The San Francisco mayor/golden child hasn't been seen in public since Oct. 30, and his staff had no idea if he went to Hawaii as reported because he didn't tell them anything. Now the local Board of Supervisors is debating whether Newsom might be hunkered down with a city-funded svengali, according to Brock Keeling at SFist:

It is rumored that the San Francisco Mayor spent little time with anyone else other than his life coach during the last few days of his gubernatorial bid. Said life coach also might have accompanied Newsom to Hawaii last week... Supervisor Chris Daly asked the city controller to look into whether or not city funds were used to pay Newsom's life coach.

It's a great move on Newsom's part: Making a grand show of his pain and introspection will only make his future claims that "I have truly changed!" or whatever all the more believable. Especially since, as Keeling points out, life coaches are well known to dedicated reality TV viewers. Those are any wife-fucking recovering-alcoholic gay-marrying mayor's core constituents! (Life coach footage below, via SFist.)

(Top pic: Newsom by darthdowney on Flickr)

The Dellums situation, in which he has acknowledged underpaying at least some taxes, is especially sad. While Dellums has been, on balance, tragically ineffective as mayor of Oakland, he had a distinguished, 28-year career in Congress that included passing anti-apartheid legislation over Ronald Reagan's veto. Now he's part of the "disgusting" backdrop of local deviance and depravity that techies love to hate, until the day they (read: some!) up and leave.

[East Bay Express, SF Chronicle]

First, Emeryville mayor Ken Bukowski killed a guy with his car. Then he was slapped for inappropriate loans. Now his niece accuses him of meth addiction. A lone bad apple? Not among San Francisco Bay Area mayors.

Bukowski is no longer mayor of Emeryville, the small city that's home to Steve Jobs' Pixar, and was even stripped of his vice mayorship. But that's not to say misbehavior is regularly punished. In the superficially spiritual Bay Area, the belief in redemption and personal reinvention springs eternal, and the locals don't need the unifying trauma of a world-changing metropolitan disaster to get over a leader's moral failings; a half-sincere pledge of contrition will do just fine.

A mayor can then move on to greater things. Like running for governor. And people wonder why some top tech talent finds the area "filthy" and utterly dysfunctional. Some of the mayors in question (click each to expand):

It's not just Gavin Newsom's hair that's oily. The San Francisco mayor slept with his chief of staff's wife., and within four days said he would seek treatment for alcohol abuse. Since then, Newsom has repeatedly declined to discuss his "treatment," but has launched a campaign for California governor and won an endorsement from, of all people, Hillary Clinton. And she thought she was done forgiving adulterous men. (Pic: by Thomas Hawk)

Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates eventually pled guilty to trashing about 1,000 copies of the University of California, Berkeley student newspaper after the paper endorsed his opponent. He initially denied throwing away the papers, but confessed, in the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, "a month later, after campus police prepared a report to send to the district attorney." His punishment? Re-election in 2006 (with the Chronicle's endorsement). (Disclaimer: I edited the UC Berkeley student paper in college but was long gone when the Bates thing happened.) (Pic: by Allen Lew)

When mayor of Emeryville two years ago, Ken Bukowski accidentally struck and killed a security job in his car on a rainy day. What did he tell the San Francisco Chronicle? "I don't feel the accident will impair my ability to serve as the city's new mayor." Police reportedly did not test the mayor for drugs or alcohol.

But his niece has just accused him of being a meth addict and ratted him out for keeping a rent-controlled apartment across the bay in San Francisco even though he's a councilman in Emeryville. Bukowski has also been investigated and stripped of various city council titles for taking tens of thousands of dollars in loans from developers and other businesses; busted for failing to pay taxes and fined for misusing campaign funds.

You can blame Bukowski's constituents for electing him, but not for making him mayor: that position is selected by the council on a rotating basis.

It's not unreasonable to expect that Newsom, a candidate for California governor, might have seen the essay from Twitter API lead Alex Payne (pictured); it's attracted plenty of notice among bloggers on both coasts. The blog post, titled "So You're Moving to San Francisco," carries extra punch for two reasons: Its tone is more dispassionate than ranty, acknowledging the city's upside along with its flaws; and it comes from a man whose job involves interfacing with the growing ecosystem of Twitter-centric startups, many of which are based in and around San Francisco.

After giving the city credit for its weather, food, cocktails, coffee and tech scene, Payne moves on to the reasons he desperately wants to ditch San Francisco for the uber-trendy hipster haven of Portland, Oregon "once I'm able to work remotely with confidence:"

• an annoying surplus of superifical and narcissistic well-to-do white nerds;
  
• crime;
  
• human waste and other filth in the streets;
  
• streets choked with homeless people;
• terrible mass transit;
  
• "mediocre" cultural offerings;
  
• hollowed out neighborhoods with weak architecture.

And then there are the ones that hit Newsom where it hurts. Though the mayor was first elected in 2003 on a promise to improve the homeless situation, Payne complains that

• "the city government seem[s] to accept these circumstances..."
• and about "Generally poor urban/civic planning"

An excerpt:

For a first world city, San Francisco is dirty. No, filthy. No, disgusting. Whenever I travel outside of San Francisco, I'm amazed at what a disastrous anomaly it is. Sidewalks are routinely covered in broken glass, trash, old food, and human excrement...



.... Aging hippies in the Haight argue about marijuana legalization and anti-war referendums when men and women are dying – visibly dying – on the streets of the Tenderloin. It's as if all parties don't occupy the same city...

Payne isn't the first to make these observations about San Francisco, and he won't be the last. But he's a key staffer at a company Newsom holds up as a pinnacle of local entrepreneurial achievement, and his scathing evaluation comes fully six years after Newsom was elected to office on a promise to clean up many of these exact problems. Oh, and then there's this: Payne is largely correct.

Twitter Inc. probably isn't leaving San Francisco anytime soon; co-founder and SF resident Evan Williams is building a new house, Silicon Valley is too dreadfully dull for Twitter's hipster executives and Portland lacks the depth of tech talent needed to source top flight engineers. But the high-profile startup need not abandon its hometime to damage San Francisco's reputation. It just needs to complain this loudly.

(Pic by Lou Springer)

"Welcome back from Burning Man," tweets Gregory McGarry. "You smell. Go get your car washed and reevaluate your life. We'll wait."

Or not! After all, burner, your friends have been bashing your festival for days:

• Violet Blue said sex was better in your absence, since the mating pool was free of "hippies and vaudeville hipster performers... ravers and... wealthy tech industry wonks."
  
• Environmentalists like SFGate's Cameron Scott are still complaining about the driving, generators, bottled water and, well, fire associated with the festival.
  
• Civil libertarians are incensed at the festival's policy of owning your pictures for third-party licensing purposes.

Plenty of participants sound stoked on Twitter, to be sure, even those coping with morning-after headaches like backlogged emails. And even those people are stoked they have a job to come back to, unlike some participants:

UPDATE: Original photo removed at photographer's request.

(Pic: Burning Man 2009, by affinity1 on Flickr)

1 minute. Withdrawal! Confusion! Meta!

3 minutes. Brian Conley, live from Tumblr! Fear his angry "back side"!

7 minutes. Twitter's gothically geeky operations engineer John Adams implores you, put your pitchforks down.

And pro headphones, and a backup keyboard, too:

Check the duct tape. Why rough it, refreshing Facebook over and over from your own too-small "Lower Nob Hill" work-from-home studio, when you can stroke your Wacom pen in public, surrounded by others just like you? And why not grab a $4 latte while you're at it? Everybody — the cafe owners, the city of San Francisco, the pushers of the Always-On Internet High life — wins.

(Photos by MGG)

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom may be known nationally as the patron saint of gay marriage, but back home, Newsom has built his career on things like buying fleets of hybrid vehicles and installing windmills near the Golden Gate Bridge.

Small problem — as Curbed SF points out, Newsom has never built a windmill or anything else energy-related anywhere near the Golden Gate Bridge. Not that such considerations would quell admiration from right-coast hacks looking to promote handsome, young politicians for the benefit of the party machine.

If you live in New York, you might think San Francisco's Gavin "Gavvy-gav" Newsom is some sort of John Lindsay-handsome but Michael Bloomberg-effective miraculous wonder. He married the gays! And instituted universal healthcare! And tans his hot bod with solar panels! It's okay, we understand — you guys have never had as firm a grasp on left-coast reality as you thought you did. In truth, Newsom's administration has failed on such basic points as violent crime, public transportation, and affordable housing.

While local New Yorker correspondent Tad Friend chewed on Newsom's presentation hook, line and sinker, even he can't be entirely blamed. The regional press corps has been filled with unapologetic boosters since the gold rush days. With Nancy Pelosi, our local political machine's grand inquisitor, running the House of Representatives, it's only natural that we press a lanky golden-boy type upon you poor suckers statewide. For my sake and yours, however, don't believe the hype.

Gavvy-gav was, and is, a ditzy jock who just happened to be related to somone endeared to the Getty oil fortune. As a perennial ringer for upwardly mobile softball teams otherwise stacked with the obliged noblesse, he rose quickly from above the muddied ranks of local activists and condo association street fighters. Picking topics which cost him little political capital locally while presenting them as daring moves nationally, Newsom has cemented the perception of his position firmly between the socially center-left and economically center-right.

Which, honestly, is about the perfect balance for the pot-smoking, free-market and gay-loving populace which forms his constituency. Still, it's no frame to hang an Obama-level cult of personality on. Newsom's feather-light shoulders and uncannily cheery countenance really can't take the weight of serious responsibility. Take pity, east coasters, and please don't bother to burden him with it.

(Photo by Franco Folini)

By banishing computers from their lives, Erasmus's reclusive colleagues are able to nourish what he calls "attention surplus disorder," the ability to focus on and think about one thing for a long time. Erasmus's order passes its trains of thought from generation to generation — a Church of the Long Now.

By contrast, the video and telecom-addled civilization that bustles outside their walls is full of shallow and incorrect knowledge. People who've never taken time to study anything feel they know everything. Constantly distracted by their jangling electronic gizmos, they can't comprehend the powerful ideas and complex systems wrought by thousands of years of civilization. Their smart machines make them dumb. Inevitably, they look to the cloistered nerds to save them.

I've pledged not to do a review until September 9th, but I'll tell you Stephenson's worldview is contagious from page one. It's been following me around in the real world — I haven't hated normal people this much since I was an MIT freshman. You say you're a "geek?" Let's see you unplug your iPhone for a month. Surely you have something more interesting to do.

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission [See? I told you Adbusters is fun] Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.” An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Here we go again. New graffiti on the sidewalk at 18th and Dolores claims nothing short of "Mission Exploitation" by Google employees. A decade ago, the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project posted flyers urging Valencia Street's self-styled "artists" to vandalize luxury cars. Some did. In 2008, most Web 2.0 workers aren't rich enough to draw the righteous anger of their slightly-less-privileged neighbors. Except for Googlers who dare move into the city's youth-culture ghetto between Cesar Chavez and Market.

The company's unparalleled success sparks rage in the hearts of permalosers who never, ever want to look at anyone whose career is doing better. Somewhere under the sheer jealousy is a legit issue: San Francisco was once a low-rent haven for hippies and a sanctuary for political refugees from all over the world. Dotcom money and disingenuous "live/work" lofts — I signed a contract declaring I was an "artist" to move into one in 2003, enabling the loft's developer to collect $2,700 a month without paying local school taxes — helped drive SF's cost of living higher than much of New York.

But the antiyuppies aren't playing straight, either. Progressive economist Paul Krugman has cited rent control as a major contributor to San Francisco's housing shortage. No one ever quotes him on that. Instead, if Google keeps growing, expect a resurgence in white-on-white carbashings and hatemongering handbills. O cool, grey city of love! (Photo from San Francisco Wiki)

"It was a sugar marathon that would predictably peak in the middle in a weird haze of digital SLR flashbulbs, Twittering iPhones, and San Francisco body odor," wrote Cagle of the blogging, livestreaming, and actual tasting of cupcakes. "Apparently, it is more important to prove you were there than to actually have fun, which is especially ironic when you can't stop bitching loudly about 'the damn media.'" We have met the media, and it is us. We just haven't figured it out yet.

(Photo by SFBG)

Because it's a nasty breeding ground for predators and there's nothing women can do about it. These guys are far worse people than the kind who stalk you on the way home from work or rape their girlfriends or hit their partners or molest their own kids: they have access to your photos from sunning with the girls in Cabo. The most terrifying part about being sexually victimized is the breach of trust and the painful powerplay, and no one can go there like a guy you've never met messaging you for sex. Especially if his name is ~*-joe69 is my game*~!. And especially if you recognize him from LinkedIn. Only your modesty and your Delete key can keep the bad men at bay.

Because we don't know any better than to overshare. When presented with an open text box and an Internet connection, women have proven that they can't be trusted. Whether that's our adolescent sisters flashing it, or elder ladies dating and mating in public past what they refuse to accept as their prime, women cannot keep it in their pants. A set of modest server-side restrictions could help. Rather than face temptation daily, we could also consider removing the Internet from those institutions where its use among girls goes unmonitored. The future of women in computer science could be ushered in by tasking these same young ladies with developing the next NetNanny. For the already of-age, it's not too late. Ask yourself, what trusted man could you give your email logins to?

Because there's nothing worse in this world than being called a slut and online it lasts forever. (As long as it's indexed, anyway.) The most potent insult to sling at a girl is to brag that she may have once gone off in pursuit of an orgasm. Even when we do it ourselves. As soon as you, Ms. Aspiring CTO, pose for the wrong photo, or text the wrong Twitter, your career is done for. Besides, being subject to whispered compliments at one's prowess at adult sexual activity is something that even the most professional woman should not have to suffer.

Because we're giving it up for nothing! Who will pay for monthly recurring billing on a subscription-based business model like marriage when you offer the cow for a complimentary trial period? It's old hat now for girls to go posting a facial comeshot to their tumblelog, but even baring a little Flickr cleavage could ruin a girl these days. Breasts are thieves in the attention economy, I say. If you're not getting paid and paid somehow, you're getting ripped off. A little "angel investment" may be the only way to save your reputation. Not even whores do it for free.

Because men don't believe we're real women anyway. Tits or get the fuck off? Just watch us.

(Photo by The Internet Women's Temperance League)