The Call of Nature

A guy from Flint invents a toilet for dogs, a worthy project that will render my hard-hitting investigative journalism pointless.

Banning Plastic Bags Might Not Help the Environment

Genesee County is considering a ban on plastic bags. It sounds like an obvious way to help the environment, right? That's what San Francisco thought when it enacted a bag ban. But it turns out all the ban does is encourage people to use paper bags, which turns out to be worse for the environment.

Joe Eskenazi told the counter-intuitive tale in a recent issue of SF Weekly. He writes:

Still, a number of cities and even nations have weighed the scientific evidence and concluded that a San Francisco–style ban simply shunts shoppers to paper bags and is markedly worse for the environment than the status quo. "Paper bags have a greater environmental impact than plastic bags, and therefore you would not create a policy that banned plastic and forced everyone to use paper only," said Dick Lilly, the manager of the waste prevention program for Seattle Public Utilities. After much analysis, that city spurned the San Francisco model in favor of a fee on all bags, meant to spur shoppers to bring their own.

Genesee County officials should read the article before they act. There's no denying that plastic bags are about as evil as plastic water bottles, but a ban might actually make things worse. The real solution is getting people to embrace BYOB — Bring your own bag.

Murmurs of Flint

I felt some roundabout Flint nostalgia last night when I went to the R.E.M/Modest Mouse/The National show at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley with my friend Will. He blogged about it for SF Weekly, where he works. I haven't listend to R.E.M in what must be 15 years — and after seeing them that won't change — but songs from Murmur got heavy rotation on the little portable tape deck I rode around with in Flint in the early eighties. (No in-dash tape player in the old LeSabre or the Electra.)

From Flint to San Francisco...and out of a job

Jessie Evans, who coached the Flint Northwestern basketball team from 1973-1976, finds himself in a strange predicament in California.

Debra Gore-Mann, the athletic director at the University of San Francisco — where Evans had coached since 2004 — announced on December 26 of last year that Evans had requested a "leave of absence" for the remainder of the 07-08 season. When asked why the leave was necessary, USF clammed up, and Evans was quickly replaced on an interim basis by coaching legend Eddie Sutton.

That was a little weird. Then SF Weekly ran a story showing that things were even weirder:

Evans says he neither requested nor consented to a leave. He suspected his job was in jeopardy on Dec. 22, after receiving a message from one of Gore-Mann's subordinates while he and the team were in South Bend, Indiana, to play Notre Dame. The message instructed him to be in the AD's office at 8:30 a.m. the day after Christmas.

That meeting lasted only a few minutes. Evans says that Gore-Mann opened it by telling him that he was relieved of his duties as head coach.

"I said, 'Huh?' And that's when she presented me with a piece of paper and gave me an ultimatum," Evans recalls. "She said I could either take a leave of absence, saying that it was due to health or personal reasons, or that I would be fired with cause by 4 o'clock that afternoon."

Evans says Gore-Mann never said what cause she had to fire him, and that as far as he was concerned, he left her office as USF's basketball coach. He learned otherwise an hour or two later, he says, after news of Sutton's acceptance of the job scrolled across his TV screen as he watched ESPN.

Now that the season is over, USF officials are claiming Evans committed several "secondary" NCAA violations.

"When you have multiple NCAA violations, even if they're minor, the problem you have with the NCAA is called 'loss of control,' " USF attorney Michael Vartain told Tom FitzGerald of the San Francisco Chronicle. "That means they don't trust that your coach is accountable for the program."

Evans has no comment on the alleged violations, and he's lawyered up to fight the Jesuit university over the balance of his contract or a negotiated settlement.