Author: Eric Scheie

This morning I read that a woman was arrested in San Francisco for biting another woman in a dispute over a parking place: San Francisco police arrested Sara Gillan, accusing her of biting another woman over a parking spot around 6 p.m. Tuesday on Jennings Street in The Bayview. Police said the fight began when…

This is sad. San Francisco’s legendary Sam Wo restaurant (which I’ve written about before and which was home to the “world’s rudest, worst, most insulting waiter” — the famed Edsel Ford Fong) is closing. It’s 106 years old and the main reason it is being closed is because it would cost too much to bring it up…

While I’ve got better stuff to do with my life than call giant unaccountable corporations and get lost in their user-unfriendly maze of rerecorded promptings and customer “service” voice mail dead-ends  asking me to leave messages, I was so annoyed by the post Glenn Reynolds linked earlier that it’s what I wasted at least a…

I’m so sorry to see that Dick Clark died. The man was a giant as well as a family friend. I grew up in Philadelphia and I was thrilled to meet him when I was a kid and he was doing the American Bandstand thing. Some of my fondest memories are from when I was…

As regular readers know, I don’t like the war on drugs, and I don’t like the welfare system. Both seem intractably embedded in our national psyche, though, and getting rid of either is politically impossible. All attempts at reform are, it seems, doomed to perpetual failure. What worries me is the way dislike of the…

Regular commenter Frank just emailed me about the latest in what has become all too standard police practice in America. Shooting the family dog. On Saturday afternoon, a passerby called 911 around 4:30 to report a domestic disturbance. What the responding officer, APD Officer Thomas Griffin, didn’t know when he arrived minutes later is that the 911 caller mistakenly gave…

Oh darn. I hate it when I miss details, but late last night when I discussed the Secret Service prostitution scandal, and I failed to mention the evil root cause of their behavior. Those damn homos! It’s all their fault! They forced the president into repealing don’t ask don’t tell, and by extension, the president’s…

I’m having trouble keeping track of our, um, gummint offishuls. A few days ago, I complained that President Obama would probably ignore the growing clamor among Latin American heads of state to consider legalizing drugs. Which he did. President Obama and his administration and the Democrats are adamantly opposed to that, as are most Republicans.…

There’s an old expression that you can’t put the genie back into the bottle (or the toothpaste back into the tube). Governments around the world are working willy-nilly to prove that old expression wrong. So says Sergey Brin, as he explains why Web freedom faces the greatest threat ever: In an interview with the Guardian, Brin…

This headline got my attention. Naked Vermont governor almost eaten by bears At least, he says he was. No politician in his right mind would make up such a story. Speaking to the editorial board of Valley News in Vermont, the first-term Democrat said he noticed the bears in the back yard late at night,…

Fear of numbers is a fascinating thing, and it seems to permeate many cultures in different forms. A friend sent me a compendium of helpful hints the other day, and it included this:   I don’t think the information is accurate, nor do a lot of online skeptics.  But what’s more interesting than that is…

Via Reason, I just learned that a number of Central and South American leaders have had it with the war on drugs, and want to call it quits. Nice snarky headline too! You Are Now (Almost) Free to Discuss Ending the War on DrugsLatin American leaders talk drug legalization. Will Obama join in? On Friday…

I’m getting so sick of anti-American rants like this one: We’re here, we’re invasive, so get used to it!

Whether this is an opinion or scientific fact, I am not 100% sure, but the following image is floating around on Facebook, and I found it amusing. And another way of putting it: Technically speaking, the only two things in life that give you reason to keep living are dopamine and serotonin. In other words, that…

I try not to be a bigot. Honest. But developments in a San Francisco news story do not endear me to bicyclists. I realize that not all bicyclists are inconsiderate assholes, and not all bicyclists run red lights. I’m sure the majority are law-abiding and it’s only the obnoxious minority that gets all the attention. However,…

M. Simon sent me a disturbing link to Radley Balko’s latest (unfortunately among many) puppycide stories. When police in Taneytown, Maryland came to a house to search for a man who wasn’t there, they shot the family dog owned by the man’s parents. Awarding the couple $620,000, the jury found that the police entered without…

First it was the Republican war on women. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, if we apply to Reince Priebus’s analogy the lefty logic Sarah painstakingly explained here, then Republicans are also at war on caterpillars! It must be true, or it wouldn’t have been in the Atlantic: …the war on caterpillars and other…

Here’s an unedited scene showing the latest arrival cleaning my aquarium. Here’s what his other side looks like: The tank sits in front of a window that looks south and for some time I have been tired of scraping off the algae with a utility knife blade. At a local pet store the other day,…

Via Drudge, I learned about a coming crackdown on rubbing in the crowded DC Metro. They are using this provocative picture. It’s not all that different from one I used here in one of my numerous tirades against public transportation: Needless to say, the image of the sexy young woman being “rubbed” is supposed to…

I think that the subtext of the following utterance by former Obama official Van Jones belies the claim that identity politics or the Democratic Party have anything to do with tolerance in the real sense of the word: “I think if President Obama came out as gay, he wouldn’t lose the black vote,” a cheerful Van…