Depending on which source you check, the high temperature in San Francisco ranged from 95 to 97 yesterday. Either one is more than 20 degrees above normal for September, the warmest month of the year in this city without air conditioning. Either one is also more than my poor, fragile, little system can take. I don’t think I slept more than two hours last night, and I’m tired and cranky as hell. So if you plan to say anything to me today, you’d better phrase it politely: I’ve already tried to get one receptionist fired for being rude on the phone today…

Question for readers in Sacramento: There used to be this really great store on 16th Street just north of the railroad tracks (and across the street from the homeless huts) which sold furniture and other random artifacts from the 1960s and 1970s. It was in sort of a shed-like building, and I can’t remember the name. I drove by this weekend and it was gone, with a big “no trespassing” sign out front. Anyone know what happened to it?

Hypocrites using religion as a justification for their irrational viewpoints? Hmmm. You don’t see that very often:

DeVeaux, who called her church the nation’s oldest black congregation and one of its largest, said its position bears no animus to homosexuals, and many of the leaders gathered heralded their own role in the civil rights movement.

“This is not about being anti-gay,” she said. “It’s about being for marriage as between a woman and a man. I would never, ever try to do anything negative against any segment of the population.”

Utter bullshit. As if writing discrimination into the Constitution were not “negative”. Rewrite that last sentence as “It’s about being for marriage as between a WHITE woman and a WHITE man.” See how it plays…

Assuming that Ms. Patricia DeVeaux has devoted her life to combating bigotry, one wonders why she is so firmly in favor of segregation and unequal protection under the law as long as it applies to a minority group of which she is not a member. It disturbs me that churches with a predominantly black following — every one of whom should know better — would engage in this sort of bigotry and prejudice…

It is the absolute height of hypocrisy that ranking officers of major black churches, including the very same Walter Fauntroy who was so closely aligned with Martin Luther King, have now found their own group of people to send to the back of the bus…

These particular “civil rights leaders” sound disturbingly like old Southern plantation owners who believed that keeping their slaves in bondage and managing their lives for them was the only humanitarian alternative. Note that one of the major aspects of control plantation owners exercised over their slaves was the decision over who they would or would not be allowed to marry…

I have very little respect for “religious leaders”, whose primary goal often seems to be the complete elimination of religious (or personal) freedom in America. I have over the years, however, managed to hold on to some level of respect for the black churches and their work to rebuild their communities and elminate bigotry. Suffice to say that respect is now waning…

No matter how much some people want to rationalize it, claims that “CDs cost too much” or rants that “big corporations do not market sufficiently interesting music” do not make downloading copyrighted music without paying for it any less illegal or unethical…

I’ve done it, you’ve done it, and millions of other people have done it. And I agree that CDs cost too much and that major corporations do not market sufficiently interesting music. But let’s not delude ourselves into thinking we have the moral high ground here…

No one would really suggest that the fact that Safeway charges too much for ground beef and does not carry my favorite cereal would not be sufficient justification for my decision to steal a few cans of strained beets, now would they?

Not, of course, that I’d steal strained beets even if I was starving to death (in which case it still wouldn’t be justified)…