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Wartales overview: a dirty medieval fantasy RPG rife with emergent tales

Daily SF News — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 12:14:10 +0000

Wartales review
This grungy medieval low fantasy tactical RPG isn’t just a sandbox, but a quick-sandbox, capable of sucking you right in with emergent stories and moments equally thrilling and silly. The trade off here is it can lack a bit of momentum, but if you stay curious, you’ll end up well rewarded by its layered and considered world and systems.

Developer: Shiro Games
Publisher: Shiro Unlimited
Release: April 12th 2023
On: Windows
From: Steam
Price: £30/€35/$35

‘The Tank’, I’ll admit, is a monumentally uninspired name for the mace-wielding brick privy of a man I’d bestowed the dubious honour of soaking up hits in place of my squishier mercs, but when sandbox tactical RPG Wartales let me assemble a party of 12 mad lasses and tapped chaps, the stash of good nicknames was always going to be the first casualty. So, The Tank he lived, and also died. Questing endlessly in this grimy medieval world won’t cut it. You’ll also need to keep your troupe paid and fed, so when evening fell to find nought but a handful of foraged mushrooms and a single mouldy apple I’d pried from the fingertips of a disemboweled bandit, it was time to get creative.

“Waste not, want not”, said the Earl of Human Sandwich, the inventor of cannibalism (I’m told). With this in mind, I’d invested one of my early ‘Knowledge Points’ into a tech that let me repurpose my dearly departed as delicious drumsticks. Slain friendlies don’t disappear after battle. Instead, you’ll find their tastefully dressed corpses in the loot menu afterwards. Ghoulishly, the ‘loot all’ option doesn’t add their cadavers to your inventory with the rest. You’ll have to manually drag them over, giving you just enough time to consciously make the decision to either bury or eat them. I did not bury him.

Now, here’s something you never want to say about someone you’ve eaten: this was not the last I saw of The Tank. I’d throw him in the pot along with some berries I’d brought at the market, and some fish I’d caught through a minigame fun enough to make me take a note that said “why is the fishing better than Dredge, a game about fishing?!?” My troupe would feast, sleep, and then I’d find The Tank’s corpse back in my inventory again. The boring explanation involves bugs, but I like to think my gang treated his decomposing remains as a sort of communion wafer, nibbling on his flesh with ascetic restraint. I eventually foisted the half-eaten lump on a blacksmith whose face I didn’t like for a single gold piece which I then spent on wine. Welcome to Wartales.

A year and a bit ago, I wrote about the nuts, bolts, and beans of the experience in early access. The broad headline for this 1.0 release is, “Like that, but more of it”, although that doesn’t quite tell the whole story, since even the first area has been refined and deepened. The basic flow of Wartales goes thusly: Go to a nearby village, get some contracts, fight a turn-based battle, level up, kit out your troupe, buy some food, maybe go fishing or foraging or craft some armour or capture a bear with a rope and indoctrinate it into joining your mercenary troupe, maybe progress the overarching quest for the area of the map you’re currently in, go back to the village, get paid, repeat. Basically, every step here seems to have benefitted tremendously from not just the reality, but also the ethos of long-term early access. Namely: How can we make this relatively peripheral system better? And you do that with as many systems as Wartales has, eventually you end up with a really solid title.

A chief gripe of mine previously was the length of the turn-based battles, which started to chafe after a while because of their frequency and because, arguably, they’re not even the main event here. To say that these tactically interesting, tense, and wonderfully animated fights aren’t the game’s main event is more of a compliment than it sounds, since one of Wartales main strengths is how each of its many systems, from party management to economy tweaking, can be gripping in their own right. Anyway, they’ve reduced the number of enemies in a battle, but made the individual enemies tougher, so fights are briefer but more deadly.

One of Wartales main strengths is how each of its many systems, from party management to economy tweaking, can be gripping in their own right

Another new(ish?) feature is the choice to play with either enemy scaling or region-locked difficulty. You know that bit in Dark Souls where you find Havel the Rock at the bottom of the tower in the game’s first proper area and he’s arguably far out of your capabilities, but if you spend time learning a few tricks, you can take him down early? I love that stuff. It’s not just a challenge thing – it gives RPG worlds so much gravitas. Naturally, I played region-locked.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what’s been introduced in what stage of early access, but camp management also seems to have grown tremendously since I last played. A few hours in, my party ventured into an ancient tomb that had me using a limited stock of expensive torches to explore winding passageways and find runes to unlock a puzzle door. It also had me solve a slide puzzle which, I swear to god, could have been the cut knuckle-chewer from the Resi 4 remake, so profoundly irritating was it. After fighting off some crusty shamblers in the dark, I eventually found a sarcophagus full of relics that needed appraising. The game let me build a lectern at camp, appoint one of my troupe to the ‘scholar’ profession, and accrue knowledge points over time. After a while, your shabby campfire will eventually blossom into a respectable spread of useful spots, each granting meaningful bonuses for combat, exploration, and character growth.

This is all very nice, but the real secret sauce here dwells in Wartales place as what I’ve previously called ‘storybox’ games; your Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, games that offer sets of character traits and interactions, of nouns and verbs, then allow them to interact with each other in surprising but logical ways, effectively turning the game into a little box you poke at to make stories fall out of. It’s also got something in common with that ‘anecdote factory’ term that Far Cry tried to claim, even if 90% of said anecdotes were some variation on “set fire to X, got attacked by a wild Y” (Yak, Yucatan Squirrel, Yellow-eyed Penguin.) Wartales, though, earns the ‘tales’ part of its name well. Some part-scripted, some personal, but most genuinely successful at sucking you further into its quick-sandbox. No real wars, though, but I suppose ‘six-man rat fracas tales’ isn’t as catchy.

It’s with this in mind that my primary criticism of Wartales is probably a little unfair, but please know that I’m making it of a very cool game that I think could be ice-cold if I felt just a little more momentum to progress through its world. Yep, I’m asking for a main questline. Some central, driving mystery at the heart of this evocatively grimy low fantasy world that, maybe, you don’t uncover anything significant about for hours before happening upon some passing nugget of information or a hint toward something that blows its fiction wide open. I think a lot of RPGs can go super heavy on the main quest to the detriment of world building. In contrast, Wartales is all worldbuilding. Multi-layered region questlines offer insight into class struggle and disease, refugee crises and food shortages, but ruins aside, any real-world history feels ephemeral. All the better to forge your own personal (war)tales within? Absolutely. A little lacking in vivacity if your roleplaying brain doesn’t feel like putting in the work today, and you just want to be barded at? Also yes.

Another non-criticism that might be better described as ‘an understandable annoyance’: the amount of walking you do in Wartales is immense. More like Walktales amirite? I’d estimate at least a quarter of the game is spent hoofing across (very pretty) fields and dales, down dust paths, and up mountain trails. It’s not necessarily thrilling, but it does feel too deliberate to consider a flaw to solve rather than an intentional choice to experience. Everything here has a trade off – it’s somewhat of an economic sim in this sense – whether that’s the economy of actual wages and food, or the economy of fatigue and danger. So even that traditionally rote act of travel is redolent with both friction and possibility. This doesn’t mean you’re an unappreciative fool for getting irked with it though, and you might well do so, so something to keep in mind. You also unlock fast travel later, but it takes a bit.

But it is that same friction and possibility that results in some of the game’s best moments. After questing in the second area, I felt underpowered, so I spent some of my accrued knowledge points of some blacksmith recipes, and went poking around a nearby woods for boars, to kill for leather to make armour. I did find boars, but they were ghost boars. Also, ghost wolves, and a terrifying ghost ram boss called a ‘nightmare’. I lost two of my rogues in that fight, stabby Corhan and stabby Hakert, the stabby twins. Things were looking grim until a rogue bolt of lightning one-shotted the ghost ram. Turns out there is a god! And one whomst bloody loves a bit of stabbing.

It’s workmanlike without being uninspired, fascinating without being flashy. It’s like a loveable cockney chimney sweep with a sparkle in its eye

The presentation is probably a bit nicer than it honestly needed to be across the board. The music is lovely, all driving war drums layered with whimsical, slightly discordant European folk instruments. The minigames are all great aside from that bastard slide puzzle. Also, get this: I once picked two locks on a three lock chest but broke my last pick on the final one. I came back to it about three hours later with a fresh set of picks, and the two locks I did last time were still open! This sounds incredibly minor but I feel it exemplifies a sort of coherence and persistence about the world that I feel is crucial to the soul of this sort of game.

And this here is sort of the key to Wartales, I think. It feels consistent. It’s workmanlike without being uninspired, fascinating without being flashy. It’s like a loveable cockney chimney sweep with a sparkle in its eye. It might be too mundane to scratch the itch for high adventure, but if you’re feverish for a grounded low fantasy ramble with the occasional giant rat, Wartales will cure ya. Also, apropos of nothing: I still haven’t played Battle Brothers yet, so I don’t know. Go away.

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35 Nursery Rhyme Origin Tales That Inform Fascinating Tales

Daily SF News — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 14:25:08 +0000

Chances are that when you were a kid, your parents sang you nursery rhymes to get you to sleep. And if that was the case, it is very likely they sang old nursery rhymes that were passed on from generation to generation like some family relic. A relic whose origins are unknown, meaning undiscovered, and powers unchanged. However, there comes a time when every mystery is solved, so if you came here to figure out nursery rhyme origin stories, you’ll absolutely find just that in this list.

But, before you begin gleaning the information on origin stories of nursery rhymes, be warned that most of them are much more sinister than you would’ve cared to think. Nursery rhymes often served the purpose of cautionary tales, although who thought that slipping the idea of chopped-off fingers to kids would help them fall asleep is beyond us. It’s probably because life, in general, used to be much more brutal than in our time, and these nursery rhymes for kids seemed appropriate, well, for kids. However, we do warn you again – chopped-off fingers are just a cherry on top, and revisiting these children’s rhymes in your adult years might make you all goose-bumpy with their cruelty and brutishness.

Okay, now that we’ve shared our warnings not once but twice, and since you’re still here, you can now proceed to the children’s nursery rhymes and the stories behind them. Once you are done with these shocking tales, be sure to upvote the old nursery rhymes whose origin stories were the most unexpected to you; we’re very curious to see which one of them will be the winner!

“Baa Baa Black Sheep”

This poem is allegedly about the medieval wool tax imposed by King Edward I, under which he earned one-third of the proceeds of every sack. Having three sacks of wool meant that one was for the king, so to speak. Additionally, since black sheep wool couldn’t be coloured, it sold for less money, making it less profitable.

“Baa, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,
Three bags full;
One for my master,
One for my dame,
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane.”

bbc.com Report

“Little Miss Muffet”

Patience Muffet, often known as Little Miss Muffet, was a little child. Her dad, Dr. Muffet, was a well-known entomologist who published the first academic list of British insects between 1553 and 1604. Little Miss Muffet was eating curds and whey for breakfast when she was startled by one of his spiders and fled. According to Dr. Muffet’s birthdate, this specific Little Miss Muffet nursery rhyme is believed to have been written in the late 16th century.

“Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
There came a big spider,
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.”

Iona Archibald Opie and Peter Opie Report

“Three Blind Mice”

Three Blind Mice was first recorded in writing in 1609. Three Protestant allies known as “the three blind mice” were charged with conspiring to overthrow Queen Mary I. The queen who shared extensive estates with her husband, King Philip of Spain, is referred to as the “farmer’s wife.” The three guys were burned at the stake.

“Three blind mice. Three blind mice.
See how they run. See how they run.
They all ran after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,
Did you ever see such a sight in your life,
As three blind mice?”

education.com Report

“One for Sorrow”

The poem is based on ornithomancy myths about magpies, which were thought to be a sign of bad luck in various cultures and in Britain at least as early as the seventeenth century. The poem was originally mentioned in a remark in John Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities of Lincolnshire, which was published about 1780.

“One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.”

Iona Opie and Moira Tatem Report

“Rub a Dub Dub”

This poem originally dealt with sexual amusement. “Three maids” were in a tub in the story. The limerick was about a peep show where guests may see ladies wash, a common feature at traveling fairs. The baker, the candlestick maker, and the butcher were among the onlookers. Later, the Victorians modified the terms to place the three men in the tub and referred to themselves as cleaning it up.

“Rub-a-dub-dub,
Three men in a tub,
And who do you think they be?
The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker,
And all of them out to sea.”

Chris Roberts Report

“Doctor Foster”

The origins of this rhyme may go back more than 700 years, to the reign of King Edward I, despite being first printed in 1844. Edward was a powerful guy, stood over six feet tall. He was frequently called Longshanks. Edward was also regarded as a smart and knowledgeable man, earning the moniker Dr. Foster; the name’s origins are lost to time. Edward, who was not a big friend of the Welsh, was probably at Gloucester because of its advantageous location at a significant River Seven crossing into Wales.
According to legend, the king rode his horse in the wrong direction after mistaking a a huge ditch for a minor puddle when he arrived during a storm. Infuriated and perhaps humiliated by the ordeal, he vowed never to return to the town when his horse and rider became stuck in the muck and had to be dragged out.

“Doctor Foster went to Gloucester,
In a shower of rain;
He stepped in a puddle,
Right up to his middle,
And never went there again.”

Iona Archibald Opie and Peter Opie Report

“Jack and Jill”

This well-known rhyme, originally titled “Jack and Gill,” describes King Charles I’s attempt to enact a reform of liquid taxes. Jacks and gills were apparently used as units of measurement. Charles lowered the volume of these measures after Parliament rejected the tax.

“Jack and Gill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Gill came tumbling after.”

Albert Jack Report

“Row, Row, Row Your Boat”

The song’s first publication dates back to 1852, when it was released with words that are close to those used today but a radically different music. Two years later, it was issued once more with new music and the same words. The Franklin Square Song Collection initially included the words and the contemporary music in 1881, naming Eliphalet Oram Lyte but leaving it unclear as to whether or not he was the composer or adaptor.

“Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.”

William E. Studwell Report

“Roses are Red”

A children’s rhyme and love poem, it has produced several hilarious and parodic variations and has come to be associated with Valentine’s Day.
The rhyme is based on literary devices that may be found in Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene from 1590.

“Roses are red
Violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet
And so are you.”

sacred-texts.com Report

“Akai Kutsu”

The widely accepted idea holds that the lyrics were inspired by a real-life event. Iwasaki Kimi, a young woman from Fushimi in Shizuoka Prefecture, is thought to have served as the inspiration for the image of the woman wearing red shoes.
In the beginning, Kimi’s mother, Kayo Iwasaki, raised her alone until relocating to Hokkaido and marrying Shirou Suzuki. When Kimi was 3 years old, her parents moved to a Hokkaido commoner’s farm, which at the time was being closely scrutinized as a component of the Socialist movement. However, farming was a hard life, so Kayo gave Kimi’s upbringing to a married American missionary couple named Hewitt, using her father-in-law Sano Yasuyoshi as a middleman.
The Hewitt family eventually made the decision to move back to the United States, but they were unable to bring Kimi with them since she had the then-incurable disease tuberculosis. Instead, they sent her to the church’s orphanage in Azabu, Tokyo, and left without her. Kimi passed away at the orphanage at age nine, never getting to see her mother again. Kayo believed during her whole life that Kimi had traveled to America with the Hewitts, but in reality, Kimi had passed away from tuberculosis at a Tokyo orphanage.

“A young girl with red shoes
was taken away by a foreigner.
She rode on a ship from Yokohama pier
taken away by a foreigner
I imagine right now she has become blue-eyed
living in that foreigner’s land.
Every time I see red shoes, I think of her
And every time I meet a foreigner, I think of her.”

Tokuma Shoten Report

“If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride”

The lines “If wishes were thrushes beggars would feed birds” from William Camden’s “Remains of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine,” published in 1605, are the rhyme’s first recognized predecessor. The phrase “and wishes were horses, pure [poor] folks wald ride” originally appeared in James Carmichael’s Proverbs in Scots, published in 1628. “If wishes would bide, beggars would ride” is the first time beggars are mentioned in English proverbs, appearing in John Ray’s Collection of English Proverbs in 1670.

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
If turnips were watches, I’d wear one by my side.
If “ifs” and “ands” were pots and pans,
There’d be no work for tinkers’ hands.”

G. L. Apperson Report

“Jack Sprat”

Jack Sprat could have been King Charles I, who was left “lean” when parliament refused to tax him but was free to “wipe the plate clean” after dissolving parliament with his queen Henrietta Maria, according to history writer Linda Alchin.

“Jack Sprat could eat no fat,
His wife could eat no lean.
And so between them both, you see,
They licked the platter clean.”

Linda Kathryn Alchin Report

“Old McDonald Had a Farm”

The first known version of the song is “In the Fields in Frost and Snow,” which appears in Thomas d’Urfey’s 1706 opera “The Kingdom of the Birds or Wonders of the Sun.” It’s unclear if this is where the song first appeared or if his interpretation was based on an older folk tune. The animals shift from verse to verse, and the rhythm is quite similar to current renditions, but the melody is in a different minor key.

“Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O!
And on his farm he had a cow, E-I-E-I-O!
With a moo-moo here and a moo-moo there,
Here a moo, there a moo,
Everywhere a moo-moo,
Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O!”

tunearch.org Report

“Georgie Porgy”

It is believed that the “Georgie Porgie” was actually the Prince Regent, afterwards known as George IV. George, who was a little on the tubby side and weighed more than 20 stone with a waist of 50 inches (Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie), was often made fun of in the popular press of the day because of his appearance.

“Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry,
When the girls came out to play,
Georgie Porgie ran away.”

historic-uk.com Report

“John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt”

The verses of the nursery rhyme “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” are American in origin and may be an allusion to the massive influx of German immigrants throughout American history. Both the last name Schmidt and the last name prefix “heimer” have Germanic roots. It is a popular children’s rhyme that is sometimes referred to as a “bus song.” In order to parody the lengthy names that are frequently encountered in this language, the pseudo-German term “Jingleheimer” was presumably utilized.

“John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt
His name is my name too
When ever we go out
The people always shout
There goes
John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.”

Dairy River Report

“Star Light Star Bright”

The rhyme which alludes to the idea that you can wish upon a star, is said to have its roots in late 19th-century America.

“Star light, star bright,
First star I see tonight;
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have the wish I wish tonight.”

Iona Opie and Moira Tatem Report

“The Grand old Duke of York”

The Battle of Wakefield, which took place on December 30, 1460, and Richard, Duke of York, the pretender to the throne of England and Protector of England are said to be referenced in the nursery rhyme. Richard set up a defensive posture against the Lancastrian army while the Duke of York and his army marched to the castle he owned at Sandal.

“Oh, the grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.”

Iona Archibald Opie and Peter Opie Report

“Lavender’s Blue”

Mr. Robert B. Waltz claims “The singer tells his girlfriend that since he loves her, she must also love him. He describes a valley where a young guy and a maid had camped together and advises them to follow suit”. This broadside version, according to Sandra Stahl Dolby, is about a girl named Nell who keeps the singer’s bed warm.

“Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly, lavender’s green,
When I am king, dilly dilly, you shall be queen:
Who told you so, dilly dilly, who told you so?
‘Twas mine own heart, dilly dilly, that told me so.”

fresnostate.edu Report

“Jack be Nimble”

The rhyme was initially discovered in a manuscript from approximately 1815, and James Orchard Halliwell began collecting it in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Jumping candlesticks was both a sort of sport and fate reading. It was believed that clearing a candle without putting out the flame would bring good fortune.

“Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick,
Jack jump over
The candlestick.”

Iona Archibald Opie and Peter Opie Report

“How Many Miles to Babylon?”

Although the poem was not written down until the nineteenth century, some have speculated that Caledon during the Crusades is what is meant by the allusion to Cantelon in the Scottish version. While the city was a frequent reference, notably in seventeenth-century England, and “Can I reach there by candlelight?” was a familiar phrase in the sixteenth century, Babylon may be a corruption of “Babyland.” It refers to the time of day when a candle needed to be lit as the daylight dwindled.

“How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?
Yes, and back again …
If your heels are nimble and your toes are light,
You may get there by candle-light”

Iona Archibald Opie and Peter Opie Report

“See Saw Margery Daw”

The rhyme may have its roots in a sawyer’s labor song that helped maintain rhythm while using a two-person saw.

“See Saw Margery Daw,
Jacky shall have a new master;
Jacky shall earn but a penny a day,
Because he can’t work any faster.”

Iona Archibald Opie and Peter Opie Report

“There Was an Old Woman Who Lived Under a Hill”

This children’s song first appeared in The Academy of Complements in 1714 as a catch.

“There was an old woman lived under the hill,
And if she’s not gone she lives there still.
Baked apples she sold, and cranberry pies,
And she’s the old woman that never told lies.”

J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps Report

“The Lion and the Unicorn”

The words of The Lion and the Unicorn were written in 1603 when James VI of Scotland united the Scottish and English kingdoms as James I of England. James, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, was designated as Elizabeth 1’s successor. As a result of the two nations’ union, a new royal coat of arms, known as “The lion and the unicorn” was created by merging Scotland’s two unicorns with England’s two lions. The British coat of arms now has one Lion and one Unicorn as a result of a compromise, and the poem “The Lion and the Unicorn” was written as a result.

“The lion and the unicorn
Were fighting for the crown
The lion beat the unicorn
All around the town.”

Iona Archibald Opie and Peter Opie Report

“London Bridge is Falling Down”

Although there are a number of potential sources for this incredibly well-known rhyme, it is most probable that the Vikings chanted it as they attacked the bridge in 1014. Variations of the song allegedly were sung by Vikings during a number of their victories.

“London Bridge is falling down,
Falling down, falling down.
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady.”

Iona Archibald Opie and Peter Opie Report

“Round and Round the Garden”

This nursery rhyme has very recent beginnings. One of the most popular presents to give a newborn infant is a “Teddy Bear,” and this tradition dates back to the early 1900s, when the Ideal Novelty and Toy Co. in America and the Steiff company in Germany created the first plush Teddy Bears. Teddy, the nickname of former American President Theodore Roosevelt, is where the term Teddy Bear originated. Theodore Roosevelt, the president, went bear hunting in Mississippi in 1902. Members of the group surrounded a juvenile black bear, which Roosevelt found injured and ordered to be mercy killed.

“Round and round the garden
Like a teddy bear;
One step, two step,
Tickle you under there!”

Iona Archibald Opie and Peter Opie Report

“Eeper Weeper”

The narrative of a chimney sweep who murders his second wife and puts her body up a chimney is depicted in this well-known English nursery rhyme and skipping song.
The rhyme has been used in this form at least since the first decade of the 20th century, according to Iona and Peter Opie.

“Eeper Weeper, chimney sweeper,
Had a wife but couldn’t keep her.
Had another, didn’t love her,
Up the chimney he did shove her.”

Iona Archibald Opie and Peter Opie Report

“To market, to Market”

The rhyme is first mentioned in John Florio’s 1598 book “A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious, and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English,” which defines “Abomba” as “a man’s home or resting place: home againe, home againe,” and the 1611 edition, which is even clearer, refers to “the place where children playing hide themselves… Also as we used to say Home againe home againe, market is done.”

“To market, to market, to buy a penny bun,
Home again, home again, market is done.”

Iona Archibald Opie and Peter Opie Report

“Bobby Shafto’s Gone to Sea”

The song was used by the followers of Robert Shafto, a British Member of Parliament for County Durham in the eighteenth century, and afterwards the borough of Downton in Wiltshire.
When he married Anne Duncombe of Duncombe Park in Yorkshire, the song is claimed to tell the tale of how he shattered Bridget Belasyse’s heart at Brancepeth Castle in County Durham, where his brother Thomas served as rector. According to reports, Bridget Belasyse passed away two weeks after learning the news.

“Bobby Shafto’s gone to sea,
Silver buckles at his knee;
He’ll come back and marry me,
Bonny Bobby Shafto!
Bobby Shafto’s bright and fair,
Combing down his yellow hair;
He’s my love for evermore,
Bonny Bobby Shafto!”

newcastle.gov.uk Report

“Humpty Dumpty”

A small, clumsy individual who was frequently full of ail was referred to as Humpty Dumpty in the past.

Additionally, because intoxicated people tend to stumble, they wouldn’t have the ideal balance when engaging in drunken antics.

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.”

Eric Partridge Report

“Pop Goes the Weasel”

Pop goes the Weasel for Fun and Frolic was released as sheet music by Miller & Beacham of Baltimore in the early 1850s. The first source that links the name to this song is this one. The music by Miller and Beacham was an adaptation of the 1700s song “The Haymakers.” The “Haymakers” country dance or jig can be found in Gow’s Repository of the Dance Music of Scotland (1799 to 1820).

“Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop! Goes the weasel.”

Albert Jack Report

“There was a Little Guinea Pig”

Like many classic nursery rhymes, the roots and lyrics of “There was a tiny guinea-pig” have buried, hidden meanings and make references to historical figures and events. The characters at King Richard III of England’s Plantagenet court are said to be the subject of references in the poem “There was a tiny guinea-pig.”
Sir Thomas Catesby was the Cat. Sir William Ratcliffe of Ordsall Hall was the Rat. Francis, Lord Lovell was a dog, a now-extinct hunting hound breed, talbot. Richard III was “The Hog” (his emblem was a white boar).

“There was a little Guinea-pig,
Who, being little, was not big;
He always walked upon his feet,
And never fasted when he eat.”

richardiii.org.uk Report

“Arthur o’ Bower”

In 1823, William Wordsworth recalled hearing this rhyme “in the time of a strong wind” as a young boy. According to an anonymous contributor to The Spectator in 1893, in the 1830s, “We yelled or sung as we ran whenever we were joyful enough to be running around in a strong wind as kids. In fact, it was frequently performed while dangling from the top of a tree since it was thought to be an essential accompaniment to the wind.”

“Arthur o’Bower has broken his band,
He comes roaring up the land.
King of Scots with all his power
Cannot turn Arthur of the Bower.”

babel.hathitrust.org Report

“As I was going by Charing Cross”

The equestrian statue of Charles I that was built during the Restoration in 1660 and transported to the location of the former Charing Cross in central London in 1675 is supposed to be the subject of the poem. Although the tarnished bronze statue’s color is mostly dark, the word “black” might be a reference to the king’s hair color.

“As I was going by Charing Cross,
I saw a black man upon a black horse;
They told me it was King Charles the First-
Oh dear, my heart was ready to burst!”

Iona Archibald Opie and Peter Opie Report

“Baby Shark”

It began as a chant or song over a campfire. The original song was likely written in the 20th century and may have been inspired by the Jaws film by camp counselors. The campers use their hands to mimic the sharks’ jaws as they introduce each member of a family of sharks in the chant.

“Baby Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo
Baby Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo
Baby Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo
Baby Shark.”

cbc.ca Report

“Did You Ever See a Lassie?”

Although this song was first collected in the United States in the latter decade of the nineteenth century and was not discovered in Great Britain until the middle of the twentieth, the usage of the names “lassie” and “laddie” indicate that it may have Scottish origins. However, it might be suggested that Scottish immigrants or Scottish-Americans may have contributed to the song’s lyrics.

“Did you ever see a lassie,
A lassie, a lassie?
Did you ever see a lassie,
Go this way and that?
Go this way and that way,
Go this way and that way.
Did you ever see a lassie,
Go this way and that?”

J. J. Fuld Report

The post 35 Nursery Rhyme Origin Tales That Inform Fascinating Tales appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

11 Tales You Have to See

Daily SF News — Sat, 26 Aug 2023 08:19:25 +0000

A roundup of the week’s most newsworthy policy and public interest press releases from PR Newswire, including a new Army campaign and projects to combat food insecurity.

NEW YORK

,

Aug. 25, 2023

/PRNewswire/ — With thousands of press releases published each week, it can be difficult to keep up with everything on PR Newswire. To help journalists covering the policy and public interest industries stay on top of the week’s most newsworthy and popular releases, here’s a roundup of stories from the week that shouldn’t be missed.

The list below includes the headline (with a link to the full text) and an excerpt from each story. Click on the press release headlines to access accompanying multimedia assets that are available for download.

Governor Green: Visitors Should Avoid West Maui For Now, Travelers Welcome Elsewhere On Maui and Other Hawaiian Islands

In alignment with Governor Green, the Hawai’i Tourism Authority urges visitors to refrain from going to

West Maui

(including

Lahaina

, Nāpili, Kāʻanapali, and

Kapalua

) as a means of respect to the people and places that have been lost in

Lahaina

during this devastating tragedy.
New Jersey Pharmacist Wins Toastmasters’ 2023 World Championship of Public Speaking

Tyson’s winning speech was titled, “Have You Been There?” and told the story of her overcoming a variety of obstacles to complete a triathlon in 2021. While she struggled mightily at times during the challenging race, listening to her inner go-getter led Tyson to triumph and enabled her to cross the accomplishment off her bucket list.
New Army campaign inspires youth to take the first step to “Be All You Can Be”

“First Steps” is the Army’s most authentic portrayal of what it means to be a Soldier, offering an up-close, personal, and unfiltered look at Soldiers embarking on some of the most powerful experiences in their Army journey.
United Pledges

$1.25 Million

in Support of Aviation and STEM Projects Across The Country This Back-to-School Season

United will donate

$1.25 million

to DonorsChoose.Org to fund aviation, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) projects across classrooms in the airline’s seven Hub markets:

Chicago

,

Denver

,

Washington, D.C.

,

New York

,

Houston

,

San Francisco

, and

Los Angeles

, as well as in

Phoenix

and across

Hawaii

.
This Back-to-School Season, No Kid Hungry Celebrates School Heroes Who Connect Kids to the Most Important School Supply: Food

“It’s going to take all of us working together to make childhood hunger in America a thing of the past,” said

Allison Shuffield

, managing director of corporate partnerships at Share Our Strength, the organization behind the No Kid Hungry campaign.
Carhartt Continues Support of Skilled Trades with Labor Day Donation Benefitting Team Rubicon’s Veteran-Led Skilled Job Training Program

Expected to continue developing over the next five years, Team Rubicon’s TRades Academy seeks to train military veterans transitioning to civilian life – as well as other workers – in disaster-standard licensed contracting skills like carpentry, electrical, plumbing, heating, ventilation and air conditioning so they can help rebuild homes in the communities that need it most.
The 2023 “Moms’ Agenda” Is Released

Mom Congress announced the bills included in its 2023 Moms’ Agenda – a series of bills to address the urgent challenges mothers face because of woefully inadequate infrastructure to support pregnancy, birth, and early parenting in the U.S.
MGM Resorts Foundation Awards More Than

$2.7 Million

to Local Nonprofit Organizations

The organizations provide services around affordable housing, economic opportunity and workforce development, K-12 education, family services, food insecurity, health and wellness, homelessness, services for seniors and services for veterans and military families.
The Bob Woodruff Foundation Publishes Understanding the PACT Act to Address Confusion Surrounding Eligibility and Benefits Under the Law

When it comes to the PACT Act – one of the largest expansions of health care for veterans in US – misinformation about eligibility and filing claims exists. This misinformation continues to confuse veterans or their survivors, and, as a result, some who may be eligible for expanded benefits are not receiving them.
This Hunger Action Month, Two Good® and Busy Philipps Are Asking People to #GetHangryForGood to Help Get Food to Those In Need

While “hangry” traditionally embodies the bad-temper or irritability that comes from being hungry, Two Good believes that hanger should instead be channeled into a force for good to help the 1 in 10 households that are experiencing food insecurity.
Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Incorporated Takes The Fight For Black Maternal Health To The Nation’s Capitol This September

On

September 20, 2023

, Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc. will host its annual Zeta Day on the Hill social action programmatic initiative where members of the organization convene together for education and to advocate for policy changes that directly impact communities of color across

the United States

.

11 Tales You Must See

Daily SF News — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 12:09:49 +0000

A roundup of the week’s most newsworthy policy and public interest press releases from PR Newswire, including a new Army campaign and projects to combat food insecurity.

NEW YORK, Aug. 25, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — With thousands of press releases published each week, it can be difficult to keep up with everything on PR Newswire. To help journalists covering the policy and public interest industries stay on top of the week’s most newsworthy and popular releases, here’s a roundup of stories from the week that shouldn’t be missed.

PR Newswire Weekly Policy & Public Interest Press Release Roundup, Aug. 21-25, 2023. Photo provided by United Airlines. https://prn.to/3LdU1Ft

Governor Green: Visitors Should Avoid West Maui For Now, Travelers Welcome Elsewhere On Maui and Other Hawaiian Islands
In alignment with Governor Green, the Hawai’i Tourism Authority urges visitors to refrain from going to West Maui (including Lahaina, Nāpili, Kāʻanapali, and Kapalua) as a means of respect to the people and places that have been lost in Lahaina during this devastating tragedy.
New Jersey Pharmacist Wins Toastmasters’ 2023 World Championship of Public Speaking
Tyson’s winning speech was titled, “Have You Been There?” and told the story of her overcoming a variety of obstacles to complete a triathlon in 2021. While she struggled mightily at times during the challenging race, listening to her inner go-getter led Tyson to triumph and enabled her to cross the accomplishment off her bucket list.
New Army campaign inspires youth to take the first step to “Be All You Can Be”
“First Steps” is the Army’s most authentic portrayal of what it means to be a Soldier, offering an up-close, personal, and unfiltered look at Soldiers embarking on some of the most powerful experiences in their Army journey.
United Pledges $1.25 Million in Support of Aviation and STEM Projects Across The Country This Back-to-School Season
United will donate $1.25 million to DonorsChoose.Org to fund aviation, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) projects across classrooms in the airline’s seven Hub markets: Chicago, Denver, Washington, D.C., New York, Houston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, as well as in Phoenix and across Hawaii.
This Back-to-School Season, No Kid Hungry Celebrates School Heroes Who Connect Kids to the Most Important School Supply: Food
“It’s going to take all of us working together to make childhood hunger in America a thing of the past,” said Allison Shuffield, managing director of corporate partnerships at Share Our Strength, the organization behind the No Kid Hungry campaign.
Carhartt Continues Support of Skilled Trades with Labor Day Donation Benefitting Team Rubicon’s Veteran-Led Skilled Job Training Program
Expected to continue developing over the next five years, Team Rubicon’s TRades Academy seeks to train military veterans transitioning to civilian life – as well as other workers – in disaster-standard licensed contracting skills like carpentry, electrical, plumbing, heating, ventilation and air conditioning so they can help rebuild homes in the communities that need it most.
The 2023 “Moms’ Agenda” Is Released
Mom Congress announced the bills included in its 2023 Moms’ Agenda – a series of bills to address the urgent challenges mothers face because of woefully inadequate infrastructure to support pregnancy, birth, and early parenting in the U.S.
MGM Resorts Foundation Awards More Than $2.7 Million to Local Nonprofit Organizations
The organizations provide services around affordable housing, economic opportunity and workforce development, K-12 education, family services, food insecurity, health and wellness, homelessness, services for seniors and services for veterans and military families.
The Bob Woodruff Foundation Publishes Understanding the PACT Act to Address Confusion Surrounding Eligibility and Benefits Under the Law
When it comes to the PACT Act – one of the largest expansions of health care for veterans in US – misinformation about eligibility and filing claims exists. This misinformation continues to confuse veterans or their survivors, and, as a result, some who may be eligible for expanded benefits are not receiving them.
This Hunger Action Month, Two Good® and Busy Philipps Are Asking People to #GetHangryForGood to Help Get Food to Those In Need
While “hangry” traditionally embodies the bad-temper or irritability that comes from being hungry, Two Good believes that hanger should instead be channeled into a force for good to help the 1 in 10 households that are experiencing food insecurity.
Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Incorporated Takes The Fight For Black Maternal Health To The Nation’s Capitol This September
On September 20, 2023, Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc. will host its annual Zeta Day on the Hill social action programmatic initiative where members of the organization convene together for education and to advocate for policy changes that directly impact communities of color across the United States.

Read more of the latest policy-related releases from PR Newswire and stay caught up on the top press releases by following @PRNpolicy and @prnedu on Twitter.

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The post 11 Tales You Must See appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Tales on San Francisco’s “doom loop” overlook alternative

Daily SF News — Sun, 14 May 2023 01:24:51 +0000

It’s the weekend and I’m dreaming of sushi. I’m Carolina A. Miranda, arts and design columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and I’m serving up all the nigiri with a side of essential arts news:

The narrative of the ‘unfixable’ city

In the United States, we have several hallowed cultural traditions: driving large cars, watching movies with lots of explosions and dumping on cities — the latter activity reaching a fever pitch during presidential election years. New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have all served as rhetorical whipping boys. Now, it is San Francisco‘s turn.

“San Francisco Falls Into the Abyss” reads a recent dispatch on the website of the conservative Hoover Institution. Earlier this month, Elon Musk described the city as “post-apocalyptic.” And now we have a report by Elizabeth Weil in Curbed that bears the ominous headline: “Spiraling in San Francisco’s Doom Loop: What it’s like to live in a city that no longer believes its problems can be fixed.”

The story opens with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff surveying “his kingdom” from the top floor of the new Salesforce tower in 2019, before moving on to a kickboxer who has left S.F. for reasons. It concludes with the deep thought: “Now, it was clear tech wouldn’t save us. Tech wouldn’t even stay in town. I rode the bus around the city, scribbling in my notebook: face of god, face of GOD, trying to keep myself open to the world as it fell apart.” (I’m not sure if it was the author’s intent to make me laugh.)

Del Seymour, right, the unofficial Mayor of the Tenderloin, walks past a sleeping homeless man while leading a tour of the neighborhood in 2019.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

San Francisco — downtown San Francisco, to be specific — is facing some staggering urban problems generated, in part, by the pandemic. This was detailed in a lengthy report by the San Francisco Chronicle in March, which likewise used the “doom loop” narrative as a frame (though its story posits some solutions). The gist of it is this: As workers remain largely remote, offices remain underpopulated; downtown areas become ghost towns; neighborhood businesses close; the tax base shrinks, and with it social services, making the problems worse, leading more people to leave the city … and you get the idea.

The problem is not unique to San Francisco. COVID-19 has had a similar effect on business districts in other cities, such as New York and Los Angeles. But none have been hit quite as hard as San Francisco, which, according to the Chronicle, remains the emptiest office market in the nation. Some of this has to do with the way San Francisco is zoned (downtown remains almost entirely commercial). Some of it has to do with the fact that the city’s economic wagons have been hitched to high-earning knowledge workers who skipped off the moment the pandemic landed. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that the city has done little to make itself more hospitable to lower- and middle-income wage earners — the very people who are more likely to stick around a city for the long haul.

And the unhoused population? It is not new. It’s perhaps simply more visible now that downtown San Francisco has grown quiet. Just peep this informative 2019 story by Matthew Green at KQED about how four decades’ worth of San Francisco mayors have dealt with the issue. Interesting fact: Swathes of the Mid-Market area were cleared under Ed Lee‘s mayoralty in the 2010s to woo tech firms.

Tech not only didn’t save San Francisco. It was complicit in propping up the scrim that kept the messiness of city life out of view.

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What Weil’s story misses (besides a conversation with an actual urban planner) is that this difficult moment marks an opportunity for San Francisco to become a more equitable city. Not everyone is crying over the doom loop, which has brought down real estate prices from mind-numbingly astronomical to a hair above unaffordable. As the Chronicle’s Noah Arroyo notes in a recent report: “Some hope the decline will lower the cost of housing so they and others can afford to move to the city — or avoid having to leave — after persistently high prices pushed or kept them out for years, or had them barely making the rent.” His story concludes with a young woman who was able to return to the Mission to live near her parents.

SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, has a list of four policy ideas for helping revitalize San Francisco’s downtown. Among them: diversifying land use and investing in public transit. I would also recommend this interview with sociologist David Madden by Alissa Walker (right in Curbed!), who notes that it’s a mistake to conflate the “urban general good and the good of downtown real-estate owners” — and proceeds to offer a host of ideas for how urban downtowns might reemerge from the pandemic.

In January, California State Assembly member Alex Lee (D-San Jose) introduced a bill to encourage the development of social housing in California — housing geared at accommodating a mix of household income ranges. It’d be interesting to consider how a statute of that nature could support commercial-to-residential conversions (and how those could be made affordable to the average mortal).

Weil writes that San Francisco needs a shared project: “museums, a university, people, community.” Housing for those communities would be a good place to start; museums, not so much. (Another interesting fact: SFMOMA and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts were built on a literal graveyard of demolished single room occupancy hotels.)

An encampment at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza last year.

(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

The problems are big and will not be easy to resolve. But throwing our hands up in the air and shouting “doom loop” is not only unhelpful, it contributes to an anti-cities rhetoric that is often just thinly veiled racism.

For some, a San Francisco without a Whole Foods on Market Street is a hollowed-out city. For countless others, it was the tech wealth that did the hollowing to begin with — driving up rents, displacing communities, gutting longtime cultural and social services organizations.

In her 2000 book, “Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism,” Rebecca Solnit wrote about the ways the tech industry reshaped the landscape of her beloved city. Nearly a quarter-century later, the book reads like a road map to 2023.

“Wealth,” she writes, “has proven able to ravage cities as well as or better than poverty.”

In the galleries

“I think of the studio as a gut,” says artist Max Hooper Schneider, “and I’m like a digestive enzyme, circulating through it.” The artist is the subject of a solo at François Ghebaly gallery in downtown Los Angeles that will feature his “disorienting vistas.” Times contributor Leah Ollman describes these sculptures, which depict miniaturized worlds, as “microcosmic scenarios that allude to macrocosmic phenomena of ecological, biological, anthropological and sociological distress.” Sounds like she had quite the studio visit.

A detail from Max Hooper Schneider’s “Diving Bells” series.

(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

“Witness” is a group show on view at the WACO Theater Center that brings together 14 Black women and nonbinary artists exploring the ways they see themselves. Organized by Tina Knowles Lawson and Genel Ambrose, it was inspired in part by a passage from a 1971 essay by Toni Morrison: “And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.” Contributor Leigh-Ann Jackson reports on the work and inspirations of the artists involved in the show.

Long Beach is moving forward on plans to establish a Cambodian American Cultural Center. The next step includes establishing a nonprofit to coordinate finding a location, raising funds and developing programming.

Classical notes

Remember that story about a woman reportedly having an orgasm while listening to the L.A. Phil? My colleague Steven Vargas follows up with a short history on how audiences have responded to performances historically. “Sitting in complete silence while taking in a theatrical performance,” he reports, “is a fairly new phenomenon.” His story is a fascinating trip that covers sexist 19th century theories about women and music as well as anecdotes of restive crowds throwing food at the stage.

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Department of delayed apologies

In 2000, my colleague Deborah Vankin sat down to profile writer Thomas Beller for L.A. Weekly. He was really late and not very nice. (You can read that profile here and it is very much worth it.) Twenty-three years later he’s back with a new book, “Lost in the Game: A Book About Basketball” — as well as an apology for Vankin, who is now a staffer at The Times. “How much of Beller’s apology was a play for book event publicity?,” writes the wary Vankin. “While I don’t fault any author for being proactive about DIY publicity in these days of cash-strapped publishing, bundling it into a retroactive apology felt dubious.” A story about an apology that is also a story about where we all were in 2000. (Checking voicemail and reading dude lit.)

Design time

A design evoking a stark ghost forest has been chosen as the winning concept for a memorial to honor the victims of the Chinese Massacre of 1871. Devised by artist Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong and writer Judy Chui-Hua Chang, the concept was inspired by the banyan trees that guard the entrances to villages in Guangdong, where many early Chinese immigrants to L.A. originated.

An eight-member evaluation panel chose a winning design to mark L.A.’s 1871 Chinese Massacre.

(Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong and Judy Chui-Hua Chung)

Can downtown L.A.’s garment industry survive the downtown condo boom? David Wagner has an interesting story in LAist.

Essential happenings

The Times’ summer preview section lands this weekend and The Times fine arts team has put together a list of essentials so you can plan the season — from performances at the Hollywood Bowl to a show at the Cheech.

Summer is coming!

(Illustration by David Milan / For The Times; photos KO_OP; Warner Bros. Pictures; Catapult; Viking; Eli and Edith Broad Collection; Getty Images; Apple TV)

In his weekly L.A. Goes Out newsletter, Steven Vargas rounds up the latest art happenings, including performances by L.A. Dance Project and Blue13 Dance Company.

Matt Cooper has all the Mother’s Day events, including mom-themed comedy shows and musicals, as well as a Mother’s Day recital by the Seal Beach Symphony on Sunday.

And Marsha Takeda-Morrison has compiled a roundup of 10 important L.A. buildings you can visit on a tour.

Moves

The Getty announced this week that it will be issuing an additional $17 million in grants for arts organizations for the next iteration of Pacific Standard Time and tweaking the initiative’s name to “PST Art.” The next series, which will launch in September 2024, is focused on the juncture of art and science. The Times’ Deborah Vankin has the lowdown on the shows being planned.

There are lots of staffing changes at the Hammer Museum. Chief curator Connie Butler is leaving to become director of MoMA PS1 in New York and senior curator Aram Moshayedi will be headed to Mexico City to serve as curator in residence at the Tamayo Museum (though he will remain at the Hammer as an adjunct). Joining the museum full-time will be Pablo José Ramírez, who is serving as co-curator of the upcoming Hammer biennial. Plus, Erin Christovale has been bumped up to curator. The Times’ Christopher Knight gets into all the changes.

Connie Butler, Hammer chief curator since 2013, has been tapped to become director of MoMA PS1.

(Mark Hanauer)

Margaret Tracey, formerly a New York City Ballet principal and director of Boston Ballet School, has been named dean of the Trudl Zipper Dance Institute at the Colburn School.

The Ford Foundation is teaming up with the Alice L. Walton Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and Pilot House Philanthropy to fund an initiative that will support racial equity in leadership roles in art museums.

The Ruth Foundation for the Arts has announced its 2023 grant recipients, which this year include the World Stage in Leimert Park and the Chinatown art space Human Resources L.A.

Arts Orange County has announced its 2023 honorees for its annual art awards; they include flamenco dancer Claudia de la Cruz and patron Jane Fujishige Yada.

The Huntington has acquired a landscape by David Hockney, “Tree on Woldgate, 6 March,” 2006 — a gift made in honor of the late L.A. art book dealer Dagny Janss Corcoran.

Pulitzer Prizes

The Times won not one but two Pulitzer Prizes this week! One was for a team of reporters that worked on a package of stories related to the city council leaks; another went to one of my regular collaborators, Christina House, for her stellar feature photography.

Two novels — Barbara Kingsolver‘s “Demon Copperhead” and Hernan Diaz‘s “Trust” — shared the prize for fiction, while Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa‘s “His Name Is George Floyd” nabbed the award for nonfiction. Hua Hsu‘s “Stray True” won for memoir. The Times’ Jonah Valdez reports on some of the other winning book categories, including biography, history and poetry.

Plus, Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels took home the prize for music, for their opera “Omar.” When the opera was presented in L.A. last fall, Times theater critic Charles McNulty wrote that “of all the music being composed today, hers might be the clearest expression of the American experiment, in all its varied hues and tonalities.”

Rhiannon Giddens in 2019.

(Rick Loomis / For The Times)

Passages

Chris Strachwitz, a historian who traveled the United State in search of little-known performers for the Arhoolie label, has died at 91.

MTV News, the outlet that covered everything from presidential elections to the VMAs, in the process becoming a Gen-X cultural touchstone, has been shut down by Paramount Global after four decades. Former VJ Dave Holmes pays tribute.

I’d like to give a shout-out to this great MTV News piece from 2017 by Marcus Patrick Ellsworth about a pride parade in Casper, Wyo. — a dispatch that has stayed with me.

In the news

— The best essay I’ve read on the coronation is by Canadian novelist Stephen Marche.
— A profile of Lesley Lokko, the first curator of African descent to curate the Venice Architecture Biennale.
— Architecture critic Alexandra Lange dives into the expansion of the American Museum of Natural History by Studio Gang. The building, she writes, “feels like a valiant attempt to reconcile a 150-plus-year-old museum’s worth of contradictions.”
— The home as Amazon distribution warehouse: Kelly Pendergrast on Khloe Kardashian’s pantry and much much more.
— “New Angle: Voice” devotes its latest episode to Ada Louise Huxtable, whose archives are held at the Getty.
— Is national conflict good for artmaking? Pablo Helguera dives in with an essay about art, cultural stereotypes and the history of cuckoo clocks.
— Speaking of clocks, the film noir classic “The Big Clock” features a character partly inspired by Alice Neel. A good jam from Ben Davis.
— New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is hiring a provenance research team to review the collection in the wake of seizures by law enforcement.
— I didn’t know much about “king of toxic masculinity” Andrew Tate when he was arrested in Romania, so the four-part series on his rise by the “Behind the Bastards” podcast was illuminating. Start with Episode 1, which gets into the mythopoetic men’s movement that set the stage for Tate and his ilk.

And last but not least …

I’m here for the 1970s Walk of Fame photos of Ave Pildas.

The post Tales on San Francisco’s “doom loop” overlook alternative appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

San Francisco’s transit system is allotting brief tales to commuters : NPR

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 03:26:22 +0000

A kiosk distributes a William Shakespeare poem at a BART station in the San Francisco Bay Area. Maria Avila/BART hide caption

toggle caption

Maria Avila/BART

A kiosk distributes a William Shakespeare poem at a BART station in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Maria Avila/BART

Do you ever get to the train station and realize you forgot to bring something to read? Yes, we all have our phones, but many of us still like to go old school and read something printed.

Well, there’s a kiosk for that. In the San Francisco Bay Area, at least.

“You enter the fare gates and you’ll see a kiosk that is lit up and it tells you can get a one minute, a three minute, or a five minute story,” says Alicia Trost, the chief communications officer for the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit – known as BART. “You hover your hand over which length you want and it dispenses a long receipt like short story.”

It’s that simple. Riders have printed nearly 20,000 short stories and poems since the program was launched last March.

Some are classic short stories, and some are new original works, like Rainbows by Erica Johnson.

“[W]e always had this place, our place, our home. Away from the prejudice and the preachers,” Johnson writes. “Away from those who saw our relationship as wrong. Just you, me, and the beach with water as far as the eye could see.”

Trost also wants to introduce local writers to local riders.

“We wanted to do something where we do a call to artists in the Bay Area to submit stories for a contest,” Trost says. “And as of right now, we’ve received about 120 submissions. The winning stories would go into our dispensers and then you would be a published artist and BART helped make you be a published artist and I love that.”

Ridership on transit systems across the country have been down the past half century, so could short stories save transit?

Consolation thinks so.

“At the end of the day all transit agencies right now are doing everything they can to improve the rider experience. So I absolutely think we will get more riders just because of short stories,” she says.

And you’ll never be without something to read.

The post San Francisco’s transit system is allotting brief tales to commuters : NPR appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

San Francisco, San Mateo Co. Residents Urged to Share Lengthy COVID Tales

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 03:59:28 +0000

Patient Responses May Influence Services and Funding; Help Experts Understand Causes, Treatment, Prevention

By Suzanne Leigh

Kim Rhoads, MD, MPH (left) and Carina Marquez, MD, will co-lead community engagement for the Let’s Figure Out Long COVID – Tell Us Your Story, Bay Area study.

UC San Francisco, San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) and San Mateo County Health (SMC Health) are partnering with local community groups in a quest to learn about long COVID. To achieve this, researchers from the project, Let’s Figure Out Long COVID – Tell Us Your Story, Bay Area, will be calling local residents of all ethnicities and backgrounds who previously had COVID.

Long COVID, also known as post-acute sequelae of SARS-COv-2 (PASC), refers to both physical and mental health symptoms that last long after an initial infection. Those symptoms may start during infection and never go away or may appear weeks or months afterwards. Common complaints include fatigue, shortness of breath, pain, problems with concentration, depression and anxiety.

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Project Phase I

Researchers will call at least 1,000 San Francisco and San Mateo adult residents who had COVID at least three months ago.

Project Phase II

Some previous interviewees will be asked to join a more detailed research study called RECOVER (Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery) that will last three to four years. Study participants will be compensated for their time.

The goals of the project are to learn how common long COVID is in the community – information that is critical in impacting funding for local health departments and services for those debilitated by the condition – as well as to learn what causes it, and how to prevent and treat it.

In Phase I of the project, researchers will call San Francisco and San Mateo County adult residents who had COVID at least three months ago. Whether they have fully recovered or still have symptoms, their experiences will inform researchers about the frequency of long COVID. All ethnic groups and neighborhoods will be represented, and researchers are especially interested in hearing from Black/African American, Latino, Pacific Islander and Native American communities who have experienced higher rates of infections, hospitalizations and deaths than other groups.

In Phase II, some people who were previously interviewed will be asked to join a more detailed research study sponsored by the US National Institutes of Health. This study, called RECOVER (Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery), will last three to four years. Study participants will be compensated for their time.

COVID Has Had ‘Devastating Impact’ on Marginalized Communities

“Aside from the devastating impact COVID has had on societally marginalized communities, we have no idea what the long-term consequences will be,” said Kim Rhoads, MD, MPH, from the UCSF Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and the study’s community engagement co lead.

“The project will help us get a better handle on how many people are affected by long COVID, and how we might intervene to reduce the additional burden the disease will likely place on communities of color,” added Rhoads, who is also the founder of Umoja Health Partners, which unites local organizations combatting COVID-19 in Black communities, as well as the director of the Office of Community Engagement at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“Ensuring representation and equity in the community is fundamental to this study,” says Carina Marquez, pictured here (center right) at a COVID testing event in San Francisco’s Mission District. Image by Susan Merrell

“We know that communities have concerns about the effects of long COVID, and we still have a lot to learn about this condition,” said Susan Philip, MD, San Francisco’s Health Officer. “This is why it is vital that we make progress in studying long COVID in communities of color that have been most impacted by COVID-19. We need to know how we can best treat it, to inform how we can provide a targeted public health approach toward supporting communities where it is needed most,” she said.

“The partnership with UCSF and SFDPH will enable us to enhance “our capacity to understand the long-term effects of COVID,” said Curtis Chan, MD, San Mateo County’s deputy health officer. “This will help us prevent and treat long COVID, and strengthen our county’s analysis of other health inequities in the future,” he said.

“Through our patient care and work in the community, we have seen firsthand the disproportionate impact COVID-19 has had on Latino and Black communities in the Bay Area,” said Carina Marquez, MD, of the UCSF Department of Medicine and the study’s community engagement co-lead. “Ensuring representation and equity in the community is fundamental to this study.”

Minority Populations ‘Need to Have Their Stories Heard’

Community organizations will assist in ensuring that input from the community accurately reflects those ethnic groups and neighborhoods where COVID-19 has been most prevalent.

“Black, Latinx and Pacific Islander communities in San Mateo County need to have their stories heard about the impact of long COVID. Many are suffering in silence,” said Lisa Tealer, executive director of the Bay Area Community Health Advisory Council, who is working with the San Francisco Latino Task Force and Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates in its outreach efforts. Valerie Tulier-Laiwa, executive committee member of the San Francisco Latino Task Force, said she would welcome the results of the study, “so we can continue to improve health outcomes for communities of color heavily impacted by COVID-19.”

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50 Blocks: Tales from San Francisco’s Tenderloin District

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 00:35:36 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — In every block of San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, there’s a story to tell. Some good. Some trouble. All worth sharing, in the hopes of building a better community.

This project challenges city leaders and the entire Bay Area to care more, to do more, and to help build a better Bay Area for our future. We address the problems within the district from the inside out.

Join ABC7 in our commitment to reporting from the Tenderloin. Watch our latest 30-minutes streaming special, “50 Blocks: Stories from the Tenderloin,” in the video player above.

Or by downloading the ABC7 Bay Area App to watch on Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple and Android TV.

ABC7 News has covered stories in the Tenderloin ever since the station was founded in 1949, but this recent commitment came about after one particular event.

In December 2021, Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the Tenderloin in response to the city’s drug overdose crisis. The mayor stated more than 700 people died due to drug overdoses in 2021, which at the time was nearly double the city’s COVID-19 death toll.

The ultra-lethal synthetic opioid fentanyl was believed to be responsible for the crisis and the vast majority of all fentanyl sales were happening in the tenderloin.

After this announcement, ABC7 News committed to reporting on how the emergency initiative unfolded, what difference it made, and what happened after the declaration was over.

This is a timeline of our reporting:

December 2021

Dec 17: State of Emergency Declared

When Mayor London Breed declared a State of Emergency in Tenderloin, she explained the keys to her plan would be, “To disrupt the illegal activity in the neighborhood, to get people the treatment and support they need, and to make the Tenderloin a safer, more livable place for the families and children who call the neighborhood home.”

She cited the COVID-19 emergency declaration as a template that allowed them to “cut through the bureaucracy and barriers that get in the way of decisive action, we can get things done and make real, tangible progress.”

One of the key pieces of her plan was the opening of a linkage center, which would connect Tenderloin residents with basic health and human services quickly and easily, including behavior health care, substance abuse treatment, and housing assistance.

ABC7 examined the mayor’s plan to figure out how it would work to make the city safer for residents, visitors.

Jan 2022

Jan 18: Tenderloin Linkage Center Opens

Officials said once fully staffed, the center on Market Street would be able to serve up to 100 guests at a time, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.

“I am optimistic that the new Linkage Center will provide new and useful services for Tenderloin residents who are battling mental illness and drug addiction,” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen. “I am also watching its success closely to see if it could be converted into a Citywide resource as the permanent site of the upcoming Mental Health SF Service Center.”

Mayor Breed appeared on ABC7’s Getting Answers show to talk about the center.

February 2022

As the mayor’s plan began to actually happen, ABC7 News started actively reporting in the tenderloin to see how it was going. We walked through the streets with the captain of the Tenderloin station as he explained why 85% of SF’s drug arrests happen in this district.

ABC7 News also talked to a Tenderloin historian about how its rich history sheds light on its current role as a containment zone for vice.

Feb 8: Drug Addicts’ Families Protest Linkage Center

Not everyone was in favor of the new Linkage Center. A group of mothers staged a protest at the center because it has a safe injection site. That’s a place where drug users can take drugs while being monitored by a staff member so they do not overdose. The Department of Public Health said the staff has already reversed an average of three overdoses a week since the site opened. But the protestors say the site may only be making the crisis worse.

“You have to quit enabling them,” one demonstrator exclaimed. “Giving them everything they need. Why would I ever leave?”

Feb 23: Nonprofit Worker Shot In Broad Daylight

At the end of the month, a city ambassador from the nonprofit Urban Alchemy was shot, prompting residents to plead for more help saying, “It’s the Tenderloin. Nobody feels safe in the Tenderloin.”

Mayor Breed said this to ABC7 News, “We are definitely going to need to step up our presence. Both our wellness teams and our police and a number of other resources in order to ensure safety. Not just for people who are part of Urban Alchemy , but the entire community.”

Concerns later surfaced that the nonprofit, that received millions from the city to hire ambassadors, might be exploiting a loophole that exempts charitable organizations from having employees receive standardized security training. ABC7 News talked with our colleagues at the San Francisco Standard about this claim.

March 2022

Part of the mayor’s plan was to make the tenderloin a safer and more livable space. One key to that goal was to literally make the streets cleaner. ABC7 News went along as cleaning teams went out to work on cleaning up the Tenderloin’s streets.

“It’s daunting to be honest, because we can clean the street and 10 minutes later it looks like we have never been there.”

ABC7 also followed along with one family to see how they viewed the effort. Jacques Bidjima walks his two children to school in the Tenderloin everyday. They have two routes available. One could be described as bad, the other as awful.

“I start hating myself,” he said. “How can I have my kids growing up in an environment like this? I don’t have much choice.”

March 16: Mayor Breed Ends Emergency Declaration

Ninety days after the State of Emergency was declared, it came up for review. Mayor Breed announced she would allow it to expire and said the Tenderloin’s emergency declaration improved conditions, but still had a long road ahead. The city reported that 345 people were placed in shelters with another 154 going to permanent supportive housing.

The city agrees changing the persistent culture there will take more than 90 days and says the Linkage Center will continue to operate through June, but now under the direction of the public health department.

April 2022

April 4: Linkage Center Protests Escalate

The same group that protested the Linkage Center’s safe injection site escalated their protest by purchasing a billboard in Union Square calling out open drug use. The billboard read, “Famous for the world over for our brains, beauty and now dirt-cheap fentanyl.”

Organizers say they put the billboard up in response to the Mayor ending the emergency declaration and then heading to Europe to pitch San Francisco as a tourist destination.

“And we’re like, wait a minute, it’s not changed,” one organizer said. “We should still be in a state of emergency. And then she went to Europe and said, ‘Come to San Francisco. It’s fine.’ Um, no, it’s not fine. It’s really not.”

April 29: Another Urban Alchemy ambassador shot

The shooting happened in broad daylight and police said a search for the suspect was underway.

June 2022

June 16: City Announces Tenderloin Linkage Center Will Close In December

While the center got a 6-month extension to operate until the end of 2022, Mayor London Breed declined to fund the center in her latest budget proposal. A spokesperson for the mayor said the Linkage Center was only meant to be a temporary solution until they could develop longer term plans for the tenderloin.

June 23: City Announces Opening Of First Sobering Center

The center named SoMa RISE was described as , “a safe indoor space for people who are intoxicated… to come in off the streets, rest and stabilize, and get connected to care and services.”

They also said it would service the Tenderloin neighborhood by helping fill some of the void left by the Linkage Center.

So Where Does That Leave The Tenderloin Now?

ABC7 News is trying to answer that in our latest 30-minute streaming special, ”50 Blocks: Stories from the Tenderloin.”

You can stream the full documentary by downloading the ABC7 Bay Area App to watch on Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple and Android TV or by watching it in the video player on this story.

Click here to see more ABC7 Originals content.

If you’re on the ABC7 News app, click here to watch live

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The largest San Francisco tech information tales of 2022 to date

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 12:22:48 +0000

There’s no escaping the tech industry when you live in San Francisco, but ever since the beginning of the pandemic, it can feel as if the tech industry itself is trying to escape the city by the bay.

The theme of the past couple of years in Silicon Valley has largely been one of exodus, which continued this year with companies like Slack and Robinhood pivoting to remote work policies. The familiar perks that come with those offices are also slowly being put into question, with Meta doing away with laundry service and the architect behind Google’s campus speaking out about the dangers of its all-inclusive nature.

Crypto has also dominated news cycles, from startups utilizing the technology for novel uses like air monitoring to local companies running confounding Super Bowl ads. Streaming services have become obsessed with startup horror stories. CEOs have not exactly been on their best behavior, major computing companies have been defeated by hackers and perhaps most notably, Elon Musk has leveled up from Twitter troll to Twitter king.

Here are all of SFGATE’s best tech stories of 2022 so far, which we’ll be updating throughout the year.

Elon Musk talks Twitter takeover in extended interview at TED2022 Vancouver

“In a 45-minute interview at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver, Elon Musk had a lot to say.

“Whereas the mercurial tech entrepreneur most often speaks in short tweets, today he spoke with TED host Chris Anderson about everything from sleeping on the floor of the Fremont Tesla factory to how he hopes to save democracy with a hostile takeover of Twitter.” — Dan Gentile, read more

San Francisco VC firm required job applicants to take online IQ test

“The owner of a San Francisco-based venture capital firm apologized after his company faced a social media backlash for requiring job applicants to take an online IQ test.

“Aneel Ranadive, the founder of Soma Capital and the son of Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadive, posted the mea culpa on Twitter after screenshots of a Soma job application with the IQ test requirement circulated online.” — Joshua Bote, read more

Major Silicon Valley chip manufacturer Nvidia hit by ‘malicious’ cyber attack

“A major Silicon Valley microchip manufacturer has been hit by a cyber attack which one insider told the Telegraph, which first broke the news, ‘completely compromised’ the tech firm’s internal systems.

“Nvidia, headquartered in Santa Clara, was first affected Wednesday, when its email system and developer resources went down following what the Telegraph reported to be a malicious network intrusion.

“Since then, it appears that parts of Nvidia’s email system has returned, the Telegraph reported, but the company has yet to reveal any specifics about the cyber attack. It is unclear if any customers are affected.” — Joshua Bote, read more

No bar in San Francisco has a Mark Zuckerberg anecdote as good as Phone Booth’s

“The list of famous people who have [been to Phone Booth] is long and eclectic. I mean sure, we all expect John Waters to have drank at the Phone Booth (he’s done so twice), but so have Chloe Sevigny, Michael Fassbender, Spike Jonze, Michael Stipe, Andy Samberg, Hope Sandoval and many more.

“’So, Mark Zuckerberg has been here,’ [the owner] Steve tells me during my third drink, ‘which was a fiasco.’” — Stuart Schuffman, read more

Better.com CEO Vishal Garg to be reinstated after mass Zoom layoff controversy

“Vishal Garg, the contentious founder of the digital mortgage lending service Better.com, has been reinstated as CEO following his brutal mass layoff of about 900 employees right before the holidays last year via Zoom.

“In a letter sent to employees Tuesday evening obtained by SFGATE, Garg confirmed his return ‘to work full-time at Better’ and apologized to staff for his indiscretion.” — Joshua Bote, read more

Googleplex, the corporate headquarters complex of Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc.

SOPA Images/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Major Bay Area-based tech company calls employees back to office

“Google told employees Wednesday that its voluntary-work-from-home period, which has been in place for two years ago, will end April 4, a company spokesperson told SFGATE.

“Employees in the San Francisco Bay Area and some of its other offices in the US, UK and Asia Pacific will be required to come to work in person three times a week. Employees can have two days of remote work.

“’We plan to use the month of March to help employees transition to their new routines and then aim to be fully functional in our hybrid working approach by April 4,’ Google said.” — Amy Graff, read more

Meta employee upset as Facebook parent company ends laundry perk

“An engineer for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, with a self-reported total compensation — or TC, which includes salary, stock options and other benefits — of $850,000 took to the anonymous job forum blindly to complain about the perks, or lack thereof, that awaited their return to the office.

“Aside from complaints about restrictions on free dinners, downturns in the market leading to a $200,000 reduction in his TC and cut ‘childcare reimbursements,’ the poster lamented the loss of laundry services provided by Meta.” — Joshua Bote, read more

The man behind Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters says fancy tech offices are ‘dangerous’

“Celebrated architect Clive Wilkinson, in an interview with NPR, decried the pervasiveness of the all-inclusive tech office — despite having helped build Googleplex, arguably the definitive tech campus.

“He argues that workers offering everything they need in a singular site blurs the line between work and non-work, a line that has been obliterated during the course of the pandemic. It also encourages creativity.

“’Work-life balance cannot be achieved by spending all your life on a work campus,’ Wilkinson told NPR. ‘It’s not real. It’s not really engaging with the world in the way most people do.’” — Joshua Bote, read more

A view inside Bandcamp’s Oakland headquarters.

bandcamp

Epic Games acquires Oakland-based Bandcamp and music fans are quite worried

“The Oakland-based company [Bandcamp], which also operated a physical record shop and performance space on Broadway pre-pandemic, has one of the few artist-friendly distribution models in the industry. Although you can stream tracks for free, the site tries to steer the listener toward purchasing music, either digitally or as physical media, with an average of 82% of the net revenue going directly to artists.

“So the music industry internet let out a collective gasp when it was announced Wednesday morning that Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite, Gears of War and Unreal, has acquired Bandcamp. The deal was announced by Bandcamp CEO and co-founder Ethan Diamond in a blog post that was short on details but stressed a shared vision with Epic of building ‘the most open, artist-friendly ecosystem in the world.’” — Dan Gentile, read more

Slack to sublease 200,000 square feet of office space in move to ‘digital-first’ work

“The corporate messaging platform service Slack is no longer the holder of one of the largest office space leases in San Francisco, reported the San Francisco Business Times on Wednesday.

“The tech company is subleasing its space on 45 Fremont St., which spans more than 200,000 square feet, just three years after it moved into the space around the time of its IPO. The San Francisco Business Times ranked the lease the fifth largest of 2019.

“Its main headquarters are still open.” — Joshua Bote, read more

Controversial Silicon Valley company Robinhood to allow nearly all employees to work remotely

“Another Silicon Valley tech company is joining the ranks of Dropbox and Adobe in pivoting almost entirely into remote work.

“Robinhood, the Menlo Park-based stock management app most notorious for its place in the GameStop short selling frenzy of last year, announced Wednesday in a blog post that it would ‘be staying primarily remote’ going forward.

“‘Our teams have done amazing work and built a strong workplace community during these uncertain and challenging times, and we’re excited to continue to offer them the flexibility they’ve asked for by staying primarily remote,’ the company said.” — Joshua Bote, read more

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Travis Kalanick in “Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber.”

Photo Illustration: SFGATE / Elizabeth Morris / Showtime

Showtime’s Uber series ‘Super Pumped’ shows the horrors of Silicon Valley

“Unless you’ve been living under a yellow-checkered rock lined with cracked black vinyl and a credit card machine that mysteriously doesn’t work, you’ve likely heard of Uber.

“The ride-hailing company that disrupted the taxi industry has become a household name. Its rise and many falls was recounted in a 594 page best-seller by New York Times journalist (and San Francisco resident) Mike Isaac, which lends its title to Showtime’s new startup drama ‘Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber.’” — Dan Gentile, read more

Theranos swag floods eBay following Holmes’ guilty verdict

“At long last, the verdict in Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos trial is in. The infamous Silicon Valley huckster was found guilty of two counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit fraud (she was acquitted on a handful of other charges) and now faces up to 20 years in prison for each count.

“As you can imagine, Twitter was ablaze with its typical deluge of hot takes and observations, but it wasn’t the only over-active corner of the internet following the trial verdict.

“Over on eBay, a microeconomy of Theranos-branded swag exploded in the wake of the jury’s announcement (special shout out to Washington Post tech culture reporter Nitasha Tiku for tipping the trend on Twitter).” — Brian Boyle, read more

Salesforce opens ranch in the California redwoods for employees to connect in person

“As the COVID-19 pandemic finally wanes, Salesforce is luring its employees away from Zoom and back to in-person meetings with an alluring ‘workspace’: a tranquil resort-like ranch with an infinity-edge hot tub and guided nature walks in the California redwoods.

“The San Francisco-based cloud computing pioneer announced Thursday that employees will begin to visit the new Trailblazer Ranch in Scotts Valley in March for onboarding, training, skills building, talent development and generally to connect with colleagues in person.” — Amy Graff, read more

Apple joins other Bay Area tech giants in responding to Russian invasion of Ukraine

“Across the globe, national governments and corporations have made sharp rebukes of Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. In the Bay Area, tech companies have also taken measures to sanction Russia and ensure their platforms aren’t being used as strategic tools of war. Here’s how each of these major companies has responded.” — Dan Gentile, read more

Here’s what happened if you scanned the QR code in Coinbase’s strange Super Bowl commercial

“Every Super Bowl is defined by its commercials, and this year, one of the clips that had everyone talking was predictably related to cryptocurrency exchange.

“Coinbase’s 60-second spot was simple. A colour-changing QR code bounced around the black screen like a DVD screensaver (you know, the ones you’d watch for 15 minutes while you waited for the logo to hit one of the corners of the screen because it was so oddly satisfying? )” — Amanda Bartlett, read more

This startup pays Bay Area residents to monitor their air quality — in crypto

“Every summer as wildfire season approaches, everyone in the Bay Area becomes very aware of the air we breathe. We obsessively refresh websites like PurpleAir to tell whether it’s safe to open windows and compete to buy air filtering systems before they sell out.

“Running an air filter may give peace of mind, but it’s hard to tell whether they’re just scratching a hypochondriac itch. One company, called Planetwatch, aims to help people find out — and earn cryptocurrency in the process.” — Dan Gentile, read more

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The strangest San Francisco Christmas Day tales

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 20:22:54 +0000

Christmas in San Francisco is known for ice skating in Union Square, drunk Santas crawling down Polk Street and a very weird Christmas tree. Historically the day has brought with it some even stranger news. We dug into the archives to find the Christmas Day stories that could maybe only happen here.

By the time Christmas rolled around in 1967, hippies were a thing, nowhere more so than in San Francisco. Headline writers took aim at the longhairs and used “hippie” liberally and usually pejoratively. When Berkeley student Orville Jeffers was found to have stolen a tiger from San Francisco Zoo, he was deemed a hippie tiger kidnapper, despite Jeffers not looking particularly groovy in his mug shot.

Jeffers’ motive for breaking into the zoo with three friends and a hacksaw one night to steal Jimmie the cat? “I went to the zoo, and saw Jimmie and fell in love with him. I had to have him.” Sadly, the story did not end in the spirit of free love. After running out of money in LA a few weeks later, Jeffers sold the hot cat to a pet store, which turned it in to authorities. Jeffers was charged with catnapping and Jimmie returned to San Francisco Zoo, only to die a week later from choking on a piece of meat.

The San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 26, 1967.

San Francisco Examiner / Archival

‘Television Ghosts Blamed On Reflections From Fog’

On Christmas Day 1955, San Franciscans apparently had some concerns about ghosts living in their television sets. The Examiner was happy to put folks’ fears to rest with news that the specters were in fact caused by San Francisco’s fog bouncing beams around the city and into people’s homes. While it’s easy to mock the worried viewers, at the time, TVs were still relatively new technology in homes, and the concern doesn’t seem much more irrational than the fear that microwaves cause cancer (they don’t) or that 5G technology is giving you COVID (it’s not).

The San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 26, 1955.

San Francisco Examiner / Archival

‘Slow Old Man’s Scooter Has Fast Cops Reeling’

Bay Bridge highway patrol had to contend with a “little old man” attempting to cross from San Francisco to Oakland on a tiny green scooter that trundled at under 10 mph on Christmas Day 1956.

Three police cars, sirens blaring, chased down the unnamed scofflaw (vehicles with under 5 horsepower are forbidden on the bridge), leading to the man falling off his scooter on the eastern span of the bridge.

He told the police he had bought the scooter as a Christmas gift to himself and was making his way to Oakland for a family Christmas dinner. After giving him the fright of his life, the cops eventually showed some Christmas cheer in not citing the man and helped him get to his destination. But there was no word on how he got the vehicle back to San Francisco.

The San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 26, 1956.

San Francisco Examiner / Archival

‘Beer, Whole Pitcher of It, Saves Flaming Car’

This one isn’t in San Francisco, but made the front page of the Examiner on Boxing Day 1933.

The story, with its Yoda-like headline construction, reveals the heroism of a drunk in LA saving a cop car from a fiery end. Only one quote is attributed to the man who swilled a pitcher of beer on the flames: “Whe’sha fire?

The story calls to mind the Vacaville man caught in the 2020 wildfires who extinguished a fire in his home with Bud Light.

The San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 26, 1933.

San Francisco Examiner / Archival

‘Bomb Slays, And Wrecks Hindu Temple’

One of the most tragic, and mysterious, stories from the Christmas archives concerns the 1914 bombing of Vedanta Temple in Cow Hollow. There are conflicting reports exactly how the bombing occurred, but Hindu leader Swami Trigunatita was left dead after a former student walked into the temple during a service with a bomb in a hat box. We dug into the story earlier in the year, and made the argument for why the old temple at 2963 Webster St. may be the most beautiful building in San Francisco.

The San Francisco Examiner front page, Dec. 28, 1914.

San Francisco Examiner

‘Wonderful Town’

We’ll end on this small and delightful Herb Caen column published the day after Christmas in 1956 about nothing in particular, which makes it all the more wonderful. Dated gender stereotypes aside, Caen’s summary of Christmas Day in the city has a proud and poignant heart. It’s not hard to see why Caen’s love letters to the city made him a household name and earned him a Pulitzer Prize. “In the crowded bars, there were no strangers whatever,” the famed columnist wrote. “A cool and joyful day, fading into a warm and wonderful night – starry eyed and aglow with a million lights. May they always burn as brightly, all over the world.”

The San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 26, 1956.

San Francisco Examiner / Archival

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