22 posts tagged “san francisco”

My letter to Mayor Newsom:

ATTENTION MAYOR NEWSOM: THE MUNI IS BROKEN!  PLEASE FIX IT NOW...it's your job.
 
I can handle waiti ng half an hour for an N to show up at Carl and Cole during morning rush hour to take me down town. It sucks but it happens so frequently I’m used to it. I can deal with the cattle-car conditions on the N itself—hundreds people packed in like doomed galley slaves. I can withstand the constant barrage of delays in the tunnel. I’ve even grown accustomed to the terrible customer service: the surly, mean, dismissive attitude shared by most Muni drivers. These drivers routinely display the stereotypical worst behavior of the protected civil servant whom only a gun rampage can get fired for cause.
 
With the new T-line, all of this has gotten immeasurably worse, but I have been riding the Muni for a few years now and I’m used to all these annoyances. What I cannot handle, what no citizen of our great city should EVER have to handle, is riding on the Muni during the hottest week of the year, when half the Muni cars on the N have the heater on.  On the way home last night and again tonight, I was stuck on standing-room only, outbound-N with the heater running full bore.

As a Jew, I paniced momentarily, recalling that our Govenor was raised by an SS man.
 
WHY in the NAME OF GOD are the heaters going in these cars? It must have been a hundred degrees! People were already squished together, sweating and stressed and upset while old people stripped  and fanned themselves, just an inch from fainting dead away, and the HEATER was BLASTING from the ceiling like a infernal kiln. What circle of Hell, I wondered, had I been banished to at last?
 
Mayor Newsom, hard working San Franciscans should not be treated like this. We SHOULD NOT be subject to such dangerous conditions on a daily basis, as we commute to and from our jobs where we earn the money that pays you and the City Council and subsidizes the Muni. These conditions are unacceptable. I can guarantee that the first person to hit the deck from heat exhaustion will cost the city plenty. I will certainly voulanteer to testify in their suit. Does your budget have a surplus for the possible law suits that await?
 
I ride the Muni by choice: to help the environment, to save on parking, to avoid traffic. All the typical San Francican tree-hugger virtues.  Yet I am being punished for my choice. I feel punished because the conditions on the Muni feel, in every way, like punishment. A kind of daily purgatory. Are you aware that the new Pope abolished purgatory? Are not steamrooms still banned in San Francisco?
 
I don’t care what you have to do to fix this, just fix it. FIRE who you need to fire. Retire deadwood supervisors.  Raise taxes to pay for maintenance people to fix the cars. RAISE THE FARE TO $2.00! Start a guest worker program for foreign cable car repairmen. I would happily pay more to have a nice commute to work. Hell, I think I *deserve* a TOLERABLE commute! I'm certainly willing to pay for it!
 
PLEASE HELP US!  I voted for you. I even worked on your campaign.  Please do not let me down. I appreciate many of the progressive choices you've made during your term to make San Francisco a beacon of hope for many. However, if you can't maintain the transportation infrastructure that you are responsible for, do not expect my support come reelection time. You are leading a city, not a morning talk show. Great hair and good looks will take you only so far in politics. Please act like my mayor and fix the damn MUNI.
 
Respectfully,

Tim Wayne

So I got the pics from the "Tequila Dinner" I went to on Friday. Here's some further experimentation with embedded code.

HP and I went a-trollin through Japantown yesterday. The first destination was lunch.  We picked this Japanese hole-in-the-wall across the street from the main mall.  Lunch was basically an unbloggable affair, though right outside in the square we saw a wedding party gathering to take pictures with the Peace Pagoda in the background.

Later we went walking through the mall. Mostly it was HP looking at hobby stores for toys or this or that. We got separated for a while and I went about taking pictures of stuff that looked interesting, like this gorgeous kimono in a store window

(Now, the Japantown mall is this mostly indoor deal. I hate indoor malls on principle, so my coverage of this place is probably negatively biased. Even so, with fake bushes strewn with christmas lights all over the place, dry fountains full of plastic plants and painted water; the place is meretricious and dusty. How could a people famous for bonsai decorate their mall with fake ficus trees? The official Japantown website describes this indoor mall as "like visiting Japan without the hassle and expense of a long trip across the Pacific." If Japan sucks as much as this mall, I'll save myself the trip. Now, that being said, there's still a lot of cool and interesting stores and vendors here, and that is what we came to see).

As I said, HP and I were off in different areas of the mall. He was inside looking at toys and I ended up outside in the square  watching these J-Pop cheerleader bimbos practicing what looked like a summer camp fireside skit.
And I saw this little kid playing in the fountain. Something about him splashing water onto the pigeons while ignoring his parents perturbed calls struck me as funny. While watching the kid, I heard some shouting off in the distance. I couldn't tell what it was, only that it seemed like a lot of people and maybe a loudspeaker or two. I started off in the direction of the sound. I walked past the Pagoda to Geary and then up Geary to the next block, where there were a bunch of cops and a few hundred people, yelling about a free Tibet.
I kept hearing this one chant over and over, "CHINA LIES! TIBETANS DIE!" which sort irked me. Get your own damn chant, Tibetans. It's supposed to go "Bush lies! People die!"  But then again, they probably stole it too.

"Free Tibet!" "Free Tibet!" But free it for what? So it can return to a theocratic monarchy? How is that better than the capitalist communism of the PRC? Julia Sweeny and Penn Jillette said it better than I can:
  

Anyways, I gingerly walked around the police in the no-protestor zone, right on the door of the Consulate building where no protestors were allowed to go, to snap some pictures. I think the cops ignored me because I was the only white guy to be seen and also I was wearing a big ugly tropical shirt and taking pictures. They must have thought, "tourist." No cop bashed in my skull, I am happy to report.

Just about then, HP started calling me. He found a store full of kitchen porn (our term for kitchen supplies or equipment that are super fancy, while totally unnecessary and  superfluous  for our kitchen). Sigh. I caught up with him but then I had the unpleasant experience of sort-of-recognizing this dude who was dating a friend's ex-boyfriend who got said ex-boyfriend into tweak and onto a downward spiral. Or something messy along those lines (answer hazy, ask again later).

We fled to the crepe shack on the other side of the mall, where we shared crepe full of  green-tea ice cream red-bean paste (a starchy concoction that looked like refried beans but tasted like dessert), and perved on this gay teenage flirt who kept orbiting our spot the whole time we ate. But no pictures: I would have taken pictures of the crepe place but there were "NO PICTURES / NO VIDEO" signs all over, and snapping photos of the teenager might have gotten us the wrong kind of attention from Japantown Mall Security.   Ah, good times.   

HP and I had a very yummy breakfast at the Reverie Cafe (map, reviews) in Cole Valley.  Normally we avoid this place since its usually filled with a neighborhood crowd of unsufferably pretentious (when not downright surly) Cole Valley locals.  But the breakfast here is totally yummy and a great deal, and with the cold, cloudy morning weather we figured we could sit in their fabulous back yard area by ourselves.  We were right---not a single upturned nose.  Aaaanyways, we ordered the crab cakes benedict (get extra holandaise because they never put enough on) and the bagel with salmon. They serve Gina Marie cream cheese ---the really good stuff (from Say Cheese, the cheese shop right next door).  HP and I split both the dishes (one eggs benedict muffin and one-half a bagel each). The total was about $17.  YAY!

(watch her feet)

Alex and I discovered Best of Thai Noodle (map, reviews) right down the street from my flat. I've lived three blocks away for four years and I never went in.  I'm glad I finally did. The soups are really yummy and they're all six or seven bucks. In fact, I think everything on their menu is six or seven bucks.

We usually get the won ton soup and the duck soup (yeah, together, two soups. So what? they're Suuuuper yummy! )

I cannot freakin' believe I did not go to this. I knew about it. I was lying on the bed and HP and we were like,

Should we go?
No, I'm tired.
Me too. But... zombies! it's gonna be cool!
No, it's gonna be stupid.
But you like zombies too!
It's probably renaissance faire people.
Hmmm... yeah, you're right.
I've had enough of those.
Yeah, me too.  ... but... but... it might be fun!
Ugh. You know it's gonna be dumb.
Well, probably. But it might not be.

Here, let's get stoned first.

...and that's all she wrote. We didn't get off the bed until 5PM. I think we watched cartoons or something.  Or maybe we went shopping. I seem to remember eating marshmallow pies by a fountain but the memory is dim.

A friend sent me this and it is absolutely legit:

So, check out http://www.eatbrains.com/  for all the oozing, coagulating details.

You have to admit, this sounds pretty fucking hilarious:

The details: Saturday, Aug 19th, zombies will be storming the corner of Market and Sansome at 2:30. We will then walk/limp/crawl to Powell Station by 3:00. There will be a big massacre on Powell between Market and O'Farrel. We'll Pick up stragglers at Union Square by 3:30. See the Map

How to participate: Plant yourself somewhere along our route. Show up in plain clothes minus anything of value. Wear a small piece of duct tape (or similar) clearly visible on your torso. Attract our attention somehow. (screaming "aaaiiieeee! zombies!" is good for this). We will attack you, cover you with blood, shred your clothes, and slip you a makeup kit so you can create new zombies. If you want to show up already in zombie gear, great. Just join the mob at any time.

Check out the VIDEO from last year. WOW. By the end there's like fifty nerds!  I totally want to go do this today but HP refuses. He's such an anti-nerd.