I'm a lasagna boy!

Pittsburgh news is always the weirdest.

David Warnes, 37, of Bethel Park, was terminated from his bagging job at the grocery chain's Village Square location for taking a doughnut off a shelf and eating it in January 2002.

Last October, the U.S. Department of Labor honored the grocery chain with a New Freedom Initiative Award under a program started by President Bush for "outstanding employment practices toward people with disabilities," according to a news release.

Giant Eagle Must Pay For Doughnut Firing

Fri Mar 5, 6:54 PM ET

A mentally challenged man will receive an undisclosed settlement from Giant Eagle after a federal jury found that the company was wrong to fire him, Channel 4's Whitney Drolen reported Friday.

David Warnes, 37, of Bethel Park, was terminated from his bagging job at the grocery chain's Village Square location for taking a doughnut off a shelf and eating it in January 2002.

Warnes' mother, Carol, filed a lawsuit claiming a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act. She said her son acted on impulse and didn't understand the consequences of what he did.

Rob Borella, Giant Eagle director for communications and sports marketing, said the incident was the final straw in a series of job performance-related issues involving Warnes. He said Giant Eagle employs hundreds of disabled people and will continue to do so.

Punctuate this burger!

Despite the unruly punctuation of Phyllis' Giant Burger, they make a fine mushroom bacon burger.

I need a kamera.

I live in a beautiful city, and I have lots of cameras.
My first cameras were all digital, but lately I've been buying Polaroids in various sizes, LOMO multi-lens cameras, and now I have a hankering for a traditional SLR.
But were it not for lo-tech, would I have made a cameo appearance in a photo blog?

Yo
warning: 400k image file

How to buy a MUNI ticket, part I.

At the 4th Street transfer point between MUNI and Caltrain, five ticket vending machines provide their mechanical services to riders.
Correction: two do, but only one accepts bills.
One of the machines (CT-5) has been wearing an Out of Service sticker for more than two weeks; another (CT-2) has a fuzzy screen; a third (CT-4) had a handwritten "Out of Order" sign that came off yesterday, although the machine is still broken.
Which means that someone who wishes to purchase a MUNI ticket at this busy transfer point must wait in a queue for one of the two working machines; if you are in the wrong queue and end up in front of the machine that doesn't accept bills, you might well miss your train.
MUNI doesn't provide a convenient way to purchase single-ride tickets ahead of time: all tickets sold through vending machines are stamped with a 90-minute lifespan. Tokens are available for a reduced price ($1.05 instead of the full $1.25), but through select and obscure vendors only (tobacconists in the Tenderloin). They are not typically available at MUNI stations.

Although I feel a sentimental attachment to each of the varied shape of paper transfers MUNI sells, I'd much rather suffer through the availability and convenience of an electronic fare card.

Stop that talking.

Reading Ben Brantley's Theater Review in today's paper, I learned a new word.

... this oddball speculation has been given amusing flesh in the Second Stage Theater's production of Charles L. Mee's "Wintertime," the logorrheic romp of a sex farce that opened last night.

You're it!

Six years of taking digital photographs of local graffiti, and I plumb forgot to snap a picture the first time my building was tagged.

Props to my next-door neighbours for sending me email about this: I read their note on the way home, marched straight into the basement to get the house paint and a brush, and bob's your uncle.

The sticker is its own reward

I encourage my neighbours, colleagues, and friends to vote: one great way is by wearing an "I Voted Today" sticker, a simple and direct reminder that we're participating in the electoral process. Another way that casting one's vote is made easier in San Francisco is through the provisional voting: a voter may participate at any polling place, as long as they present proper ID. I've brought some of my colleagues, who might have otherwise lingered too long at work, to my polling place.
But the poor organisation of polling places combined with the lack of training or uniform instructions for officals at the polling places leads to an offensive voting environment.

Today I suggested to Anna that we go vote together, and then get a cup of coffee to celebrate. However, the officials at our local polling place turned her away because it wasn't her regular polling place. She and I both knew that this wasn't right, but I've never seen a fruitful discussion take place at a polling place (which in this city and county are not necessarily public locations such as schools, libraries, or civic buildings, but cafés, private basements, church offices, and the like).

The process with which I'm familiar in San Francisco is a slightly tedious but usefully redundant one: one polling place official (PPO) checks my address and name against a printer roster, and then nods to another PPO, who finds the name on a second roster and has me countersign. I then receive a blue privacy folder with the ballot sheet(s) in it, and retire to a plastic booth where I connect the dots. The process is synchronous: all of these steps must complete for each person before the PPOs begin processing the next voter.
Today was a demonstration of how little training the PPOs have. As I showed my ID (State Driver's License) to the first PPO, a second began collating the ballot sheets for me:I had to tell him my part affiliation, so that he could put the correct primary sheet into the folder. He then got up and went away from the table, leaving two other PPOs to finish up. The first had found my name on the first roster, but the second couldn't find my strongly-ethnic name, and was at the point of giving up when I pointed to it. She then spent some time comparing my ID with the printed name, and just as she realised that the two matched, couldn't find a pen to tick off my name.
They abandoned the folder that the first official had prepared, and began assembling a new one ("I'm a registered Democrat", I repeated). When I got to the booth, I found that I had two primary ballots, one Democrat and one Independent, but no ballot for state and local propositions and offices. The officials didn't grasp my position, and finally insisted that we start over. I pointed out that they needed to give me one from that stack, and one from that stack, and then made my way back to a booth. I don't know what happened to the first set of ballots I started on; they took them back, but I don't know whether they were physically discarded or simply put aside.

Anna reported that a polling official at the church where she voted couldn't find her name, either. One of the PPO responsibilities is helping voters understand instructions and ballots; how can they accomplish this, when they can't collate the ballots or alphabetize unfamiliar names?

In the state election last November, I cast ballots twice; the first round were invalidated (the PPO placed it in a paper envelope, which he in turn labelled INVALID with a marking pen). The second batch I fed into the Eagle computer.

Ramblings from an un-named state in the West.

Began reading Truman Capote's Music for Chameleons. Now I wonder: the deliberately-titled "Nonfiction Account of an American Crime" novella which marks his entreé into the nonfiction novel genre (did he create that? as he more-or-less claims in the Introduction) bears the mark of verisimilitude as does, say, Fargo, which starts off with the title "Based on a true story." And of course it wasn't.
Never mind that the incident which sparks all the crime is a land-grab for water rights.

I would like to find a nice, short biography of Capote. I never finished either Rexroth's Autobiographical Novel or the biography which I have started several times in the past six years -- and Rexroth has long fascinated me, in his writing and in his life. He lived just down the street, on the same block as I live now.

She had nut-painted arms.

The suggestive power of media: all the talking, the opinion columns, the cinema marquees have embedded a certain word in my mind, and with that word a certain shade of its meaning. And that's why I have "The Passion of Lovers" by bauhaus in my mind.
Thank goodness for the ipod, which has soothed this desire.