God bless San Francisco, I said to myself yesterday.

(And by "God," I of course mean whatever conception of the universal deity or natural force, including the lack of such deity or force, to which you may personally subscribe, up to and including the bizarre fire-breathing ethnic she-demon to whom your particular snake-charmer relatives may dedicate their burning incense and goats. Whatever floats your boat, you know.)

The inspiration for this blessing? Was it the tediously wonderful weather, you wonder? The near-absence of Republicans, at least ones willing to loudly proclaim themselves as such? The tolerance, bordering on boredom, for public displays of pansexual perversion? The friendly hobos and their hilarious psychotic schizoid disorders? The fun-loving, rampaging Anarchists? The endless Viagra parties at Dave Eggers's place? None of the above, although I do love those things.

Here's what inspired me to utter those words: an article (called to my attention by my significant other) in our very own S.F. Chronicle, which is the journalistic beacon of the Bay area, and has been since the Examiner was turned into a sort of spineless New York Post-wannabe by a group of heathen Chinese or something.

The topic of this article: Why Emeryville smells so damn bad. (For those unfamiliar with the area, Emeryville is just over the Bay Bridge from our fair city, and greets those passing over its freeways with a cloud of noxious funk rivaled only by such East Coast highlights of olfactory odiousness as the Gowanus Canal and the bathroom at CBGB's. For those who have neither New York nor San Francisco as a reference, I can only ask you to imagine something that smells really bad. This is like that bad-smelling thing.)

But wait, that's not the good part (although it's not bad). The good part is not even that the article contains the quote, "The new arrivals have no idea... they smell poop and they freak out."

The good part is the ad which magically appears at the bottom of the article.



I know, this has more to do with Google's ad-placing technology than any quality of the city in which it was published, but I sense Providence at work.

Ian @ 8:19 AM
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