Ken! Again!
Just as Rob Brezsny foretold, the depression has set in. We're explaining it away as the inevitable letdown after being named Best Newspaper Column in the Best of San Francisco readers' poll, but we're under no illusions as to how long that excuse will be tolerated. After all, if the average person were called upon to draw up a list of desirable or even forgivable personality traits, moodiness wouldn't be anywhere near its top.
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We did set out to console ourselves with a new lipstick, but the one we had our heart set on -- Trish McEvoy's Glamorous, since it seemed to promise more than merely a change of facial color scheme -- turned out to be ickily brownish, and not at all the sultry, warmish red we had envisioned after seeing a photo in a magazine, which really made us question a lot of our past buying decisions, based as they have been on whatever happened to be in the Marie Claires we've flipped through while waiting, with dripping wet hair, for the stylist to get through with his previous client. Oh, yes, it's always easy to sneer at other people for being fashion victims.
Anyway, enough about us; weeks like these are why frozen waffles were invented. Let us turn our attention, instead, to Ken Garcia. A rumormonger suggested the Chronicle columnist was furious after a minor redesign at the paper shrank his head. Like other name-brand scribes at the Chron, Garcia will now grin out at readers from inside a box; in his case, we will no longer see the top of his coiffure or his shirt and tie. "No, that's not true," insisted Chron Associate Managing Editor Linda Strean, when we asked her whether Ken had been upset. OK, then, was he disgruntled? "That's all I have to say," replied Strean, hanging up.
Still, we think Ken may have something on his mind, even if it's not the photo: As it happens, he's just found out Dog Bites has been mocking him for months. "Since I'm not one of the 60 people who bothers to read the Weekly, it has only recently come to my attention that several weeks ago you took it upon yourself to print a personal email of mine that I sent to a reader who wanted to discuss one of my columns," he wrote us, apparently in great bitterness of spirit.
Ken felt our use of the e-mail, in which he called reader Eric Barnes a "self-righteous fool," was unethical, which he said "probably [doesn't] concern you much, but since I've been in the newspaper business a long time, I thought I'd take the time to share the information.
"By the way, you may want to check this email to make sure that the signed author did in fact write it," he added. "But fact-checking is probably not too high on your list either."
"Good luck with your career," he concluded. "The Fangs are probably looking for lots of journalists just like you."
Oooooh.
Quite frankly, we're a little hurt. After all the coverage Ken has received in this space -- why, a couple of hundred readers voted in our Golden Handshake Reader Poll, selecting him as the columnist most likely to be reassigned when the staffs of the Chronand the Ex merge! -- you'd think we'd rate a little more than a perfunctory nasty e-mail. God, what about a drink? In fact, only a few weeks ago we attended the Peninsula Press Club awards banquet, mostly because we hoped Garcia would make an appearance. (We had to leave early, but other disappointed partygoers told us he didn't show.) "Do you think he hates you?" asked a colleague, somewhat anxiously, as we nursed Cosmopolitans at the Weekly's table while waiting for the festivities to begin. "Or do you think he, you know, gets it?"
Well, we think those questions have been answered now.
Checkbook Journalism
Given our already fragile mental state, we were a little horrified that someone actually took us up on our offer to endorse a plan for the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, provided we were paid $6.95 to do so. One Richard Kadel has actually sent us a check and a plan, leaving us in a moral quandary: Sure, it's not like we're going to throw our support behind Kadel's mayoral candidacy in return for his not siccing the Department of Justice on us, but matters of principle are, well, matters of principle, and the actual dollar figure isn't supposed to matter ... man, we wish we'd asked for more money.
Anyway, though a girl needs her Pumas, the key point of Kadel's one-page plan is that it adds a third deck to the bridge for rail lines, with trains that will stop at Treasure Island, allowing development there without increased car traffic, and the possibility of a new mass transit link from Sacramento to San Jose. Dog Bites must note here that on an excursion to the Western Railway Museum sometime ago we were interested to learn the lower deck of the Bay Bridge had originally been dedicated to a commuter rail system connecting the East Bay with the city, an arrangement abandoned with the ascendancy of the private automobile. (God, how's that for a phrase. "The ascendancy of the private automobile." Listen, the Fangs would be lucky to get us.)
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