David Phinney

She notes the contractor, First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting, "is a relative novice in embassy building and has been criticized for its treatment of Asian workers, who, critics say, are imported because they can be paid low wages, and because they work under hard conditions."

Actually, the company has been repeatedly accused of trafficking in labor, forcing low paid workers into Iraq against their wishes and providing poor labor and living conditions. I guess the Filipinos and others who endured such treatment could be classified as "critics."

I just want to set the record straight. All those phone calls and emails to Iraq, Kuwait, Dubai and Jordan were done by mistake. They mean nothing. I know nothing.

And I am changing to Vonage very shortly.

The kicker:

Roughly one-quarter of U.S. adults say "things in the country are going in the right direction."

Well, yeah. They certainly aren't going left.

And the rest:

69% say "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track."

This entry by Fufkin Vollmayer of San Francisco is in memory of one of my very best friends, Michael Mallery, who lived a good life, a generous life and a brilliant life.

Michael Leroy Mallery, an impresario of aesthetics and of the 1980's south of Market art and music scene, died in his sleep when his furnace caught fire on Saturday, April 15th, 2006. He was 57 years old.

Michael was born in Buffalo, New York on October 10th, 1948, but as soon as he could, headed out to the Bay Area. (More below photo.)

He was the driving aesthetic force and publisher of Another Room, a magazine on avant garde culture. Started in 1978, Another Room was a San Francisco 'zine for the emerging underground music called punk and new wave, technology, and modern art.

Another Room was a seminal publication for emerging rock and roll critics. Rolling Stone writers such as Christine McKenna and Greil Marcus contributed interviews and stories. The magazine combined cultural critique, interviews, along with news about the then-emerging field of software technology.

Michael made a significant contribution to desktop publishing. When he joined Another Room, he redesigned the magazine and worked as the art director. In 1978, he owned one of the first five by seven inch Macintosh computers. Michael had the radical idea of taking Another Room away from the printing trade, which involved stripping and laying out type, and instead put the entire magazine into the Macintosh. He pioneered the use of desktop publishing to produce Another Room, at a time when no one at Apple Computers or even the nascent Mac World magazine, had seen any publication attempt this, let alone a bunch of new wave punk sensibility aesthetes with a geeky weakness for technology.

In the words of John Gullak, a founder of Another Room and of the San Francisco punk band, the Mutants, "I was against the idea since I thought he was going to print the magazine on the daisy wheel printer on cheesy-looking computer paper. I got it all wrong. Michael saw the graphic potential of the Mac and adapted it to publishing."

Ironically, it was his early experience as a printer that saved him from combat during the Viet Nam war.

Michael was drafted and on his way over to Viet Nam when an army bureaucrat noticed Michael's work as a printer in his file. The publications department in Hawaii had an opening for a skilled stripper. As he was boarding the plane at the Oakland Army Base, the bureaucrat yanked Michael from the line and put him on a plane to Hawaii where he completed his service printing newspapers and forms for the Armed Services.

Michael returned to the Bay Area after the war, and after Another Room's final issue, was also a pioneer in what was then the warehouse district of San Francisco, south of Market. This was in 1982, when garment factories and warehouses operated along Harrison Street. No one, save for the down-and-out in SRO hotels lived south of Market. Michael turned a giant 3000 foot concrete shell into a south-of-Market loft that housed his printing business and his home.

He started a print business, World Litho, and had a rolodex from the alternative press. His clients included Mother Jones and Girlfriends magazines, and he did a steady business in printing political campaign materials.

Through out the 1980's, if you were young, hip, and alive, chances are you got invited to one of Michael's famous Christmas parties. Bang a drum, yell into feedback, blast the speakers, and rev your motorcycle, you could do it all in 1986 at Michael's Christmas party because no one, except for Michael and a few other pioneers, actually lived there. At his hundred-something Christmas parties, all you had to have was an appetite and wit. No one ever went away hungry or bored.

Which is why the aesthetic-obsessed, music-loving, techno-geeks decided to take up golf. Michael and his roving band of bad boys golfed like it was a punk rock show: with energy, anybody can do it, even if you don't know how. Dressed in black with wild hair, they careened around hitting nine holes and nabbing a six pack. A lot of smoking, hitting, and laughing among Michael and his merry band of amateur golfers. As one friend said, "We figured, why should golfing only be for guys in their 50's, we wanted to take back this activity though none of us could putt."

An art lover was just too mild, too passive a term for Michael's commitment to aesthetics. He pursued art the way some men pursue sky-diving or mountain climbing. Despite deadlines and responsibilities, he once blew off work, went standby, and flew to New York to see the Vermeer show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Or decided, also on a moment's notice, that he just had to take in the 1995 Cezanne exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There was the time he dropped everything to fly off and see the motorcycle exhibit at the Guggenheim. Michael's motto: anything for art.

Like so many San Franciscans, Michael was evicted from his south of Market loft, and eventually settled in a house in the Oakland hills, where he built a studio, installed a garden, and threw many dinner parties. Like some kind of transplanted Australian, the barbeque was always on, with some concoction of ginger and garlic brewing.

Among his friends and colleagues, two words come up again and again: passionate and generous. Down on your luck, needed help moving, having some trouble with a design problem on your website? Michael was always there to lend a hand or an eye. Literally.

Michael was an avid photographer, a fabulous cook, and one smart aleck. He was always in the mix, gave great dinner parties, and had a penetrating intellect.

In the words of a longtime friend, "The world lost one of the good guys."

Michael is survived by his sister, Linda Harger, of Kansas City, Missouri and his nephew.

A memorial service will be held for Michael on Sunday, April 30th, 2006 at Michael's house at 3 p.m. His address is 7925 Greenly Drive, Oakland, CA. Friends are invited to attend and honor Michael's life and accomplishments.

Michael Mallery's Memorial Web site

Man who died in house fire is identified
By Susan McDonough, STAFF WRITER

OAKLAND — A man who died Saturday in a house fire that also killed his pet cat was identified Tuesday as Michael Mallery, 57, a semi-retired graphic artist and Vietnam war veteran.

Mallery was found burned to death about 9:30 p.m. Saturday in the basement of his house in the 7900 block of Greenly Avenue.

Officials say they believe the fire started accidentally in the basement, possibly because of a faulty furnace. Capt. Melinda Drayton said the flames burned through the floor of Mallery's bedroom. Mallery fell through to the basement when the floor collapsed.

A neighbor saw smoke coming from the house and tried to rouse Mallery but did not get a response, officials said.

Mallery had owned the house for about eight years and lived alone with Squint, a feral cat he adopted and tamed several years ago, friend Lucy Childs said.

She said Mallery continued to work from home designing business cards, letterhead, logos and books.

Mallery loved to cook for friends and was the kind of person who chatted up strangers in grocery stores, Childs said.

"He was a wonderful person and very much missed," she said.

Let us remember his own fabled interpretation of the mother tongue when he flew to Tampa, Fla., last year to flog his agenda for Social Security changes.... Mr. Prez made as much sense as flying from NYC to LA with a change of planes in Hong Kong:

THE PRESIDENT: Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.

Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

"Study finds that many fare poorly at finding Louisiana."

We're talking Americans, of course.

Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 fared even worse with foreign locations: six in 10 could't find Iraq.

That's because they probably get everything they want at Walmart -- not to mention that the teachers may have something to do with it.

Leave no child behind, especially if you don't want them to go anywhere in the first place.

Read more on MSNBC.com.

I stepped into a hole in Marion Park. Narrow and deep, it obviously was dug by one of the many overachieving dogs that populate my Capitol Hill neighborhod. (The dog shall remain nameless to protect the innocent.)

The knee is supposed to go forward when it bends. This time it went backwards.

I went to visit a doctor for the first time under my new health plan with Kaiser.

Suffice it to say that the health plan was the cheapest of all the expensive options that were available to me. I thought I would be getting Blue Cross. (The person who led me to believe this shall remain nameless to protect the innocent. ie, me.)

Let me emphasize that: KAISER. The health plan operator that is notorious in the news media for keeping costs down to the detriment of patients. But, hey, I work in the news media. I am fully aware that the news is frequently misdirected, wrong even..... Besides, I am an iron man. I never get ill, and when I have a physical injury, it heals overnight.....BUT, maybe I should have heeded the better side of caution.

The Kaiser doctor, who looked like he just stepped out of medical school, x-rayed me and with relief he then told me I didn't have arthritis. I could have told him that. I have step-in-the-hole, "oh shit, my knee is killing me" syndrome.

I asked the doctor, "should I get a knee brace?"

No, he didn't think that was necessary.

What he wanted me to do was take two ibuprofen every four hours.

Two weeks into it and I'm not walking more than 50 steps at a time without keeling over. I called the doctor again. I begged him for a stronger pain killer. He wrote a script for acetaminophen, a 13-letter word that I wouldn't bother pronouncing in the morning without a cup of coffee first, but which is a secret code word for Tylenol. I begin double doses of the prescribed amount in the day and spend the night tossing and turning in bed in agony. I am beginning to hate my doctor.

Finally, this week a neighbor recommends his "Voodoo Witchdoctor," a chiropractor in Fairfax, Virginia.

What does the chriro tell me? My kneecap was dislocated and there's a very good chance that I tore my meniscus along with a little other cartilage -- a common enough injury when the knee joint is bent and the knee is then twisted.

Why didn't the Kaiser doctor tell me this? I don't know. But I do know that I called on Monday, May 1, for a specialist. Kaiser set an appointment for May 17. I am getting really pissed.

What's missing? The fact that the Kuwaiti-based contractor building the embasy wasn't the lowest bidder, along with the US State Department's feeble attempts to keep the contract a secret since last August. And reporters fail to pick up on the allegations that First Kuwaiti Trading and Contracting has been repeatedly accused of coercing unwilling South Asian laborers to work in Iraq.