Well I didn't sell a whole lot of copies of Party Like a Rock Star

But it turns out I did sell more than La Dolce Musto (so far, anyway), and his book is filled with celebrity gossip. I suppose I shouldn't feel good about that, but I do.

Health Care for Everybody! (Eventually)

San Francisco opened enrollment in its universal health care plan yesterday. The press releases tauted the July starting date, but now that it's July it turns out the plan is only open to people who already use a couple of particular free clinics. Then it will be open to people who use all free clinics, then not until January will the plan be open to people like me who just can't afford health insurance but aren't checking in to SF General every week. So basically the plan is not covering anyone who isn't getting free health care already.

One of my writer's organizations finally expanded their health care plans outside of NYC so I called them up. For any of the plans I can afford, there are discounted doctor's visits and prescriptions and then rates for all sorts of different hospital and emergency care. The thing is they all have deductibles and maximum pay-outs. If I understand it correctly, a trip to the emergency room would involve a co-pay on each part: the ambulance, emergency room care, hospital bed, and services. If you add it all up, you've got several thousand dollars' worth of bills. I only have a few thousand dollars in my savings account, so I would be broke after a hospital visit after paying a couple hundred bucks a month for the privilege. The alternative is not having health insurance and having to declare bankruptcy from a hospital visit anyway. Either way, I'm broke at the end.

Both options are just terrific.

SF and Tahoe

Last weekend, my brother and sister-in-law (SIL) stopped through California on their way to a glamorous vacation in Hawaii. We spent one day in San Francisco and two in Tahoe.

On Saturday they arrived around 2PM. We picked up a car from the airport and headed back to the city. After an always-awesome burrito at Papalote, they napped while I worked. Later that day, we did some shopping down Valencia Street, then headed over to the Chinese New Year Parade.

I had no idea how big this event was. The parade is two hours long, and that makes for a lot of floats. It seems that every junior high school in the Bay Area has its own dragon dance squad, and all of them were out. I'm not a big fan of parades usually, but this one had lots of little kids dressed up like little pigs, so it was cute as heck.

After that we went to AsiaSF, the restaurant filled with "gender illusionist" servers. Now, I see drag all the time but the relatives don't. My SIL was fascinated. "I want to talk to them and get to know their stories!" she says.

AsiaSF is filled with mostly birthday and bachelorette parties, so a good 80% of the patrons are female. This is odd for a drag show crowd. The food was pretty good. The cocktails were overly sweet, but that's what you expect at a bar that caters to women drinkers. The songs and lip-synch acts that the waitresses did on the bar (three songs, once an hour) were not good quality drag, but my relatives seemed to enjoy it all the same. Overall I'd say it's a fine experience, but best left to tourists and others for drag is unusual.

The next morning we got up early and headed to South Lake Tahoe for some snowboarding. We stayed at the Harrah's casino, which was not bad at all. My brother and I went snowboarding for the second half of the day.

I'd only been snowboarding twice before, and it turns out Heavenly is not the best place for the sport. The views from the top of the mountain and on the actual slopes are incredible- you can see across Lake Tahoe and far into Nevada- but many of the intermediate-level slopes are too flat so I spent a heck of a lot of time stopping and carrying my board as opposed to riding it. No wonder there were so many more skiers than snowboarders on the mountain.

That night we just went out for dinner and gambled away a few dollars at the casino. The next day while my brother went for snowboarding, SIL and I rented cross-country skis on which we barely crossed 200 yards before we headed back to the bar for bloody marys. Then after lunch we did the inner tube slide. Because it was almost 50 degrees out, the snow melted and turned into a big ice slick, so you could get whizzing around the bends of the track.

Later than night we went to a restaurant with all the class of Dennys in a restaurant with a stream running through it, played Dance Dance Revolution (I was much better at it than the first time I played, as I didn't know you're supposed to step on the steps when they hit the top of the screen), and then hit the hay.


They got up at 3:30AM to take a shuttle to the Reno airport, and I slept in until 8 or so before driving back to SF then hitting the airport later the same day.

Note to Self

I read most of the current New York magazine article on children's self-esteem. It's about how praising children's intelligence actually makes them lazy and unwilling to try things at which they might fail, whereas children praised for their effort work harder and do better.

(By the way, after reading that summary sentence, you can skip the article. I was about 3,000 words into it when I realized it was just repeating that thought ad nauseum.)

I only read the article because I hate children, and know that the self-esteem nonsense has been creating monsters out of them for decades. If you've ridden public transit, surely you've seen it too: the stupid (and/or poor) kids scream endlessly about how great they are when they can't even form coherent sentences, arguing over their inherent perfection. The smarter (and/or richer) kids air their unearned entitlement whenever possible, spouting banal nonsense to each other (as opposed to at each other like the poor kids), then perking up and throwing around statistics when impressible adults are around.

Aside: I also believe that the basic wrongness of hip-hop music is due to self-esteem training that began in the 1970's and 80's. The person doing the heavy lifting is the anonymous guy making the beats, who is rarely also the person talking over them. The one rapping about how great he is is usually unoriginal and untalented and learned the value of high self-esteem in the public school system. It's not that all rappers are without artistic merit, but almost anyone could have a hit album if Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, or the Neptunes were making the beats and producing it.

But back to my story- after all, what is blogging if not talking about oneself incessantly, like rappers of the internet- I realized that I was a test case for the praising intelligence versus praising effort.

I always got straight A's in everything until college. My brother was a B and C student. I'd bring home a report card and it would always be the same old thing, but if my brother got a B+ in something then they'd fall over themselves and we'd all go out for sundaes at Friendly's to celebrate. I think there was some reward system where we'd get 20 bucks or some portion of it for good grades, and they'd fluff up my brother's portion to encourage him, whereas to me they mustered all the enthusiasm of paying taxes.

But here's the real rub: My parents once told me when I was in 7th grade or so that they thought my brother was actually more intelligent, and I was not as smart but just worked harder. So rather than praise me for good grades they insulted me. (Note: is it any wonder I hated my parents?) This didn't result in me throwing myself off a bridge, but it drove me to try harder and get smarter and further prove that my parents are stupid hicks.

In the end though, my brother developed a work ethic in college and is the married one with a couple of houses whereas I stew in adolescent squalor. But I do work really hard at it.

Life's Full of Smurfs

I have had a backpack full of change (except for quarters) that I've been trying to get rid of forever. I go to one Safeway and they don't have a CoinStar machine any more. I go to another one and wait in line only to have the only one that works break down on the person in front of me. And today I learned that the CoinStar machines, the ones that don't take out 10% of your money for a service fee if you get an Amazon.com gift certificate instead of cash, have been replaced by CoinMaster machines that still do.

Note to banks: fuck you for not taking loose change. You're a bank! If there was a bank that offered free coin counting machines, I'd switch to that bank on principle.

So anyway, I was in Safeway getting ripped off by the CoinMaster, then went shopping. I noticed that the Veggie Patch fake chicken nuggets were on sale two-for-one, so I bought two of them. I only buy the fake meat- this brand and Morningstar Farms stuff- when it's on sale because normally it's also a huge ripoff. Why does a hamburger with buns and crap cost a buck at McDonald's while a veggie burger made out of the stuff you feed to the cows that make those burgers cost four bucks a pack?

The problem when the fake chicken nuggets are on two-for-one sale is that I come home and eat two packs of them right away, thus saving no money and doubling my caloric intake. Somehow, this is someone else's fault.

For 'Surance

As of December 1, I have no health insurance. I am currently eligible for COBRA until the end of January, so if something happens by then I can retroactively pay for it. The problem is that COBRA is $350/month, which is over $4,000 per year. I just can't afford that.

I'm not eligible for any of the emergency medical plans that are much cheaper, because of pre-existing conditions (high cholesterol), so I can't opt for that.

I looked into joining the National Writer's Union, but it still costs $35o/month for their insurance plans, and it costs a couple hundred bucks in application fees and dues. So COBRA is actually less expensive.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to create a universal health care plan for city residents, which is scheduled to begin on July 1, 2007.

Health Access Program

What: A plan that will extend the charity-care services to an estimated 82,000 uninsured San Francisco adults.

Who qualifies: Uninsured residents who are not eligible for government programs such as Medi-Cal.

Cost: About $200 million a year, funded by private employers, taxpayers and participants.

When: Begins July 1.

The Chronicle article says that a lot of the plan's details aren't worked out, such as how much individuals will have to pay. The plan is set to cost $200/month per person to run.

If I had to pay for my own insurance, I could afford $200/month. That's still a lot of money, but oh well. I tried to join Kaiser Permanente's plan that costs a little bit over $200/month, but of course I was turned down. It sounds like I'm the perfect candidate for this plan- not poor enough that I'm on Welfare, but not rich enough to afford the huge premiums of most insurance plans.

I doubt that the plan will actually happen by July 1, but it would be nice. I just have to remember not to fall off a barstool and break an arm between now and then.

Newspaper Futures

There was a really good article in the SF Weekly about the future of the SF Chronicle. (And one of the rare mature articles about the Chron to come out of the Weekly- usually they're juvenile.) It was an analysis of the direction of the newspaper, from a money perspective. The Chronicle is losing subscribers faster than most newspapers, and losing a million dollars a week in the process. On the other hand, readership of the paper seems to be growing, as many people read it online. Yet the online arm certainly makes less money than print. Some points that stuck out in the story:

• The Chron is transforming from a publishing company to an information company.
  
• They're selling their printing presses, and will now outsource the printing of the newspaper.
  
• They're investing hugely in the online arm of the company, adding podcasts, additional photography, video, and a new "continuous news desk" to facilitate getting news reported quickly.
• They recognize that by the time you get the paper, you already know all the news that happened yesterday, so they're not bothering to print it on the front page anymore.
• New staff must be able to say how a blog or podcasting will add to their beat.
  
• They're beefing up the feature sections of the newspaper, instead of hard news reporting.
  

I not only find this fascinating, but I think it's a great vision of the future. The news is old before the newspaper can print it, so don't focus on printing it. On the other hand, a publication that's all feature stories is called a magazine. The trick will be finding the balance in getting the amount of feature story revenue to afford the news coverage and reporting staff.

Though it doesn't appear they're offering it right now, in recent months the newspaper has allowed a partial-week subscription of the print edition Wednesday through Sunday. Why would they do that? Because those are when the features sections come out: Wednesday Food, Thursday 96 Hours, Friday Wine, and the big Sunday edition.

That subscription offer was the first sign I saw that the Chron knows the value of these sections. You get your news online, but many features are more fun to read in print. This is the reason I like to see the paper. In the paper, recipe stories look better. Nightlife and social scene pictures look better. Long stories read better.

Ads are less obtrusive in print than they are online. Online, they try all sorts of tricks to put them in your face like pop-ups and click-throughs, which intrinsically makes you hate them. In print, they line the sides of the page and I actually glance through them quickly to see if there is anything interesting. Online? I want to avoid them.

So assuming the Chron knows all this, what would make the printed paper a cultural dynamo? What would make people like me subscribe to it again because there is more value in the features sections? Here are my suggestions:

• Put the travel stories in one place. Right now there is the Sunday Travel section, then another travel article in the Sunday Datebook, then also a Thursday Travel section. In the end, the Sunday Travel section is too thin and you might miss content printed other places in the paper. Why not combine all the stories in one place, and break it into local travel, national, international, and specialty travel just like the format of the paper itself.
  
• (That said, I have two pitches out to their travel section, so I would just like to say all the travel sections are perfect just the way they are.)
  
• Expand the Books section. I'm not sure why this section shrunk so much recently. San Francisco is supposed to have one of the highest numbers of bookstores and bars per capita. But the book reviews there I've usually read in several different places before the Chronicle prints them. As Litquake and other literary events prove, San Franciscans love books and authors, so the paper should reflect that a little bit better.
  
• Michael Bauer's food blog on the website is great reading. I think that content- trend pieces mostly- would work well in the pages of the paper. The print version doesn't give much of an indication that Bauer's got his finger on the pulse of culinary San Francisco- he just reviews single venues- but the stuff in his blog is what eating in this city is all about. Likes/dislikes/trends/annoyances/etc. (People have a less of a problem with dogs in restaurants than they do babies.) On the other hand, you wouldn't get the awesome comments that people leave on his blog, from diners who never tip more than 8% to waiters who think anything less than 25% is an insult.
  
• The Wine Section should hire Camper English full-time to cover cocktails, spirits, beer, bars, home mixology, and the like, and to blog for them as well. Duh No Brainer!
  

And likewise, the online version of the paper could be better tuned to its advantages. Possible improvements are:

• Tagging news stories. This would allow users to easily create customized news pages for themselves. For example, a story about a murder in Tahoe would be tagged with "Tahoe" "crime." One about skiing in Tahoe would be tagged with "Tahoe," "ski" and maybe "travel."
  
• Then users could build specialty news pages based on keywords, like news aggregation sites.
  
• This would also make searching the archives easier.
  
• This would also drive up ad revenue, as items tagged with keywords like "ski" would get targeted ads like "skiweatherreport.com" posted nearby.
  
• Additional photos, videos, and podcasts for news stories. The Chronicle has already been doing this with feature stories. In the age of digital photography, it costs almost nothing to put up extra photos that accompany print news stories. So why not do more of this? Photo pages make for great online ad placement, as people are used to clicking "next" with a new ad on each page.
  

Like many people in this city, I want the hometown paper to be something I'm proud of. I don't want it to be all fluff and wire stories (see: The Examiner) even if that's the bare bones way to stay profitable. You can drive up revenue in the culture sections of the newspaper to pay for the news reporting. There are advantages to online news (speed, searchability, repackaging opportunities) and of print (layout, advertising, texture) that can compliment each other by taking advantage of different aspects of the same stories.

So get it together, Chron.

And P.S. Hire me to rock your Wine section.