Another morning, another city full of shitty drivers

It's raining. It's rush hour. You're in your huge car and right in front of you is a little tiny vespa with TWO passengers. So what do you do? You cut them off. Over and over and over again. On slick streets. With no signal. With no distance between vehicles.

Thanks San Francisco. You sure can drive.

Hooray for predatory men!

Someone got caught in a Noe Valley bar in the infuriating act of trying to drug and rape a date. It makes me really sad to think how many men get away with this - this guy learned his tricks somewhere...

Please read this Chron story and be careful whom you go out with.

Quick-thinking S.F. pair nail man slipping his companion a mickey

Tony Kushner still my hero

"When you circle around endlessly patrolling a border, your footsteps dig you into a deeper and deeper ditch."

This was my favorite one-liner from last night. Calm down. He wasn't talking about Israel exactly, he was talking about all sorts of borders, the borders we draw around various parts of ourselves and our communities. It was a beautiful image.

I finally got to shake Tony Kushner's hand last night. He spoke at the JCC - I bought the tickets about 6 months ago. The talk was EXCELLENT. I was nervous on several counts - would Peter Stein be a good moderator (he's a film guy, not a theater guy), would Kushner talk about theater or just about Israeli politics, and finally, would the obnoxious Bay Area Jewish community *let* him say anything politically sensitive without a shouting match across Kanbar Hall?

I was relieved on all counts. Thankfully the JCC has adopted question cards instead of an open mic (I think this was my idea at a Taube center meeting a year ago) and this really solved a lot of problems. Granted, I was still literally on the edge of my seat the whole time Kushner talked about Israel/Palestine - waiting for some bozo in the room to start yelling - but not only did it go alright, but Kushner also said some beautiful things that gave me new ways to look at the conflict around the conflict.

He compared the rage that discussing the conflict evokes in some hard-liners to that which is evoked when discussing the Confederacy with some Southerners. Rage coming from an attack on an indefensible fantasy, which in the case of the Confederacy is all that remains - a dead fantasy. I can relate to this as a Southerner who spent a lot of time in my teenage years arguing with people who still refer to it as the War of Northern Aggression. (Note that Kushner was incredibly careful not to call Israel an indefensible fantasy, but rather the situation with the Palestinians.)

Then there was a lot of talk about various theater he's worked on, of course about Munich, and a nice chunk of time devoted to Caroline, or Change, my favorite play of his. His new project is a Lincoln film with Steven Spielberg based on the Doris Kearns Goodwin history, Team of Rivals.

Thank G-d someone is taking on Evite

Those of you who have worked with me on an event know how much I fucking hate evite. They suck. Their templates suck, their character limits suck, their auto-reminder emails that you didn't want suck, their failure to let you easily customize jack shit sucks.

Yet we all use it.

The infamous founder (and squanderer) of Friendster Jonathan Abrams (who seems like a schmuck every time I meet him socially) is my new hero because he launched a competitor today, Socializr. The gamma website is easy to use, fast, importing-smart, and intuitive.

May he prosper mightily. I may even be nice to him next time I run into him.

Read on.
Sign up.

The New York Times is gettin kinkyyyyyy

The Grey Lady is getting all Shibari on my ass. Where was this sort of shit when I worked there? No leather boys running around getting me coffee in those days I tell you.

I'm all a-twitter

If you haven't yet been bombarded by Twitter, allow me to introduce you to The Next Big Thing that will waste your time while letting you "socially network." Whatever.

I kinda like it, despite myself. The guy who told me about it described it as "ambient intimacy" and I think that's an accurate read on what this microblogging tool is good for creating. Really, it's just one-to-many texting, but it creates this weird feeling of webbyness.

The site blew up last week - probably just about when I heard about it - and so its running REALLY slowly now, but you should check it out. I think adoption is being strongly driven along by tech conferences, like GDC and SXSW.

My ID is sarahlefton. Twitter me.

The Brooklyn Hereafter | The Cornell Daily Sun

The Brooklyn Hereafter | The Cornell Daily Sun: "The Brooklyn Hereafter"

Me and Chewwie

Me and Chewwie
Originally uploaded by sarahlefton.

I crashed a LucasParty

Busy GDC week

You'd think I was a game developer or something. Read my two Chron posts:

My night partying with Linden Labs

My LucasNight

A buzzzzzzy Purim

me n bill
Originally uploaded by sarahlefton.

Me n Bill at the Mission Minyan throwdown