Recently a friend asked why he had not seen any letters to the editor from me recently. I hope this answers the question.

Since moving to San Francisco about thirty years ago, I have written a number of letters to the editor of the Chronicle and have had a fairly good success rate at having them printed. Things change however and now I spend most of my time raving and ranting via this blog page or more recently, by posting comments in the comments section of www.sfgate.com under articles of interest. If there is really something that moves me in the news I will send a letter to one of the local newspapers but I am finding that my success rate has dropped to nearly zero recently. Is my writing getting worse or are the editorial staffs aware of this blog page and reluctant to give me another venue for my opinions? Who knows. It doesn't really matter to me anyway. I will send e-mails to members of the Board of Stuporvisors if I am really ticked off by their actions but even there I feel like I am banging my head against a brick wall.

As for the bottled water v. tap water controversy, I have found that using a filtering system such as Brita solves both problems. I don't have the expense of continually buying bottled water and the Brita filters take care of any pests that might have inadvertently gotten into the system.

Now, about Halloween in the Castro. When I moved to this city most of the (non-leather) gay bars were located on Polk Street and that was where the Halloween celebration was held. At first it was friendly and manageable but eventually it turned into a rowdy mob. There were just scores of young people roaming up and down the street (none in costume either) and there was a lot of vandalism in its final years in the late seventies. It was eventually canceled as there was too much damage to local merchants' shops and by that time gay bars has started the migration to Castro Street anyway. So history repeats itself in the Castro. My own idea would be to hold several large parties indoors at venues such as the Civic Auditorium and the Convention Center where people could be controlled. There would be an admission charge based on age and whether one was in costume or not and security would be plentiful so outsiders could not just wander in to cause trouble.

Then we have the problem of homeless shelters in this city...not enough beds and dangerous conditions. Well, folks, we can trace this back to the time of Governor Reagan when he decided to close many of the state's mental institutions because they were not doing their job. He did not even try to correct the problems but instead threw out the baby with the dirty bath water. Then, as president he made thing even worse by cutting public health funds. Now most of these people wandering the streets are still the crazies of this world and they are the ones causing the dangerous conditions in these shelters. They do not want to live by anyones rules except their own. These people should not be sleeping in dorm like conditions which is what these shelters provide. They need to be locked up in secure single occupancy rooms. There are people who would like to get back on their feet and live a normal life but they can't due to the reasons I mentioned above.

Well, I see that the U.S. Marines want out of Iraq and desire to help out in Afghanistan. Ha, fat chance that will happen with the Bush burning in the White House.

Agh...another gin & tonic bartender...