Either that guy doesn't live here or the Chinese don't know they all live in the Sunset. And culturally lagging? Hah! What about that musical with all the big hats!

About twelve years back, I was a traveling sales trainer for a PC company. One assignment took me to a bland midwestern city. Let's call it . . . Witchita. There was a plaque in the hotel elevator touting the Skyline Lounge or somesuch . . . a bar on the top floor. The big attraction was a lady piano player named Doris. She looked kind of big and well into middle age. "Wow, how wonderfully lame!" I thought, "I bet this is the big night spot! Sneer! Smirk!"

At the training the next day, one of the sales guys at Silo asked me where I'd been put up. I mentioned the hotel's name. "WOW!" he said, "Did you go see Doris!?!?"

And then there was the time in Tulsa with the hotel hosting International Order of the Daughters of Job . . .

But anyway . . . I'll take a place like San Francisco, with all the mess and bums and pretentious impractical jackass activists and technoyuppies, over the clusters of strip-malls, subdivisions, and dead-after-six pseudo-downtowns that pass for cities in most of the country.

Cripes, I just moved to Fairly Hip and Very Livable Portland, and DANG . . . one public TV station? One public radio station? Coyotes slipping onto the light rail line to nap?

So, if San Francisco's lame, what's cool?