I left my cash in San Francisco…

SAN FRANCISCO, California – If you’re suffering from Manila’s and Asia’s tropical heat or the humidity of the monsoon season, a direct flight of 12 hours to San Francisco on the Bay is your best bet. While New York and the Eastern Seaboard still swelters in the steamy heat of later summer – but Fall’s cool winds are on the way – San Francisco is chilly most afternoons and nights of the year thanks to the cold air swept in by the "Japan current."

Right now, it’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And so, if you’re planning a jaunt to this enchanting city, which attracts ten million tourists and visitors per year, bring a warm jacket, sweater, your "thermals" and a turtleneck if you’ve got one. If you have to live on the land by purchasing these items here "plus tax," you’re sunk. You’ll leave your cash and maxed-out credit card in San Francisco – not just your heart.

For even Macey’s on Union Square, which by the way is all boarded up, with its park honoring Admiral Dewey and the Victory in Manila Bay concealed by a tall green fence for "renovation", is far from cheap.

Locals go off to Fremont for their "outlet bargains." But a word to the wise: The best buys, bargains, and prices for US and European brand-names, as well as "pirated" clothes, products – etc. from Bangkok, Beijing and Shanghai are still – Manila. You can even purchase your overcoats and leather jackets there. A Chinese-made leather jacket in a shop on Grant avenue, in S.F.’s Chinatown, costs at least US$175.

Much cheaper at home, or in Shenzen across the border from Hong Kong.

Yet, San Francisco still swings.

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This week all the major hotels are filled to the rafters. You can’t get a room at the St. Francis, for example, for love, money, or Auld Lang Syne. This is because the city is chock-full of conferences and conventions.

One of them, I discovered when I bumped into a delegate from Honolulu, a transplanted Saluyot from Ilocos Norte, is the Brotherhood of Meat Packers. Another, from the explanation of two ladies we met in the elevator, is the Association of Electricians. Another on-going affair is a congress of visitors and agents from all over the world sponsored by SAS (the Scandinavian Airways System, Susmarisep, not the British military wam-bam group, the Special Air Service or SAS).

Many of the conventions are taking place in the downtown Moscone Center, named after a mayor who was assassinated in his office by one of his aides ("high", they said, on a drug-laced "twinkie"). So, you see, it’s not only in the Philippines that mayors are an endangered species.

Years ago, I covered the Democratic Party (National Convention in the Moscone Center. That was the convention which gave the Presidential nomination to then Vice-President Walter Mondale. I shook candidate Mondale’s hand. It was limp, and as frigid as a crater on the Dark Side of the moon. I said to myself: "How can this guy win?" (He didn’t). It was at this conference that the humorous question was concocted: "Where’s the beef?" In our RP conventions, the question really is "Where’s the pork?"

When the election returns came in that year, Mondale ended up as chopped liver.

If you want to know where we got the awful practice of "honoring" politicians by naming every airport, avenue, street, or park after them, just look over here. The city of San Jose (the entrance to the rich Sillicon Valley) has just renamed its airport – a short hop away from San Francisco – in honor of a living official, whose political career is far from dead. The San Jose airport will be named after US Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta.

Who knows? Mineta might get San Jose some "pork." So, what’s the beef? The name "change" was the brainchild of Mayor Ron Gonzales.

In fact, three major airports are named after persons who aren’t dead – yet. One is the "Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the George H.W. Bush (daddy, not sonny) Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas; and the Gerald P. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Mayor Gonzales, of course, claims that he wasn’t angling for federal aid, but wants to pay tribute to "a native son who made good." Mineta was the first Asian American to serve in the presidential cabinet of Bill Clinton. The 69-year-old former San Jose mayor, Mineta (who also represented San Jose in Congress) is now President George Walker Bush’s only "adviser" borrowed from the opposition Democratic Party.

The Americans have a penchant for toasting the living. One is the USS "Jimmy Carter," the US Navy’s latest submarine of the Seawolf class; another is the Bob Hope, a sea-lifter class Navy vessel; and the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76), the ninth Nimitz Class nuke-powered aircraft carrier.

In South Carolina, there’s the J. Strom Thurmond Dam named after the Senator. There’s the Rosa Parks Elementary School in Berkeley. In San Jose, there’s Woz Way, in celebration of Apple Computer "inventor" Steve Wozniak. (Thought it was "Steve Jobs", who was always out of a job, who invented Apple-Mac).

Sentiments change, too. After the Nicole Crown Simpson murder, the football field in San Francisco’s Galileo Academy of Science and Technology was no longer called "The O.J. Simpson Field." Obviously, "The Juice" was no longer regarded as that school’s most famous alumnus.

The only place safe from the "Curse of the Living Hero" is the US Postal Service. The Postal service prohibits not only stamps from "honoring" living persons but won’t honor individuals until they’ve been dead for 10 years.

As Postal Service spokesman Don Smeraldi told The San Francisco Chronicle, "The idea is for the subject to stand the test of time." American icons like pop star Michael Jackson, etc., are honored by stamps in Zaire, Guyana, etc., anyway.

In the Philippines, Juniors who are congressmen simply name streets after their fathers, so it looks like the street is named after their own persona. I remember that when I was working my way through high school, one of my jobs was as a messenger. I sped all over Metro Manila on a bike (suffering flat tires on the average of twice a week) delivering letters, dispatches and packages. I knew each and every street, alley, and cul de sac. Nowadays, I get lost. All the names (except Taft Avenue) have been changed.

Wait for an avenue to be renamed Erap, or even Victor Corpus. Then, we’ll be truly lost.