As a young man, Mark Hawthorn reported for the Times. Now he lives on the streets of Berkeley where he eats garbage and wears women's clothing. Known as the Hate Man, he asks people to tell him, "I hate you."
Last September a homeless alcoholic who goes by the name of Stress was walking past Toronto's InterContinental Hotel after having spent the night on the steps of a church when out popped overly good-looking Irishman Colin Farrell, who was in town to promote In Bruges at the city's annual Film Festival. Next thing Stress knew, he was tooling around town in the back of the actor's limo while Farrell treated him to a $3000 shopping spree and an anti-addiction pep talk.
Google's cafeterias are an arm of its PR machine. One can read endless paeans to their free, organic, locally-sourced, employee-engorging meals. But you'll never read about how they're serving up homelessness as a side dish. Google pays its chefs so little that at least one has ended up in a San Francisco homeless shelter, unable to find a $1,000/mo. studio he can afford.
The sun is shining, Shake Shack is thriving, and the homeless are openly jerking off. It's official — spring is here to stay.
Because no one was buying that whole "I'm a homeless and hungry Vietnam vet" thing anymore, anyway.
Cyberpunk writer Paul di Filippo tells of the San Francisco of the future, in which a dozen named bloggers, most of whom have print gigs and none of whom actually hail from the city, wander around San Francisco's fugtastic Transamerica Pyramid. Filippo runs into BoingBoinger Cory Doctorow:
A new study out today from a homeless-advocacy group ranks the 20 U.S. cities meanest to the homeless. New York ranks 14th. Though it's nice to know we're less mean than Little Rock, Atlanta, or Dallas, that we even made the list is at least moderately distressing news to everyone who likes to think of our fair city as a shining beacon of enlightened tolerance and old-school liberalism.
