The Creative Class
So I finally bought Richard Florida's book, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, to read in full rather than having just read excerpts and reviews of it when it first came out.
And I bought it at a real-life, local bookstore. A few months ago I had read a sign at Keplers in Menlo Park which urged customers to buy where they shop. Meaning, don't check out books at your local bookstore and then head home to buy them online at Amazon for a significant discount. Not if you want those local bookstores to still be around in the long term, bookstores where you can go browse and read and feel the books in your hands.
Talking of signs, driving into San Francisco last week, I came off Hwy 101 into the city and found myself waiting for the light to change. Waiting quite a bit since the offramp backs up as the city redos one of the main exits and turns a street off Market (adjacent to the LGBT Community Center) into a boulevard that goes thru Hayes Valley.
So as I waited to get thru, I saw a homeless man trying to get drivers' attention with a sign. Not just any sign but a gosh-darn imaginative sign that had four different messages written on it. Two messages on each side the way he'd constructed it...as he flipped the strips every few seconds just like one of the billboards which changes as the vertical strips rotate 180 degrees. One of the messages declared:
Sometimes I do rhyme
with my creative flip sign
Only in San Francisco. Can't wait to read the Rise of the Creative Class.