July 27, 2016
Send gossip, titillating trivia and scandal to: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com
Looking for something new at 901 Mission? According to the Chronicle jobs-available website, these positions are open – assuming you can figure out what it is you are supposed to do if you get one. To be a circulation retention manager you must “leverage all customer touch points.” To be a digital sales strategist you must “develop strategies to alter outcomes on an individual level for our digital product set.” To be a customer success manager for 46Mile you must “launch ownership of deliverable calendars.” Sign us up!…
Leah Garchik’s amazing son, Jacob, an avant garde New York trombonist, finished second in Downbeat magazine’s national rankings of rising trombonists, a mere eight points behind the first place finisher (whose slide Leah is even now plotting how to slip a little super glue into)…Shopnotes Fun Fact: our former colleague Mark Twain never had to apply default packaging…We are not going to say which reporter it was who, assigned to cover an outdoor speech by Nancy Pelosi, sent a series of dispatches to editor Mark Lundgren on a cell phone that kept auto-correcting Pelosi’s name to “Pelvis.” The reporter was unable to notice this, as the sun was too bright for him to read the texts he was typing. After a half dozen dispatches, an exasperated Lundgren uttered the immortal words, “Who the hell is Nancy Pelvis?”…
We knew it was a big game, but the Warriors’ defeat in Game 7 of the NBA finals also prevented Chronicle circulation from finishing in the black for the second quarter of 2016, according to the mournful graph displayed on the overhead monitor presented at yet another great Thirsty Thursday. There was plenty of beer to wash down the sad news, fortunately, and the leftover sliders were just as good when offered up to the staff the next day, otherwise known as Freeloader Friday. Thrift, Horatio! Like Hamlet says, the funeral-baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table…While it’s true that Robert Egelko, rearranged, spells “Bloke Or Egret,” it’s also true that Kristen Go is “Skirt Gone” and Benny Evangelista is “Banal Evenings Yet”…Shopnotes Fun Fact: Retired copy editor and page designer Rick Nobles was named for Ricky (“Lucy, you got some ‘splaining to do”) Ricardo. If you check out his Facebook page, you can see him at 3, decked out by Mom in a white suit like a performer at the Copacabana…We dedicate this edition of Shopnotes to the memory of our friend and colleague Jillian Sullivan, who brightened the newsroom every day…
We think we figured out the new vacation memo! You can never take vacation in January, because you haven’t earned it yet! And you can never take your last day of vacation, because you don’t earn it until the final day of December! And please sign this new document, promising you’ll never quit until the staff finishes building the pyramids. It’s nice to feel wanted! We’ll never leave the building again, we promise…
Dead Language (not dead tree) Dept.: We’ve been told that folks have long wondered what “lorem ipsum dolor” means. It’s the first three words in what looks like gibberish on the CCI text page (and in countless other places), the placeholder words that pop up before you write a story. Well, it turns out it isn’t gibberish. It’s Cicero, from 45 B.C. The entire passage, translated from the Latin, means, “There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.” That might even be true, or it might mean that Cicero never met an editor…Uh-oh. As of the deadline, only 55 of 178 staff members had submitted their “mandatory” entries into this year’s Videolicious film festival…What reporter said she nearly wrote “widespread obesity”?…Check out the 24 colorful melted baby food jars that have newly been installed on the wall at Joe and Fi’s, part of the new Recology exhibit with art pieces made from stuff found at the SF dump After all, the dump is the place where, according to the old joke, the Lone Ranger takes his garbage (“to the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump)…The amazing Grace Prien, who covered society for the Chronicle from the 1940s to the 1970s, has died at the age of 101. She walked to work from Nob Hill, subsisted on fish and veggies and eschewed high-end cosmetics for Pond’s cold cream. She was wondrous in all respects…Just back from Santa Fe, N.M., are Deb Wandell and Allen Matthews, who visited former executive editor Matt Wilson and former This World magazine editor Lyle York. They also toured the Georgia O’Keeffe museum and did some hiking. Allen these days is a fundraiser and adviser for the USS Hornet (where Tricky Dick welcomed Neil Armstrong back to earth in 1969) and for his ancestral home, the Daily Cal…
Nineteen dollars and ninety-nine cents is enough to buy a lot of great stuff, such as a round-trip for two on BART to Castro Valley. It’s also the amount of the top Schedule A weekly raise that took effect on July 1. The annual raise of 1.5% was negotiated by the Guild as part of the contract that took effect in 2012 and that expires next year. If you’d like to get involved in helping to negotiate the next one, contact our own Carl T. Hall or Kat Anderson at headquarters. One of them is a union maid and the other knows all the verses to “Union Maid” and, with any luck, will not sing them to you…FYI, Kat got reappointed to the Democratic County Central Committee and also got named to the SF Rec and Park commission, two boards where things get almost as intense as a guild negotiating session…Shopnotes Fun Fact: The Chronicle staff used to be addicted to the hokey pokey but it turned itself around…
Curiouser & Curiouser
