Another reason I miss Los Angeles more than San Francisco: you rarely saw houses driving down the freeway in San Francisco. I’m not sure if that’s because there were so few freeways in SF to begin with, or because people who could afford houses in SF rarely ever took them out for a Sunday drive. Afraid of scratches and dings, y’know?

I am partcularly glad this week that I no longer live adjacent to Folsom Street. I’m also glad it’s almost time for a fair I actually want to go to, as opposed to one that I usually left town to avoid. Lest you argue that this fact makes me seem old, boring, or “sex-negative”, I assure you that I still like sex very much. But the Folsom Street Fair wasn’t really about sex for me. It was usually more about pawing my way through 100,000 annoying, smelly, drunk people (most of whom had very little reason to be exposing so much naked flesh) as I tried to make my way home to watch “The Simpsons”.

Plus, the hot dogs are better at the Dixie Classic.

I knew there was still intelligent life in San Francisco, but it’s rare that you see evidence of it in the Chronicle:

Tim Holt “Critical Mass turns 15” (Sept. 14) compares the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement with that of Critical Mass. Hard to see what people risking their lives fighting for voting rights have in common with elitists on $3,000 bikes who deliberately disrupt traffic to make it hard for working people to get home. In his attempt to elevate this juvenile obstructionism, Holt trivializes a great historical movement.

The above is a letter to the editor in response to this nonsense by guest columnist Tim Holt about how an anarchist slugfest that has antagonized motorists, pedestrians, transit users, and damned near everyone else in San Francisco every month for fifteen years has been an overwhelmingly “affirming” process. To paraphrase another letter writer, the mind boggles at the thought of how many great things cyclisyts might have accomplished without the PR debacle that is Critical Mass.

Observation du jour, after a mildly unpleasant Friday: why do so many ad agencies and design firms (disctinctions blur these days) have such a nagging tendency to find the absolute most complicated manner possible of completing any given task? I suppose it’s an easy way to maximize billable hours, which is probably why they also get so bloody territorial about it when you call them on it.

No, I’m not going to be any more specific, because I plan to take a lot of business away from this particular firm as a result of my class, grace under pressure, and old-fashioned customer service skills. Not to mention my humility.

It’s 9:00. May I have my weekend now, please?