Kasper Hauser. They are an absolutely hilarious four-man sketch comedy group (“skit club”) whom I have seen six or seven times, most recently a couple of Saturday nights ago at the SF Sketchfest. Not to be missed. (I have met three of the four by the simple expedient of strolling about the Mission, which is kind of odd, though it occurred to me that maybe every single person in the Mission does something that someone else is aware of; whereas I said, “My god, it’s Rob of Kasper Hauser,” and thought nothing about the person walking behind him, if the right person had been with me at the bus stop, maybe she would have thought nothing of Rob of Kasper Hauser but observed of the guy behind him, “My god, it’s the lead singer of … ”)
David Lazarus. He is the San Francisco Chronicle’s wonderful crusading business columnist. He is always writing these columns--I read them at www.sfgate.com--that say, “This company is doing such-and-such horrible things to their customers,” which is great enough, but then he adds something like, “Oh, and the CEO also runs a secret torture prison in Ypsilanti, MI, and when he was a kid, he used to leave his dog chained to the garage instead of taking him for a walk.” He ferrets out everything. And then, two days later, sometimes he writes that Dianne Feinstein is sponsoring a bill to make whatever the company was doing illegal. That is to say, he is on the side of the average consumer, he is excellent at what he does, and he gets results. He’s one of my heroes.
Naomi Wolf. She is a genius. I just read, belatedly, her 1993 book Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century. It does sound drearily informative and PC, but it’s absolutely excellent. She discusses why so many people share the goals of feminism but don’t regard themselves as or call themselves feminists. It’s full of interesting tidbits, such as the fact that when employers want to discourage female applicants for a job, they simply advertise the same job again but with a higher salary. She discusses victim feminism versus power feminism—we already are a majority in this country, so it’s not a matter of asking for power but using it.
Since writing the above paragraph I have discovered that Fire with Fire is out of print, and also that everyone hates Naomi Wolf for being conventionally attractive and having a fabulous career and lots of money and having the nerve to address women’s issues when her life appears from the outside not to have been one of suffering. Well, I don’t care. She has the right to write about whatever she feels like, and I’m glad she has tons of money and a fabulous life (maybe not 100 percent fabulous; it looks like she got divorced last year—that can’t be so fabulous), and I think her books are excellent. Is the idea that if you look a certain way and have a certain amount of money, you have to keep your mouth shut? I think not. Onwards.
PRIMTER IS BROKE!! At www.fixyourownprinter.com, there is an FAQ section that includes this question: PRIMTER IS BROKE!! The answer to that “question” is that they’d like you to survey the information available on their site before contacting them directly. Whenever I think of that, I chuckle. It makes a good all-purpose exclamation of distress: PRIMTER IS BROKE!! (In the end, I just bought a new printer, which, when it roars into life, makes all the lights in my apartment flicker, which could possibly indicate a fire hazard. My landlord spent probably a small fortune proving that the wiring throughout the building was sound and also, rightly, scolded me for using 100-watt bulbs in 60-watt fixtures, so now I have bags of 100-watt bulbs stashed away and I can’t see anything. Between that and my disappearing vision, I look better every day. Unless I get one inch from the mirror, my skin appears to be youthfully flawless.)
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