Life of Crime

My latest Zippy column from the Marina Times:

ZIPPY
Life of Crime
by John Zipperer

Among the many pleasures of living in a big city, one of them is definitely not coming home and having police cars parked in your driveway, crime scene tape lining the street, and medical examiner vehicles parked nearby.

A suspicious death in a nearby home had brought out San Francisco’s finest, and we’ve gotten to know them a bit better in the ensuing week as they collected evidence, handed out flyers,

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The News, Short and Sweet

I wrote a lot for the current edition of the Marina Times. Here's a media column:

MEDIA
The News, Short and Sweet: One in depth, one in brief
By John Zipperer
Opinion articles about the media are often critical, pointing out everything that is wrong with all or certain media outlets. Here is a corrective. 

There are countless professional news and information outlets available via the Internet. Some are good, a few are great, and many are bad or incompetent. Here are two very different websites that take divergent approaches, and each succeeds in increasing the reach of news and ideas. Newser is arguably the best place to ...

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All in the Family

My latest politics article from the Marina Times:

Ross Mirkarimi from happier times
in 2008 (Photo: Brian Kusler)

POLITICS
All in the Family: There Are no Winners in This Fight 

By John Zipperer 

Say the name Ross Mirkarimi, and you are almost guaranteed to get strong and even visceral opinions from just about anyone in San Francisco. Through a combination of his own actions and obstinacy, as well as some heavily socially engineered legislation over the years, San Francisco Sheriff Mirkarimi will continue to be a lightning rod for a long time. In short, he won’t let the story die.

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Blond Roots

My latest column in the Marina Times:

ZIPPY  

Blond roots

The Marina doesn’t deserve its rep

By John Zipperer 

Can you judge a neighborhood by its enemies? If you read what some people are saying online about the Marina, you can be forgiven for expecting the Marina to be a Beverly Hills-wannabe neighborhood filled with Stepford Wives. The mildest might be SFGate, which says that the Marina District’s “apartment buildings, shops and restaurants seem to be bursting at their seams with beautiful, young and fit 20- and 30-somethings.” Hardly sounds like hell on earth. But apparently it does sound like that to other reviewers ...

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Living in the Cheap: My Latest Northside San Francisco Column

In the February 2012 issue of Northside San Francisco:

COMMON KNOWLEDGE COLUMN 

Living in the Cheap 

By John Zipperer 

Britain’s Prince Charles rendered his greatest service to his nation in 1987 when he complained about the ugliness of postwar London architecture. “Give this much to the Luftwaffe: When it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that. Clausewitz called war the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Around St Paul’s [Cathedral], planning turned out to be the continuation of war by other means.” 

Those tough comments by the heir to the British throne were pretty widely denounced by the modernists who rule the architectural criticism world. But give the man credit for bravery; he made his speech about the sins of urban planners to a meeting of the London planning committee.

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2012 Predictions: My Latest Northside San Francisco Column

Here is my column in the January 2012 edition of Northside San Francisco magazine, available online and in print across San Francisco.

Common KnowledgeSurprise Me in 2012
By John Zipperer 

A few decades ago The Commonwealth Club began each year by hosting a local psychic, who would make predictions about world events in the year ahead. For example, psychic Barbara Mousalam’s forecast for 1984 included the prediction that Soviet leader Yuri Andropov “will pull some dramatic antics during the first part of 1984, but he will settle down.” True enough; he died in early 1984 and settled down permanently.  

For 1985 Mousalam predicted further change ...

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Northside San Francisco: Oh, Give Me a Home

My latest column from Northside San Francisco magazine:

COMMON KNOWLEDGE COLUMN
Oh, Give Me a Home
By John Zipperer 

In the midst of a tough fight for the GOP nomination, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney recently decided to tear down and replace his 3,009-square-foot beachside home in La Jolla, Calif., with an 11,062-square-foot property. It might be less of an attempt to tell the American people “I’m one of you” and more to let them know “I might hire you to paint my garage.” This led Vanity Fair to run a list of things that would fit inside Romney’s new house, including “the Diane Von Furstenburg flagship store in New York’s meatpacking district” or “the world’s largest whale.”
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Bank of America Home Loans president Barbara Desoer says the recovery is slow but real. Photo by Ed Ritger.

My Latest Northside San Francisco Column: Food Fights, From Tang to Tacos

Common Knowledge
Food fights: From Tang to tacos
By John Zipperer

Let’s blame Tang, that instant orangish drink given to schoolchildren in the mistaken belief that all good liquids begin life as colored powder. It symbolizes for many people one step too far away from actual food that was grown in or raised on good old-fashioned soil.

Why Tang? Why not some other faddish food or drink from the plastic seventies?

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New Common Knowledge Column in Northside SF: Anti-Social Media

My third column in Northside San Francisco:

Anti-Social Media: Be My Friend No. 3,467

Downtown BART and Muni stations have sported some rather curious ads over the past few months. A major smart-phone company is seeking to entice new customers by stressing what it must believe to be the major strength of its product: support for popular social media applications.

In the process the company is making some fun applications sound boring and trivial, which I think undercuts the sales pitch. The idea is that you can get your friends’ tweets, Facebook updates, and text messages without having to do something difficult, such as go to a regular computer or, frankly, use any other smart phone, all of which already allow you to do these things.

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My New Column in Northside San Francisco

The new issue of Northside San Francisco is out (in print and online), and it includes my first column for the publication. The column's called Common Knowledge, and this month it features my city's mayor (and probably future state lt. governor), Gavin Newsom.

Everything’s relative in Newsom’s next race
By John Zipperer

When San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom made his abortive run for the office of California governor, he was the Democratic Party’s liberal candidate. So I was surprised when my friend Gina said that Newsom had been her preferred candidate. Gina’s politics are solidly center or even center-right; she’s a Facebook fan of John McCain. What, I asked, was Newsom’s appeal? “He’s practical,” she said. “I like his pragmatism.”

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