I AM WRITING THIS FROM SAN DIEGO, where it is always sunny, rather than Philadelphia, where it is always sunny only in situation comedies. It is the day after Barry Bonds hit his record tying 755th home run and the caption on the front page of the Union-Tribune actually begins like this,"San Diego became part of baseall lore last night. . ."
It's hard to imagine a newspaper in Philadelphia -- let alone Pittsburgh, New York, Boston, Chicago or St. Louis -- feeling the need to trumpet the hometown's claim of being a legitimate "part of baseball lore." Especially a steroid-laced part of baseball lore. But that hip hip hooray bit of needless boosterism tells you a lot about how San Diego sees itself as a major league city.
Clearly this is a city that has not suffered enough.
A bad day in San Diego is like that TV commercial for Florida where the people on the beach moan when the sun goes behind a cloud for a few seconds. "It was so much nicer yesterday." In fact, the weather in San Diego is not perfect all the time. Sometimes it's like Pamela Anderson on a bad hair day. You'd have to be Pamela Anderson to notice it.
If 75 degrees and sparkly is your idea of a perfect summer day in August, then San Diego won't disappoint. It's the kind of weather that makes you wish you could grab a city by the T-shirt and slap it around a little bit just to remind it that not all cities have weather like this.
In some cities it gets hot followed by humid followed by hotter during August. In some cities you have to change your shirt at 8 a.m. because its drenched through with sweat before you've even walked outside. Some cities have situation comedy weather.
San Diego, the next great American city on a pace to surpass Philadelphia in population, is struggling with the same increase in murders as we are. Sort of. In a cover story in the San Diego Weekly Reader, the City Paper/Philly Weekly equivalent, headlined "Tales from the Homicide Beat" the writer points out San Diego's alarming spike in homicides, which have zoomed from 53 by the same time last year to 66 as of June 30.
I almost did a spit take when I read that. Clearly, uniformly gorgeous weather does not incite murderous passions on an East Coast level where 66 homicides by mid-summer would be an occasion for "The Philadelphia Miracle" headlines.
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