A 3rd edition of ‘Carbondale After Dark and Other Stories’ has even more Carbondale history | Carbondale | Custom Cook Book Printing

West Philadelphia born and raised, I now live in the Kreuzberg 36 neighborhood of the former West Berlin. I’ve been here for the past thirteen years via New York City, Santa Fe, NM, and Madrid, Spain.

Last week brought approximately one million people to the Bay Area to celebrate America’s men and women in the Armed Forces at the 37th annual San Francisco Fleet Week. My father served two combat deployments as a naval officer aboard the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany (CV-34) in the Tonkin Gulf in 1969 and 1970. For roughly the past decade, he and a group of fellow officers from the carrier known affectionately as The Mighty O have made the annual pilgrimage to the City by the Bay. This year the invitation extended to children and grandchildren, meaning nearly a dozen of us descended on the city to navigate cable cars, relentless hills, and the crowds at Fisherman’s Wharf.

The first such book we got was “De Vrolijke Vier Seizoenen” (“The Merry Four Seasons,” Google Translate tells me, though the book was published in the United States in 2008 as “In the Town All Year ’Round”), by Rotraut Susanne Berner. It depicts the same seven panoramic scenes in a village (including a residential street, a city plaza and a department store) across the seasons. There’s no text except for signage in the scenes.

Meanwhile, Washington’s subway system — 117 miles of rail — has become a public embarrassment, with long delays, rising fares, and nagging safety problems. The system’s chronic underfunding reflects a national trend. US investments in infrastructure have fallen off dramatically, from 3.3 percent of GDP in 1968 to 1.3 percent in 2011, a long-term decline that began at almost exactly the same time as inequality in America started rising. The US states where the rich have gained the most at the expense of the middle class turn out to be the states that invest the least in infrastructure.

Less is a novel about Arthur Less, a gay man of a certain age who takes a trip around the world to avoid attending the wedding of an ex-boyfriend. The writing is crisp and funny, as Less navigates a comedic gauntlet of awkward, international social situations like unknowingly and relentlessly butchering a foreign language.

The CDF, ADA, CEQA, EPA, FDA, DEA, CFG, EHS, PRMD, WMA, CCR, BCC, DPH, BPC, DFA, MCSB, CDFA, CDTFA, OSHA and other agencies are mostly destructive interferences with an already healthy, working, and profoundly benign “industry.”

The real problem, Sundstrom says, was that he didn’t have a network for distribution. Sundstrom printed 5,000 copies and quickly sold half. Five years later, he has 1,000 copies left. When a local publisher, Sasquatch Books, approached Sundstrom to reissue the book in a soft-cover format and with coverage of Lark’s new location, Sundstrom agreed and accepted an advance of about $10,000. Sasquatch, which is connected to Penguin Random House, has sold 3,000 books to date — succeeding where Sundstrom failed at getting the book into national distribution chains, but it still hasn’t made a significant difference.

But in the last year, a fleet of high-profile Silicon Valley defectors have been sounding alarms in increasingly dire terms about what these gadgets do to the human brain. Suddenly rank-and-file Silicon Valley workers are obsessed. No-tech homes are cropping up across the region. Nannies are being asked to sign no-phone contracts.

Google promises unlimited free “storage,” sure: “safe, secure, and always with you.” But some of its other promises, the ones we haven’t heard before, are strikingly of their time: “Never worry about running out of space on your phone again.”

The magazine placed Baltimore second on a list of "Hot Startup Cities That Aren’t San Francisco or New York," emphasizing its concentration of companies working in the education field.

To our hopelessly out-of-touch culture-war and corporate puppets pretending to be “public servants” acting for the common good:

That first cookbook has a foreword from Martha Stewart; Ina had a column in her magazine after the book did gangbusters. It reads straightforwardly as an endorsement — and yet, when you look at the actual words, they assemble themselves, as so much does in Martha’s world, into some kind of menace, an alpha act of undermining. Martha writes: "It took a while, but I finally understood what motivated Ina, realizing that here was a true kindred spirit with really similar but unique talents." Exactly how long did it take, Martha?