September 11, 2002

talkback...

No more Metreon

Enough with the Metreon already. After finally getting laid off from my SOMA dot-com job last Christmas (of course), I've been going to 1000 Van Ness instead. But we happened to be downtown today and decided to visit the Metreon again.

I've ground my teeth for years in anger at the ticket prices and concession stand prices, but what happened today was beyond the pale of even normal corporate larceny. I tried to buy my usual "child's" popcorn (what would be the "small" at any other theater) and was told I am no longer allowed to buy the child size, because only children ages 2 to 12 can now buy the child size.

San Francisco, please join me in returning to all the wonderful small theaters we have here. Let's give our money to people who earn it by caring about the movies and selling us nonstale popcorn. Enough with the Metreon already.

Greg Berry

San Francisco

Zero-emission genius

Bruce Livingston's strong feelings about the conspiracy surrounding the new Segway scooter sent me into a flurry [Op-Ed, 8/28/02]. To sum up, a new electric scooter was invented that you can stand on and control just by balancing normally. It's basically a platform between two wheels with a stem coming up so you can hold a tiny handlebar. It's electric, energy efficient, and technologically revolutionary.

Trying to make headway against huge traffic and pollution problems, lawmakers want to allow people to use these scooters on city sidewalks. This is the root of Livingston's fear: they will be dangerous to people walking. The evidence being that, in his one, brief experience with a Segway scooter, he deliberately knocked over a stack of chairs by running into it. Thus, (the logic went) the legalization of it would force "cities and counties to scramble to further legislate safety, insurance, testing, training, sidewalk etiquette, and selected bans."

Keep in mind that the scooter weighs 83 pounds, travels up to 12.5 mph, and fits right under your feet. I could push over a stack of chairs. I (or a guy 83 pounds heavier than me) could jog on the sidewalk and be more of a danger. I've ridden my bicycle on the sidewalk for years and never hit anyone. I can't wait to use the scooter. But look out! I might not see you walking right in front of me!

Merrill Long

Orinda

The bogus virgin

Great piece on the pope's visit to sanctify various tools used to facilitate the European invasion and cultural holocaust in this hemisphere ["The Pope's New Conquest," 8/21/02]. It was about time someone escorted Guadalupe off her pedestal. Even the left has been bowing and scraping before this bogus stand-in for Tonantzin.

As for the two finks also being canonized, I'd never heard of them before – and the mainstream press sure wasn't telling their true deeds. This is alternative journalism at its best. Thanks.

Cathy McKinney

San Francisco

Is bin Laden dead?

Do you suppose that we either know that bin Laden is dead or have captured him but the Bush administration is keeping it secret from the American people so they have justification to continue the war on terrorism? There is strong evidence that the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin was fabricated so we would enter the Vietnam war. With a morally corrupt administration like we have with Bush, anything is possible.

David Bell

Castro Valley

Mumia's missing story

Project Censored's top-25 list of most-censored stories of 2001 ("Censored!," 8/2802) leaves the impression that the problems of race, ethnicity, and just plain justice have been solved in the United States, or are treated [TK as?] uncensored in the media. P.C.'s tally omits the story of Arnold Beverly, the confessed killer for whose crime award-winning journalist, and former Black Panther, Mumia Abu-Jamal, was railroaded to death row in 1982 (where he still sits).

Beverly's confession became known in May 2001. Beverly said that he was hired by corrupt cops who wanted to kill one of their own to protect their graft and payoffs in downtown Philadelphia and that Mumia had nothing to do with it. It was an astounding breakthrough, corroborated by other evidence, in an internationally known case, in a city ridden with police corruption and racism; but who knew? The blackout in the national media was total.

You have to go back to slave law (Dred Scott, 1857) to "justify" recent court decisions against Mumia (which ignore blatant racist bias by the original trial judge). With Mumia's case (like the Rosenbergs', Sacco and Vansetti's), if you are a critic of the government, you are an "enemy" who can be executed or jailed for life, despite evidence of your innocence. And now, in Bush's America, immigrants, citizens of Arab and Puerto Rican ancestry, and political dissidents are in the process of losing the right to a trial by a jury of our peers. (But we do get military tribunals and secret federal courts to direct eavesdropping.) Not one of P.C.'s most-censored stories dealt with these issues.

Chris Kinder