name “Stormy”. It fit. The “psychedelic revolution” was still years away. We can hardly imagine how the varied socio/ethnic/economic group of philanderers who wound up at “the pad” must have reacted when dosed. Most had never heard of, much less consumed any hallucinogenic substance before.

Richard Stratton interviewed George White’s last living Operation Midnight Climax associate for Spin Magazine in 1994. According White lieutenant Ira “Ike” Feldman:

“White was a son of a bitch, but he was a great cop. He made that fruitcake Hoover look like Nancy Drew. The LSD, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Write this down. Espionage. Assassinations. Dirty tricks. Drug experiments. Sexual encounters and the study of prostitutes for clandestine use. That’s what I was doing when I worked for George White and the CIA.”

George Hunter White continued operating his Telegraph Hill LSD brothel until 1965, when he retired from the service. He moved to Stinson Beach. Locals came to know him as Colonel White. He became the Stinson Beach Fire Marshall—and, after a few years on the wagon White died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1975.

Upon his death White’s widow gifted the Electronic Museum at Foothills Junior College, forty miles south of San Francisco, with his diaries. According to a Washington Post article dated September 5, 1977 these diaries: “provide documentary evidence that White met to discuss drugs and safe houses with such CIA luminaries as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Division and the man who ran MK-ULTRA, and Dr. Robert V. Lashbrook, a CIA chemist who worked with LSD. Other high-ranking CIA officials mentioned prominently include James Angleton, C. P. Cabell and Stanley Lovell. Gottleib and Lashbrook have been subpoenaed to testify Sept. 20 (1977) before a Senate subcommittee investigating the MK-ULTRA project.”

Upon retirement George Hunter White wrote to Harry Anslinger, his old boss at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, reflecting on White’s many years of service: “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

And so concludes a true San Francisco tale about your American taxpayer dollars working to protect you and yours.
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QUEENIE CUMMINS is an internationally acclaimed majorette, researcher and motivational consultant. She heads SF Bay Timeless’ crack investigative team of former spooks, occult historians, ephemera hounds and curiosity seekers. She and her cadre of highly trained professionals are bent on exposing world domination-style conspiracies. Anyone suspecting such—past, present or future—is urged to comment. Queenie pledges she’ll lead on from there.

Dear Professor Braene,
It’s been foggy the past few mornings here in San Francisco. It reminds me of summer, but this fog isn’t nearly as interesting as summer fog. It got me thinking. Where does our summer fog come from?
—Theresa Bell

Yes, Theresa—San Francisco’s summer fog is like no other. Dashiell Hammett concocted the hardboiled detective, framing his stories in the stuff. Newfoundland, Argentina and Washington’s Point Disappointment have even more of it than us—but who celebrates disappointment? London’s pea soup turned out to be pollution. There are at least 12 identifiable types of it.

“What residents know for sure is that the San Francisco Bay Area has three seasons: winter, summer and fog.”
—Carl Nolte

We’re not talking Foggy Bottom, nor the Fog of War—nor memory lapses by former administration officials testifying before Congress. We’re talking our fog, the world’s finest fog—that stuff pouring into the SF Bay Area at those exquisite moments when all points east suffer triple digit temperatures. It’s the world’s best air conditioning system.

Poor souls condemned to California’s Central Valley suffer stifling heat, frigid cold and oatmeal-thick Tule fog, depending on the season. Our Bay Area, is more temperate—not too hot, not too cold.

And our fog, particularly the summer sort, is mythic, romantic, generally welcomed and often gorgeous to behold. It comes in lacy wisps, billows up like cumulus cotton, caressing and cascading down our hillsides. Our fog floats in, spreading out in wraith-like fingers. Its arrival is heralded by a raw symphony of barnacled fog horns bellowing out from bay and coast, alike.

Today’s question is: Where does it come from—and will we lose it to global warming?

“What residents know for sure is that the San Francisco Bay Area has three seasons: winter, summer and fog.”
—Carl Nolte

Come September, with the kids back in school and Halloween beginning to goblin-up storefront windows, our fog begins to lift. Summer is already, for much of the country, officially, if not technically, over. But here in the Bay Area clear summer weather cranks up in earnest. In fact, it can get downright hot through October. The summer fog pouring through the Golden Gate and sliding between North and South Bay mountain chinks recedes. But why?

The Pacific High
The cycle which typically winds down in September begins each spring as we inch toward the sun. A warm high pressure system near the equator pushes north over the Pacific Ocean towards the Arctic.

“Some of it cools off and sinks to the ocean surface again several thousand miles to the north as the Pacific High—a ‘mountain’ of cool air weighing heavily on the water.”
—Harold Gilliam

The Sun’s rays evaporate surface water, pumping moisture into winds heading our way. The earth’s rotation spins northern hemispheric winds clockwise, so those winds hit us at about a 45-degree angle from the northwest. This phenomenon is called the Coriolis Force. As this moist air approaches the Bay Area cold up-rushing water replaces warmer surface water along our coast. Salt sprayed into the air captures minute water particles as moisture-laden winds meet cold coastal waters, condensing and producing “the great fog bank.” From late spring through summer this mass of fog hugs our coastline. It’s often a hundred miles thick and a half mile from the water up into the sky.

‘This… is a point upon a map of fog.”
—Ambrose Bierce

Meanwhile, as spring wends toward summer California’s Central Valley turns infernal. One hundred-plus degree temperatures become the summer norm. With Sierra peaks blocking it from heading east, the Central Valley’s hot rising air sucks fog into the Bay Area, like goose down into a vacuum. Fog sneaks through land-breaks like the Russian River Valley, Petaluma Gap’s Estero Lowland and the Nicasio and Muir Woods Gaps to the north; and the San Bruno and Crystal Springs Gaps to the south. Of course, the heavy fog-hitter is the Golden Gate, providing both unhindered access to the interior, and plenty of cool water to juice up the in-rushing fog.

But our fog is not an equal opportunity weather provider, even here in the Bay Area. I’ve left San Francisco’s Richmond district covered with fog in the upper 50’s, driven across the Golden Gate Bridge a few miles to Sausalito, where it’s sunny mid-90s. On days like that you can’t even see San Francisco for the fog bank overwhelming it. I’ve driven from the Alexander Valley south to the City, monitoring temperatures rising and falling three or four times through Sonoma and Marin Counties, the fog coming and going, until the temperature bottoms out in foggy San Francisco. Then consider the many microclimates within the 47 square miles comprising San Francisco itself. It’s even possible to experience a range of different types of fog on the very same day when traveling from one Bay Area destination to the next.

Cycles & Breakdown
The fog comes and goes in cycles—daily, weekly and such, from spring through summer. We’re all familiar with these cycles. But in September and into October, as the Central Valley temperatures begin to dip and the Pacific High heads south, the whole system breaks down. That’s why we often experience our clearest, hottest days this time of year.

Global Warming & The Fog
No one knows for certain how ongoing world climate change will affect our fog. While we’ve heard dire predictions concerning the toasty fate of Wine Country vineyards, I was pleasantly surprised to read Harold Gilliam, the dean of Bay Area environmental journalists’ opine on this subject in the updated edition of his 1962 classic Weather of the San Francisco Bay Region. Gilliam contends that as the earth warms we may actually experience more fog than at present. But he sure doesn’t guarantee it. Earth-wide weather patterns, greenhouse gasses, melting ice caps, the jet stream and our localized carbon emissions might combine to alter or dissipate the fog entirely, though it seems unlikely to happen in our lifetime.

Of the many things our Bay Area is famous for, summer fog ranks right up there with wine, computers, cable cars and sourdough. Can you imagine life here without any one of them?

Professor Ida Braene, Ph.D, M.D., J.D. D.T. & E.T., is a three time Nobel, two time MacArthur Fellowship and one time Pulitzer, Polk and Country Music Legends awards winner. She and her menagerie live in the Berkeley hills.

Cupertino mud wrestling coach Vella Miner just emailed:

Dear Mikki,
Is it true a British study has proven G-Spots are a hoax? Did I fake all my orgasms? They sure did feel real.

Yes, Vella, Sunday’s Times of London reports on a Kings College study adjudging women’s G-Spots to be mere myth. 1,804 women participated in the British survey. They ranged from 23 to 83 years of age. All were either identical or non-identical twins. The study concludes that while 56 percent of the women claimed to possess G-Spots, researchers didn’t believe them. Apparently the G-Spot-less minority were deemed more truthful.

The Times article notes that the survey’s younger, more sexually active women were more likely to assert the G-Spot’s existence than their older, less active counterparts.

Well, I really hate to stoop this low….but….I mean — duhhhhhhh!

While the prostate is oft called the “male G-Spot,” my guess is fewer than 56 percent of you men have a hand up your ass when you masturbate…

The G-spot is an admittedly illusive erogenous zone. It takes effort to locate it and, once located, effort and some expertise is required to stimulate it. Still, personal experience tells me that not only can the G-Spot be found, but that it’s well worth the effort.

According to the Times fully 56 percent, or 950 of women in their study group, do claim to have a G-Spot. So, if the researchers conclude that the G-Spot is bogus, how do they account for what the majority of women polled say they have? Are we as a gender caught in some Salem witch-like erotic delusion? You know, silly hysterical women just acting hysterical again?

Other facts intrude upon the Kings College conclusions, however. Professional estimates are that as many as 15 percent of all women have never orgasmed, meaning either 270 women in the King’s College study don’t know they have a clitoris, can’t feel it, are afraid of it or else they don’t know how to use it.

It’s fair to assume that the 56 percent with G-Spots have likely experienced orgasms of one sort or both. Consequently, the 15 percent of all women who’ve never reached any sort of climax should likely be subtracted from the study’s 44 percent minority. This leaves the no-G-Spotter group numbering 583, or less than one third of the 1804 woman test group. Each of the remaining 583 has thus experienced orgasm, but swear they have no G-spot.

Okay, now—how many guys reading this have personally dug up your butt to locate your prostrate gland? Do you get off fiddling with it? While the prostate is oft called the “male G-Spot,” my guess is fewer than 56 percent of you have a hand up your ass when you masturbate or have your partner to do it for you when dancing duo. Of course, many do enjoy prostate stimulation. But over half of you? Doubtful. There is, however, no debate concerning the existence of the “male G-Spot.”

We might equate locating and learning to play one’s G-spot with learning a musical instrument. Sure, rank beginners manage to provoke squawks and squeaks, but to make hot, beautiful music requires time, patience and an abiding interest in the outcome. How many Kings College test group members were satisfied with relatively simple exterior stimulation leading to climax? How many limit their climax-seeking to diddling with and having partners diddle their more accessible and openly engaging clitoris? And how many don’t give one loud damn about whether they have a G-Spot or not? I haven’t accessed the Kings College study yet, but could it be that some women in their study simply never looked for it?

Subtracting non-cummers and we’re down to about 3 in 10 women who, though orgasmic, have never come across a G-Spot. Again, what’s the equivalent number of men regarding their prostates?

Then there’s the age issue. The study cites participants as old as 83. Likely few octogenarians participated in the test study. Still, we must ask if significant numbers of participants lost interest in sex before even hearing of such a thing as the G-Spot. Ernst Grafenberg hypothesized the G-Spot 60 years ago. It’s always faced doubt and ridicule from the medical community. It wouldn’t surprise me to find a good many women have either never heard of the G-Spot, or haven’t spent time searching for it. Many of the professionals women turn to for advice don’t believe in its existence, so would be unlikely to recommend finding it.

Again, according to the Times, G-Spotters were more sexually active than those reporting no G-Spot, meaning G-Spotters tended to be more sexually adventuresome, more experimental and more likely to find hidden treasures than their less adventurous sisters.

I haven’t read the study so that’s all I’ll say for now, except all this talk has inspired me to make a date with myself. Just me and my horny little G-Spot.

1927—San Francisco’s Philo T. Farnsworth invents boob tube. Civilization ends

1846—U.S. swipes Alta California from Mexico. Bear Flag looks like pig

1976—Madam Sally Stanford is mayor of Sausalito. Parrot tapped as top adviser

1859—Emperor Norton I abolishes U.S. Congress, citing fraud and corruption

2002—Homeless Human Jukebox, Grimes Poznikov, is his day’s Emperor Norton

2009—Frank Chu ascends throne

1982—Sister Boom Boom for City Supe is “Nun of the above“

1906—Mother Nature attends to “wickedest place on earth”

1989—Ditto

1848—James Marshall regrets bending over

1954—Six Gallery Howl

1963—anarchist poet Bob Kaufman clams up

1972—Gemstone File Writ, tippled with G. Gordon Liddy at the Drift Inn

1934—Harry Bridges gap between unions. Reactionaries mask murals

1972—Marilyn Chambers’ Ivory Soap slips Behind the Green Door

2000—Dot Coms gonged—Beemer & Beluga sales plummet

Treasure Island map

Once the mob pours in the savvy print hound makes for the shopping carts. Securing your own cart is like brandishing a bank safe on wheels. And, it saves you a trip to the chiropractor.

I’ve snagged many of my all-time favorite books at this sale—like an 11 volume set of novels and stories of Brett Harte, published in 1903, and a set of classic works by authors ranging from Dickens to Dostoevsky. The range of subjects and titles is always overwhelming. I always buy too many, and regret I hadn’t grabbed more. It’s like a Roman orgy for book fiends, only instead of grapes, wine and roast squab you’re eyes eagerly consume titles and your lungs breathe musty archival dust.

Of my Big Book Sale finds, one stands uniquely apart. It isn’t actually a book, nor is it some fancy schmancy history society periodical. Nosirree, it’s a big ol’ honkin’ rusty three ring binder. I paid five bucks for it, and still have the sticker to prove it. Inside the binder ninety-seven newspaper columns from the 1940’s lay preserved in plastic sheaths. The author is Robert O’Brien, a fellow who did his Irish heritage proud providing weekly tales of fantastic people, places and early Bay Area happenings.

Robert O’Brien wrote a column called “Riptides.” Some of you old timers may recall it. Riptides was published from 1939 until 1952 in the San Francisco Chronicle. O’Brien wove magical yarns of the Lost Pegleg Mine, the Camels of California, of Pop Demerest—the Hermit of Russian Hill and of legendary plays on Mt. Tam and the origins of The Big Game.

Here come the Camels

O’Brien graduated from Yale, then began his career at small town papers in Virginia and North Carolina. He arrived in San Francisco in 1939.

Accounts tell of how The City’s beauty and freedom charmed and thrilled him. O’Brien family legend holds that he landed his Riptides column, promoted as the “blend of California’s brilliant past and present” after he’d penned a short ditty about a moth’s lone ferry ride across the bay. An editor happened to read it and put him to work.

For the next thirteen years this near-forgotten columnist regaled his readership with Tong Wars, Lightning Trains and the Telescopic Eye, with adventures traveling around early California, visiting haunted houses and jaunts through, around and over Butchertown, Irish Hill and Mt. Olympus. O’Brien wrote about Ishi, the last of the Yahi Indians, and chronicled snow falling in San Francisco. He waxed fondly on “odd characters” ranging from the inimitable Emperor Norton to that famed promoter of sobriety and benefactor of those with a thirst for water, Dr. Henry Daniel Cogswell.

One of the pleasures in reading Riptides is realizing that much of O’Brien’s subject matter were still living memories for his many readers. What seems like ancient history today—the Great Earthquake, Woodwards Garden and Sutro’s Cliff House were, some sixty or seventy years ago, still wistfully recalled by a great many in his audience. Ironically, these columns remain crisp and oddly contemporary.

Riptide columns were compiled into two books, both out of print, but still available if you’re willing to dig for them. Look for “California Called Them” and “This is San Francisco.”

Robert O’Brien left the Bay Area for the East Coast in 1952. He spent the remainder of his career writing for Reader’s Digest, Collier’s magazine and Time-Life Books. Upon retiring he took up glider planing. O’Brien lived to age 93. He died in Hawaii on August 15, 2004.

Back on December 19, 1952 O’Brien signed off his final Riptide with “It is strange that after having said so much in all that time, there is so little to say now. Good-byes are always that way.”

Holy Sisters of Prune Face Frustration

Happy Jack Harrington owned the Opera Comique, a notorious Barbary Coast dive. It was a bawdy concert hall situated at Jackson & Kearny Streets, an aptly named stretch known as “Murderer’s Corner.” Fortunately for Jack, his paramour and partner in crime was a levelheaded business gal named Big Louise.

Whatever else it was, their Opera Comique was not what you nor I would call an opera house. On the other hand, let’s say you’d just set anchor after a long ocean voyage. Why, here you’d find stout drink, games of chance, winsome entertainment most unrefined, and your choice of tender embrace from a bevy of cash-only lovelies. Happy Jack indulged himself in it all—and all to grand excess.

Picture Jack’s wide-brimmed plug hat placed just-so atop a milk chocolate cascade of perfectly-coiffed curls. Jack’s beloved mustache accompanied the silken cascade down past his handsomely angular face. A ruffled shirt, diamond stickpin and long-tailed vested jacket adorned his torso. Paint-tight trousers tucked into shiny knee-length black boots completed Jack’s rakish attire. A natty Happy Jack Harrington was the Barbary Coast’s own Beau Brummel, Bacchus and P.T. Barnum all rolled up into one.

Happy Jack loved everyone, and everyone loved Happy Jack.

But Jack’s good-times-express jumped the tracks early one head-pounding morning. He was coming off an exceptionally brutal drunk—puking, crying and hallucinating. Though none can say with certainty, it may well have been New Year’s Day. That’s when a decidedly un-Happy Jack fell under the spell of San Francisco’s notorious Praying Band. These high-minded ladies unceasingly haunted hell-pits like the Opera Comique. Praying Band members lived but to bestow God’s salvation, teamed with their own sober lifestyle, upon reprobate Barbary Coast infidels—just like our hero, Happy Jack.

Another good time buddy

“Jack took to his new biblical vocation like a mad butcher to a side of beef.”

Even the Praying Band knew that to convert such wretches demanded the miraculous. San Francisco’s multitude of lost souls actually seemed to revel in their vile abyss. You see, back in those Barbary Coast days San Francisco was universally esteemed as “the Wickedest Place on Earth.” Most every San Franciscan took pride in this distinction, sparing no effort or expense in preserving his hometown accolade. Even elites joined the unwashed in perpetually potted debaucharies, until they either passed out, or passed on.

Still, out there, out in that horrible light of day, lurked staunch proponents of sobriety, honest work and similar balderdash. Not only that, these Praying Band “temperance” ladies used their Bible like an accomplished shanghaier’s lead pipe. As fixed betting odds would have it they’d luck upon the rare hopeless drunkard at his most vulnerable moment, pointing out Jesus in every pink elephant, crawling bug and slithering snake that set upon him.

A delirious Happy Jack Harrington was thus lured into the Praying Band’s spotless religious lair. One can only guess what mischief caused Jack to forsake his valued possessions, not to mention Big Louise, but that previous night must have been a doozy.

Classy joint

Jack immediately sold his stake in the Opera Comique, following the preying ladies to their California Street compound, clear the other side of town. There he took to his new vocation like a mad butcher to a side of beef. His unquenchable spirit must have impressed the God-gals, for Jack, who attended services and read his Bible daily, was soon made manager of the Praying Band’s own little restaurant. Perhaps he ran a faro game after hours to retain his sanity, but all this do-good-ed-ness was bound to take its toll. Happy Jack Harrington’s road to heaven had, after all, been paved with every despicable, sordid and stylishly bad behavior.

The last of the year’s damp chill fog swept in from the sea like a nightmare invading a wet dream. It crept through flesh, bore through bones, settling in like an icy plague, deep within the marrow of The City. Jack lay bundled, shivering upon his cot, lost and alone. It had been one long month since Delirium Tremens imposed his exile.

That night Happy Jack Harrington waged war, battling armies of inner demons. Blow after crushing evil blow befell him. The weight of the world pressed down upon him. He could barely breathe.

Suddenly, brilliant light enveloped him. Jack twisted about ecstatically, immersed in a profound spiritual awakening. In an instant he recognized the grotesque folly that was his life. The heavens opened to him. An angelic chorus swelled. Revelation shook Jack like a rag doll. It threw him from his bed. There, face down against that clammy floor, You-Know-Who spoke directly to him. The no-nonsense basso profundo demanded that Happy Jack Harrington henceforth do His bidding, and His bidding only.

So Jack did what any self respecting Barbary Coast Ranger would do upon such a transformative awakening. Happy Jack marked a pack of playing cards and headed down the hill to save souls—down into Satan’s playground, back into the gaping maw of pure evil, province of the lost and the wretched—San Francisco’s own Barbary Coast.

Jack dreamt of Big Louise

Once his newly acquired resort was up and running, Jack focused next on establishing his born again credentials. Soon, habitues of the Coast were confronted with hundreds of posters pasted to walls throughout their environs. These announced a free-of-charge fire-and-brimstone sermon cum lecture to be given by Mr. Happy Jack, himself. The poster read: “The True Inwardness of the Gospel Temperance Movement, or, the Potato Peeled.”

The day finally arrived. Inside the immense rented auditorium, brass band blaring, sat six bemused newsmen, and not a single other soul. God must have smiled down upon him though, for Happy Jack was saved from the embarrassment of an indifferent public when a vociferous drunk stumbled into the proceedings, quite by accident. This character boosted Jack’s spirits, and made for an inspirational cheering section.

But it is not those missing or even those precious few in attendance that matter. It is, rather, the nature and content of Happy Jack Harrington’s sermon which will be acclaimed long after we pass from this world.

Once he’d confessed to a vast litany of sins habitually committed throughout his lifetime, Jack’s soliloquy really caught fire. He detailed his brief affair with the Praying Band, explaining that consequent to his conversion he’d turned his back upon everything he valued most in life – Big Louise, most of all. Then, in a prophet’s roar, Happy Jack Harrington counted off each extraordinary thing he’d forfeited to the ladies’ Lord Temperance. Still, a contrite Jack admitted he was solely to blame for his misfortunes, letting it be known he had freely chosen to follow a false god.

Happy Jack offered up his trials as hard lessons learned. He had emerged from darkness a saved soul, he proclaimed, born once again. This illumination had led him to the key of righteous living. That holy key unlocked sacred hidden doors, behind which rested salvation, eternal grace and the ultimate human truth—that sobriety was the root of all evil. Then Happy Jack Harrington faced up to heaven with hands outstretched, fairly shouting to his Lord Father that should ever again God find Happy Jack Harrington drawing even one single sober breath—that God in His infinite mercy should smite him and send him howling straight to hell.

It’s said that Happy Jack Harrington never once drew a sober breath again.