No one gets tattoos of scale bars. They’re not nearly as pretty as a compass rose, you never see as much variation or style in them and I think the best that can be said for them is that you can tuck them out of the way and forget about…

“Go fly a kite” is very nearly a perfect metaphor for “fuck off and do nothing” and we have Mary Poppins (1964) to thank. A stuffy English patrician, a banker literally named George Banks, gets fired from his job only to realize that his regimented aristocratic life is an absurd…

At the beginning of fire season in 2019 I visited the Situation Room at PG&E’s downtown San Francisco headquarters and it was like walking onto a movie set. There were floor-to-ceiling monitors and rows of analysts watching live-streams from remote webcams on fire watch towers and dashboards tracking Twitter, weather…

A good college friend wheedled me into writing this all the way back in May so that I could submit it to an online magazine that was trying to catalog how art is helping people get through these wild times. I got a lovely personalized rejection note from the publisher…

There’s a lot that I don’t know about Friday night. As I understand it, riots are not often understood well but this one for me was particularly chaotic and disorienting. I’ve been to marches and protests aplenty but none quite like this. I want to provide as much context as…

I was hanging out (at a distance) with my friends at the beach last weekend and one of their friends (at a distance) was asking me about cameras. I currently had one of my own dangling about 150 feet above our heads from a kite taking pictures. Presumably this advertises…

I’ll be updating this from time to time as more maps filter in. Watch this space!

The COVID-19 virus is a big deal. As of this writing, over *20,000 people on the planet have died because of it. Thousands more will almost certainly die.

Yes, it is true that your…

It’s a very fashionable thing right now to bash PG&E but despite the receptive atmosphere for kvetching, my latest chapter of PG&E antagonism has been more difficult for me to write. It is not often that I feel a true compulsion to write but now that it has struck, my…