San Francisco Chronicle Bay Area - Spoken Edition

Even the SF Bay ferries are crowded these days It is one of those deals with the devil that make modern life so complex: You take a good-paying job in the city while opting for a good life in the country or the suburbs. The suburbs are more affordable, the schools are better, and the grass is greener. But the devil demands his price: The dreaded morning and evening commutes. Everyone knows traffic is impossible and BART is jammed. That’s one reason for a boom in commuting by ferry.

How Jerry Brown pulled a fast one on Trump Gov. Jerry Brown found himself caught in no man’s land when it came to deploying the California National Guard to make President Trump happy. He still managed to come out a winner. Brown knew he had no choice but to go along with Trump’s request to call out the Guard, even though the waves of illegal immigrants that the president cited as a reason exist mainly in his head.

It’s easy for San Franciscans to be blue these days. From the needles and tent camps plaguing our sidewalks to the national disaster that is the current White House, there seems to be no respite from bad news. So every once in awhile, I like to go looking for silver — in this case, Silver linings.

It was only the last paragraph in Willie Brown’s column last Sunday, but it stirred up more dust than the great San Francisco earthquake. After a long discussion of other topics, Brown praised the late Mayor Ed Lee, who had a role in restoring the historic Lotta’s Fountain at Kearny, Market and Geary streets, and then wrote: “We are going to rename it after the late mayor .

The coffee shop was gone. Jane Chai was sure of it. It was early on the morning of Oct. 9, and the Tubbs Fire was encircling the Larkfield Shopping Center off Old Redwood Highway north of Santa Rosa. Everyone had been evacuated. Local television stations were reporting that the center — and with it Chai’s business, Blue Beagle Coffee — was burning. Nearly one-third of the surrounding neighborhood was already in ashes, the once-familiar landscape obliterated.

More than 500 women will celebrate the centennial Saturday of a running revolution with a tough — and historic — footrace in Marin. It is the 100th anniversary of the Women’s Dipsea Hike, one of the country’s pioneering sporting events for women.

Dante Zedd can barely recognize Clawson, the West Oakland neighborhood he’s lived in for more than three decades. He calls Clawson Dogtown, a nickname he says was earned because of the stray dogs that once roamed the streets nuzzling for food. The dogs barking in Dogtown these days are on leashes or in yards with sturdy fences.

At first, no one thought to check underground. When the Tubbs Fire roared through Santa Rosa in October, torching more than 3,000 homes and displacing tens of thousands of residents, one of the hardest hit neighborhoods was Fountaingrove in the hills north of downtown. Residents who had fled for their lives returned to find 1,420 homes leveled amid a nearly unrecognizable landscape.

As any creative type knows, coming up with the big, bizarre idea is the easy part. Pulling it off? Now that’s another story. In February, I told you that my fellow Chronicle writer Peter Hartlaub and I had struck on the totally pointless yet fun idea of riding every Muni line in one day. We had the ambition. We had the hashtag: #TotalMuni2018. We didn’t have much else. Now, we have a lot of enthusiastic support. It seems people are eager for a silly diversion amid all the dark news.

Sacrificing privacy to tech has big costs, but also major rewards These are tough days for the Internet and the tech moguls who run it. Everybody has seen the spectacle of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in the hot seat last week. Two days of testimony before Congress, bright lights in his eyes, the cameras clicking, senators boring in. “Let me cut to the chase,” said Sen.

Three weeks. That’s how long Carlos Alfredo Rueda Cruz went without prescription medication while he was detained at West County Detention Facility in Richmond, according to medical records his attorney obtained from the jail and shared with me. Cruz was being detained by our federal government for being in the U.S. without immigration documentation.

Mayor Ed Lee lives on at his favorite table at Sam’s Diner on Market A collection of the late Mayor Ed Lee’s staffers held a luncheon memorial Friday at his “table” at Sam’s Diner on Market Street, feasting on Lee’s favorite dish — the Mahalo Loco Moco — a beef patty and two eggs over easy, layered on steamed rice and covered with brown gravy.

Three days after a subtropical storm walloped Stinson Beach, huge chunks of the destination’s main parking lot continued Monday to wash into the ocean.The damage is so extensive that the National Park Service, which operates the lot, and Marin County Public Works, which is in charge of the flooded Easkoot Creek, couldn’t estimate how long repairs will take and how much they will cost.

Change has swept over San Francisco like a hurricane, but there are bits and pieces of an older city everywhere. You just have to look, sometimes in odd corners of the city.On Evans Avenue in the Bayview is the world headquarters of L. Ph. Bolander & Sons, which sells flags and flagpoles, a niche business with deep roots in the city. Their products are found atop hotels and stores, and in front of police stations and post offices.

Why London Breed pulled out of race for Democratic committee endorsement The recent vote by the the Democratic County Central Committee to endorse former state Sen. Mark Leno and Supervisor Jane Kim, in that order, for San Francisco mayor came as no surprise — but it was not without drama. For weeks, the progressive-dominated committee had been wrangling over which candidate should get the top endorsement and who should be No. 2.