disturbing

I'm not sure how much play this story got outside the local area.

Ten years ago, a local woman mysteriously disappeared and has not been seen since. The man she was on a date with that evening, the last known person to see her, was eventually arrested and charged with her murder, but after two years in jail without trial, his charges were dropped for lack of usable evidence.

But a lot of people still think he did it, and one of them was the victim's brother. Apparently by happenstance, the brother saw the suspect in a local restaurant on Saturday evening, had words with him, and then went out and got a gun (probably either from his car or his nearby home), confronted him again at a coffee vendor in the same shopping center, shot him dead, and then went out to the parking lot and killed himself. (Tell us again how widespread gun ownership makes us safer?)

What brings it up close to me is that, while I've never been in either of those particular establishments, I walk right past them all the time. It's the shopping center I visit probably more often than any other. It has a branch of my bank, it has my usual office supply and greeting card stores, it has the movie theatre where I saw both Fair Game and True Grit within the last month, it has a lunch place I do visit frequently and which is almost adjacent to Peet's, so I really do walk past its front door often.

Not my only close encounter with a crime scene, but disturbing.

musical chairs

KDFC, San Francisco's pathetic excuse for a classical music FM station, has been sold to an NPO and is changing frequencies.

First question. Will this move away from an advertising-supported model mean an improvement in its execrable lowest-uncommon-denominator programming? Possibly not. We are informed that the current staff, including the self-important H.S. and the vacuous D.N. as announcers, will remain, and that's not a good sign.

Second question. What's with the frequencies? The two other classical stations within far-hailing distance, KBOQ in Monterey and KXPR in Sacramento, both changed frequencies within the last several years, both acquiring much less powerful signals that could no longer leak over the mountains and sometimes be heard in the Bay Area. An unfortunate outcome, as they're both much better stations than KDFC.

KDFC, we're told, is moving to two new frequencies, though the article doesn't say why two, and it also says it'll be tri-casting on all three frequencies starting this afternoon for the next week, when the old one goes off the air. When I went out to my car to check (I only listen to the radio in the car; at home I have all my CDs, and at home I do not have an operable radio antenna), at 5 PM, I found that KDFC was on the old frequency, 102.1, and one of the new ones, 89.9, but not the other new one, 90.3, which was broadcasting an NPR station. (ETA: Thanks to a comment on SFgate I can guess that what I was hearing on 90.3 was the local repeater station of KUSP drowning KDFC out.)

Even more curiously, the announcement said that 90.3 is for the City and 89.9 is for the North Bay, yet I was picking it up just fine in the South Bay, which is said to be an area which will have difficulty picking up any of the new signals. So it's supposed to be another move to a weaker signal, but is it?