WCS 60: Think like a booster rocket
w/: Seahawks @ Niners + Mary Jane meets AG Gaetz + Tyson vs Paul is 80s vs 20s
A mass exodus is occurring on Ex-Twitter. A big percentage of the accounts belong to corporate media workers who, somehow, finally located their consciences. Shameless on the surface, these feebs are actually talking into microphones and throwing up posts about their belated moves.
Who says sex work hasn’t lost its stigma?
To be sure, the donnyshell Twitter account got deactivated the week I started West Coast Sojourn. The September 2023 decision was quick and cost hella visibility. So, I don’t get why a decent adult human would keep using the site, lending that increasingly racist and misogynist platform credibility throughout an election whose consequences we must now face.
Tonight is the true Super Bowl of the kind of men who drove 4547 to power. The rest of us will watch because nostalgia and spectacle are officially now what make the world go ’round.
Among the countless election facets misunderstood in real time is how our incoming rulers would deftly jettison spent apparatus.
Talking heads on your cable and the YouTube might piggyback wishful words on dwindling rally crowd size into some kind of meaningful GOP detriment. That assessment was untrue. In actuality, the Republican candidate had moved on to podcasts. The rallies already served their function.
Just like Ex-Twitter. Buying and then junking that once-great San Francisco company might be the most remarkable investment that Musk has yet made.
Canadian Coast Sojourn, anyone?
I’d miss Chicago, but sure.
Now, for 10 items and their potent lil sidekicks:
10 Matt Gaetz is going to make us feel bad about weed
The nearly1,000-page Project 2025 document doesn’t mention use the word “marijuana” or cannabis or, for that matter, weed. Right-wing orthodoxy won’t likely hold back bud remotely like it’s impacting immigrant life and female US citizens’ right to choose and how the nation’s racial history is taught.
Mary Jane is having it easy. In a post-11.5 world, we got that goin for us. Small victories. Count them.
This week’s nomination of highly-unqualified Congressman Matt Gaetz for Attorney General should give the federal legalization movement energy, assuming the polarizing Trump ally earns Senate confirmation.
WUSF / NPR / Marijuana Moment
During his campaign, the President-Elect supported Florida's recreational cannabis ballot measure, which failed to reach the requisite 60 percent approval.
Gaetz is a weed fan, the rare Republican supporter of the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act. (He opposed the Florida measure on the basis that such issues should not be decided through constitutional amendments.)
He’s also a racist who happens to support dismantling the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Florida weed is not amazing. And the American cannabis industry absolutely should not be run the way that state gets down.
Lil Hit
A New Zealand study delivers noteworthy evidence that cannabis keeps us healthier than the pointlessly straight and anguished average human being.
San Jose Mercury News
For future coverage I’d like to take your answers into account.
9 A tight Seattle win window for Sunday
Seattle has dropped five of their last six games. Defending NFC champion San Francisco is one of the NFL’s rising powers, and the Niners hold a 6-0 record against the Seahawks, going back to December of 2021.
Only two games separate first from last place in the NFC West. Here is what must happen if the Washington squad is to mount a meaningful challenge on Sunday in Santa Clara and go from bottom-dwellers to playoff threat.
12th Man Rising
The Seahawks need to both establish a ground game and hold back the 49ers’ potent rushing attack. The latter’s going to be tough as Seattle is without Jerome Baker and Tyrel Dodson—the two top off-ball linebackers the team began the season with.
In the passing game, it’s mandatory that the visitors give Geno Smith an adequate pocket to throw from. On defense, covering the middle of the field is an absolute must.
Also—if you’re a religious Seattle fan—you might want to pray.
Lil Hit
Dave Zirin invoked Colin Kaepernick in writing for the umpteenth time that Republicans don’t play by the rules. Buckeye Nick Bossa’s Sunday Night Football electioneering gambit is his latest example.
The Nation“‘Everything Happens for a Reason,’ Says Woman Who Has Never Actually Been Through Shit” might be pretend news, but it’s the moment’s zeitgeist headline.
Reductress
8 New SF leadership faces shortfall and probable DC reprisals
A new mayor + a Board of Supervisors made up of “four progressives, five center-right friends of the billionaires, and two in the middle” make up the new San Francisco leadership as The City faces a massive budget deficit and the prospect of “efficiency” reprisals from the President and Elon Musk.
48 Hills
Tim Redmond reports that SF has “a structural budget deficit of more than $700 million,” before one even addresses the precarity of nearly $500 million that San Francisco gets each year from the federal government.
Most likely, cuts will come in public health, municipal libraries, and public works.
It’s unclear where the money to clear street encampments—as new mayor Dan Lurie has promised—will come from.
Lil Hit
Damian Lillard, Intel’s Pentium Pro, and Dark Horse Comics are among the people and developments that changed Portland.
Willamette Week
Bay Area thespian Nikolai Lokteff took this photo.
7 Are we in a 2nd Warriors revolution?
Remember when Golden State changed the way basketball looks and is played, about a decade back? Well, Steve Kerr’s team is back at the whole changing-the-game thing.
I’m a Lakers die-hard, but what the San Francisco team is doing has me thoroughly entralled. The style is so simple and fresh.
Golden State of Mind
This summer the Warriors’ coach played up his Paris Olympics team’s depth and won a gold medal. He’s brought the approach back to his NBA gig in an outrageous way, consistently playing a 12-man rotation.
Most teams don’t play 12 players because they don’t have a dozen players capable of holding their own. Golden State does have 12 good ones, and the extra bench time keeps players fresh enough to go all-out whenever they take the floor.
A nine-player rotation is the NBA norm. Advanced stats show Warriors consistently performing at a level that could discredit the established star-driven “Big 3” approach to roster construction.
Lil Hit
A long look at new US Census Department figures indicates that the California population exodus has ended.
Orange County Register
I’ve written just a little here about the storytelling project in which I’m most engrossed. Here is a little more.
May is my deadline. It’s the work I’d like to be remembered for.
6 Washington State is 8-1, suckas!
Between lamenting the end of Pac-12 Classic Action, being star-struck by QB Cam Ward’s rise to a Heisman candidacy on the far side of America, and watching the Oregon Ducks power to the very top of college football, it’s been no big feat to overlook the miracles being pulled together out in Pullman.
This week ESPN ranked Washington State No. 18 in America.
Seattle Sports
The Cougars travel to take on the 4-6 New Mexico Lobos tomorrow and then go Corvallis next weekend to take on Oregon State. Expectations are that WSU will playin in San Antonio’s Alamo Bowl.
Meanwhile, word is that quarterback John Mateer is being offered a million bucks to move on to another program. CFB’s transfer portal opens on December 9.
Lil Hits
Wu-Tang’s Raekwon the Chef has opened a dispensary in Newark called Hashstoria. Wu-Tang is worldwide!
PatchSpeaking of Wu Tang, the GZA and RZA get mentions in this spectacularly candid and satisfying conversation with Bill Murray.
The Full Herb Caen
History will look back at how incongruously normal corporate media has sounded while the country turns to solid darkness…
Like, Why is Steve Inskeep still maintaining that tone? He has the same information I do…
Nothing better expresses how corporations set dubious agendas for citizens than how American football fans are forced to talk and think about the dependably inconsequential Dallas Cowboys on a year-round basis…
From “I, Anonymous,” in Portland’s Mercury alt-weekly: Rene Gonzalez lost! He's not the Mayor, he's not on city council. He's just some douche at your kids soccer game complaining about the homeless now. That dude is out of our lives! Horray!”…
The next four years will mark four more years of war on factual reality, which means nuance must go underground…
It shouldn’t take an election to realize that the American electorate will throw over minorities to take home a few more bucks…
Look back at a seminal TV moment…
Watching this takes me back to being a little boy in Ohio, watching Friday night sitcoms while curled up with my mom on a living room couch. When Red Fox delivered his laugh line, the uproarious reaction? It was the biggest I’d ever heard.
Does Netflix have only a half dozen design templates for its in-house documentaries?
As with the visibility of Bronny James, we are going to have to accept the show biz factor when considering regular season record’s meaning—as we do “strength of schedule.” A lot of guys sit out because your show is their business…
That the junior James doesn’t make road trips with his G League team is pretty notable…
I usually credit my great relationship with punctuation to a three-day Fort Mason copywriting workshop during which I was high on a heroic dose of herbal Ecstasy. But it was LA Weekly critic and editor Manohla Dargis who taught me how to properly deploy a semicolon…
5 The end of the wind biz as we know it?
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