Arts & Culture, Book Reviews, Essays, Slow News that Doesn't Break
About
Paul Lyons outside City Hall in San FranciscoNOTE FROM THE EDITOR: The San Francisco Journal is an online journal by Paul Lyons that focuses on Arts & Culture, Book Reviews & Politics. Every word on this website is a creation of a human being and there are no Artificial Intelligence applications used. The primary tool for writing these muses and rants is a dictionary. Furthermore, this website is 100% real and not “fake news” or pink-slime journalism. What has the world come to! Enjoy your journey.
Paul Lyons – June 20, 2024
About Paul Lyons – The Guy That Writes all This Stuff
Dad, Musician, Piano, Harmonica & Trombone Player, Programmer, Husband, Writer, Sometime Surfer, Skier, Bike Rider .. not in that particular order
Paul Lyons – Early days
The Automobile Version
One day, somewhere in a grade school library in the Midwest, A young boy by the name of Gus was looking at a map of the United States. The wind chill was somewhere very negative. The radiators, filled with spiderwebs, were always stone-cold. He looked at the map and saw the California coast and thought – “when I call the shots, and get to choose the program, I am getting the hell out of this God-forsaken place. I am going to check out that Highway 1 that goes up and down the West Coast of the United States. The view from the edge of the continent must be incredible!“
Before that cold day, his family had always traveled East. Back to visit the grandparents. Cousins in Vermont. Reunions in the Holiday Inn in Michigan. Grandparents in tall buildings in Philadelphia. Ashtrays in the elevators smelling like death. Large cars with chrome bumpers. Then three years, in the Middle East with extended layovers and jaunts though Europe. That was pretty cool! Strange smells and colorful sounds echoing from the bazaars. Exotic food that sometime made you wonder if it had recently spent some time in someone else’s digestive track. We survived that, even the skiing in the mountains in the Alburz with the unattended high speed Poma lifts. Above the treeline. Open and barren.
Many years later, in 1982 I headed West in a 1974 Honda Civic CVCC. 38 Miles to the gallon. Five speeds and I mostly lived in gear 5 – like many before, amazed at the open landscapes. After a winter working in the mountains of Utah I spent about a month camping up and down that Highway 1, exploring the coastal towns. I vowed to return someday.
The return trip started on a cold and rainy day in November 1987. After eloping with my beautiful wife in the county of Dodge, we headed West. Married in a law office in a little town. The lawyer looking nervous and foreboding. The female secretary in the office served as witness, seemingly enjoying the change of the daily routine. The second vehicle was a 1966 Mercedes 200D that I bought for $1000. Money earned by painting houses with my brother and playing music in bars and at a summer theater.
The diesel motor diesel gave it 38 miles per gallon but unlike the Honda, this car had three on the column, glow plugs, a sun roof, fins and a massive trunk for all our treasured vinyl record albums we still listen to to this day.
Since then I have called San Francisco home with my wife and two, now, all grown up offspring.
Paul Lyons with his sweetheart
Peace and Be Well
San Francisco Journal – The Really Boring Stuff
The San Francisco Journal was launched in September of 2019. The San Francisco Journal started as The Pelican Cafe (pelicancafe.net) in 2006. Both pelicancafe.net and sfjournal.net are entirely the creation of Paul Lyons who lives, works and plays in San Francisco.
The Pelican Cafe was a website that I used as a platform to write essays, rant and muse about the world, and general have fun on the web. Original the pelicancafe.net was a custom blog written in Classic ASP. Later I converted to WordPress and would often try out new themes or plugins and just have fun tinkering around with code in a very experiential way. Sort of how the internet was back in the early 2000. It was a good time but in the last few years I began to noticed that Google had caught up to me and my SEO was in the toilet. That Facebook may not be an actual “book,” there are indeed actual places called “The Pelican Cafe.”
For some reason cute names for virtual spaces dropped down in the Google algorithm. No longer was The Pelican Cafe showing up in search results. Instead, actual physical cafes started dominating and of course on Google you can get directions to these cafes with their maps. The last thing I need is some intellectually challenged person knocking on my door at 3 AM in the morning thinking that they can get a cup of coffee at my Pelican Cafe. Anyway, there are a few Pelican Cafes in Florida and probably Pelican Cafes scattered all over the place where there is water. Evidently The Diving Pelican Cafe in Muir Beach is no longer open. Maybe the “diving” had something to do with it going under.
Paul Lyons – Editor in Chief, CEO and Head of Facilities at the San Francisco Journal – Photo is from a trip to New Orleans 2019
So, out with the old. In with the new. San Francisco Journal seems like it will be better SEO. Indeed, this website does originate from San Francisco, and “no” I do not own a café. I was actually a bit amazed that the domain sfjournal.net was available .
NOTE: January 8, 2022
Your domain name has absolutely no bearing on your SEO. If you read anything on sfjournal.net, let it be known that you are on the exotic hinterlands of the internet.
Many years later, in 1982 I headed West in a 1974 Honda Civic CVCC. 38 Miles to the gallon. Five speeds and I mostly lived in gear 5 – like many before, amazed at the open landscapes. After a winter working in the mountains of Utah I spent about a month camping up and down that Highway 1, exploring the coastal towns. I vowed to return someday.
