Columnists

Fighting Measures A and B on next Tuesday’s ballot has pushed me over the edge. I’ve lost weight, acquired more wrinkles and lost my sense of humor. Sometimes I don’t even speak in coherent sentences. I’ve put my clothes on inside out, forgotten to zip my fly, backed out of the driveway without looking left or right for oncoming traffic. -more-

I am a longtime supporter of public transportation, and have been so since my youth when I used to ride around Oakland on AC Transit, often getting off and walking the last 10 blocks home along East 14th only because I thought it extravagant to pay the extra 10 cents it used to cost to go past 73rd Avenue. I was born too late to ride on the old Key System, but I fell in love with light rail when I worked, for a time, in San Jose, and thereafter thought that its reintroduction into Oakland would help ease the city’s traffic and parking problems in our city, and might also help to reinvigorate the downtrodden parts of International Boulevard east of High Street as well as West Oakland’s floundering business and commercial districts. -more-

Some 10 years ago I was out in my backyard pulling up ivy. My next door neighbor was doing the same. As we both neared the fence he muttered, “Gardening in California—it’s all about killing things.” He was right. -more-

Speaking truth to power is all very well. Sometimes, though, I just lose my temper and feel the need to speak truth to cockamamie. -more-

Murphy must be in the contracting business. You know, the one who wrote that famous law: Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. He (or she, we’ve never met in the flesh, although I’ve fallen victim to his/her epistemology a time or two) was either a contractor or the client of one for enough time to codify the law and its corollaries. -more-

A friend asks me to check out the website www.idealist.org. I click on their URL and up pops a paid plea from Children’s Hospital Oakland, (CHO). It asks for help distributing 50,000 “Vote Yes on Measure A” yard signs. That’s one helluva lot of soon-to-be-thrown-away plastic signs. -more-

Not that I miss them, but I haven’t found any Argentine ants in the house this winter. I hesitate to consider this a permanent victory, though. They’re out there somewhere, biding their time. -more-