Beth Winegarner

SUCH a great song!

Golden Gate Park Ghost Rider In 1912, a man of science encountered a ghostly rider in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

GHOST HORSIE

www.sanfranciscostory.com/golden-gate-...

Four Cemeteries on my ‘Bucket List’ — Beth Winegarner As Halloween and Samhain draw near, I’m thinking a lot about the cemeteries I’d like to visit. All of them are places where my ancestors are buried; I’ve also got a long mental list of “destination” c...

As Halloween and Samhain draw near, I’m thinking a lot about the cemeteries I’d like to visit. All of them are places where my ancestors are buried. Here are a few:

www.bethwinegarner.com/bite-sized-b...

Whenever you hear a tech bro screeching about drug addiction in San Francisco, remember that crypto is supercharging the fentanyl trade and reflect on the quote historian Rick Perlstein attributed to Marc Andreessen in 2017:

“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”

We were on the way home from Point Reyes Station on Saturday night and there was this teenage bobcat sitting in the middle of the road by Inverness. Glad we spotted it early. #bobcat

New episode of Dead Reckoning!

"If you got sick in 19th century SF, you wouldn’t be taken to a doctor or a hospital. You wouldn’t be given chicken soup and penicillin. You’d be forcibly removed in a zinc-lined cop carriage to a set of decrepit cottages in Potrero Hill known as the PESTHOUSE.

He's actually proudly posting a video of himself SHITTING ON AMERICANS. The president of the United States is proud of AI slop showing him SHITTING ON PEOPLE exercising their 1st Amendment rights.

We've hit an unfathomable low in vulgarity and contempt from a sitting president. It's appalling.

highs in the low 50s most of next week. finally … it is my time … i Rise

Yall, I looked it up. Polebridge, MT doesn’t have electricity. They use whale oil lamps.
Also, It was 35 degrees there today.
This is so amazing

A woman wearing rhinestone-spangled red, white, and blue star earrings holding up a sign attached to a necklace that says DAMN RIGHT I'M ANTI-FASCIST: I'M JEWISH!

I know it's not de rigeur to show faces in protest photos, but I feel like: if as a Jewish woman and a rabbi I can't proudly identify myself as anti-fascist, something is really wrong here. (Something is. But I'm still going to stand up for being opposed to fascism.)

#NoKings #NorthAdams

This is the future antifa wants

YouTube video by UnidiscMusic The Whispers - Rock Steady (Official Music Video)

Nobody:

My brain:

youtu.be/rPJz3syNbtE?...

Me too

Diane Keaton, Miss Major, D'Angelo... Who gets to live a "long" life in America?

“And then it came, the realization that—at least in my mind—79 years old was so young for a famous rich white woman in America like Diane Keaton and that 78 years old was practically a miracle for a black trans woman like Miss Major.”

Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

Wikipedia is seeing a significant decline in human traffic because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking to the site

www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

I just made an appointment for a flu shot.

Walgreens asked if I had any chronic conditions.

They set a fucking character limit on the field, so I couldn't list them all.

I’m not trying to give @pbs.org ideas for raising money—but I am. I would buy women’s fit T-shirts of all my favorite childhood shows. Reading rainbow, 321 contact, square one, zoobiliee zoo. I feel like two generations will run to donate even more money for shirts with Levar Burton on them…

Goodbye Dolores Bridge When trains passed second-story windows in San Francisco's Noe Valley.

Woody LaBounty writes about one of my favorite former rail lines through SF (and has some amazing photos to go with). And yes, I have a favorite former rail line. What do you think I am, neurotypical?

www.sanfranciscostory.com/goodbye-dolo...

Newspaper text reads: "LOST, STRAYED OR STOLEN. — One Simon M. Cohen, an astrologer by occupation. He was arrested with Dr. C. C. O’Donnell and Arabella Knapp for the murder of Eugenie Chauvet, by procuring an abortion. He was subsequently released on $10,000 bail, his bondsmen being A. Rafael, L. Peyser and H. Bockheim. The Grand Jury found a true bill against him, but a bench warrant has been unsuccessful in reaching him. It is stated by some that the astrologer has “gone to the Springs;” others that he seeks the spot “where the woodbine twineth,” there to make lunar observations, and to hold communion with his lucky star. Go hence base maligner: would you insinuate that there “ain’t $10,000 ‘n the case, and that it ain’t cheap at the price that will be realized?”"

By the mid-19th Century it was illegal to advertise abortion services directly and "astrologer" was one of the code words that abortionists would use. I can't tell if the newspaper knew this (you'd think so). SF, 1871.

This course will cover the building blocks of short-form memoir and personal narrative writing.

Thursdays, Oct. 9th - 30th, from 6:00-8:30pm PT. Via Zoom.

www.writersgrotto.org/classes-and-...

#memoir #memoirwriting #creativenonfiction #writing #writingcraft #writingclass #writingworkshop

this is our cracker barrel moment

Míle Buíochas, a Chara: Manchán Magan — Beth Winegarner I was devastated to learn last night that Irish writer and broadcaster Manchán Magan died on Oct. 2 . It seems impossible; he was only 55, and had so many plans ahead of him.  I first encounter...

Devastated.

www.bethwinegarner.com/bite-sized-b...

Interview with “Too Poor to Die” author Amy Shea Podcast Episode · Dead Reckoning · 10/02/2025 · 1h 11m

Do you know what happens to people when they die in poverty and estranged from family? In the new episode of Dead Reckoning, we talk to writer and advocate Amy Shea about her book, “Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins."

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i...

Broadcaster and scríbhneoir Manchán Magan dies aged 55 The writer, broadcaster and documentary maker Manchán Magan has died at the age of 55, his family has confirmed.

Such upsetting news. I loved his books, his talks, his devotion to bringing Irish language, culture and folklore to the present and future.

www.rte.ie/news/2025/10...

Swimming in the Bay: Salty Autumn - Bay Nature Autumn in San Francisco Bay is a halcyon moment between the punishing winds of summer and the frigid swells of winter.

"The Bay water on my tongue is saltier than it’s been for most of the past millennium. That’s a big problem for some organisms, including humans, and climate change is making it worse. By immersing myself in the Bay, I’m getting a taste of things to come."

How Spiders Fly - Bay Nature Darwin saw them ballooning. Without any wind. Eventually some scientists figured out their electric secret.

"All 16 species of long-jawed orb weavers (Tetragnatha) on the Hawaiian Islands are descended from a single spider that arrived in Kauai 5 million years ago. That ancestral spider shares a suspicious amount of DNA with Tetragnatha currently residing in California."

baynature.org/2025/09/18/h...

Beautiful, Linda!

Jane Goodall's work insisting, with evidence from her brilliant and tenacious fieldwork, that we were not so separate from animals, and they were much more like us than the Eurocentric theorists asserted, was so important.

On Wednesdays we wear black.

Breaking: Babydog is not with Senator Jim Justice today