There's a little red Japanese fire truck rolling around all over San Francisco. But instead of putting out fires, Kiri the Japanese Fire Truck is spreading joy and inspiring smiles.

In this episode, meet and get to know Todd Lappin, the human being who brought Kiri from Japan to the US—Bernal Heights specifically.

We start with Todd's life story in Part 1. He has lived in the 94110 ZIP code for 34 years. But he's originally from New Jersey. "Even after 34 years, New Jersey is like a stain that doesn't wash out," he says. He grew up in what he calls the "Ohio part" of the state. I call it "the pretty part," meaning not New York City-adjacent.

Todd is a self-described Gen Xer—growing up mostly in the Eighties, latch-key kid, etc. Most of the growing up happened in Hackettstown, NJ, one of the places where M&M's are made. It's not far from the eastern end of I-80, also. NYC was an hour away and Todd spent plenty of time there as a kid. In addition to being born in New York and raised in New Jersey, Todd spent one year in Oakland as a kid when his navy dad got stationed in Alameda.

He's long held a fascination with cars, specifically what are known as "working vehicles." Think of them as cars people use for jobs. He appreciates the aesthetic honesty of such automobiles.

Though it was and still is small, Hackettstown served as a hub for surrounding farmland and even smaller nearby towns. When Todd was in high school, one of those surrounding towns' volunteer fire department sold a Cadillac ambulance for $600. He didn't buy it, and regrets that to this day. It's his "Rosebud," so to speak.

When he was young, he also started getting deep into Asian culture. For Todd, this fascination stemmed from diving more into the US war in Vietnam. He learned about Confucianism. He ended up going to Brown University for college and getting even deeper into Asian history and culture—focusing first on Chinese, then moving onto Japanese.

Todd did a semester abroad in Japan, in fact. He didn't love the school part of his time there, but ended up traveling around the country on his own. Those travels eventually led him into China. After this, he pivoted from studying modern Japan to digging into ancient China, with a specific focus on Daoism. He ended up with a degree in Chinese intellectual history.

Going back to Todd's Bay Area connections, besides that one year in Oakland when he was little, he'd visited with his parents when he was a teenager. When he graduated from Brown, he was dating a woman from here. But it was a high school spring break visit that really cemented it for him—this is where he wanted to be eventually.

For young Todd in the Eighties, San Francisco felt urban in a way that reminded him of his time in NYC. After that, it was the beauty, the thoughtfulness, as he puts it, that hooked him. Six years or so after that spring break visit, Todd put down roots in SF.

The two of us digress to talk in some depth about differences between SF and NYC. One way that Todd characterizes it is: The East Coast anoints. The West Coast creates. I can see what he means.

Todd still loves Providence, RI, where Brown is. But a year after graduating and staying there, that SF "hook" pulled him here. When he landed in early-Nineties Mission (1991), it felt like Providence, so there was a familiarity to his new hometown.

Zine culture was still big at the time, and Todd did a little writing, much of it journalistic. One of those gigs was to edit a book by one of his mentors—Orville Schell, who was once the dean of the UC Berkeley journalism school. Like Todd, Schell studied Chinese history and culture.

So, that was 34 years ago. Todd doesn't think the 94110 has changed, or, as he puts it, hasn't changed enough. The City has grown, but the Mission and Bernal for him are mostly the same. He eventually got a job at and worked for Wired for a while. Years later, he launched Bernalwood, a blog about his neighborhood. This is where Todd's and my worlds first intersected. Todd sees blogs as a natural progression from zines—both have low barriers to entry and so foster a more-independent spirit than established or corporate news orgs. I agree, having been part of the blogging world myself.

At this point, we turn to the topic of this episode—Kiri, the tiny Japanese fire truck. Todd shares that story with us all here.

Going back to his pivot from studying Japanese to studying Chinese culture, Todd says at that point, he felt he was done with Japan. But in 2004, a friend who was going through a divorce mentioned wanting to visit Japan and Todd accompanied him. This trip brought it all back for him. He had enough of the language stored in his brain to be able to function and had a terrific time.

With that flame reignited, Todd has visited Japan "nonstop" since then. On one of those trips, he met someone who'd become something of a "car creator," meaning he was making content around cars and publishing it on YouTube. Todd had been driving Jeeps and SUVs back in the US, automobiles that he'd outfitted to look like company trucks. This is where Telstar Logistics—a fictitious company he created—comes in. But that new friend who made videos about cars introduced him to a Nissan Skyline R32 while he was in Japan. Todd was so taken by the car that he bought and imported one back to California.

Through that importation process, he learned that any car that was 25 years or older could be brought to the US from another country. There were some other California-specific hoops he had to jump through, metaphorically, but he had learned what it took.

Check back Thursday for Part 2 to hear how Todd locked sights on the automobile that became known as Kiri.

We recorded this episode at Pinhole Coffee in Bernal Heights in February 2026.

Photography by Nate Oliveira

For Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Soleil was working in restaurants in Minneapolis, both front-of-house and back, and also starting writing about food around this time.

There was a new food publication in Minneapolis at the time called Heavy Table, and Soleil offered to intern for them. At first, it was a lot of looking around for events for the publication to cover. Eventually, there were opportunities to do some writing, and Soleil pounced. That led to other chances to write, and the proverbial ball was rolling. They were also on food stamps at the time, which doesn't surprise me too much.

Rewinding a bit, Soleil talks about the food blog they had around 2007. It was mostly for recipes, but it was theirs and theirs alone. They looked up to the big food bloggers of the time, people who are still around and still writing about food.

From Minneapolis, Soleil moved to Portland. After they, tried New Orleans with the idea of going to grad school there, but fell back to restaurant work. And then they went to Puerto Vallarta to help their mom open a restaurant there. After Soleil's sister went off to college, their mom had moved to Mexico City. She worked for a restaurant group for a while, then moved to PV to be with friends. Before Soleil arrived in Mexico to help their mom, their mom had opened a bar that later became a restaurant.

During their time in Puerto Vallerta, Soleil was still writing about food, and they did a podcast with friends, too. Racist Sandwich had started in Portland, and Soleil kept it going from Mexico. The show was a reaction to blatant white supremacy in the food and restaurant worlds, a problem that, though it's eased some, is still with us today.

Juggling the many responsibilities that came with being in their mom's restaurant in Mexico, along with podcasting when they could, it all eventually gave way to Soleil deciding to move back to the US to try being a full-time food writer. So they went back to Minneapolis and stayed for about six months. (Honey the dog chimed in here again, and you'll have to use your imagination to guess what she had to say.)

It was 2018, and longtime SF Chronicle food writer Michael Bauer was retiring. Soleil picked up on that from Minnesota and it piqued their interest. The Washington Post was writing about the retirement, and asking folks out here in the Bay Area what they wanted the Chronicle do next. They published a slate of candidates to take over after Bauer, and it included Soleil. Shocked, they applied for the job. They got a phone call shortly after that, and here we are.

Soleil's only prior visit to The Bay came in 2011, when they stayed at their friend's apartment in the Tenderloin for a while. They visited Western Addition a lot, went to Zuni (such a good restaurant, though it's mostly for special occasions for my family), and finally had good coffee at Phil's.

I ask them whether San Francisco and the Bay Area stood out for them among the many, many places they've called home. They cite the history of the place as being quite the magnet. Then we get to the story of the approach Soleil wanted to bring to writing for the Chronicle, which, in their words, was to give more context to the art of food preparation.

After writing on staff for a bit, Soleil got one note from their bosses: They were writing about too many Asian restaurants. We both agree, though: DUH. There are hella Asian restaurants here, and it's part of what a lot of us love about the place. Still, Soleil feels that the paper gave them enough freedom to write about what they wanted to write about.

I share the context of my own life and the world around me back in 2018 when I first learned about Soleil, letting them know that I, among many others I'm sure, welcomed them after such a long tenure of their predecessor. We start talking about doing their work during the pandemic, and they mention that they feel they were predisposed to talking about labor and other social aspects of the restaurant business.

Eventually, though, it was time to move on. One reason they cite for leaving the Chronicle is that they got tired of being so visible. A significant number of readers were hostile to Soleil, and it got to feel like a mismatch. The rightward political drift of the paper didn't sit well either. They left in 2025.

That year, Soleil joined with some friends to launch COYOTE, a worker-owned media outlet. Those friends include: Nuala Bishari, Emma Silvers, Danny Lavery, Rahawa Haile, Estefany Gonzalez, and Cecilia Lei (visit the COYOTE Staff page to learn about a couple other folks who are involved). While still working at The Chronicle and in their off-time, they'd enroll in seminars on what cooperatives are and how to start and run them. They note that existing co-ops are very generous with their years and decades of knowledge, singling out Rainbow Grocery and Oakland's Sustainable Economies Law Center.

COYOTE launched last September. Soleil says it's going well, six months in.

Follow Soleil on IG @soleil_ho. Follow COYOTE Media Collective @coyotemediacollective.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

The story of Soleil Ho starts with their grandparents.

In this episode, meet and get to know the food writer and COYOTE Media Collective member who's been on my radar since they replaced longtime Chronicle food writer and mysterious human Michael Bauer. In Part 1, we dive into Soleil's family story.

It begins two generations back, when their grandparents came to the US from Vietnam in the Seventies. They were refugees from the US war in their homeland. On Soleil's mom side, the grandparents brought Soleil's mom and seven other children from Vũng Tàu to Freeport, Illinois. They had first ended up in a refugee camp in Arkansas. It wasn't easy finding a new home for such a large family, but an older refugee from Nazi Germany who lived in Freeport took them in. Soleil's mom was around 10 years old when she got to Freeport.

Soleil's dad's family comes from Central Vietnam. After the Viet Cong took over, they put his dad (Soleil's paternal grandfather) in a re-education camp, where he remained for around 10 years. After that, he was released and was able to flee his homeland for the US to join his family (also a large one). They also ended up in Illinois, where Soleil's parents eventually met.

The story of how their parents met goes something like this: The Illinois Vietnamese scene was relatively small, and folks mostly knew one another. By Soleil's description, their maternal grandfather was "the guy," meaning he threw parties and made connections. So their parents' families just hung together, sometimes at big parties like at Lunar New Year, and there was always a lot of food.

It was a shotgun wedding, with Soleil present in fetal form. They have a younger sister and their parents are now divorced.

Soleil was born in 1987 in Illinois. Their mom had moved to Chicago to go to school there. Their earliest memories take place in Chicago, in fact. With two young parents working a lot to support their family, Soleil and their sister spent a lot of time with their maternal grandparents. They remember learning to make sandwiches in their grandparents' kitchen.

Another early memory that I find fascinating and a little funny is of Michael Jordan individually wrapped hot dogs. It was Chicagoland in the Nineties, so it makes perfect sense that Bulls merch was everywhere. And that extended to food, remarkably.

There's one memory from preschool involving contraband Gummy Bears. Fun stuff. As Soleil got a little older, they developed a love of vampires. In art classes, when asked to draw hand turkeys or Santas, Soleil would do so, but they would add fangs and bloody teeth.

Fast-forwarding a bit, Soleil says that around the time they went off to college, they realized that the family had moved around 20 times. They moved to New York City when Soleil was eight. Their mom worked in fashion and lived on the east side of Manhattan. From there, they moved to Brooklyn.

When I express awe at living in NYC in the Nineties, Soleil is quick to point out that this was Giuliani's New York. Policies of that administration transformed much of the city, especially Manhattan. We'll just leave it at that.

It was around this time that Soleil started to develop a "taste in food," as they say. Their mom was now a single mom, working a lot, and like many families, they had the drawer full of take-out menus. Through this, Soleil learned about various Chinese cuisines, Indian food, and dishes from many other cultures, all represented right there in the kitchen.

After Brooklyn came a short stint in Long Island before returning to Brooklyn, where Soleil went to high school. They compare that school to Lowell here, where you have to test to get in and "all the smart kids" go.

With a quick, feeble calculation in my head, I ask whether Soleil starting high school around 9/11. They confirm and share their story of that day—suffice to say that they saw the whole thing happen in real time.

I ask whether they're scarred from 9/11. Soleil says that, yes they are, but mostly existentially. Then they pivot to talking about how it brought about an end to illusion about the world, which is a net good thing. But seeing 9/11 in the greater context of conflict around the world really opened their eyes.

(Our second guest that day, Honey, seen in the first photo with Soleil above, took issue with a canine passer-by, which I've left in the recording because duh.)

September 11 led to Soleil's becoming an activist anti-war person, starting in 2003 with Iraq. Rather than being scarred by 9/11, it allowed them to put their own life into context. As a Vietnamese person with a French first name, they started questioning things like: Why was it so easy for the US to go to war after 9/11, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq?

When it came time for college, Soleil says that they wanted to "get as far the fuck away from New York as" they could, which for them meant Iowa and Grinnell College. They chose the school to be closer to their grandparents, who still lived in nearby Illinois, and because Grinnell essentially billed itself as a place for folks to figure it out, so to speak.

By the time Soleil graduated college four years later, the sub-prime crash had happened and the subsequent recession had begun. They worked on a farm, which was hard but helped them better understand food systems. And then they moved to Minneapolis and began working in a restaurant, where we wrap up Part 1.

Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the rest of Soleil Ho's story, including how they helped found COYOTE Media Collective.

We recorded this episode at Strawberry Creek Park in Berkeley in March 2026.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. We're talking about Mission bars, and I share a story about the backroom at Delirium. Rae brings up similar stories of her own at places like Thee Parkside, and we agree that Parkside owner Malia Spanyol is the best. Rae shares a story that confirms it.

She looks back on the years before she got her SSN grateful that Kerrang! allowed her to work. She says and I agree—those jobs don't really exist anymore. The industry itself was misogynistic, but there was also a freedom to the job. They flew her to shows all over the place. And they paid her enough to live in San Francisco.

After Rae recounts a couple of specific incidents of mistreatment she got, we go on a sidebar about the music industry specifically and entertainment industry more generally and how riddled with misogyny they are. Rae managed to get out of music journalism, but it took some time and effort. She says that when folks ask her to write about music nowadays, she recoils.

Then we talk about Rae's new book. I share how it all came to me, and that originally it was supposed to be a bonus episode where we talked "only" about Unsung Heroines. After reading the book, I decided it needed to be a feature about this incredible woman who herself should possibly be in her own book.

Rae says that if she'd stayed in the UK, the history she'd know and would hear about constantly would revolve around royals and their lives and their wars. So she dropped history. But upon moving to San Francisco, she became curious about everything she saw and heard and read. It felt natural that at some point, she'd spend her curiosity and mental energies writing some sort of history or another. We go on a sidebar here about Emperor Norton and what a troublesome character he was.

She was working at KQED writing about pop culture. After about a year, she found herself, as she puts it, "being insufferable in bars to strangers about the fact that women had been written out of history." Writing about history would be a new hat for Rae at KQED, but in 2018, she persuaded her editors to let her write five essays for Women's History Month. The series was a hit.

In 2019, her department, Pop Culture, folded and she moved into KQED Arts. She'd written a couple more essays in the interim, but once in the Arts department, she really picked up the pace. In January 2020, Rae decided to turn the essays into a monthly series, upping the pace. The series had come to be known as "Rebel Girls," a Bikini Kill reference. But that March, all the libraries closed when COVID shutdown hit.

She pivoted to library websites, but then I prompt Rae to shout out all the libraries she frequented to research her book. The SFPL History Center and the California Historical Society stand out. When I ask about women she researched who didn't make it into the book, she points out that the series, which again predates the book, includes essays about 55 women. City Lights Publishing, who put Unsung Heroines out, settled on 35 for their edition. They wanted a digestible book, and for teen readers, they felt they needed to remove women with … let's just say more risqué stories.

I ask Rae to pick three of her favorite essay subjects, and while she's thinking it over, I offer some of my own. I start with Judy Heumann, the disability rights advocate who did so, so much to guarantee the rights of other disabled folks in our country. Rae mentions Judy, whom she'd been researching well before her unfortunate passing in 2023; Ruth Beckford, who figured big in Black Panther history; and Abby Fisher, a formerly enslaved woman who couldn't read or write but, with the help of others, published a cookbook.

We take a slight detour as Rae begins to describe how they went about illustrating Abby Fisher and others, for whom there was no photographic or other visual reference. The Unsung Heroines publisher, City Lights, asked her about imagery, and when Rae told them that it's been difficult for her, she suggested illustrations. But City Lights doesn't do illustrated books and told Rae as much. Then City Lights' publisher struck up a conversation with another swimmer at the pool one day. That other swimmer was Adrienne Simms. Following that talk, the publisher found Adrienne's art, brought it to Rae, and the rest of history. Adrienne illustrated Unsung Heroines.

I ask Rae not who her favorite heroines are, but of the 35, which one or ones she'd want to join us at Vesuvio that day we recorded. Without hesitation (in fact, I believe she says the name before I finish asking), Rae offers Pat Maginnis, an incredible champion and fighter for women's reproductive rights.

Unsung Heroines is available wherever you get books (but please, don't use that one horrible fucking website). City Lights is one obvious choice, but most Bay Area independent bookstores should carry it. If not, ask them to order it for you. More people need to know about and read this book.

Follow Rae on Instagram @rae_alexandra_writing. She's on Threads @rae_alexandra3.

We end with final thoughts from Rae, specifically her feelings about all those ubiquitous dumb fucking AI billboards.

Rae Alexandra has 35 stories to share with you, plus her own.

In this Women's History Month episode, meet and get to know Rae. She recently published a book with City Lights Publishing called Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area. It's of course available at City Lights, but you can also find it at your local independent bookstore.

I read the book and could not put it down. Only toward the end of the 35 essays did I start to recognize the women Rae features. I love history and I love learning and I have mixed feelings about the fact that there are so many rad women whose stories are untold. Thank you, Rae Alexandra, for shining on a light on these incredible women.

These days, she's a staff writer at KQED. But Rae's story starts in Wales in the UK. She grew up in Cardiff, the capital of the country. (I learn in the conversation that Wales is a country. I also learn that "United Kingdom" and "Great Britain" are the same thing. Now, British vs. English we don't touch, for obvious reasons. But I digress …)

Ed. note: I'll describe my conversation with Rae as two Gen Ex journalist types with ADHD (is that redundant?) doing their best to be linear. To me, the meanderings of our talk are totally normal.

Rae says that Wales is delightful and has all the best castles, but that's because of the number times the country has been invaded and conquered. Close to where her mom lives today is a castle that boasts the world's largest crossbow. When I ask when Rae was born (1978), we discover that she's a horse as in Year of the Horse (aka 2026). Cool.

Rae continued to call Cardiff home up through her college years. She didn't go to another school outside of Wales that had accepted her because she was attached to a group of skateboarders in her hometown. After she graduated, though, she moved to London.

Music has been central for Rae as far back as she remembers (same). She shares stories of being maybe 5 and listening to the Top 40 with her cassette recorder ready to nab her favorite songs (same).

According to Rae, the English look down on the Welsh, and have for some time, based on classist generalizations. Wales is where the UK mines most of its coal. London-types consider their neighbors to the southwest feral, and in some regards, the Welsh are, she says.

In the Eighties, she remembers stories about IRA bombings appearing on the news nightly. Also, in Wales, miners went on strike and everyone knew about it. Rae says that Wales in the Eighties was essentially like listening to The Clash.

We go on a sidebar about siblings, birth order, and what it means to be the youngest, which Rae and I both are. Growing up, she was close with both her older sisters. Today, one lives in Australia and the other lives in the London suburbs.

Around age 10, Rae discovered metal. By 12, she decided that she would become a music journalist. In her teen years, she "snuck" her writing into local and college newspapers. The music journalism she consumed in those days included publications like Smash Hits, Kerrang!, NME, and Melody Maker. In fact, her first job out of college was at Kerrang!

We go on a sidebar on the whole idea of living somewhere vs. visiting, and how they're so totally different on every level. I use Chicago, where I lived for a full six months in the Nineties, as my example. Rae offers up a stay in Brooklyn as hers.

That job at Kerrang! is what brought Rae to London, another place she found impossible to live. I ask her to expound on what it was about the place, and she indulges me. She says that you have to be obscenely wealthy to live in Central London, so most folks are forced to the outskirts. But the jobs are in the middle of town, and so you end up spending around two or three hours a day commuting underground.

It was/is also gray—the weather, the architecture—and the people in London were, as Rae describes it, hostile. When she goes into detail about the ways in which they were hostile, we agree that only you get to shit on your own hometown. People who aren't from there aren't allowed. It's a rule. Look it up.

After a year working for the magazine in London, Rae met a guy from San Francisco. She'd been to The City and even spent significant time here working for Maximum Rock 'n' Roll. (At this point in the recording, I mistakenly call the BBQ place near Hayes and Divisadero until sometime in the early 2000s "Brothers." It was in fact called Brother in-law's. My apologies.)

She moved in with that guy she met, lived with him for six months in London, and then it was time for him to come home to SF. He asked her if she wanted to join him and she accepted. She had already transitioned to freelance writing for the magazine, because office life didn't suit her, so work wasn't so much a problem. But upon arrival, she soon discovered how difficult it was to do anything without a Social Security number.

That added an extra layer to moving here. But it wasn't the place itself or its people that made things hard. It was the system, so to speak. Also, while she was getting settled and learning how to survive in the US without an SSN, she started to see that the guy was, let's just say, not for her. She felt he'd been playing the long game when they lived together in London, but once back on his home turf, some of his sociopath tendencies emerged.

It was 2002 and she lived in Bernal Heights on Cortland. She spent most of her time in the Mission, just down the hill. After a short time, the guy convinced her that they needed to get married, so they moved back to London. The marriage lasted three months, and Rae returned to her new home—San Francisco.

When she came back, she experienced a stretch of housing instability. You could call it "couch surfing," but either way, it was dicey. Six months or so later, things settled. It was easier to live cheaply in the early 2000s, also. A $5 burrito could be a whole day's worth of food. And Rae had befriended enough bartenders that she rarely paid full-price for booze. She describes "The Blackout Triangle" of Killowatt, Delirium, and Dr. Bombay's. She also regularly visited Beauty Bar until that place went downhill.

Check back this Thursday for Part 2 with Rae Alexandra.

We recorded this episode at Vesuvio in North Beach in February 2026.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

Part 3 picks up right where we left off in Part 2. While she was still working that real estate job, Sonia was treating dating like a part-time job. She signed up on several dating sites (this was before swipe apps like Bumble). She went on many awkward coffee dates. Then a friend introduced her to a guy, and the two hit it off right away. They were inseparable from the moment they met, in 2008. They moved in a couple months later. In 2010, they got married, and had a kid shortly after that. But in the middle of all this amazing life shit, Sonia was smacked with a breast cancer diagnosis. She was 38.

Sonia had never necessarily wanted to be a mom. She was always happy for friends when they started having kids, but figured it just wasn't in her stars because she wanted a different kind of life. But her new partner and eventual husband told her it was a deal-breaker, and she figured, Why not? They moved from Dogpatch to Glen Park around this time, because they wanted to raise their kid in The City but needed more space to do that, and the options weren't great. Their son was born and they began raising him, eventually getting him into SF public schools.

When the kid was about two-and-a-half, Sonia and her husband started to wonder whether he was on the autism spectrum. A positive diagnosis was made eventually. Sonia praises The City and its programs for kids with special needs. And, like some kids on the spectrum, he's obsessed with public transportation, so he's in the right place. (If you listen all the way through to the end of this episode, you'll hear his recording of a BART announcement.)

Like most of us, the pandemic did a number on Sonia's little family. Their version went like this: The marriage did not survive.

Ed note: We had Sonia and her then-husband on for our Valentine's 2019 episode. After the break-up, at Sonia's request, we took that episode down.

She says that before the pandemic, she imagined that the relationship was as good as it gets. In hindsight, she thinks maybe her second breast cancer diagnosis, after her son was born, broke her husband. Up to that point, he'd been a great partner and excellent dad and solid caretaker for his wife through her first bout. The second diagnosis, coupled with a worldwide pandemic, inspired him to do not great things. Sonia tried to save the marriage, but some of her girlfriends took her down to the Madonna Inn and, as she puts it, "shook the shit out of" her.

Her new reality meant figuring out what to do every other weekend when she didn't have her son. It was a lot of going to movies solo and doing 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles while listening to podcasts. The road to healing involved early stints on dating apps, but usually only to wake up the next morning and immediately pull back. She's really learned to love her alone time.

We rewind back to 2015 to talk about the origins of a big part of Sonia's life today—podcasting. She and her now-ex-husband launched Old Movies, New Beer, a show where they'd drink a beer that was new to them while chatting about some film from the past. She enjoyed it, but he fell off quickly. A friend from her movie theater days hit her up to do a show about movies, and so Dorking Out was born. It also didn't last long, but in that time, Sonia started discovering podcasts she liked. There was F This Movie and Book vs. Movie. One of the Book vs. Movie hosts was Margo Donahue, and Sonia was a fan. She reached out and the two started following each other. The love was mutual.

Dorking Out had Margo on as a guest and she and Sonia gelled so well, her co-host essentially became a third wheel. When he left for unrelated reasons, she kept having Margo come back on the show. Margo slid in to become the show's new co-host. The two became as close as you can living across the continent from each other.

One day, Margo shared an idea she had for a new show. She wanted to call it Seriously, Fuck That Guy. It was amid the Me Too Movement, and they'd talk about whatever piece of shit man they wanted (think: Kevin Spacey or Harvey Weinstein). But every episode would end with someone who's not an asshole. Sonia was in, no question, but she thought maybe they needed a different name. It was early 2017, and What a Creep was born.

Early episode creeps included Lance Armstrong and Newt Gingrich, someone Sonia considers an OG creep. When Sonia and her ex split up, Margo was her main support. They continued doing What a Creep until 2025, when Margo suddenly passed away. They were supposed to record one day last year and Margo didn't show up. Sonia called and texted mutual friends and eventually called NYC police. Sonia had to decide whether to keep What a Creep going. She settled on having rotating guest hosts on (Erin of Bitch Talk Podcast was on recently to talk about Dick Cheney; we're in talks to have me on soon as well, which I'd be stoked to do). She appreciates the community that has developed over the years around the show. She loves it so much that it's what keeps up her presence on Facebook.

I ask Sonia whether there are any San Francisco creeps we might hear more about in the future. She mentions our mayor and our governor while saying that the show leaves space for so-called roads to redemption. I like that. But I also suggest doing episodes on AI or the stupid-ass billboards all over The City.

In contrast to that, we end the episode with Sonia talking about the kind of tech we do want.

We recorded this episode at Rosamunde in The Mission in January 2026.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Sonia's life right after her stint at community college. She left the Bay Area to attend college up north at Chico State. Widely known as a party school (perhaps rightly so?), they also had a reputable journalism department and an award-winning newspaper. This attracted Sonia, of course. But some friends also attended, and that didn't hurt. Once in Chico, Sonia joined said college paper and got a job (where else?) at a movie theater.

It was her first time to move out of her parents' house. She lived with a couple of roommates in Chico. That was one culture shock. Another was that, well, Chico isn't The Bay. And then there's those foothills winters. It also gets hotter in the summer there than it does in Concord.

Sonia wrote for every section of the school paper, and even did some online writing, thanks to Chico State's early adoption of the internet. She even developed a little campus fan base. Sometimes walking around, she'd get shout-outs. There was even a Sonia character in one of the local comic strips.

It was another phase of finding her people. She thinks that because all her roommates in Chico were men, she got really exciting to hang out with young women.

She graduated after three years, in 1996. That Bay Area magnet snatched her back after that, and she moved in with her parents again in Concord. That gave way to an apartment she shared with her sister. Sonia got a job at the Martinez News-Gazette around this time, a three-day-a-week paper where she earned $213 per week. Anywhere she could find free food, she pounced.

At the newspaper, she more or less did it all—cops, local and community news, school board meetings, and, of course, a humor column. I ask Sonia who her humor influences and inspirations are, and she immediately cites George Carlin (this is probably a big part of why we're friends). Her dad loved Carlin, too, and Sonia says the old man also has a wicked sense of humor that rubbed off on her. Another source of jokes was none other than Bugs Bunny. And lastly, Alan Alda's Hawkeye in M•A•S•H is another humor muse.

That newspaper job led to her time at the San Francisco Independent, a paper owned by the Fang family. Sonia did a neighborhood beat on that job, reporting on school board, planning commission, and other community meetings.

We rewind for a minute so Sonia can share early memories and impressions of San Francisco, having grown up across The Bay. When she was a kid, her grandma would take her to see The Nutcracker. She'd visit on other special occasions, but it wasn't until she was an adult that The City really grabbed hold of her heart. There's a hilarious story about showing up to dance at The Palladium wearing a "Ross Perot for President" T-shirt.

Years later, with that job at the Independent, Sonia found herself in San Francisco most days. Though she had to write only three stories, the money was better and the circulation bigger than her previous job in Martinez. The beat was familiar—school board and planning commission meetings. She and her sister had bought a house for themselves in Concord, where they lived with her young niece. Eventually, the paper transferred Sonia to its Burlingame office, but it was to start writing movie reviews. Eventually, she even convinced the Independent to let her write TV show reviews.

When the Fangs bought the San Francisco Examiner, they kept Sonia on to be their TV critic and moved her back to The City, to an office above the Warfield. She'll be the first to admit that when you're getting paid to watch TV, it's not so fun anymore. The paper cut Sonia, but brought her back three weeks later, this time to be the A&E editor.

The Examiner was a slimmed-down, tabloid version of its former self. That's how it was a few years later when, fresh out of journalism school at SF State, I got a job there as a copy editor. I distinctly remember one of my favorite daily tasks was editing Sonia's celebrity gossip column—Scoop, which happened early in my shifts, around 4 p.m. or so. In the episode, I riff about how much I loved reading Scoop every day, even though I've never been good at or cared much for celebrity news. I also let Sonia know that I also appreciated her presence off the page, in the newsroom.

She describes her time at The Examiner as something she loved, but it was also hard. She shares that, after working long days for little pay, she'd go home and play The Sims. Once, around 3 a.m., playing the game, her character was going to a party. And it clicked: Sonia couldn't remember the last time she went to a party. She needed to make some changes, and one was leaving The Examiner.

First up was an HR temp job where her mom worked, in Vallejo. Next was a job writing press releases for a real estate company. Then she found work at a printing company in Oakland called PS Print. (Our lives intersected again around this time, but that's another story.) She helped them create a social media presence. Outside of work, Sonia had a blog (which she still has) called The Sonia Show.

Check back tomorrow for Part 3 with Sonia.

We recorded this episode at Rosamunde in The Mission in January 2026.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

The story of Sonia Mansfield has roots in The Bay.

In this episode, we meet and get to know my friend Sonia. She and I worked together at the Fangs' Examiner back in the mid-2000s, and have been friends since. I loved her presence in the newsroom. I'd often listen to her make us all laugh from her A&E desk across the room. We've been through weddings, births, illness, divorces, and many, many beers together. These days, she hosts the What a Creep podcast, and I'm so glad you get to meet her now.

We begin Part 1 with the story of Sonia's parents. Her dad is from Richmond, California, and her mom is from Concord. Her dad eventually moved to Concord, where he went to Mt. Diablo High and dated a girl who turned out to be Sonia's mom's best friend. After her dad got his heart broken by that friend, Sonia's mom jumped right in. They were high school sweethearts who got married right after graduation, and have been together ever since.

The young couple had their first kid—Sonia—a couple years later, when they were 21. Another girl came around about three years later, followed by a boy five years after that.

Sonia was born and grew up in Concord. She recalls the East Bay town before BART, with plenty of wide-open fields and other undeveloped spaces. She rollerskated a lot (hey, it was the Seventies, after all) at local roller rinks. The Concord Pavilion (now known as Toyota Pavilion at Concord—barf) was where big touring acts played, and Sonia went to her share of concerts there.

Her childhood and early adulthood were, in her words, "so Gen X." She and her siblings and their neighborhood friends ran wild, like feral animals. Anyone from this generation, including me, can relate. Looking back as an adult with a kid now, Sonia figures her parents just wanted them out of the house. What's the worst that could happen?

The only "surveillance" would be: If the family dog, a Dachshund named Oscar, was sitting outside a nearby house, you could bet that Sonia was inside. He got there by chasing his favorite person while she rode her bike. No leash. Why would you?

It was so laissez-faire, in fact, that Sonia says she would walk into strangers' houses. "You're watching cartoons. I like cartoons." Cool. Her sister was always part of her crew, her and other kids from the neighborhood. They also had hella cousins. Sonia's mom is one of eight kids in her family.

We go on a little sidebar about all the crazy, dangerous shit we all did as kids. In Texas, there was a certain kind of injury, where some part of your body scraped across cement or asphalt. We called it "getting skinned," and it hurt like hell. But it was just part of the game.

The conversation turns to Sonia's earliest days loving TV and movies. She's loved them as long as she remembers, thanks to her dad. He used to love going to theaters to watch movies. Now, he prefers seeing them from the comfort of his own home, but it speaks to his love of the medium. And Sonia says she got that from her old man.

Her mom also loves movies, and kept going to theaters longer than her husband. She took her eldest daughter with her almost always. The movies they saw were never age-appropriate, but she got in because she was with her mom. Young Sonia also loved TV Guide, and would read the magazine from front-to-back, word-for-word. She says that before the internet, before Google, her dad would call Sonia and ask her about movies.

The TV was always on, something else I relate to (my parents, both in their mid-eighties, still do this). Sonia was an early MTV adopter. Probably because her parents were younger than most, they liked cool music and Sonia heard a lot of it.

That whole "walk into neighbors' houses, everyone's my friend" ran head-first into seventh grade, when Sonia learned the hard way that it just can't be true. One day, on the bus she rode every day, one kid started teasing her and then got other kids on the bus to join in. And it happened again the next day. And the next. The torture lasted for months. And it wasn't just the bus—the dude kept up the torment in the classroom.

She says that the bullying changed her chemically. She went from open and outgoing to shy and afraid. She started spending more and more time in the school library during lunch. She didn't share her shame with anyone—not friends, not her parents. She internalized it.

Part of turning inward for Sonia meant watching more and more TV. She'd go see movies alone. But it's not like she had zero friends. Sonia found her weirdos, the nerds and theater kids, and kept her circle small.

She got even more into writing during this time in her life. In middle school, she'd write "really shitty short stories." She asked her parents for and they bought her an electric typewriter. In high school, she took a creative writing class and joined the school paper staff, for whom she wrote movie reviews (duh). Siskel and Ebert were huge influences, and she regularly read the Contra Costa Times' A&E section.

When her family would go off on camping/hunting trips and leave Sonia behind because she wasn't into that kinda thing, she'd take the $20 they left her and go rent movies at her local indie video store. She'd browse the aisles and read the backs of every tape. She credits this with why she has so much useless knowledge around movies in her brain all these years later.

After she graduated from high school, Sonia got a job at the local movie theater. And at that job, she started making friends with other movie nerds. Because her coworkers were new in her life and not privy to the BS she put up with in middle and high school, she could start fresh with them. And she was getting attention … from boys.

Some of the folks she met at that theater job and another that followed have remained lifelong friends, in fact. Sonia was really finding herself as a young adult.

We wrap up Part 1 with her decision to stay close to home and go to community college, vs. moving away and going to a four-year school.

Check back tomorrow for Part 2.

We recorded this episode at Rosamunde in The Mission in January 2026.

Photography by Jeff Hunt

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Toshio talks about those chess players at Powell and Market and other early impressions of The City before they moved here.

Having grown up in Orange County, with its underfunded public transit system, Toshio always wanted to live somewhere that had a subway. Being able to walk was important, too, in contrast with SoCal, where you pretty much need a vehicle to get anywhere. SF and The Bay checked those boxes.

Like Part 1, this episode is rife with sidebars. I guess that's just what happens when you get two people together who both like to talk. The first one in Part 2 is about running any sort of independent media within the larger framework of late-stage capitalism, especially when the content you create is inherently anti-capitalist. You know, light stuff.

I try to get us back to Toshio's story of moving to San Francisco, then I can't help myself—another sidebar, this time about Craigslist, which of course Toshio used to help find a place to live in San Francisco. They were able to get work, as we've mentioned, but finding housing was much harder. Their first two places were in the Mission. They left the first one after only one month, thanks to a fire. Their next spot was at 24th and Bartlett, close to BART. Toshio splinters off to talk about some of the other spots they looked at and open houses they went to. "Oof," they say.

In 2013, they were able to move into a below-market-rate apartment near Civic Center (the very home where we recorded this episode, in fact). Toshio is their own landlord, something I congratulate them on. Sometime after they moved in, they met their boyfriend. They also got exposed to more and more leftist politics in SF during this time. They talk about coming to terms with the fact that the world they want to see will probably not come about in their lifetime. That's a hard pill to swallow, but it's probably best to accept that and then fight like hell to overcome it.

Toshio's light-green living magazine job afforded them the opportunity to write for further left-leaning publications like Truthout. When Al Jazeera opened its US office in The City, they got work there. They've also written for Them and Vice. It all served as background for Toshio to launch their own outlet—Sad Francisco.

We go on a sidebar about the corporate takeover of the news, and how local outlets and indie operations like our own have stepped in to try to fill that void. Toshio mentions some newer publications that they're excited about, including Bay Area Current, The Phoenix Project, and Coyote Media. (Ed. note: Look for an upcoming episode with Coyote Collective founding member Soleil Ho.)

Sad Francisco started (and continues) as an effort to fill the massive gaps left by said corporate media in the Bay Area. Toshio was curious about the podcast medium, and kicked things off reading and riffing on versions of 2,000-word pieces they had already written for traditional media. They mention that we're at a point now where every journalist, no matter the medium or the employer, should probably be diversifying the distribution of their work. I couldn't agree more.

Sidenote: I've been witnessing Toshio's move to self-facing camera reels, with them laying out whatever issue is on their mind, then expounding on it. It's a delivery mechanism I see more and more of, in my limited social media consumption. My wife, Erin (of Bitch Talk Podcast), has begun doing more of these as well, and they seem to resonate with folks. I haven't yet decided whether or when to do them myself for Storied. But I digress …

Toshio feels that in 2026, people are looking for authenticity. They don't care so much if your media product is polished. They're more interested in substance, which would be a gain for society, if true.

When I ask them how folks can find, follow, and support Sad Francisco, Toshio mentions the podcast's Patreon page. Follow them on Instagram @sadfrancis.co. And check out their website, sadfrancis.co. They're also available on most podcast apps and YouTube. Another sidebar here about how much I used to love Twitter (RIP).

We end the episode with my asking Toshio how they do it, how they report so well and so relentlessly on the vast amounts of sketchy shit going down in San Francisco and The Bay. Their answer involves their various journalistic jobs and gigs over the years, and how that work trained them to package up complex ideas and explain incredibly complicated scenarios in a simple, easy-to-understand way. Then Toshio and I indulge in a lovefest for 48Hills.org before wrapping.

Toshio Meronek's parents met at a bar.

In this episode, meet and get to know Toshio. Today, they do Sad Francisco, a really fucking amazing project that reports on and holds truth to power around here. I first became aware of Sad Francisco a few years ago and right away, I was struck by the deep reporting on and understanding of the many complex relationships and goings on in San Francisco and The Bay. And so I sat down with my fellow podcaster to get to know the human behind those efforts.

Toshio's story starts with their parents. That bar where they met was in Los Angeles. Shortly after meeting, the couple moved to Germany, where Toshio's dad had found work at a major German tech company. But after getting pregnant with Toshio, the young couple came back to Southern California—Orange County to be exact, where Toshio was born.

Some of Toshio's earliest memories involve not really digging that infamous SoCal heat. We'll get into this more later in Part 1, but Toshio picked Portland for college in part because of its more temperate, albeit wetter, climate.

Born in 1982, Toshio did most of their growing up in the Nineties. When I ask them what kinds of things they were into as a kid, they immediately say, "zines." Making zines, collecting zines, living and breathing zines. We hop on a short sidebar about Riot Grrrl, a Nineties feminist punk-adjacent movement that seeped into both our lives at different points—mine early in the decade, and Toshio's toward the end of the Nineties.

Riot Grrrl arrived in the typically and generally conservative Orange County later than a lot of other parts of the country and the world. But arrive it did, and it had an outsize impact on Toshio's young life. Zines were huge in that subculture, too. To expound on their interests as a kid, Toshio was generally into media, curious about how others live, and also sci-fi and fantasy (think D&D). Toshio was around 13 or 14 when they started writing their own zines.

Here we go on a sidebar about one of my favorite pet topics—Kinko's (RIP). IYKYK.

Eventually, Toshio eschewed the ubiquitous copy+print shop and had their zines printed on newsprint paper. It was part of a deliberate attempt to appear legitimate, more like "the establishment," something I find fascinating. They wanted people to take them seriously, and that just makes a lot of damn sense.

Music was very much a part of the Riot Grrrl movement Punk rock music to be specific. And Toshio's early publications covered that. In fact, topics ran the gamut from music and politics to culture and community.

We turn to the topic of Toshio's surroundings when they were a teenager. Record stores, zine shops, cafes that also had live music. They dabbled in the SoCal rave scene as well. They settled into the Candy Kids rave subculture and talk a little about that.

There's another short sidebar where we talk about how amazing youth activism is, and how much we always need it.

As much as young Toshio was part of these communities and subcultures, they also describe this time in terms of being a loner. They also experienced a lack of self-confidence, lots of acne, therapy to work through their being Japanese and white, or hafu (another term for "hapa"), being gay. Though Toshio has grown past those struggles, they consider them powerfully formative.

Then came time to relocate and go to college. Besides Portland having more desirable weather, Toshio chose it in part because of the Northwest's grunge legacy. College life started right around 9/11, and they started going to protests. Lots of protests.

College lasted four years, and after that, Toshio stayed behind in Portland. They got work at a magazine covering ecology for K–12 kids. They were also in bands (they play guitar, ish, sing, and play tambourine). "It felt like everybody was in an alt-country band," they say.

And then, in 2006, they left Portland for … San Francisco.

An editing job brought Toshio here. The publication was a so-called "light-green living" outfit, targeted, as it said, to yoga moms who drive their hybrid SUVs to Whole Foods. I ask Toshio if the job was editing words, and then mention that it's been my profession for a long-ass time. And we go on a sidebar about how important the work is. I'll add that everyone (including editors!) needs an editor. Sorry (not sorry), AI.

That leads to yet another sidebar (can you tell we're both podcasters?)—this one from Toshio about the nature of the "yoga mom" publication. They grew disillusioned with their work there, suffice to say.

We end Part 1 with Toshio's early memories of visiting San Francisco, before they moved here. They involve the older men who used to be found daily playing chess off Powell and Market.

Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Toshio Meronek.

We recorded this episode at Toshio's home at the confluence of The Transgender District, Tenderloin, UN Plaza, and Civic Center in January 2026.

Photography by Jeff Hunt