Dog Bites

In further highway sign news, Philip Sherburne writes, "Every day, on our drive home from our East Bay dot-com job and right before we take the Duboce exit (you know, where all those "Cleaner, Whiter' Mission posters are, gawdblessem), we see a billboard for Forbes (wait, it might be Fortune) picturing some besuited fellow smirking beneath the legend, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.' What gives? Who is this guy? And what the hell is the point of the slogan?"

Now, Dog Bites drives past this same billboard every day and every day is irritated by it; in fact, it irks us so much that it's actually become a kind of trigger that starts us ruminating on the bad things that have happened that day -- a rumination we try to have finished by the time we get to Fell Street, so we can move on to dinner menu planning in time to stop at the supermarket to pick up, say, some chard and a few tomatoes, if that happens to be what we feel like.

Anyway, Philip, the billboard does in fact advertise Fortune ("Business Rules"), and the man pictured, according to SF Weekly Associate Editor Karen Silver, is Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos. Still, we're confused: Our understanding -- feel free to argue with us -- of the proverb "In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" has always been that to those of no understanding, someone of limited understanding appears intelligent. This may not, we think, be the most flattering assumption a magazine might make about its readers, but we're sure Fortune knows its market better than we do.

Watch This Space

Meanwhile, a certain amount of soul-searching appears to be going on at the paper of record. New Publisher John Oppedahl told a meeting of senior editors and department heads that the Chronicle's own research showed people would not recommend the paper to their friends, which, in light of the other local choices, leads Dog Bites to wonder which paper these people could possibly be recommending instead.

Hmm.

Chron staffers' level of paranoia also rose on the news that Executive Vice President of News and Associate Publisher -- and former executive editor -- Matt Wilson will no longer have a newsroom role; Wilson, it was announced, will be working on as-yet-unspecified projects for Oppedahl, leaving Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Phil Bronstein to report directly to the publisher.

And sure, columnist Scott Ostler is returning to the sports section -- but that raises the burning question: Who will fill Ostler's former spot on Page 2? Sources speculate his replacement will be Rob Morse. If we were prone to ending items with dots, here's how we'd leave things ....

One Market Under God

The news that FuckedCompany.com's Pud -- aka Philip Kaplan -- will be making a personal appearance at the 21st Amendment this Tuesday has Dog Bites wondering whether the dot-com dead pool's cult celebrity will be autographing worthless stock certificates, or refereeing a scooter demolition derby, or what.

Anyway, it shouldn't be too hard to get a table for the event. Reader Niels Erich -- who is trying to interest television producers in his America's Funniest SUV Repossessions concept -- notes that though for a while he'd given up trying to eat at the once-jampacked Infusion next door, he's recently rethought his lunchtime restaurant plans. "This time we went and got a booth at 1:15 on a Thursday!" reports Erich. "Two people! Are we in a recession or what?"

OK, a slow crowd Thursday at lunch doesn't necessarily mean much. But Friday night business at Bacar, the new wine-bar-slash-restaurant on Brannan, was definitely slow; the dramatic space, renovated in hopes of attracting affluent local dot-commers -- who have in many cases ceased to be affluent, or local, or even dot-commers -- was half-empty, while Butterfly, the briefly hot Mission DJ-bar-slash-jazz-venue-slash-small-plates-restaurant, was even deader.

Meanwhile, that hideous new live-work loft development at the corner of Third and Brannan sits stubbornly empty, and Dog Bites is noticing more and more "For Rent" signs in the city's better neighborhoods. Why, even the New Mission News' Silicon Satan is pleading with readers to have some sympathy for dot-commers. "As a brutish bear market mauls stock valuations and savages even the most high-performance portfolio, we need to wake up to the immense human tragedy that threatens to befall a sector of our society much more vulnerable to a recession than the homeless: the upper classes," he writes.

Sigh! Satan, you frisky extreme capitalist, you.