Timothy Lesle

Happened yesterday, when the ruling party rammed the legislation through the National Assembly. Not exactly tears of joy; an opposition lawmaker set off a teargas canister:

A couple weeks back, I compiled a little infographic for Longshot Magazine. And they took it! Thus the badge embedded here. I put together a chart of examples through history of the price tag we’ve put on human life. The chart isn’t online, but you can see it if you buy the magazine, formatted with [...]

On Monday morning, I got to see a glimmer of Bloomberg’s San Francisco office. The office, on the second floor of a converted pier on the Embarcadero, was highlighted in August 2007 as the largest leasing deal to come along in San Francisco since the dot-com boom eight years earlier. At the time, the media [...]

[Was writing an update to the original entry and deleted it instead. Here it is again, roughly.] Am seriously thinking of putting advertising on this blog, as well as another whose development I’m playing around with and possibly unveiling one day. Any thoughts? Please let me know. Otherwise, I look forward to raking in about [...]

When the economy started its downward spiral in mid-September, the Chronicle asked some Bay Area businesspeople and economists for their perspectives on what was happening. Most struck a note of caution, the wait-and-see stance typical of that moment, since nobody really had any idea of what was happening. A couple of sources seemed less worried. [...]

When Ted Stevens was found guilty of all seven charges of failing to report gifts last week, the conventional wisdom, at least in the Lower 48, was that the Republicans had lost another Senate seat. I’m inclined to agree. But with reservations. Because if there’s any place that will surprise you politically (other than Minnesota, [...]

We stopped at a little shop fronted by a display case full of sweets to pick up some snacks before dinner. This was on Chandni Chowk, across from the Red Fort, in Delhi. We settled on 20 rupees for the confections. As he handed them over and we gave him some cash, he said, “Thirty,” [...]

In The Odd Couple, Oscar Madison admits to his ex-wife in California that he’s weeks late paying his alimony. He gets off the phone, sits down with his poker buddies, and announces: “I’m $800 behind in alimony. Let’s raise the stakes.” Eight-hundred dollars. We wonder how much that would be today. The Bureau of Labor [...]

On Tuesday, I wrote about the financial mess on Wall Street, and pointed out that the gold-medal-winning US women’s soccer team rang the closing bell on Monday. “There’s no investment like gold,” I wrote. Gold! I should have put my money where my blog is. Wednesday, the price of gold rose more in value that [...]

Rough day in the markets today. We saw it coming last night (we’ve seen it coming). Choose your loser. But it ended on a high note, right? The champion U.S. Olympics Women’s Soccer Team was on hand to ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. So there were a few winners on [...]

The franc is back in France, at least in one little village. After switching to the euro in 2002, France’s franc became obsolete. (The Swiss continue to produce their own last francs of Europe.) But some of the businesses in Collobrières are accepting the old francs in lieu of euros. According to the story in [...]

It’s easy to babble. It’s hard to write short. Writing short is a decent thing to do; it saves your reader’s precious time. But once you’re in that mode of writing, it seems even harder to write long. I usually inject a lot of “very”s. I find that very effective. Or, you have to be [...]