Carol Lloyd is a
writer for the San Francisco Chronicle who covers real estate. Her
writing is so devoid of talent and barren of any real insight that it
boggles the mind.

Let’s start with the title of her “column,” Surreal Estate.
Yes, how imaginative huh? I can imagine the thought process now: “Hmmm,
San Francisco real estate is soooo crazy. I want to write about that,
maybe I should call it Surreal Estate!!”

I could almost stomach the lame title if the writing contained within
was worthwhile and informative, which it’s not. It generally consists
of stories about how buyers have to overbid to get a house in San
Francisco (wow, that’s news!), stories about people doing good deeds to
enable others to buy a home and additional stories on the
long-predicted “real estate bubble” which Lloyd has been talking about
for three years now.

Sometimes Carol mixes the three, but most of the time she focuses on
one. As you can imagine with such a limited number of topics her
writing becomes so stale and boring and rife with cliches it’s hard to
even look at the title, knowing what’s in store for you.

Yet amazingly, Carol keeps on chuggin’! Now she’s writing a book on, guess, “San Francisco surreal estate.”
Now that’s imagination for you and proof that you don’t have to have
even half a brain to be a journalist, just a propensity to write a lot
and fill your quota with formulaic gibberish that sucks so badly I
won’t even use it to line my cat box.

Who calls a Blackberry a “Crackberry?”

This question has been on my mind since I’ve read numerous articles in
both Business Week and The Economist discussing RIMM and the
Blackberry. Supposedly the Blackberry is so popular and addictive that
its users call it the “Crackberry” which seems like a backhanded
compliment, if it can even be considered a compliment to begin with.

My boyfriend has a Blackberry, I used to have a Blackberry (right now I
have a Treo 650) and I’ve been extensively trained on both the
Blackberry Enterprise Server as well as the RIMM OS, and I’ve never
heard someone call their Blackberry a “Crackberry.”

This is an example of the media, isolated in their little bubbles,
attempting to define popular culture and its trends for us. The other,
more recent and more glaring example, is that of methampetamine abuse.

“The New Crack!!!” screams the cover of Newsweek. “Meth Mouth a
Heartland Epidemic!!” cries the newspaper cover story. Since
methamphetamine, crystal, glass, ice, crank, whatever you want to call
it, has been around forever I have to ask why it has all of sudden
become such a big deal. It’s not the “new crack” that the media is
claiming it is, and to claim it is is ridiculous and unfounded.

Slate had a great story
on the media’s irresponsible reporting on meth, and the New York Times
John Tierney, a conservative commentator with a libertarian bent, is
also ridiculing this latest drug “epidemic.” It’s about time someone
finally started calling the media’s obsessions before they become
predictable public policy goals in this country. What’s next, putting
people in jail for “Crackberry” addiction?

I recently was inspired to record on a map all the routes I had
traveled to get overseas. I only recorded the final take-off point and
destination. For example, when I lived in Seattle I always flew Delta
overseas, and they never had direct flights from Seattle to London, so
I flew from either Atlanta or Cincinnati. That’s why there are no
flights from Seattle here but some from San Francisco. It forms quite a
mosaic, I think I’ll next do a map of the United States.

Today while walking to my neighborhood grocery store I was accused by a passer-by of being “drunk as a skunk.”

Now ordinarily I would be concerned that I was giving off the appearance of being intoxicated, particularly on a day on which I was not intoxicated. But this particular person was dragging a cardboard box and mumbling to himself while he accused me of being wasted. So I paid little attention to his calls, and forged ahead with my afternoon plans, which involved working and errands.

Also, what’s with people pulling up behind you when you’re attempting to chat with a friend and then blowing their horn repeatedly? This happened to me today when I was picking up a CD from a friend of mine who lives in the Castro. I had just pulled over where he was sitting on his curb when a late-model Hyundai with two extremely obese men inside pulled up behind me and started honking. Looking at them through my rearview mirror I waved nonchalantly, letting them know I would be moving very shortly, and resumed my conversation with my friend. “Beep, beeeeeeeeep” came their horn again, approximately 10 seconds after they first honked.

Now this pissed me off and I looked back and yelled “Yeah? Why don’t you go fuck yourselves” which must have caught them by surprise because the driver’s eyes bugged out of his sockets slightly while his small, pursed mouth opened and closed repeatedly, like a guppy in search of food. After that he didn’t honk again and I decided to make him wait while I finished my conversation with my friend.

I leave for Toronto on Sunday in the swan song of my career at work. I’m happy to go, as I like Toronto, but wish the trip, and my last day at work, was sooner than next week.

I’m having a party at my house on August 27 to celebrate the return to
San Francisco of my friend Stephen Chapman, and also because the real
summer is beginning and I want to have a party!

This is the invite. If you’re in San Francisco, or near, or not even
close consider coming to what is going to be a truly legendary, LARGE
party.

Yum. I finally got my Cielo Cloud 9 CD. This compilation rocks and
expresses everything I love about that club, it’s funky,
non-pretentious, hot and sexy. If you’re looking for some fierce deep
house music buy this CD.

I’m in Texas, for one day. I leave in 5 hours and am now on a lunch break from the class I’m teaching.

One of the hazards of flying as much as I do, and reading as vociferously as I read, is that there are no good magazines left for me to buy this week. So far I’ve read:

1. The Economist
2. US Weekly
3. Star
4. Radar
5. Giant
6. In Touch
7. People

Plus I bought, and finished on the flight from San Francisco, Everybody into the Pool, which was hilarious. I guess I could start on the fag rags like Out next, but being that this is Dallas I’m unsure as to whether those are even allowed in stores here.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is constantly complaining about the over-heated housing market in San Francisco and how “working people” can’t afford to leave here anymore. Yet every chance they get they attempt to further constrict the supply of new housing in San Francisco, thusly jacking up housing prices even further!

Case in point - The Fairmont hotel wanted to convert some of its hotel rooms to condos. But Aaron Peskin, the uber-leftist president of the Board, complained and today passed an ordinance forbidding hotel to residence conversions. Why? Because “a lot of people work in those hotels.” So now hotels are supposed to act as job factories and keep rooms they don’t need for unionized staff who need jobs?

Does Peskin have a college degree? Or better yet, has he ever taken a basic economics class? Because the supply and demand theory applies everywhere, even in San Francisco. Let me spell it out:

More houses = lower housing costs
Less houses = higher housing costs

What else has the Board done this week? Let’s see, try and stop a much needed Home Depot from opening in Bayview, a poor black neighborhood here that desperately needs jobs. Despite the pleas of the residents of Bayview who asked what the board had ever done for them, the lefties tried (but failed) to stop the Home Depot from gaining city approval.

Listening to their complains was like hearing a rehash of Crosby Stills and Nash records from the sixities spun backwards. “Home Depot will destroy neighborhood businesses.” No it won’t, if I want something now I drive to Home Depot in Colma, therefore depriving San Francisco of the sales tax revenues. Do you think I’m seriously going to go to a hardware store in the Castro, drive around for 30 minutes looking for parking and suffer the indignity of being propositioned 12 times to and from my car, all for a bag of nails?

The Board here is so fucking stupid and useless I wonder sometimes if we’d even notice if a meteor were to crash into them during a meeting. Actually we probably would because I wouldn’t have to hear Tom Ammiano’s nelly screeching voice on the evening news, or be embarassed by another of Chris Daly’s abusive tirades towards San Francisco home owners or read about another attempt by Aaron Peskin to artificially control the housing market. Or listen to Gerardo Sandoval grandstand against Urban Outfitter t-shirts. What a pack of lame-ass, incompetent,lazy fucking idiots.

… I’m rich! Well not really, but it’s still nice to have finally achieved some option vesting at my current position. I finally feel like a real adult, sorta, kinda anyway.

Dear SHANE HENSINGER,

You have shares from stock option grant number XXXXX that have recently vested. You currently have a total of XXXX shares from this grant available to exercise.

Questions? Please don’t hesitate to e-mail us

This is the party I’m backing with my friends Ryan and Marcia. Please come, it’s going to become a San Francisco legend.