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Michael Fitzgerald
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Monthly Archives: August 2006
An unfortunate party address
St. Joseph’s Regional Cancer Center has sent out a festive flyer announcing its 17th Annual Gathering of Friends evening potluck picnic, which it bills as “a celebration honoring life.”
Sounds like a very good event. The location, though, sounds a bit, um, out of keeping with the party’s life-affirming theme.
The location is, “St. Joseph’s Medical [...]
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One carnivore’s comeback
Speaking of vegetarians (see below), reader Cindy Grafius forwards the following photo.
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Carnivore collectibles
I guess People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals liked the column I did recently on their Kentucky Fried Cruelty campaign. They sent me a gift.
A half-dozen of PETA’s animal rights activists protested outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet on June 22 as part of their campaign to embarrass KFC into demanding more humane treatment [...]
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Turning off A/C: the payoff
Remember when I stoically turned off my air conditioner for three days at the height of July’s heat wave? There was one upside to the misery I experienced: for once in my life I actually looked forward to my PG&E bill.
Not that I assumed it would be low. But I had high hopes. Or would [...]
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Withdraw from Washington?
Reader Harlan Pick sends along this thought, which is going around the Internet:
“If you consider that there has been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq Theater of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000.
“The rate in Washington D.C. [...]
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The heat wave in three stanzas
Stockton’s superb poet Bill Humphreys has written a poem about the recent miserable heat wave and summer yielding mercifully to Fall.
Here it is:
Threshold
August arrived like a blast furnace
pouring steel ingots into each long hot
day, scorching fire hydrant streets
blistering the cattle prod death toll,
chicken farms up and down the [...]
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Punishment for Perata
With only a week left in the state’s current legislative session, Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata has put the whole kaboodle of urgently needed flood-control measures on “pause” until next year.
How quickly he forgets. Katrina. New Orleans. Last winter’s extreme rains which all but buckled levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Perata should be forced [...]
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Joe Rosenthal: A local angle
The man on the left of the photo below is Joe Rosenthal, the photographer who snapped the famous shot of U.S. servicemen raising the flag on Iwo Jima.
Rosenthal died Monday in Novato. He was 94.
The man on the right is Jack Gulshen of Stockton. Gulshen, 79, a retired newspaperman and ex-Marine, knew Rosenthal.
Both belonged to [...]
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Al Capone he’s not
The police scanner just blurted that an alleged shoplifter is being detained–at a dollar store.
My take: that crook isn’t setting very high career goals.
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The irony of levee reform