For your reading pleasure

I’ll be hopping on a flight to DC tomorrow morning so posting here will be light or non-existent this week. In the meantime, there’s plenty to keep you busy in the blogosphere:

• Paul Shigley shares the depressing news that California’s Legislative Analyst is proposing permanently shifting funds from local redevelopment agencies to schools, while Arnold’s recommending cutting even more funds from transit agencies.

• If transit agencies are defunded, at least we’ll still have bikes. The Walk Oakland Bike Oakland blog had a great post last week about one biker’s adventure biking across Oakland to get to dinner at a friend’s house. As someone who doesn’t bike in Oakland because I’m terrified of it, I really appreciated hearing that even seasoned bike enthusiasts get nervous sometimes, especially when biking at night.

• Now that the election’s over, I finally got a chance to start reading Closing the Food Gap, which I highly recommend if you’re interested in food insecurity issues. Chews Wise recently did a thoughtful interview with the book’s author, Mark Winne, about food insecurity in times of economic crisis. Though the topic is heavy, Winne does provide some thoughts on how we can improve the situation. (For some lighter reading at Chews Wise, check out the lettuce porn.)

• City Homestead posts about a campaign to get a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. Meanwhile, Genie is having a hard time finding space to plant her own vegetables in a community garden in Oakland.

• Uptown is rapidly growing, with new restaurants and entertainment options opening, and as usual, dto510 shares the latest news. City Homestead joins in the Uptown excitement with a post about new restaurants in the area.

• If you missed Mix It Up East Bay on Thursday, you can read all about it at Oakland North, including an interview with V Smoothe.

• Rather read V Smoothe directly? You must check out today’s post on how Dellums isn’t telling the full truth about the police department and Measure Y. The entire post is important, but the best part is this analogy:

It isn’t okay to lower our expectations just because they say it’s too hard to meet them. It’s like dealing with a self-involved boyfriend. You might get all upset when he flakes on something important to you or says he’ll bring you hot and sour soup when you’re sick, but instead shows up with wonton soup, because he likes wonton soup better even though he should know by now that you hate it. It’s totally tempting to just not say anything because you don’t want to seem petty or whiny or too demanding or whatever. But when you let it slide, all you’re doing is telling him that’s it’s okay to treat you that way. Why would you then expect him to ever behave any differently in the future? Same exact thing with the City. When we give the City a pass on abandoning their promises on one issue, we’re letting them know that the practice is okay. Why should they then feel obligated to do anything else they say they will?

Can I just say that this is the best Oakland analogy ever? Really, I’ll never look at the City the same way, though at least the self-involved boyfriend brings the wrong kind of soup – if you sent Dellums out to get soup he’d probably return with a speech about how important soup is and would then hire a new staffer tasked with creating a plan on how to get you soup.

Enjoy the week, and don’t forget about the important events going on in Oakland.