Miscellaneous: August 2009 Archives

Imagine our surprise on a cold, windy summer stairway walk above Noe Valley yesterday to stumble upon a herd of goats. Provided by the fine folks at City Grazing, the goats arrived on-site last Wednesday and are scheduled to move on to, er, greener pastures after Tuesday.

Caught kissing in public. Aw.

These bright orange wangs, around 50 or so of them, appeared around Fell and Clayton over the weekend. Anyone care to explain what in God's name this is all about?

              

Plug1 was on the scene at this morning's four-alarm fire at Wallace and Jennings in the Bayview District. The blaze started at 11 a.m. and engulfed five warehouses, nearly an entire block. Today has unfortunately been a busy one for firefighters.

So, um, nice earthquake weather we're having today, huh?

      

NBC's somewhat anticipated fall drama series "Trauma" filmed a presumably nail-biting scene in Duboce Park yesterday, one that involved a helicopter landing (!) and Halloween decorations (!!).

Although Julie Chen described Russell as being a "Mixed Martial Arts Fighter from San Francisco," this hot-tempered Commercial Real Estate Broker from Walnut Creek was evicted from the Big Brother house last night by a unanimous 3-0 vote. San Francisco, Walnut Creek. Same difference, right Julie? (Since she's from Queens, we're guessing she frequently tells people she's from Manhattan.)

Zombietime will not be pleased.

Please meet one of San Francisco's dearest treasures, the Sweet Cart lady. She sells cheesecakes, cupcakes, and other assorted titular treats.

"Blue bag" by MarshaMod / Flickr.

"A Sad State of Affairs In the City of San Francisco" by Plug1. (Image shot dangerously close to SFist HQ. This is the neighborhood on a good day, folks.)

If you're like us, you judge a restaurant by the beauty and cleanliness of their bathroom. So, it makes sense to judge social media network bigwigs Twitter and Facebook based off of their offices. (OK, that's tenuous, but you get the point.) Fortunately, the divine Mr. Tate at Valleywag has a boatload of images showcasing both Facebook's and Twitter's Silicon Valley and SOMA headquarters, respectively.

"Door without a wall" by Darwin Bell.

                     

Photog Steve Rhodes captured these fun and colorful photos at the San Francisco Zine Fest on Saturday. Check out the full collection on Flickr.

Special thanks to the on-the-ball tipster who informed SFist of this humorous yet slightly disturbing occurrence surrounding Yelper Marie K.'s 3-star review of Perish Trust, an antique store on Divisadero Street, last week.

View of the Bay Bridge expansion in progress.

We randomly came across this little tidbit yesterday while searching for kid band The She's, who are performing at the Rock Make Street Festival on Sunday. The disgruntled revenge-seeker/Walnut Creek resident must have taken the time to register their gripe as a business on Google Maps, which curiously shows up at the top of the aforementioned search list, alongside various local salons and restaurants. Strange. Here's a transcript:

In light of yesterday's revelation (via the SFBG) that high school kids in SF aren't smoking nearly as much weed as they did a decade ago, we offer up this palate cleanser, featuring the classic pot-smoking sequence from the late John Hughes' The Breakfast Club. This comes from back in the day (1985) when 26% of high school seniors smoked pot habitually, and comes to us via new GenX-themed blog John Hughes Is Dead -- which is, full disclosure, the latest side project by SFist co-editor Jay Barmann.

A pointy Quentin Tarantino doing a Q&A after Inglorious Bastards (or, Inglourious Basterds) screening at the Castro Theatre.

Stamen Design, the folks behind Oakland Crimespotting, have just launched a companion site, San Francisco Crimespotting, which is a sleek, user-friendly interface that blows SFPD's clunky Crime Maps out of the water. Users can easily identify which types of crimes have taken place in their area, including the date and time of day they occurred. (We were quite relieved to see the absence of any murders or aggravated assaults in our vicinity.)

"Four" by Darwin Bell.

One of the fashions spotted at Sunday's Pakistan Independence Day bash at San Francisco Civic Center. So green!

Apparently, most of 11th Street (between Mission and Bryant Streets) was deleted from Google's Street View a few months ago, which was not fixed in yesterday's update. It also appears in the above graphic that 16th Street, between Folsom and Harrison, is not available either. Here's evidence from 2007 that Street View was in fact once available on 11th Street.

On Sunday, if you recall, there was no BART strike, a surprise twist that all but crippled Bay Area media. The unanimous (and somewhat iffy) angle on the strike aversion was that you, the public, thwarted the strike with looming fears of violent strike outrage.

Speaking of graffiti, check out this whimsical take on famous San Francisco treat It's-It.

Oh, fine. Why not.

Ultra-cherished columnist Herb Caen ... listed in a 1959 San Francisco city directory.

This photo on Curbed seriously made our afternoon. Apparently, a long-time Curbed lurker discovered this rooftop streamliner while doing a building inspection for a housing project in the Tenderloin. Blogger 40Goingon28 confirms it's located at the 100 block of Turk Street. Another Curbed commenter speculates that "All you need is an airsteam and a crane" to pull off this feat. See this beauty from another angle.

Behold Oakland's Rotunda Building. Designed by Charles Dickey in 1921, the structure is "considered one of the most beautiful buildings in the City of Oakland." It stands 120 foot high, boating a "5,000 square foot elliptical dome." Gorgeous, yes? Yes.

We love 'em. Some of you hate 'em. Some of you like the taste of 'em. With that in mind, please enjoy Mission and Highland's awesome tribute to flying kittens / rats with wings. (You can debate on which one in the comments.)

"Hold the phone" by Darin Bell.

Anyone who was around the local music scene in the 90s may remember these guys. Enrique was an SF-based, ironical-satirical pop-rock band in the vein of the B-52s and the Scissor Sisters whose 1996 debut, Cut the Cheese, included this never quite classic track, "Do It in the Dirt." We've got to give them props for costumes and choreography, but the music? Let's just say they might have given the Scissor Sisters a run for their money if only they weren't so, like, on-purpose ironic-bad. Hat tip to Heklina for sharing.

                     

Here's another set of local signage that photogs captured in all of their clever, weathered, colorful, informative and matter-of-fact glory. Enjoy.

Entrance fees to national parks will be waived this weekend, folks. (Yay!) In addition to free admission, according to the LA Times, "many park partners, including area hotels and restaurants, will offer discounts and special promotions."

Can we call it a season yet? Because last night's Giants game was brutal, with the Los Angeles Dodgers slapping us into submission 9-1. (OK, turtle_276 makes a good point. We're only one game behind in the wild card race. Excuse us for having little to no faith.)

Off the tops of our heads, we can't think of too many classical/chamber pieces written in honor of our fair city. This one, 1973's "San Francisco Polyphony," is by Hungarian-born composer György Ligeti who's most famous for scoring parts of Stanley Kubrick films like 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut. It's, like, dissonant and you can't exactly dance to it. But we welcome any imaginative suggestions for what all that scary ruckus is around 3:50 -- Embarcadero Station at rush hour?

Time and again, local photog Darwin Bell proves himself one of the best living photographers around today. Above is yet one more example why this is true. And, SFist is honored that he allows us to use his choice images.

NBC Bay Area has pointed us today, for reasons not entirely clear to their news gathering mission, to this blog via a brief piece titled "Where Have San Francisco's Beautiful Women Gone?" The site boasts Thrillist and the Adam Carolla Podcast on their blogroll, so you get the picture. It's basically a twentysomething guy (we think) -- under the pseudonym Samuel Snodgrass, age 77 -- riffing on various theories as to why he can't score a date and why, allegedly, there are "no girls in San Francisco." He provides this concise analysis regarding the bicoastal debate:

             

Sunday Streets met with a Rock the Bike event at Ocean Beach on Sunday. Some sort of amplifier was attached to bikes, then said listening device was powered by the magic of pedal power. Many revelers from Sunday Streets (an event that's quickly turning into more of a cycling event, rather than a pedestrian-friendly one) stopped by to enjoy the music and dancing

Sheer heresy, right? To ban laptop power connectivity at your favorite cafes? Well, that's just what some cafes in New York City, according to a article, are doing in an effort to get squatters to shift it. See, many customers (including some of you right this very second) buy a cup of coffee, then set up shop at a cafe for hours and hours in between small sips -- basically, running a business or obtaining a pointless college degree from a cafe for mere pennies. Which, really, isn't a good thing for the cafe, whose power and free wi-fi most of you gobble up on a daily basis. They're businesses, not libraries. (Fine. Your SFist Editor must admit to, at times, running this site at SOMA's Epicenter Cafe or The Creamery. Guilty as charged. But we do wolf down at least three onion bagels with cream cheese while squatting, so, you know, we're not that bad. Anyway.)

       

NBC's gripping drama Trauma did a little bit of filming at One Bush this morning. While there were no choice star-sighting on the wattage level of SF First Lady Jennifer Siebel -- remember: let Jennifer be Jennifer, you Hollywood bastards -- it was still quite the scene for little ol' downtown San Francisco.

Dancers at the Pistahan Parade & Festival at Yerba Buena Gardens.

Love him or hate him, this shot of SF Giants' Barry Zito is top-notch. (What wasn't top-notch? Last night's game, which saw the Giants blow it in the end against the Cincinnati Reds, 10-5. But free Jon Miller bobbleheads were given out. So, you know, there was that.)

We came across this harrowing bit of footage over at Mission Mission. This SF cyclist is, for lack of a better word, insane. And a bit sexy too, in the way that men who risk their lives at very high speeds tend to be.

by Amy Crocker

"Dog Day Afternoon" by Plug1 of What I'm Seeing.

As the southwestern neighborhoods of San Francisco continue to gain momentum in the public eye through the Western Neighborhoods Project, violent freeway proximity crime, fairly "reasonable" home prices, and stellar coverage from SFist, it's no surprise that neighborhood blogs are starting to emerge from places most San Franciscans never thought existed (or believed were in Daly City).

These fine British gents are coming to the Fox Theater in Oakland tomorrow evening, so we thought we'd offer up one of their more popular tracks, "Two Months Off" which was featured on 2002's Beaucoup Fish A Hundred Days Off [Ed. Note: Apologies... we only own two Underworld albums, and we mixed them up and were typing too fast. Jeez, sorry.]. If you're into their brand of rave-y, urgent, melodic electronica, you might also enjoy this live version of the song from 2003 concert in Japan with the full 3-minute intro intact.

"Where'd Cinderelly go?" by Darwin Bell.

One of those (dangerous looking) Smart Cars parked perpendicularly, shot by Jim Herd of SFCitizen. Is it legal to park your fun-size car like that, Herd asks? Nope.

Curbed featured this photo montage sent in by reader Ben of storefronts that are empty or for lease along Union Street from Gough to Fillmore. Check out the larger version.

      

We didn't see a hundred skydivers, but T-Mobile completed their big mid-day product launch for their hopeful iPhone rival, the myTouch 3G, featuring planes, free-falling, freelance skydivers, colored smoke, mimes, stilt-walkers, BMXers, loud MCs, DJs, many balloons and much brouhaha at Justin Herman Plaza, Pier 39, and elsewhere. Employed people around Embarcadero Center were heard muttering things about the "down economy" and a spectacle the scale and expense of which we haven't really seen since, oh, before the Great Recession. Or maybe the dot-com era. Anyway, here are a few photos. More to come.

In an attempt to get in on the hyperlocal (ugh, that word) trend, glossy rag interviewed pretty people about their favorite places to go in specific San Francisco neighborhoods. Above, Mission district fans prattle on about Revolution Cafe, Beauty Bar, and a bench.

Laughing Squid featured a photo of a rather poetic letter that's posted in the window of the former See's Candies in Nob Hill written by the building's landlord, which explains that the business has been evicted due to their contribution to the “Enron-sponsored” 9/11 attacks.

"San Quentin, from the ferry" by Jen Maiser.

Forgive us if you're one of the almost 500,000 who've seen it already... we hadn't, and it was shot in our very own Trader Joe's on Masonic on some guy's Palm Treo. It's a cute little ditty set to the tune of Jobim's "Waters of March," and we especially like the references to the over-small parking lot and the "twelve kinds of of soy milk that all taste the same." But what's that about "a snort, a sniff..."? Is TJ's selling cocaine now?

"Walk This Way, Walk That Way" by Plug1 / What I'm Seeing.

This man, whose name we believe is Bob, grew up in Vallejo and moved to San Francisco in 1979 to pursue his dreams of being a postal clerk and (possibly) becoming a liberated gay man. Bob now curates this awkward site of internet oddities, and appears quite put off by things like Roseanne Barr and bestiality. Rather than write his memoirs, Bob is vlogging them, and this 9-minute bit of YouTubery is a fine example of why oral histories are sometimes a bit more ramble-y than written ones. He describes the horrors of his first apartment -- a room in the cockroach infested SRO known as the Civic Center Hotel, which still stands today at Market and 12th Street -- and one has to wonder what irresistible joys this town had to offer which kept Bob living this "nightmare" for six straight months rather than at home with mom in Vallejo.

The scene outside last night's Midnight Mass screening of .