At 50 minutes, this is a little long for a blog, but it's worth watching for those who remember those times. I became aware of this documentary by a commenter on post 2025.2014-Add-001, about the police raid in San Francisco in 1964...
Saturday, February 15, 2025
2025.0215.0005...
From the 2015 Tokyo Motor Show...
Toyoda Gosei's Flesby Airbag Car
Yes, that's the correct spelling. Toyoda Gosei is one of 18 companies owned by Toyota.
Toyota FCV Plus Hydrogen Fuel Cell
Friday, February 14, 2025
2025.0214-Add-001...
These first two images are not from the article. I dug them up because it's a neat building...
Almost nobody remembers one of San Francisco's worst betrayals
A building on Polk Street has a problem. California Hall, which sits on the corner of Turk and Polk streets, blends in with the other boxy brick buildings that crowd the neighborhood. It looks ornate and vaguely historic, but so do most old Tenderloin buildings. It was built in the 1910s as a meeting hall for Polk Street’s German community; in the 1960s it served as a concert venue (the Grateful Dead played there in 1969); now, it’s part of the campus of Academy of Art University.
1911
Almost nobody remembers one of San Francisco's worst betrayals
A building on Polk Street has a problem. California Hall, which sits on the corner of Turk and Polk streets, blends in with the other boxy brick buildings that crowd the neighborhood. It looks ornate and vaguely historic, but so do most old Tenderloin buildings. It was built in the 1910s as a meeting hall for Polk Street’s German community; in the 1960s it served as a concert venue (the Grateful Dead played there in 1969); now, it’s part of the campus of Academy of Art University.
California Hall’s issue, according to local historians and activists, is that it’s missing a plaque.
The building was the site of a forgotten flash point of San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ history — a moment when a group of Protestant ministers struck up an unlikely but rock-solid alliance with San Francisco’s gay and lesbian communities. On New Year’s Eve, 1964, a dance and drag ball at the Hall ended with a police raid and arrests, which spun into a legal battle involving the ACLU. Before the Stonewall riot galvanized the gay liberation movement in 1969, and before the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in 1966, the California Hall raid shone a light on police harassment of LGBTQ+ communities. In a 2023 article on the raid, the Guardian declared it “San Francisco’s Stonewall.”
Click on headline to read the rather long but very interesting article.
Thursday, February 13, 2025
2025.0213-ADD-001...
The Illusion of Recycling
The recycling system itself is deeply flawed. Most plastics are incompatible, making sorting costly and inefficient. Only PET (#1) and HDPE (#2) are widely recycled. In short, once most plastic products are created and reach the end of their usefulness, they’re tough to repurpose.
The economics of recycling are also stacked against success. Virgin plastic, often subsidized by fossil fuel subsidies, is cheaper than recycled plastic. This price disparity discourages the use of recycled materials.
Furthermore, the rise of flexible packaging—those lightweight packets for snacks and food—exacerbates the problem. These multi-layered packets, while convenient, are incredibly difficult to recycle due to contamination and complex composition.
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