I am plunked down in front of the TV to watch more NFL football, Saints versus Bears and of course it occurs to me that both cities register as music hubs.
I know its Drew Brees vs Sobrisky or whoever — not sure i can name any Bears. Gale Sayers is gone. I’d go Archie Manning vs Bobby Douglass.
Word!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!(18!)
Keith Boykin, my former day reporter, 1984 at The Dartmouth. Former Clinton staffer. Author. Could easily pin Jim Jordan.
what he said!
bw
JOSH HAWLEY IS A DISGRACE, SHOULD RESIGN, AND BE BANNED FROM STANFORD LAW SCHOOL, FOR INCITING A COUP AGAINST THE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
AND1: I was going to explicate my headline, by quoting from the music video of the same name, but also noted that Bakari Sellers on CNN used the same phrasing: this is America.
andand: thank you robert reich, my fellow dartmouthian, and jb pritzker, my former hebrew school classmate for your stances: this is a coup. there is a clear and present danger.
Mark Weiss: Good evening, Board Members, Commissioners. My name is Mark Weiss. I actually have two things to talk about in three minutes. If I don’t get to both of them or all the points, I’ll send a letter to Council or to you all. I seem to have two threads going with various Commissioners or groups of Commissioners. One is about basketball, and one is about music. I was going to talk about music in my three minutes, but there were some emergent things this week with basketball. The Palo Alto Historical Association had a presentation this weekend with Dave Newhouse, former sportswriter who grew up in Menlo Park. It wasn’t on topic of his event, but a famous Palo Alto basketball player named Jim Loscutoff, who was a world champion for the Boston Celtics and Paly Class of ’48. He would be turning 90 years old next week, February 4th. I thought we should remember
him. I actually had proposed years ago when Yiaway Yeh was the Mayor in 2011—he actually discussed this with Ron Wyden, another famous Palo Alto basketball player from Paly High, who is a U.S. Senator. The idea is something to do with naming the basketball courts of our parks in honor of famous Palo Alto basketball players. At the time in 2011, it had to do with the renovations of Seale Park, the former Stockton Park, the former De Anza School yard. There’s an article you can find, I wrote in 2011, on my blog called Plastic Alto, which is a jazz reference. It was called the Lockhart Loo Proposal. It’s a little bit off topic, but it did generate some of the same ideas. Kent Lockhart was a famous basketball player from Palo Alto. They used to say that there were three Ls who were the top players, Kent Lockhart, Jeremy Lin, and Jim Loscutoff. Jeremy Lin has risen above them. I’d like to maybe talk about that sometime. I’m really here to talk about music in that I’ve been running a concert series at Mitchell Park Community Center in the relatively new building, celebrating its fifth anniversary. The people of Palo Alto authorized a $41 million bond initiative a few years back, if you recall. As a private company called Earth Wise Productions, I’ve produced ten events at Mitchell Park, and I have about another ten on sale right now. It’s my idea of a—it’s not quite a public-private partnership. As a private citizen, I’d just like to leverage our public support for the arts. I had been a consultant years ago to some of the music in the park events, for example Mitchell Park bowl is a good idea for doing events. We still do a little bit. I think it’s less than we did a few years ago with the Twilight Series and the Cogswell Plaza Brown Bag Series. It’s not the exact purview of this department. It’s almost more of an Arts Commission topic, but at least one Commissioner said it was of interest to him. The general topic of how can we use our parks to cross-pollinate, if it were, with the arts community. By the way, I’m going to stay to hear about Juanita Salisbury. I think she’s doing a great job. Good luck this year, Commissioners. Thank you for your service, and Council Member. I look forward to talking with you all about either basketball or music. Thanks.
Take me out, Michael Franti, former USF hoopster:
What a disturbing sight, of Pat Burt, the bullying, polluting, white supremacist retread being seated on council and foisted as a vice mayor!
He should resign.
We should recall him.
He makes me gag.
The Weekly, for whatever reasons, omitted numerous faults about Pat’s campaign.
I appreciate Rebecca Eisenberg for having the guts to challenge Pat during her 2 minutes of dissent last night, by Zoom.
The Weekly continues to delete me and censor me when I try to post about Pat, or about anything.
What was the Muhammed Ali line about making medicine sick? Pat Burt makes the poo emoji look like the Taj Mahal.
*her notes:
Tree experts are checking 400 trees that were brought to Stanford Stadium to root for the football team (!) to see if one of them is the El Palo Alto Rinpoche the spiritual reincarnation of the tree that the Spanish noted in 1769 then cut down a few years later.
Knock on wood.
BLUF: I make a pop culture reference below to a video with 750 million views and apparently a drug reference or organized crime, but when I say “Oaxaca” (wuh-hah-kuh) I am thinking about Palo Alto’s sister city exchange and or string cheese and I am not at all comparing Silicon Valley venture capitalists to Mexican drug cartels although the queso is muy RICO, carty.
The Palo Alto Weekly had something on their website, reprinted from San Jose Spotlight, whatever that is*, about the minimum wage rising in the county from $15.15 to $15.65 cents, up 50 cents or 3 percent.
Meanwhile, a writer from the Chron, a propos of rich people backing an initiative to recall Governor Gavin Newsom, outed a VC named Doug Leone, of Sequoia Capital. It said that he lives in LAH: maybe he was once my neighbor. There was a VC on my block named Jim who bought the Collins house, or the Wray house rather. Also, we lived near National CEO Gil Amelio but it was not true that he had a helicopter pad only that his son was a pilot and landed once on his putting green. That I witnessed.
Leone maybe gives money to Trump and the like because he’s an investor in TikTok.
But it says that thanks to IPOs by DoorDash and AirBnB he is now worth $4B.
So I tried to post to the PAW (who are programmed to delete me automatically) that although workers per se got a raise to $15.65, Doug Leone got a raise to $4B with a B, which works out to $50,000 per hour over a 40 year career in amassing power and worth.
And I am watching this morning Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group — since 1998 — mention in passing inequality as a thing, or a threat (after global warming, political polar bears and Putin). Piketty, Robert Reich – -I just bought his new book, at Keplers. They did not have Zephyr Teachout tho the Times linked the two tomes. CBS This Morning, Morning in America, Childish Bambinos, whatever. When you were mine, you were kinda sorta a Democracy. I got the plug in Oaxaca, yo.
My fav VCs are Nick Sturiale, from my Little League team, and Scott Sandell, my Dartmouth classmate. I probably know by name 40 of them, all time; I sold a truck to Nolan Bushnell in 1983, for his daughter Alyssa. When he was at Catalyst Technology. Nolan in a lecture four years later, at Flint, said that he got the lowest grades in his Utah engineering program but the highest starting salary. His net worth is $TK. Chuckie Cheese, you betcha. (“TK” was lingo for “to come”, according to my friend who interned at Time-Life in the 1980s, nb).
*by Lloyd Alaban of Bay City News which once employed my friend C___ H____ of Stanford class of 1981. 
or:
A powerful money-fueled oligarchy has emerged in America that is an enemy of democracy, Reich writes. The self-interested power of the nation’s wealthy often goes unnoticed by voters, and is partly misdirected by right-wing rhetoric about issues like immigration. But it leads to lower wages, less product choice and abusive labor practices. Trump has harnessed the frustration of the working class, Reich says, but he was a “smokescreen” for the oligarchy. Reich has an almost unmatched ability to make insightful observations about the nation’s inequities, and in “The System,” he observes that the question is no longer Democrat versus Republican or left versus right, but “democracy versus oligarchy.”
To Teachout, what’s behind our rigged system is the close cousin of oligarchy: corporate monopoly. Teachout lists her culprits, among them familiar names: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Monsanto, AT&T, Verizon, Walmart, Pfizer, Comcast, Apple and CVS. These companies “represent a new political phenomenon,” she says, “a 21st-century form of centralized, authoritarian government.”
There are at least 20 VC firms in Palo Alto per se, and Stanford supposedly was rebuilding the Ely Chevrolet car lots for office space to extend Sand Hill Road VC culture.
ok ok: Nolan ran an incubator not a VC firm and the internet says he is worth $50M with an em, and not the commas, so he is cool. Respect! I not attack you!
And to be clear, we are from Chicago but moved to Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley area) in 1968 and were in retail here for 20 years and real estate for 32 years, plus my brother is salaryman for the industry, whereas I am mostly Weiss-noise.
Benj Edwards of Fast Company wrote a comprehensive story recently about the legendary Nolan Bushnell. This looks somewhat dashed off but it took 16 revisits or revisions.
Bottom line on bottom or BLOB: do we love capital more than democracy?
Mark Weiss, Scott Sandell
andandand et al: Starting in November 2011, NEA sold or distributed to its investors the majority of its stake in Fusion-IO, Securities & Exchange Commission filings show. Distributing the shares is the equivalent of selling the shares in the venture capital game since most investors in venture funds trade out of their stock immediately after a distribution. Between December 2011 and September 2012 NEA distributed shares to its investors on days when Fusion-IO’s stock priced closed for between $23.02 and $31.59, SEC filings show. Using the closing price on the distribution days, NEA has cashed out Fusion-IO shares for more than $510 million. That’s a realized exit of more than 11 times NEA’s investment. NEA still owns Fusion-IO shares worth about $130 million. (Forbes – -no wonder he’s smiling — he literally said “Oh, I sold that!”)
To come Mark Weiss addressing City Council, on cable access (the guy in the back, Michael, always talks about fluoride in the water); staff at Ramen Nagi Palo Alto; Aaron Goldberg, piano, Josh Redman, Bing Stanford; ibid; Mark Weiss, a new knife, wearing a Native American themed ad buster Mutton Stew protective garb; KEEP TRYING THAT THING — art work from Works San Jose show; Mark Weiss on the way to a Giants game, upper Market; high school rock band Garage Mahal, Palo Alto World Music Day; ibid; ibid; Gabrielle Castro; Palo Alto Jazz Quintet featuring drummer Dan Adams, with Jim Adams in foreground; Mary Halvorsen Trio, SF Jazz; Julian Lage; cello player, Palo Alto buskers festival; Halvorsen; Jeff Parker band, June 2018, San Francisco; The Mother Hips at The Fillmore; merchandise worker, the Fillmore, selling me the last Yo La Tengo shirt; Mark Weiss Terry Acebo Davis, San Francisco; ibid, the Fillmore; Yo La Tengo the Fillmore; ibid; ibid; Mark Weiss Gary Davis, Giants game; Hutch; Madison Bumgarner at bat; the Fillmore; Giants at bat; hospice, summer, 2018; dog; Equator featuring Beauman Edwards, Lytton Plaza; Joe Zirker, FOG San Francisco; ibid; dog; fireworks at Sunken Diamond; the artists who made the Blue Trees, holding my dog; holding my dog; Terry Acebo Davis Phyllis Newhouse; the Oaxaca Kitchen; dog and man; “Hakan Sukor Best goals”; Bay Area folkloric dancers; Jon Ford Marjorie Ford at Whole Foods; Palo Alto Players rock themed musical, “Rock of Ages”; ready for the walk; (click on photo to reveal Hans Delannoy and Mark Weiss; illustration of Ralph Kiner from 1974; Terry Acebo Davis rooting for Hilary, election night, 2016 — November 8, 2016 7:54 pm; my dad somewhere in Northern California where he carried the Olympic torch in 1984; art work by Mark age 10; Tuck and Patti Rinconada Park Palo Alto music in parks series; ibid; Robert Reich not the economist; “Since the scope of truth is infinite, obviously there will always be unanswered questions” — Bertrand Russell; Ray Johnson Not Nothing; Sam The Sham poster, in collection of SF MOMA — the band featured Palo Altan Gregg Rolie later a founding member of both Journey and Santana 1966 Wes Wilson—no, wait; i’m confusing William Penn Five “Swami”. “He slept outdoors; People thought he was crazy” poster for BECH by Mark Weiss, Edwin Crayton and Luis Ruvalcaba, 1992; Chris Isaak in Redwood City; view from 101 Alma west; Mark Weiss and South African visiting potter at private pottery collection Palo Alto; human body studies in private collection, San Francisco Bay Area, photo by Mark Weiss; Dead and Company at Levi’s Santa Clara; Mexican folk art; Mark Weiss in snapshot circa 1990 holding Mexican folk art;
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Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 