Who Reads Yesterday's Papers?
With the baseball season over, we are faced with this big question: now what do we do with ourselves?
-Bay Area bound refugees from Hurricane Katrina are discovering something about the Bay Area: it's friggin expensive here. FEMA gives families a little over $2000 a month to get by until they get resettled either elsewhere or back in New Orleans and as we all know, $2000 a month in the Bay Area doesn't get you very far. Especially if you have a family. And that's not the only problem. In a quote we find awfully scary for various reasons, one of the evacuees said he was looking at a place in West Oakland, but didn't want to move there because, among other things, the "schools weren’t good." Considering Louisiana is well known as a poor, backwards-ass state, what does that say about the schools in Oakland?
-In response to the increasingly controversial controversy over TIC conversions and Ellis Act evictions, Gavin has announced that he will form a task force to look into it and got Aaron Peskin to help out. We're not experts on housing policy, but we think we can save a whole bunch of time and money with this solution to the issue: build more housing.
-Think the hose thing is the biggest obstacle SF would face if the Big One hit? Think again. Turns out the communication systems are all out of whack too. Between seventeen different agencies with seventeen different radios and a whole bunch of radio frequencies, there's no easy way for all the various agencies to communicate with each other. Unlike the hose thing, though, this isn't one of those Only in San Francisco things as it's a problem that plagues other cities and has caused problems in the past (the Oakland fires fourteen years ago and New York on 9/11). Still, we can't help but have the feeling that if the Big One hits, we're so screwed. On the other hand, it’s a good thing we're discovering this now instead of, say, when we actually need to use these things.
-That shark that almost ate Sawyer on "Los"t had a logo on it? We're not sure what's crazier-- that the shark's is all part of the mystery or that people noticed it and posted screen caps of it all over the internets.
-Matier & Ross have a good story about San Francisco schools having to spend money to upgrade their showers to make it handicapped accessible. Sounds great, right? Problem here is that many schools never actually use the showers. In fact, some of them had to move out all the storage they put in the showers to begin working on them. One spokesman for SF schools says that the reason why schools don't use the showers is because they can't afford towels. Maybe the schools in New Orleans could afford towels?