Saw the new Sylvan Learning Center commercial this morning, featuring yet another annoying, doe-eyed, blonde Mormon child and his annoying, doe-eyed, blonde Mormon mom. When will they just go ahead and start using the tagline “Sylvan Learning Centers: Fixing all the damage those horrible brown-skinned children have inflicted on your child’s education”?
Or maybe: “Sylvan Learning Centers: Cheaper than White Flight”…
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Every time I walk by the old Pacific Stock Exchange and see how it’s been stripped of all its dignity and transformed into an upscale gym, I think about how I’d almost rather that they’d torn the damned thing down. Even if you aren’t a supporter of capitalism — and I realize that a significant number of San Franciscans are rather ambivalent about this particular economic system — you have to wish they could have found some better use for a building with that much history than to turn it into a trendy latter-day sweatlodge for vain, self-obsessed yuppies…
Alas..
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I finally asked around and found out that yes, there is in fact a San Francisco city ordinance responsible for the fact that every building in the whole bloody city is freezing cold all winter long and stiflingly hot during September and October.
Enacted a year before I arrived in the city, the Structural Temperature Equality Ordinance of 1991 required that no heating or air conditioning system of any sort be employed in any San Francisco building unless said system were designed to REDUCE the temperature during the winter and ELEVATE it during the summer. It further stated that no variance of more than three degrees shoud be allowed between the outdoor and indoor air temperature within any building designed for human occupancy…
I think it had something to do with preserving the sensibilities of homeless people without heated or air-conditioned shopping carts…
And yes, I’m making this up. However, keep in mind that (a) there really DOES seem to be no discernible climate control anywhere in this godforsaken city, and (b) our Board of Supervisors is NOT above passing really silly and pointless legislation…