Month: December 2011

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Does A Raccoon Sh*t At The Zoo?

Friday was all about the lack of seagulls so it seems fitting to talk about raccoons today. We made a trip to the zoo over the weekend and while we didn’t see any raccoons, not even in cages there was evidence of them everywhere in the zoo by the small piles of raccoon crap that was everywhere.

How do I know it came from a raccoon? They’re everywhere in San Francisco, I’ve even seen them at night in the financial district. I’ve had a family of them living in my backyard that I used to feed sometimes when they’d come out in the evenings. I know feeding raccoons isn’t the smartest thing to do, but because I’ve been around a lot of them I know what their feces look like. Some of you might remember my article on the horrid sounds of raccoon sex I had written before.

Now when I said they were everywhere at the zoo, I mean everywhere once you’ve given up your ticket and gotten in. I’m actually oddly surprised that no one’s written about this before because unless you know what you’re looking at you may not notice which was obvious by all the flattened patties as we were walking around the zoo.

Actually, the children’s playground was pretty clean as is the entrance where you buy your tickets so the SF Zoo must know that there is tons of raccoon crap since raccoons don’t have any fear of sand or children’s play toys. On the other hand feral cats would use the sand in the area like a giant litter box. I know this because I had a sandbox in my backyard when I was a kid and ended up having to change it over to a large planter box because the cats were using it as a litter box. But I digress…

Walking the zoo you have to be especially careful when walking from the sea lion exhibit to the kangaroo and wallaby exhibits. The reason is that the trees planted there drop acorns that help to disguise the raccoon poop making it harder to avoid stepping in it. I actually saw a little kid trip and fall and luckily didn’t face plant into a steaming pile, but his hand did hit it giving him some lubrication to his fall and boom — face plant. His parents were more concerned at first with the raccoon crap all over their son than whether or not he had actually gotten hurt. Luckily we had some wet ones they were giving out free at the children’s zoo, so I came to their rescue and told them what it was. I’m sure the zoo officials got an earful on their way out, especially after I told them that it’s all over the place and you have to watch out for it.

So does a raccoon sh*t at the zoo? Yes and they do it everywhere.

Now on to the sea gulls. You’ll find plenty of them at the zoo and they are like a mafia crime family. All the food areas at the zoo need to have some notice about this as I see someone get hit every time. My daughter dropped a bagel and bang, there was sea gull casually walking up to it and didn’t even back away when i picked it up. I tore a piece off after I gave the bagel back to my daughter and the sea gull walked casually along with us as we started our walk. I suppose he was not yet a made man in the sea gull mafia family yet so he had to play it cool.

Eventually I tossed him his crumb so he got his vig and walked off. This was one of the nice encounters with a sea gull at the zoo. My wife once ordered a burger and didn’t hold it in close to her body and once again, bang the sea gull took it right out of her hand. Incidentally, if this happens to you don’t bother going back and telling the people that you were just attacked by a sea gull as they will just tell you that you should have been more careful. I can see it happen before it does and it’s usually the people with food on trays who like to hold the tray out in front of them or hold their food up around shoulder height. Why they do this, I don’t know, but the zoo should have some signs warning them like the sign warning people of flying gorilla poop when you’re leaning over the fence staring at the gorillas.

Don’t leave any open food out at the zoo because a sea gull will swoop down for a quick smash and grab. The sea gull mafia is ruthless and I have even seen them fly into the middle of a group of people at a table and steal food. I think the lesser squirrel mafia of the zoo is in cahoots with the sea gulls as I saw a family who left their cart outside the petting zoo with an open bag of chips come out to find the squirrels had swarmed into the open bag and were running off with the contents.

So in short, Zoo, food, sea gulls, squirrels, watch your back.

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Where Have All The Seagulls Gone?

When I was a kid seagulls were everywhere in the city. You could find them more easily than pigeons. They were all over the place. When you’d be out in the school yard eating your lunch you have to watch out that you wouldn’t be attack by one of San Francisco’s dragons of the west trying to steal your sandwich out of your hand. Now you have to go to the zoo to have that experience.

Now the seagulls have been replaced by crows and ravens. Sure we had them before, but they were hard to find. Now they’re all over the place. They’ve replaced the seagulls that used to knock the lids of your garbage bins and rifle through your trash on garbage day. They sit on the electric wires looking down at you as you walk by giving you the feeling that you’re walking through a live version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

The ravens are the eeriest of the two because they’re so big. If you go to the Randall Junior Museum you can see one up close and they’re bigger than the chickens that you’d cook up for dinner. Hell, the ravens are bigger than my old fat cat and they just sit there staring you down all the time.

I remember the first time I ever saw ravens in the wild was back in the 80’s and I was walking home from my girlfriend’s house late one night and happened to see a block of ice sitting in the middle of the street and there were two huge raven’s sitting there pecking away at the ice. As I walked by they stopped and looked directly at me and after I passed went back to their pecking. It was odd in a way because to brought to my mind Odin who had two ravens who sat on his shoulders named Huginn and Munnin. I don’t know why that got pulled out of the deep dark recesses of my brain, but it was late at night and seeing them pecking away at the bifrost just left me with an odd kind of feeling. At least they didn’t come at me like the seagulls and try and roll me for any food I might have on me.

So I’m sure there’s an Ornithologist that reads this blog every once in awhile and I ask you now, where have all the seagulls gone?

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Muni Needs WiFi

For a short period of time I had to take the 48 Quintara down to the Mission on a daily basis. I found it actually a relaxing and interesting trip that I wrote about previously as I could sit there with my iPhone and read my email and get constant updates on what was going on along with all the other riders because of the 3G access we all had, but if you like the other thousands of riders who have to take the metro downtown you’re out of luck.

There’s no signal in the tunnels at all. Granted, traveling from West Portal to Embarcadero can be rather quick, but it leaves you with unproductive downtime where if there was an emergency at home I couldn’t even get a phone call in most cases for 45 minutes. On the other hand, BART when I got on one day politely asked me if I’d like to connect to their free wifi service. Hell even going through the bay tunnel I could make cell phone calls. Why isn’t San Francisco looking into this?

There was a time a couple of years ago where I saw buses in San Francisco touting free wifi service they were testing out. You don’t see those today. In a city that says it’s so tech friendly I would expect wifi to be everywhere and available. Well, it is pretty much everywhere, but not always available.  There was a plan at one time to make wifi available throughout San Francisco, but it never took hold. Couldn’t we at least find a way to first make wifi available in the metro tunnel running downtown and then making it available on the buses? It would make the need for 3g/4g data plans almost superfluous and give everyone with a smartphone/tablet computer access to the internet while they have to sit during their commute. Most people complain about how slow Muni is, but if you had something to do during the time you were waiting you wouldn’t notice it so much.

Hell, if I could watch Indiana Jones while I was stuck in the tunnels for two hours I wouldn’t mind the wait as much.

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The Chinese Dancers of West Sunset Playground

If you head to West Sunset Playground on the weekends with your kids you’ll likely see a large line up of mostly Chinese women dance exercising to a mix of Chinese pop music or slightly upbeat house sounding music.

Most of the women are in their late 40’s or older it appears to me though I can’t tell because for some reason Asian’s tend to hold onto their youth for much longer than the rest of us. Dancing is a good method of exercise, but this is nothing like the wild dancing you’ll see at a rave. This is a much slower and actually choreographed looking form of dance. Think of it as like country line dancing with Chinese music.

Unfortunately for us, this isn’t the best time to take our daughter to the playground because she loves to watch the dancing and let’s herself go and wants to join in. She runs around the playground for a couple of minutes and goes into hyperdrive running for the dancers. She’s at an age where music makes her move and when she see’s others dancing it makes her want to join in. In some ways I wish my Cantonese/Mandarin was better so that I could talk with the few that are directing the dancing, but that wasn’t high on the list of things to learn when I was a kid. All I ever learned was how to say hello, goodbye, thank you and a few other ways that would get your face slapped. As a side note, growing up in the Sunset district I’ve learned how to get my face slapped in twelve different languages.

But let’s get back to the dancers. They are the regulars which started out as a weekend Tai-chi group and has added in a few more side groups on the weekends. The men sometimes are there to butch things up practicing martial arts in a group. One day there was a group of Chinese fan dancers [which is a little known martial art where the fan thingies between the paper used to be knives]. You pretty much never know what to expect there other than the dancers on the weekends, but it is definitely an interesting cultural display that you don’t really see anywhere else. I tried shooting video of them so you could enjoy the full experience, but unfortunately my iPhone doesn’t have any steady cam features so it would look like the video was shot by an alcoholic going through withdrawals.

The Chinese dancers are a fun event to see every weekend at West Sunset playground if you’re looking for something different to do and if you have a kid or two the playground that has had a recent redo is a great place to visit. ??????

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The Stow Lake Boat House

I read an article this morning on the San Francisco Citizen blog about someone committing yelp fraud by posting a review that really wasn’t a review or correct. This prompted me to take a drive over to the boat house to see how things were since the change in concessionaires. Well, pretty much it looks the same as it did before. A bit cleaner with newer boats and what appears to be a fresh coat of paint, but otherwise there wasn’t any difference.

Here’s what the yelp reviewer had to say:

What happened to the cool local people that worked there? Everyone we saw was white, which is weird for SF. We drove over from the East Bay to rent boats with my 2 kids and my mom. The kids couldn’t reach the pedals in the boat we rented. Howsthat? It’s for kids,right? After a unhappy boatride, my mom tripped on the crappy stairs in front of the boathouse. She was bleeding, the kids were crying, and no one bothered to help us. An old man sitting on a bench helped us and said the boathouse was just taken over by a New Mexico chain. We won’t be back.

Yes, if everyone was white that would be weird for SF. That’s not what I saw. What I saw were a mix of roughly 75% Chinese and 25% white people who were all out for a good old fashion morning stroll. It was also pretty clean and nice. I walked up to the paddle boats and judging from the distance between the seat and a pedals my almost 5 year old daughter could have peddled it. I doubt she would have wanted to, but Les L. of Oakland, CA got it wrong. As for the crappy stairs in front, they’re the same crappy stairs that have been there since I was a kid. Les, you apparently have a case of Keyboard Lycanthropy because you’re anonymous and no one can put a cap in your ass when you CAPS LOCK THEIR ASS.

Change in San Francisco is inevitable, but San Franciscans don’t really like change until after it happens then they love it. Remember how ugly the observation tower at the De Young museum was? Now I hear people referring to it as a gem of Golden Gate Park.

While they’ve spruced the place up a bit there’s still a lot of work that is anticipated to take another 90 days or so. The boathouse part of the boathouse is still that, the door was open and I saw a couple of boats stored in there. The menu of food has changed a bit for the better and at least you can still get the Wright’s Pink Popcorn I’ve talked about before.