Thanks to Charles Lewis III for his nice writeup about our parklet situation in 48 Hills! (Vote for us in Best of the Bay!)

But since this wretched timeline is one that moves backwards in all the worst ways, City Hall and the SFMTA want the Lounge's parklet destroyed. Again. Seemingly for no other reason than "just because." The 41-year-old club has two weeks to take down the utterly harmless, wholly beneficial structure, or face a 500-dollar daily fine.

You know how this very column has illustrated that Lurie's administration wants to turn SF into Manhattan? You know how we've said their idea of "a thriving San Francisco" is one that appeals not to artists, performers, or independent businesses, but soulless corporate interests? This is what we mean. The DNA Lounge is not only one of the few indie performance venues still around in SF (particularly, in the SoMA/Tenderloin area), it's one of the few -- if not the last -- concert venues that hasn't been assimilated into the TicketMaster/LiveNation mega-monster. It's a genuine San Francisco original that constantly finds itself at war with the very SF politicians who should be defending it.

Here are some photos of our lovely parklet from this very afternoon, being enjoyed by the attendees of our annual PRC / AIDS Emergency Fund benefit event. Look at all that wide open space for busses!

You may have noticed that we got coverage about this from one of the local TV stations. I'm not embedding it here because the coverage was... kinda bad.

One good thing came of it, though, which is they got Dorsey on camera saying "let's hope we can keep that parklet there". We did finally get in contact with his staff, and they are trying to set up another meeting.

SFMTA's position hasn't changed a bit, and they have still not made any real commitment to pausing the fines, which may or may not start next week depending on their mood.

Anyway, back to that TV segment: they showed up unannounced at 10am, interviewed Devon for half an hour, picked their favorite 5 seconds, and then gave the SFMTA bureaucrats a full-page copaganda press release rebuttal that went entirely unchallenged and made it sound like we just put this thing up in secret in the dead of night and they only just discovered it, which is the farthest thing from the truth. SFMTA were deeply involved in the parklet design before during and after both of its incarnations.

SFMTA like to keep saying it is "unpermitted", but the only reason for that technicality is that eight and a half years ago someone inside the city bureaucracy just... dropped the ball and didn't finish the paperwork. If they had just done their job and signed off on it when they were supposed to, we would have been fully permitted today -- with affordances for the 40 foot busses that were the standard at the time of permitting. How were we supposed to know that they didn't finish their homework? That's their job, not ours!

But because one of their own fucked up eight and a half years ago, they think they get to just make us start over from scratch with an entirely new set of rules that did not exist when this project was designed and approved. We're getting screwed because they didn't dot their i's and cross their t's when they were supposed to.

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By the way -- something else I didn't mention last time, because though it is stupid, it will obviously hold no sway with bureaucrats: this idea that there needs to be room for two busses at the curb? It's absurd! It has literally never happened, and do you know why? Because there is ALWAYS a car there! One hundred percent of the time when I have seen two busses there at once (which isn't even all that common) there has been an Uber or a Lyft or a Waymo or a delivery driver illegally parked in the bus stop, and so the second bus stops at an angle with its nose out in the traffic lane. And the bus drivers and the bus passengers just deal with it and go on with their day, because that's life in the city.

"But that's illegal", says the bureaucrat. "They can't do that."

BTW, ask me about our so-called "bike lane".

The 20th Asian Games are on in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture and the city of Nagoya, from 19 September to 4 October. About 11,000 athletes from 45 countries are competing across 43 sports

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US president doubles down on criticism of CNN and MS Now as Akayla Gardner questions attempted White House ban

A day after the White House barred CNN from traveling aboard Air Force One to provide pool television coverage of the president’s trip to Tennessee, Donald Trump doubled down on his criticism of that broadcaster and another, MS Now, he has attempted to ban over coverage of him he calls overly negative.

As he left the White House early on Saturday, Trump was asked by MS Now White House correspondent Akayla Gardner: “Do you only want outlets that support you to be a part of the press pool?”

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Microsoft's senior product manager for Excel acknowledges that "Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell." But that's now changing with arrays in cells (as well as nested arrays) and lists.

"You can create a list by selecting Insert > List or pressing Ctrl+J, then typing or pasting items separated by commas or semicolons, depending on your regional settings. Selecting the icon in the cell shows the individual values..."
"With lists, you can filter by one or more individual items instead of whole text entries. Referencing a list returns all its values for calculations. For example, =B2 spills those values into separate cells..."

"For the first time in Excel, arrays can exist natively in cells as values or as formula results. They can be any size or shape and can even contain other arrays. You can now keep the result of any spilling formula in a single cell by "wrapping" the formula body with braces { }."

"Since the introduction of dynamic arrays, array results have spilled across cells — for example ={1;2;3}. Wrapping the original array with braces creates a 1x1 array around it, so instead of spilling to multiple cells, the array stays in a single cell. Braces have long been used to describe arrays in Excel and this extends that behavior by allowing multiple layers of braces. This gives you more flexibility when building spreadsheets. Instead of leaving room for a formula to spill, you can keep the result in one cell."
"Arrays can now also 'nest' inside other arrays... Previously, a formula that produced an array of arrays would return a truncated result or #CALC! error. Now, supported formulas return the complete nested result... FLATTEN(array, [pad_value], [levels]) simplifies nested arrays by removing one or more levels of nesting..."

Three HAS functions check whether values are in an array:
— HAS(array, value) returns TRUE if value appears anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise.
— HASANY(array, values) returns TRUE if any of the values appear anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise.
— HASALL(array, values) returns TRUE if all of the values appear anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise.

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