The San Francisco Citizen

Check it. Your old-school TV, the kind that most Americans have, will stop working next year as we’re going to transition to digital service in 2009.

That means that your grandmother, who watches her stories on a TV with a “rabbit ears” antenna, is going to need your help. So you’re going to get her a Digital Television Adapter for free, or almost free, courtesy of Uncle Sucker.

How? Just go here and sign up for your nifty $40 coupons and then head on over to Circuit City, RadioShack, or the Best Buy.   

And you’d better hurry before the Department of Commerce runs out of money.

Wait a second. Don’t sign up for your DTV coupon yet, because better, cheaper boxes are coming. The problem is that these coupons expire three months after they’re sent to you.

If you sign up too early, you’ll have to shell out your own money to supplement the coupon and your box won’t be all that good. If you sign up too late, then you’ll miss out on any subsidy. But if you time things just right, then you’ll get a sweet converter for free.

Or, you can just buy her a new digitally-enabled TV.

Choose wisely.  

It’s not even finished yet but our new California Academy of Sciences building, “on track” to becoming LEED-certified, has some reason to leave its lights blazing.

Perhaps a team of electricians are testing circuits at night? Or maybe the CAS has money to burn what with admission prices going up something like 150%?

Compare this glare with the old-school, non-LEED certified lamp post on the right that would look familiar to the people that acted in Jitney Elopement, a short movie made by Charlie Chaplin  in Golden Gate Park almost a hundred years ago.

Hello lamp post/ Whatcha knowing?/ I’ve come to watch your neighbor glowing.

You see, the street light is turned off, as it wasn’t really needed at that time of day.

LEED certification: It’s in the way that you use it. 

Or maybe they were just testing their expensive solar photovoltaic system - it still seems like a waste of juice regardless.

Here’s the problem: You become famous and then everybody wants to use your image to sell stuff, whether you (and your agent) get paid or not.

Check out this large poster used to promote the idea of wearing “PEARLS” that just happens to right outside a jewelry store on Post Street called Miseki. Is this shot from an ad campaign, or did somebody Photoshop a red-carpet paparazzi photo?

Either way, poor Angelina might not be getting her fair share of the cut. Sadly, Kiera Knightly’s visage is similarly being used by the same store.

The perils of fame!