Sorry Kestrel! I was originally going to include asking if they finally got a doctor that wasn't white but I decided not to be quite that evil.
This was in my local paper this morning: Recent research suggests wood smoke, primarily from fireplaces, wood stoves and restaurant grills, plays a much larger role in the particulate problem than previously believed. This is because of its high content of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, which act as a precursor to particle formation, according to Kerry Kelly, a chemical engineer with the University of Utah. "Compared with burning natural gas or gasoline, burning wood produces orders of magnitude more VOC, hundreds of thousands more VOC per unit of energy output," said Kelly, who serves on the Utah Air Quality Board.
Oh, come on. You're in San Francisco; it's not cold. Nobody needs to burn anything to stay warm. You say these the coldest nights of the year, yet the temperatures are like a nice spring day for many parts of the country. If it were that warm where I live I wouldn't even be thinking about turning the furnace on yet.
An analorgy should be appropriate. Like a BBQ on a balcony. Or turning music up to loud. Or smoking cigarettes. But molesting children, building an atomic bomb and burning books would be really inappropriate analorgies for burning wood. But of course, all of it is illegal, just like burning wood.
It's been like this every winter in the Bay Area for the past few years. Hell, even I get Spare The Air email notifications from the Bay Area Air Quality Management, and my family doesn't even use our fireplace. Bottomline: It makes zero difference to me if wood burning is illegal on certain nights. I have a heater in my room, although I'm freezing my ass off even as I type this.
Look man, you can have a balcony BBQ, burn books, turn the music up as loud as you want, smoke cigarettes, build an atomic bomb (I assume this is some kind of group sex euphemism and you don't have access to actual WMD materials) and even get a bad case of burning wood at this inappropriate analorgy of yours. But for God's sake, keep the children out of it.