The Offline Report

From this morning's S.F. Chronicle, a fire story's mention of water : While the snowpack was about 75% below average statewide for the 2020-2021 rain year, it was the lack of runoff that shocked state hydrologists. Water coming off the mountains dropped to about 20% of the forecast, an estimate that already took into account the low amount of snow, according to the California Department of Water Resources. “The water never showed up in the reservoirs,” said David Rizzardo, a top hydrologist with the water department. “It went two places as far as anyone can tell. It soaked into the ground because the ground was so thirsty. Or if you had heavy winds, it wiped it off the surface.” And it wasn’t enough to replenish forests stressed by years of winters with below-average rain. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

"'San Francisco is now less expensive and less crowded, and its tech workers are more productive. Those are good things,' Bloom says." - San Francisco Examiner . If history doesnt repeat itself what will see fill the vaccuum of pandemic flight? According to the City University of New York's Sounds and Scenes of New York City: Hip-Hop | Music of the Oppressed : ...in the 1960s, the vacancy rates were at their highest in the South Bronx because of desegregation policies bussing students of color to different schools to put desegregation policies in action. Most parents soon followed suit and moved closer to the schools. The vacant spots made the perfect destination for block parties from whence the culture of hip-hop came about. That late 1970's and early 1980's culture is still being portrayed in new streaming series. But it was captured in one memorable early film, produced at a time before the music, dance and graffiti trio became widely known as

This summary is from earthweek.com and it appears beneath the last page of the sports section the "Sporting Green" section of our Sunday newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle. Occassionally I'll clip one of the articles and past it to this blog. But this week each of the seven articles seemed equally alarming. On closer inspection, four of the seven articles are alarming as in "climate change is here" right now. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

I wrote a trees vs. fire piece the East Bay Express published two weeks ago . It appears to be affecting others' fire reportage in the region . Here's the S.F. Chronicle today, with more specificity of what burned and what didn't in the Big Basin Fire: More than 90% of the park’s countless redwoods, which can grow 300 feet tall and live for 2,000 years, survived the fire. Their foot-thick bark warded off flames even as most of the giants are now saddled with large black scars on their trunks. The forest’s Douglas fir and tan oak didn’t fare as well. Large swaths of mountainside are filled with crisp, copper-colored trees and scorched brown earth. Roughly 97% of the 18,000-acre park burned. Still, across much of the forest, new shoots of redwoods and other trees have begun to poke through the moonscape, offering a glimpse of the greening that is sure to accelerate. Room for fire reportage improvement remains. Those young green shoots are more vulnerable to fire than the

By just one of our fine local movie critics, in his Sunday column answering reader mail: Hi Eric: Unfortunately, you’re right. The internet is like a wind tunnel for ideas. As soon as an idea barely forms, it gets blown into the public space, and once it’s there, there’s no reason to develop or modify it, because it’s already there. It’s done. Plus, there’s another idea already entering the wind tunnel. -- Mick LaSalle in Datebook I originally titled this post "Radical Statement in Plain Site" but someone mistook my play-on-words for a malapropism. LaSalle was responding to reponses to his earlier column in which he remembered planning to pan a live performance by falling star Andy Gibb, but changed his mind when : Somehow, seeing him up close, close enough to see the sweat on his temple, I suddenly understood that he was an actual person. Of course, I’d known that before, but there’s a difference between knowing something and really knowing it. In that moment, I realized

Inside a vaccination-skeptics twitter thread, a skeptic linked to this article , which was published the first month COVID-19 raged in New York City and long before the Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines were in clinical trials: The correction to this misinformation is found ... wihin the same article, beneath subhead "What are the vaccine options?": This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

From Friday's San Francisco Chronicle. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Note to reader: Editor's posting this LTE from today's San Francisco Chronicle does not imply endorsement. Apply that policy to this from the twitter newsbar: This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Aug 31, 2021 "Selling the open space to become housing that only the very wealthiest city residents could afford “seems tantamount to theft of public funds and an illegal use of property designated for affordable housing,” said the group 1900 Diamond For All, which has asked the City Attorney’s Office to investigate."    sfchronicle.com   📰 "Dozens of Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) on Monday demanding an end to the $20.5 billion in annual fossil fuel industry subsidies as part of the latest round of negotiations of President Joe Biden’s mammoth $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act."    hillreporter.com The correct spelling of dum-dum contains one hyphen and zero 'b's.    merriam-webster.com A story with an incendiary headline about Apple, Google and privacy.    inc.com Can investors save the Amazon?     bbc.com Aug 29, 2021 Pinchot was a euge