A recent, rather vulgar news clip on public urination in SF Chinatown's Portsmouth Square doesn't leave much to the imagination, featuring multiple offenders — their faces blurred out — shooting streams of pee in plain view throughout the park. Then, the reporter asks one of them why he did it.

The graphic scenes captured by ABC7 of anonymous men openly peeing in Portsmouth Square are on par with those crass Calvin & Hobbes bumper stickers. The accompanying article really drives it home, too, with lines such as: "Years of public urination have left their mark on a now corroded pole."

The SF Recreation and Parks Department tells ABC7 that despite the large number of public urinaters in the park, the restrooms there are the most heavily used in the park system. They plan to renovate the park starting in the early fall of this year and will be adding more restrooms.

The ABC7 clip culminates with reporter Lyanne Melendez stalking approaching one of the unsuspecting offenders after he's "done with his business:"

Excuse me, sir, hi, we're with ABC News, my name is Lyanne Melendez. I wanted to ask you, you realize there are public bathrooms upstairs, but you choose to urinate here. Can I ask you why?

To which the man responds, "OK, thank you," before walking away.

Image: Google Maps

Dad rock fans rejoice! 59-year-old ABC 7 news anchor Dan Ashley, who does indeed moonlight as a rock’n’roll singer, has just had his band added to the Saturday lineup for Outside Lands.

It’s sort of a open secret that KGO evening news anchor of the last 28 years Dan Ashley has a rock band on the side. The band simply goes by the name Dan Ashley, and they’ll be a little less of an open secret once they play San Francisco's biggest music festival of the summer. KGO reported Friday that Dan Ashley’s band is scheduled to play Outside Lands, and the Outside Lands website now confirms that Dan Ashley is on the lineup for early Saturday.

According to KGO, “Dan and his band are slated to perform on Saturday, Aug. 12 in the early afternoon.” A specific set time is not detailed on the Outside Lands website, nor does it initiate at which stage Ashley and company will be performing.

But yes, Dan Ashley is a legit musician. He and his band opened for Joan Jett and the Blackhearts in April at a benefit for Ashley’s charity Rock the CASA, which benefits Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Boys & Girls Club. Ashley’s band is also playing the San Mateo’s Rock the Block outdoor concert series on Thursday, September 1 at the Hillsdale Shopping Center.

And Ashley is backed up by an 11-piece band, some of whom have played with the likes of Eddie Money, Starship, Boz Scaggs, and Huey Lewis. And as you can see from these embedded Youtube videos, that gives you a sense of Dan Ashley’s genre of music.  

But if Dan Ashley is the one thing that would get you to buy Outside Lands tickets, we’re afraid you’re out of luck. Single-day tickets for Saturday’s Outside Lands are already sold out, and three-day passes are sold out too. The only remaining Outside Lands ticket options are single-day tickets on Sunday, which features Odesza, the 1975, and Megan Thee Stallion.

Outside Lands 2023 is in two weeks, from August 11-13.

Related: Outside Lands 15th Anniversary Lineup Includes Kendrick Lamar, Odesza, Lana Del Rey, and Janelle Monae [SFist]

Image via Outside Lands

You haven’t seen KGO’s Luz Peña on the ABC 7 news for four weeks, and it turns out that she suffered a ski accident that left her unconscious and unable to breathe, and she nearly needed to have a leg amputated.

KGO-TV reporter Luz Peña broke one of the most impactful San Francisco news stories yet in 2023 — her February 3 exclusive report about the recent proliferation of sex workers on Capp Street and the mayhem it was causing for residents. That one report has stayed in the news cycle for weeks, leading to barricades on Capp Street, blowback from the firefighters union over said barricades, and even a policy proposal to legalize sex work. Peña’s story was filed on February 3, and she has not aired a story since, even as that original story continued to generate more headlines and developments for weeks.

But now we know why Peña has not filed a story in weeks. Just days after that report aired, KGO now informs us that Peña had a near-death incident in a terrible ski accident when she crashed into a tree at Heavenly Ski Resort. And while she won’t be able to walk again for the foreseeable future, she is well enough to tell her in the segment below that aides this week.

The video has footage taken just five minutes before the accident that nearly took her life.  “I crashed head-on into a tree,” Peña explains. “My husband and brother-in-law found me on top of a tree well, motionless, face-down, intertwined into multiple trees.”

“They said my face was blue, my eyes were wide open, and I was making snoring noises,” she adds. “That noise is called a ‘death rattle.’ It’s a sign that a person is approaching death. My brother-in-law kept asking me to blink and I wouldn’t.”

“While my husband held me in his arms, I actually stopped breathing. They estimate that I was unconscious for about ten minutes.”

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A post shared by Luz Peña (@luzpenatv)

Peña eventually regained consciousness, but could not answer basic questions. This was in an area with no cellular reception, but a fellow skier had a satellite phone that relayed their geographic coordinates. First responders sledded her down the hill, and she was airlifted to a Reno hospital (“I couldn’t remember any of this,” Peña says), and she nearly needed to have her leg amputated.

The Chronicle adds that “After she was transported down the mountain, she was airlifted to Renown Regional Medical Center in Reno, where doctors began examining the damage to her leg and other parts of her body. She needed surgery immediately to repair a broken tibia — a bone fragment that was a centimeter away from cutting an artery. “

She now has a plate and eight screws in her leg, and likely won’t be able to walk independently for several months. But she shows up in the KGO segment above at the 6:30 mark, looking remarkably well and recovered, a recovery we’re all pulling for and hoping continues.

And Luz Peña has some advice for viewers.“My helmet truly did make a difference,” she told her KGO colleagues. “Sidenote: Please ski and snowboard with a helmet, especially one with MIPS technology. You’ll know it has MIPS if it has a little sticker in the back. We had just gotten ours a few weeks back. This technology protected my brain during the impact.”

Related: Helmet Cam Video Captures Near-Death Tahoe Ski Stunt Gone Wrong, as Skier Nearly Suffocates Immersed in Snow [SFist]

Image: luzpenatv via Instagram

ABC 7 got an exclusive interview with the woman herself, the one and only racist ranting tour guide who really hates Chinatown, and who has many things about it she would like to see effed. The interview Thursday evening followed a day in which the company she worked for, City Sightseeing, issued a public apology, and after Supervisors David Chiu and Malia Cohen held a rally against hate speech, in response to her rant.

The Oakland woman, who declined to be identified by name or have her face on camera, reached out to tell her side of things to the news station, saying that she "intended for [the rant] to be a satirical, comedic portion of the tour." But she admits that yes, the part about eating turtles and frogs may have been a bit of a "personal jab against the Chinese people."

I would say, "Fuck your parades, fuck your dragons. Fuck Chinatown!" is kind of insulting too.

Also she says she was not drunk, but was only "sipping" from that forty.

Then they get Chiu on the phone, and the woman speaks directly to him saying, "I thought that I could bend the rules. I thought that I could be outrageous, and it was something that went way too far."

Regardless of your opinion of her form of comedy, she was, of course, correct about one thing: No one wears jade anymore.

Previously: Tour Guide Goes On Epic, Angry, Racist Rant About Chinatown
Racist Ranting Tour Guide Possibly ID'd; David Chiu Demands Apology, Holds Rally

KGO-TV reporter Don Sanchez, who began his career at the station in 1972, retired after his broadcast last night. In recent years he's been the affable, mustachioed, always coiffed arts and entertainment correspondent for the ABC affiliate, going on all the junkets that one goes on as an arts and entertainment reporter — like a recent jaunt to Scotland with Pixar on the eve of the release of Brave, and various trips to the Oscars. And, of course, he's been the movie critic who rates things based on a full, half-full, or empty bucket of popcorn. It's been a cushy way to slide into retirement.

People who grew up in the Bay Area have always known Don't mug on their TV, and he's played pretty much every role a local newscaster can play, from cub reporter to sportscaster to nightly news anchor.

We've joked about Don being a wig model, but in all honesty, we have no confirmation that that is not still, against all odds and visual instincts, his own hair. His hair and mustache have been his signatures over the decades, and as he tells his one-time co-anchor Cheryl Jennings in this farewell piece, there was just one brief moment in the 70s when he shaved it off, but when he did a stint as a sportscaster the network told him he looked too young and ought to grow a mustache, so it returned.

The news of Don's retirement follows quickly on the recent announcement that longtime anchor Dana King was leaving KPIX to pursue her penis sculpting career.

Obviously, he will be missed, and we here at SFist wish him the best.

[ABC 7]

Not satisfied with having only heard from her via that open letter to the Chronicle, ABC 7's Dan Noyes flew down to Caracas, Venezuela to tape an interview with Eliana Lopez, the wife of suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. She recounts the story we've already heard Mirkarimi tell of their New Year's Eve fight, but from her perspective, and she admits that she may, yes, maybe, be divorcing him.

As we've heard, Lopez is due back in the States, by court order, on June 16, unless a judge decides to allow her to again extend her stay. But ABC 7 wasn't about to wait that long. In the interview, Lopez says that her fighting with Mirkarimi began because she was heartbroken over not being able to share her motherhood with her family back home.

She insists that she never felt she or her son were in danger from MIrkarimi, and she downplays the grabbing of her arm even further.

And then we came back home and I say, 'OK, we cannot talk,' and he grabbed my arm and in the first moment I say, 'Stop.' He stop it. He react like, 'Oh my gosh,' and I said, 'OK, let's go inside.' ... He immediately ... when I said, 'stop,' he stopped.

Also, she has more to say about neighbor and key witness in the upcoming Ethics Commission ersatz trial, Ivory Madison. "She represent herself as a lawyer," says Lopez. And of the video they made: "She used the words 'this is confidential, this is your property." Well, that ship has sailed. As for whether she was considering a divorce back around the new year, or if she is still, she leaves that open. She says, "Maybe I will get divorced with Ross, but I am very close with him in this fight. This is about justice." She goes further to say that the political fight that could end with barring Mirkarimi from ever holding public office again seems fascist to her, and shouldn't happen all because he grabbed her arm.

Anyway, this is just the first of a two-parter, but we have no clue what they're going to cover in Part Two. Maybe more footage of her on Venezuelan TV? The who-would-you-take-to-a-desert-island question?

See the full first part below.

[ABC 7]

All previous Ross Mirkarimi coverage on SFist.

The chimps at the Oakland Zoo got to open their Christmas presents early this year, and even though this is just a baldfaced publicity stunt, we really want to see them get in that plastic car and drive around. [ABC 7]

A man in a wheelchair was hit by a cargo train rolling through Jack London Square in Oakland early this morning and subsequently trapped underneath the "cow-catcher" on the front of the train. The man was injured but perhaps not severely, and was conscious and talking to rescuers during the 45-minute-long effort to jack up the 130-ton train engine a few inches in order to pull him out. (We will refrain from speculating as to whether the man was intoxicated and/or home-challenged at the time of the accident.) The man was taken to a hospital, and ABC 7's Terry McSweeney, getting into the holiday spirit, says, "this is about as close to a miracle as we're going to get today."

Watch the coverage below.

The Icelandic volcano that no one can pronounce and that has paralyzed European air travel for the last five days continues spewing ash into the air, but some airlines like KLM and Air France have been getting flights out of SFO in the last 24 hours.

Several flight zones have been established in order to open up certain parts of Europe that are furthest from the ash clouds. ABC 7 interviews some frustrated (and broke) Europeans who have been stuck in a vortex of airline customer service lines for several days. Not to make light of their difficult situation, but please appreciate the uniquely German anger of the man at 2:15 in the video below.

An Amtrak passenger train collided with a stalled AC Transit bus near the Oakland Coliseum early this morning. Above is some raw video of the scene from ABC 7. The Appeal reports that there were no passengers on board the the bus, and that the driver was unharmed.