Debt On

I swear I didn’t know this: it turns out that cashier is the top disappearing job according to Forbes magazine. They say that anybody handling cash is going to be out of a job in favor of a soulless machine.

I say that we shouldn’t take that. So all you register jockeys, clerks and tellers get together and beat those machines! Show ’em how well you can do it, John Henry Style.

So you’ll see on the left that Bounty’s myspace page has been heating up lately. He’s building support for his 2007 Presidential Campaign, (nobody’s told him yet the election’s in 2008) so if you got a myspace, holla!

To close, here is a picture of me and my city.

Hell no that’s not my city. You think I can afford to live in San Francisco??? Click some ads, donate for crissakes! Vote below!

Recently spent a few days in Yosemite National Park and thought I’d share a bit of the beauty…

Campsite sketching

There were huge marches supporting immigration throughout the United States yesterday including 400,000 in Chicago, 300,000 in L.A., New York, Dallas, Oakland, San Francisco, and many other cities across the country amid a boycott of work designed to prove the enormous dependence the United States has on immigrant labor:

Lettuce, tomatoes and grapes went unpicked in fields in California and Arizona, which contribute more than half the nation’s produce, as scores of growers let workers take the day off. Truckers who move 70 percent of the goods in ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif., did not work.

Meatpacking companies, including Tyson Foods and Cargill, closed plants in the Midwest and the West employing more than 20,000 people, while the flower and produce markets in downtown Los Angeles stood largely and eerily empty.

The management in the restaurant I work at must have been worried when they called me a half hour before my shift yesterday. It was clear in the preceding days that few of their staff would be attending work that day. They left me a second message to let me know that even though I missed a lunch shift that day, I could still work dinner if I wanted to.

What follows is photos from the march and rally in San Francisco. Sorry about the big pictures, especially if you have dialup. This will probably work better as an archive piece. To compensate I’m going to limit the main page to two blog posts at a time for now.

The convergence point at Embarcadero

This man is not a worker.

The police had a surprisingly low presence at this protest. Perhaps they’re afraid of clowns.

UN Plaza

Outside City Hall

Reconvergence at the Federal Building

Keepin it real

(BTW – our banner is made from my old work aprons)

Last year on May 1 I lamented the lack of any large and visible celebration of Mayday, International Worker’s Day, in the United States. This year it appears it will be recognized in a bigger way than I ever would have dreamed even a few weeks ago.

As most of you probably know, during the last few weeks the United States has seen a growing furor over immigration sparked by a bill that passed the House in December. If passed, all undocumented residents in the United States would be considered felons, a move that would break up families and unnecessarily punish many hardworking people.

No one but the people seem willing to take a clear stand on this issue. The Republican Party is fractured and bickering among themselves, but this unethical legislation is slowly moving forward through the legal process. Too many politicians seem terribly afraid of being seen as soft on immigration. Others use immigration as a political talking point for campaigning but take little action. They are not to be trusted.

In recent weeks the bill has led to widespread protests in support of immigration throughout the United States. And today, May 1, organizers are calling for widespread boycotts and marches, just like you’d find in most any other country in the world where worker’s holidays are not shunned. It seems that it will be a day to remember.

Lastly, I’d just like to point out that some of the media attention given to this issue is appalling. Just an example, the New York Times’ first quote in their article anticipating today’s boycott is from a casino owner in Las Vegas, the conveniently named Alberto Lopez:

“A walkout really isn’t the constructive way — it’s the opposite of what should be happening,” said Alberto Lopez, a spokesman for Harrah’s Entertainment, the casino company, where prominent banners and petitions calling for immigration reform (to be delivered, ultimately, to members of Congress) have been placed in employee dining halls. But, in the end, no one was certain what workers would choose to do.

Thanks, Times for that tremendous insight into this complicated issue. Casino owners think boycotts aren’t constructive. Right, noted.

So consider calling in sick to work today. And don’t take that trip to the supermarket or the department store you were planning. Anybody can participate so long as you work. It’s an International movement — at its best it always has been. Show you care about the ones that do the worst jobs in our country. The ones that hope to prove tomorrow, we can’t get by without them.

The reason superheroes always have double identities is because most cartoonists have double identities. They are people that spend years in thankless day jobs, slaving over their drawings late at night hoping to someday carve out a living for themselves. But to keep that roof over their head so their paper doesn’t get all soggy, they have to keep showing up at the Daily Planet.



Anybody checking out the sweet iMac on my desk.. yeah it is nice. But hasn’t been working too nice lately. I’m hoping I can resolve these problems very soon, because I’m having trouble taking time on a project I’m afraid is going to be lost.

In other news, Snoopy lives next door to me:

But the real pimp of the neighborhood is our own Bobby Llello a.k.a. Kitty Capone