Author: Eric Kauschen

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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.

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Conan The Barbarian and The Turkey of Doom

Well, I was trying to be witty with the title, but sometimes I don’t quite hit it. This is about dealing with the leftover turkey after Thanksgiving. I did something this year that was always my mother’s job — ripping all the remaining meat off the carcass. This was always a job done by hand and it can get pretty ugly. My wife left the room because she did not want to witness me defiling the carcass.

There was grease all over me from the turkey fat if you saw me from behind there was meat flying off to one side and bones off to the other. It was a real mess getting the meat off the bones, but I did it in a timely fashion. We couldn’t store the carcass whole as it was too big for our refrigerator and well, bird carcass isn’t very visually pleasing to my wife. In the end I ended up with several pounds of meat so what did I do next? Well I waited a few days because other things came up, but yesterday I through the now finely shredded meat into a pot with a lovely mixture of celery, onions and carrots, i.e. the classic mire poix. To this I added three tablespoons of a spice mix called Pride of Prague which is a really good spice blend from Urban Accents. I let this all boil slowly for about an hour after adding some chicken stock and added some peas and corn in the last half hour. Now that I think about it, bacon should have been there somewhere.

In the end it tasted great and the soup/stew weighed in at a little over 10 pounds. Now my mom never really liked to eat dark meat when she could see it, just like I as a kid never liked to eat vegetables unless they were in a soup. She used to buy only a turkey breast for thanksgiving because she felt since she only like white meat that would waste the least amount of meat. That’s true, but it also cost her over $20. We decided to go cheap this year and got an 11 lb turkey for $5, yes, you read that right. Safeway was selling 8-12 lb turkeys for $5. If you purchased $25 in groceries.

We figured we could find something to do with the rest of the meat and when dark meat is finely chopped and boiled in chicken stock with some vegetables it’s pretty unrecognizable. So what did I learn from this? For under $10 we were able to get over a weeks worth of food. Top that one.

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I Took One For The Team: $1 Rib-Eye Steak from Dollar Tree

OK, OK, I know this is supposed to be about life in and around San Francisco and Dollar Tree is a national chain, but there’s also a Dollar Tree in Colma, home of the dead people where we sometimes shop because, well, everything is a dollar. About a month ago I saw a $1 3.5oz rib-eye steak and bought one. It took be a while letting it sit in its frozen state, but last night I actually threw it on the grill and here’s what I found out about it.

First, it’s salty. It’s what foodies would call wet aged since it’s packed in a hermetically sealed plastic with a meat tenderizer mix of salt, ficin [meat tenderizer derived from figs] and bromelin [meat tenderizer derived from papaya that’s different than papin which also comes from papaya]. It was actually very tender after the five minutes it sat on the grill and only had a small area of gristly fat that had to be cut out.

3.5 oz is about the amount of protein that a person should have with each meal according to the medical community even though they also suggest 2 grams per kg of body weight so at 28.35 gms per oz I was a little under my daily intake per day. On first taste there was an obviously processed taste to it. I thought of what an army issued MRE steak would taste like. I’ve never had one, but this would probably come close to it. It was tender, very tender and compared to the top round steak I cooked with it, I actually like it better.

If you’re a person short on money, but love your meat I’d recommend you try it. It’s not anywhere near steak house quality and definitely not something you’d expect from the House of Prime Rib, but for people on a budget for a buck you could do a lot worse. Due to the high sodium content I’d suggest you have a baked potato with it or a salad with avocado so that you get more potassium to flush the excess sodium out. I think we’ll be picking up a few more of those steaks next time we travel down to the land of the dead just because they’re cheap and we can’t at the moment afford Snake River Kobe-styled beef. The $1 rib-eye’s don’t look pretty, but when you toss them on a grill for a couple minutes they’re pretty tasty.

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Having Clout is Better than Having Klout!

My wife tipped me off to an article after I read a newspaper article about how tech savvy businesses are asking people their Klout scores in job interviews. I have been asked my Klout score on at least two interviews and I believe their influence in social media is unfair as well as unjust and I’m going to get into that area now.

I heard about Klout [which wordpress keeps automatically changing to clout so it isn’t as influential as it may want you to think it is] through some of my friends on twitter, so I jumped off the bridge because they did and joined up with said website.I started out with a score in the high 40’s which slowly moved up to 67. I thought it was pretty good at the time and then they changed their algorithm and I dropped down to 50 overnight. As a matter of fact, I noticed that everyone I saw on Klout that I had influence with dropped overnight. This was kind of like devaluing the dollar and then having banks tell you that the $10,000 you had in savings is now only $5,000. The company is acting recklessly yet companies who value social media take it seriously.

I have clout. When I walked into a Mayoral debate, several of the candidates for mayor knew me on site and walked up and shook my hand. Some didn’t because I had spoken ill of them and had even had their campaign coordinators call me to speak with me. There are many restaurants and businesses in San Francisco that when I walk into them the owners know me by name and welcome me. Some even ask my opinion on new dishes they are thinking of selling. I’ve got clout. My Klout score on the the other hand speaks differently.

Klout says it takes it’s information from many different social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, etc. Recently it’s said that it’s new algorithm uses only the four previously mentioned sites, but I disagree. I have many posts on Facebook, LinkedIn and FourSquare, but have recently declined in my twitter posts to maybe once or twice a day and noticed my Klout score decreased daily until one day I posted four tweets and it suddenly jumped up a point. Some of my fellow twits decided to do a test one day and we started a conversation on twitter about Klout going back and forth and the next day I had jumped up 5 points.

Klout is highly weighted towards twitter usage. That has become obvious and I defy them to prove otherwise. This website has reached out to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. I am known, yet there are people data farmed on Klout who are shown to have influence on topics that A: They know nothing about and B: are not on Klout. When I joined it took me over a month before Klout showed that I have influence on several topics. The topic that I have the most Klout on according to the website is Smartphones. The least amount of Klout I have is on San Francisco. While I love my iPhone I regularly write about San Francisco so I think it should be the other way around. They aren’t taking this blog into account. I am one of the few born and raised San Franciscans who writes about San Francisco. I would think Woody LaBounty of the Western Neighborhoods Project should have more Klout on San Francisco than me, but his score is only 21 and his topic of influence is Geneva. I don’t know if that’s the street or the city in Switzerland, but something is not right here.

Klout is currently in beta so nobody should be taking it too seriously, so it seems strange to me that there are companies looking for people with social media skills that ARE taking Klout seriously. If people are going to use Klout they should seriously consider it’s value with a large Siberian salt mine at the moment.

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The History of Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving, the day when we eat way too much, drink way too much and we all fall into what has been referred to as the Turkey Coma after dinner. This is the biggest day of the year for feeding the rich and the poor so I decided to take a look into the history of this all American holiday.

Well first off, it’s not just celebrated by Americans. Maybe on this day it is, but there are many other countries that celebrate Thanksgiving as well. The fourth Thursday of November was declared to be the official celebration date of Thanksgiving by congress in 1941. The same year we entered into World War II. Canada also celebrates Thanksgiving on the second Monday in October. Grenada celebrates Thanksgiving on October 25th, but that has nothing to do with pilgrims, but is a giving of thanks for the 1983 US invasion. Liberia celebrates Thanksgiving on the first Thursday in November. The Netherlands celebrate Thanksgiving on whatever day we tell them we’re going to celebrate it in honor of the Dutch pilgrims who moved here because of the hospitality they received in Leiden on their way. The Australian territory of Norfolk Island celebrates Thanksgiving on the last Wednesday of November because American whaling ships dropped by and said, let’s eat!

Now the oddest thing about this holiday around the world is that except for Grenada, no one can pin it down to an exact date. Christmas or yule is always on the 25th of December. Valentine’s day is always February 14th. The Fourth of July is always on, well, you get my point. Easter always changes dates, but I guess that’s because people are confused about how our lord and savior pooped out multicolored hard boiled eggs while coming back to life and gave them to bunnies to hide for the little kids to find.

But getting back to the point…Thanksgiving was a end of the harvest celebration for years that finally got it’s name in 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln declared November 26th a day for all to give thanks. What people refer to as the first Thanksgiving that the pilgrims celebrated was [and I lifted this from the font of all truths, Wikipedia]:

The event that Americans commonly call the “First Thanksgiving” was celebrated to give thanks to God for guiding them safely to the New World. The first Thanksgiving feast lasted three days, providing enough food for 13 Pilgrims and 90 Native Americans. The feast consisted of fish (cod, eels, and bass) and shellfish (clams, lobster, and mussels), wild fowl (ducks, geese, swans, and turkey), venison, berries and fruit, vegetables (peas, pumpkin, beetroot and possibly, wild or cultivated onion), harvest grains (barley and wheat), and the Three Sisters: beans, dried Indian maize or corn, and squash. The New England colonists were accustomed to regularly celebrating “thanksgivings” — days of prayer thanking God for blessings such as military victory or the end of a drought.

Three days of eating and turkey was just a small part of it. Since the first pilgrims were near the coast, seafood was probably the biggest protein they consumed during this time. The holiday wasn’t as secular as it is today and I still haven’t been able to find out how the turkey became the center piece, but it seems that turkey day started in the 20th century.

I had never thought about it, but there is also some controversy associated with Thanksgiving and I quote [once again from wikipedia]:

Much like Columbus Day, Thanksgiving is seen by some as a celebration of the conquest and genocide of Native Americans by European colonists. Professor Dan Brook of UC Berkeley condemns the “cultural and political amnesia” of Americans that celebrate Thanksgiving, saying that “We do not have to feel guilty, but we do need to feel something.” Professor Robert Jensen of the University of Texas at Austin is somewhat harsher, saying that “One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.”

Since 1970, the United American Indians of New England, a protest group led by Frank “Wamsutta” James that has accused the United States and European settlers of fabricating the Thanksgiving story and whitewashing a supposed genocide and injustice against Indians, has led a National Day of Mourning protest on Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts in the name of social equality and in honor of political prisoners.

Another notable example of anti-Thanksgiving sentiment was when hundreds of supporters traveled to Alcatraz on Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the Occupation of Alcatraz by Indians of All Tribes. The American Indian Movement also holds a negative view of Thanksgiving and has used it as a platform of protest, most notably when they took over a Mayflower float in a Thanksgiving Day parade. Some Native Americans hold “Unthanksgiving Day” celebrations in which they mourn the deaths of their ancestors, fast, dance, and pray. This tradition has been taking place since 1975. 

However, the perception of Thanksgiving among Native Americans is not universally negative. Tim Giago, founder of the Native American Journalists Organization, seeks to reconcile Thanksgiving with Native American traditions. He compares Thanksgiving to “wopila,” a thanks-giving celebration practiced by Native Americans of the Great Plains. He writes in The Huffington Post that “the idea of a day of Thanksgiving has been a part of the Native American landscape for centuries. The fact that it is also a national holiday for all Americans blends in perfectly with Native American traditions.” He also shares personal anecdotes of Native American families coming together to celebrate Thanksgiving. Jacqueline Keeler of the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux also celebrates Thanksgiving. She sees it as a celebration of Wampanoag generosity to starving, impoverished colonists while still lamenting the violence that followed. Members of the Oneida Indian Nation marched in the 2010 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with a float called “The True Spirit of Thanksgiving.”

Well, I guess giving thanks for successfully invading another people’s lands could piss a few people off, but it wasn’t like they didn’t have a hand in it. The Indian tribes that the first pilgrims interacted with actually gave from their food stores to help them through the winter because they didn’t have enough when they arrived.

All in all, Thanksgiving to me is just a day to gorge yourself on food. Now we just have to figure out how to get our $5 Safeway turkey that’s been in the refrigerator for two days to defrost so we can cook it today.

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Anthony Bourdain Makes a Layover in San Francisco

Ever since Anthony Bourdain made his first cracks about how much he hated San Francisco because of the earthy crunchy people like Alice Waters, I’ve tried to get in touch with him to set him straight. He did later, under a bit of duress actually shoot an episode of No Reservations that started to change his mind.

Tony like San Francisco has a colorful past. I’ve heard stories of him nodding off into a slump next to a stove in a restaurant he worked at from doing a little too much heroin that day. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s a colorful story just like the many San Francisco has.

Tony has a new show that aired for the first time last night called The Layover where he stops in for 24-48 hours in a cities and tries to cram as much as he can into that short time. Last night was Singapore, but in a few weeks we’ll see him in San Francisco. It’s been shot already so I won’t get to meet up with him to tell him about some real San Francisco places to visit. I was surprised at some of the place he went to in Singapore last night so maybe Tony will surprise me with some good places he found that are off the beaten path. Hopefully made a trip out to the Sunset to try some of the food at Thanh Long or had one of the best burritos in the city made at El Burrito Express.

Tony now calls San Francisco a two fisted drinking, meat eating town which it is and more and I hope when I get to see the show Tony found that out as well.

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