Who Reads Yesterday's Papers?
-A battle is brewing over the putting of Marines commended for heroism in the Iraqi War on billboards throughout the area. The billboards are part of the Marines' "Hometown Heroes" campaign which puts the pictures of local Marines up on the billboards with a mention of what award they have won and why. One of those who will be featured is Cpl. Michael Montemayor of San Jose who braved enemy gunfire and ran into a canal to rescue another injured Marine. This being the Bay Area, however, not all are psyched on the idea. Critics are calling the program a recruiting tool and "propaganda" because in honoring someone for heroism, they are making heroism seem, umm, heroic and thus might get people to join the military to be a hero. Not every anti-war group is against the billboards, however as some are pointing out that it's okay to call someone brave enough to jump into enemy fire a hero and still disagree with the war.
-And in another story showing how we're a little different than most people, developers in Hayward are asking the City Council to change the way they assign house numbers because they're finding it difficult to sell homes whose numbers are bad feng shui. Due to Alameda county rules, house numbers are assigned based on how far they are from downtown Oakland. Houses in Hayward and a couple of other cities have numbers in the five digits and some of those numbers are bad feng shui. Which means, yes, that in California, it's okay to buy exorbitantly priced houses with little acreage but not okay to buy a house with an unlucky number. Last week city council members unanimously agreed to allow certain developers to shorten their numbers so they wouldn't scare off potential homeowners.
SFist MattyMatt who forwarded this story off to us, also mentions that he knows someone on the Friends of the Urban Forest who tells him that they've been having trouble installing trees in the Sunset due to Feng Shui concerns. Now that you can't cut down a tree unless it's pretty much voted on and decided by every committee in the city, we can't wait for someone to apply to cut down a tree to get good chi to see which politically correct issue takes precedent over the other-- saving the trees or saving some Eastern superstition.
Is a world in which we don't have photos of Jessica Simpson shopping a world worth living in?
-The New Year is bringing in a lot of new laws with it, but not much in the way of anything exciting as most of the big attempts at new laws were vetoed by the Governor or held up in court. Two of those laws held up in court are ones calling for restrictions in selling video games to kids and banning junk faxes. And no, we don’t know whether the Founding Fathers would be okay with bombarding fax machines with junk faxes and if they were, it's because they never sat near a fax machine. One of the more interesting new laws is one protecting one of California's most precious resources- celebrities. The new law against "stalkarazzi" says paparazzi will be three times liable for any damage they inflict trying to take pictures of Britney going to Starbucks and could lose profits they make in selling the photos. Opponents of the measure, mainly those people who make a living photographing celebrities like some sort of wild safari photographer, claim that it's a freedom of the press issue and, wait for it-- unconstitutional. See comment about original intent of Founding Fathers, although we heard Ben Franklin was a big fan of published sketches of Betsy Ross nipple slips.