My friend Tom who runs the Ocean Beach Bulletin and has a pic of the day about things in and around Ocean Beach. Since I cover more things San Francisco and not just the Westside of the city I thought it would be a good idea to add pictures in and around the city. If you’re out and about with your camera and see an interesting place, snap a photo and send it to me with any info you can on the spot and I’ll post it along with your name. If you can add any more info like your camera settings I’ll add that in as well. I used to do this way back in the early days of the blog and I think I’ll start it up again. You can email the photos to me directly by clicking on link there.
So to start off with, here’s a pic I took with my iPhone at the Japanese Tea Garden. It’s a nice peaceful place to visit that just walking around will put you in a meditative state.
Yesterday was probably one of hardest days for me. While I grew up having dogs and being around pets I never had to put one to sleep. My mom had asked me once with one of our dogs if I would go and be with him when he was put to sleep, but I couldn’t do it. I always felt like I was being the executioner. Well, yesterday the time had come for the woman I had spent the last 19 years with to go to sleep for good. It was time to take the long walk with Morgana.
I could tell the last couple of days were hard for her as her meow changed to a yowl that sounded like she was in pain and we noticed that she couldn’t walk very well. This was hard to take because she had always been a feisty cat in her youth that would jump off our deck in the mission [that was 10′ high] and hit the ground rolling with a bird in her mouth. She survived a couple of raccoon attacks with almost no scratches and she even was shot with a BB gun that didn’t seem to phase her until I happened to notice it when she was on my lap one day. My friend Mike gave her to me to replace Max who had adopted me just by walking in my house one day and curling up in my lap. Max left me when I was away on a trip to London in the days before laptops and email or text messaging so I was a little shocked when I came home, but it was much easier to deal with. Morgana’s mom was an Abyssinian who happened to get loss the first time she went into heat and met up with a rakish tabby and got their freak on. She started life with big Abyssinian ears like her mom and she was the last one of the litter to go. I think I did pretty good with her. She only started to slow down in the last six months.
The two worst parts where having to make the phone call and having to take the long walk to the vet. I really hurt inside feeling like I was escorting a friend to the gas chamber. I managed to hold it together long enough and I have to give big kudos’ to my friend Dr. Scott Anderson of Avenues Pet Hospital. I’ve known him since I was a little kid and he and his staff have always taken excellent care of our pets.
Seeing as this was the first time I had to do this I wasn’t aware of the options. I didn’t realize it only took 12 seconds, but I did know that you could be there if you wanted to. I couldn’t do that. That would have been too hard for me. I was offered the choice to see her after, but I didn’t want that either. I was even offered the choice to bring her home after and bury her in my back yard which I couldn’t do because that just seemed gross to me. In the end she will be cremated and I’ll get the ashes to put somewhere appropriate.
She was a great cat that got a good long life. I’ll miss her, but I know she won’t be in pain anymore.
Well my doctor who can be blunt at times, which is good because I tend to take blunt people more seriously told me I was out of shape today and need to walk at least fifteen minutes a day. I kind of got an idea that something was wrong the night of the SF Weekly awards when I walked out of the metro station and by the time I got down to 111 Minna I had broken out in a sweat. I did that walk every day for years and never broke a sweat unless it was a very hot day. So things have changed for me and I sat down and thought about it for a bit.
For the last two years I’ve been unemployed except for a short 3 month stretch with a start up company that required me to sit at home in front of the computer and record voice overs for a cool iPhone app called HearPlanet. It turns out that being that sedentary all day long isn’t good for you. I spent most of my days at my computer, looking for work, doing freelance work or watching Hulu and Netflix and tweeting and Facebooking. This is not a good habit to have.
The weird thing is that I feel like I should look like the guy in the picture, but I don’t. I could lose five pounds, but I don’t look overweight for my age. I’m pretty close to my BMI which is good, but if I break out in a sweat after walking a block something’s got to change. As you may have noticed, my posting has been reduced a bit with my new job. I’m going to need to step away from the computer a bit more now so that I can get myself back to being able to walk six blocks to the store easily. That means I’ll try to have at least three posts a week.
It’s time I turned myself around so the guy in the picture can’t beat me in a sprint. We love our wide screen TV’s and computers and all the big techie stuff you can sit in front of for hours on end staring at here in San Francisco, but it’s not good for you. While my doctor has said my heart is in good shape, I still don’t want to die in my 50’s due to natural causes. Now it’s time to get up and take a walk after which I will call my friend Clint the yoga master down in Costa Rica for some yoga tips. For what it did for him, it might get me back in shape.
This pops up every once in awhile and I think it’s about time I said something about it. I got to pull another late shift at work last night and was driving home close to 8pm. I drive through the park, because there really isn’t much other way to get from the Richmond to the Sunset off of the bridge, but driving through the park. While Golden Gate Park has street lights, it also has lots of trees, some of which block the light.
Now during this drive I saw several very smart people. They were bike riders and joggers who had front and rear facing lights strapped to them. Maybe they weren’t so smart for biking and jogging through Golden Gate Park at night, but at least you could see them. Unfortunately when I turned off of transverse drive things changed.
I almost hit a guy who was jogging across the street, not in a crosswalk even, who was wearing at black shirt and black jogging pants. I can see a Darwin award coming for this guy. The next were three bikers that were riding next to each other that had cheap dime store reflectors that were probably as old as me. It was so dark in that part of the park that I turned on my high beams just so I could see the faded out road divider and not hit one of the somewhat undetectable asphalt curbs. As I finally made it to Sunset Blvd and turned onto it things got brighter and there was no one in danger of being hit, anymore.
There was one other problem that had nothing to do with bikers or joggers though, As I was driving up Taraval after a stop at a local store I decided to turn back onto Sunset and almost hit a pedestrian — wearing all black with a set of headphones on. Now, I may be getting a bit older and sometimes I think my night vision is starting to slip sometimes even though my Opthamologist disagrees with me, When you’ve got several car headlights beaming in your face while you’re trying to turn it sort of cancels out your visibility of darker objects, like people dressed in black walking at night.
I think that our street lights need to be brighter in the first place. The street I live on is one of the long blocks in San Francisco. It has two street lights on either side of it. As you can see from the picture up top, I live on a very dark street at night and it’s really hard to see. I’ve even seen people walking with flashlights at night sometimes because you can’t see what’s in front of you on the ground. Hell, after I took this picture I tripped walking back out of the street because I couldn’t make out the curb very well.
So my words for everyone whether they’re a biker, jogger or pedestrian, if you’re going to walk at night in dark clothing and aren’t doing ninja work prepare not to be seen. Now I think I’m going to have to email Supervisor Carmen Chu this article to bring it to her attention. I haven’t talked to her in a long time. Maybe I could talk her into having a few drinks at one of the Sunset’s fine drinking establishments.
So there’s an old joke that I’m going to paraphrase to start this article that I heard years ago. It goes like this, I’ve written many books, but I’ve never been called an writer. I’ve sung many songs, but I’ve never been called a singer, I make one comment about a practice that’s destroying our oceans that a Chinese politician is in favor of and…. The original was funnier, but the end result is true.
Ever since I posted my articles on why the process of shark finning is bad for our ocean’s environment I have been called a racist by someone using Leland Yee’s twitter account, I have received telephone calls from his campaign managers and Saturday night, I start getting trolled once again on twitter by someone using the name @generic_ This person had a blog on Tumblr where they have passed themselves off as a straight, white, liberal, atheist. They even have a myspace page [really? myspace?] and have posted a picture of a, well, generic white guy. They also mentioned that they did the graphics for Necessary Conversations, a video blog or podcast that is hosted by Beth Spotswood and Melissa Griffin [who incidentally I was up against in the Best Local Politics Blog contest with SF Weekly]. When I look at the site I see that a Cameron Eng is listed as the being in charge of the graphics for the show.
NOTE: I have been informed by a reader that the person posting as @generic_ is not Cameron Eng and is indeed a male caucasian who is trying to win favor with Jim Stearns Group in order to get a job so he attacks anyone who says anything bad about a client of Stearns Consulting. My apologies to Cameron Eng for any possible inferences. While I can’t say for sure that @generic_ is indeed Cameron Eng things at this point in time do seem to be pointing in that direction. I found out my information by dropping the URL into archive.org which is an interesting website for getting information on website histories. I still will be reserved on who the real identity of this person was, but I can say that I’ve never been called a racist by any person other than Leland Yee’s camp and @generic_ who from his posts seems to also be in favor of Leland Yee for Mayor, so I guess anyone who isn’t in favor of Leland Yee for mayor is a racist in @generic_‘s book. Which then means, Rose Pak can also ride in my racist boat along with Mayor Ed Lee and everyone else running for Mayor.
I would like to take this time to apologize to the citizen’s of California and San Francisco for my previous statements. I am sorry that only people of Chinese decent eat shark fin soup, but at the same time glad, because if the entire world consumed it our oceans would be in extreme danger. In the video I posted on Saturday, Gordon Ramsey noted that the shark fin collectors get $28/pound for the fins and $2/pound for the rest of the shark. There is only one dish made with shark fins and that is shark fin soup. Because it is expensive to purchase in a Chinese restaurant it makes it worth it to the fishermen to harvest only the fins and throw back the cheaper meat that no one wants. If you have a boat that could haul in a ton of sharks would you want to take the whole shark, or just the fins which would give you 14 times the value of the shark? You’d go for the fins.
I do agree with Leland Yee’s comment about AB376 that why not ban the entire shark and not just the fins? I believe they should ban fishing for sharks. The problem was that there are very few restaurants in California that have shark on the menu and very few places that you can even find shark meat for sale. Leland Yee’s camp and @generic_ sited the fallacy that you can buy shark meat at CostCo — You can’t. They haven’t sold it for over 10 years because no one was buying it. A trip to Lucky’s, Andronico’s, Whole foods and Safeway shows that there is no shark available in their fish departments. The people who authored the bill knew that and that is why they focused on the fins. Shark is even noted as a do not buy and unhealthy fish to eat by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch.
My comments have been focused on two things:
1. Shark finning is an outrageous practice that is causing serious damage to the oceans by depleting the top predator.
2. Shark meat in any form isn’t the healthiest meat to eat being high in methyl mercury due to ocean pollution. It is even recommended as a fish that you should not eat by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch.
This has nothing to do with Chinese people except for the fact that they are the only one’s that eat it. Other Asian cultures do don’t consume this dish. I am sorry if those of Chinese decent feel I am a racist for pointing out that the over harvesting of sharks is destroying our oceans as well as pointing out the fact that shark is not a healthy fish to eat.
The only thing good about all this is that @generic_‘s posting stopped at around 9:30pm last night. Most of them where attacks on me and one other attack on my fellow blogger Greg Dewar [also nominated in the same category as me for the SF Weekly web awards], but not once in Saturday’s stupidity did I once use the R word. As they say in poker, keep your cards close, know when to hold them, know when to fold them. Sometimes it’s best to not drop the race card too quickly.
I received an email from Senator Leland Yee yesterday about his outrage of the funding of a $750,000 grant for a Brooklyn artist to create sculptures for Muni who in the 70’s made a film where he made an art film in which he adopted a dog and chained it to a fence and then shot the dog.
I have to admit that I had heard of the film, but never saw it, but not only am I disgusted by the idea of this film, but so was the man who made it. He remarked that what he did was wrong and it was the stupidity of his youth that made him unable to see the bigger picture, yet at the same time, we have a California state Senator who while being disgusted by the shooting of a dog, sees nothing wrong with the dismembering of a shark and throwing its writhing, living body back into the ocean to die as being a Chinese cultural tradition.
To quote Senator Yee from his email:
This week, Ed Lee and the SFMTA approved spending $750,000 of taxpayer money on a central subway contract for Brooklyn artist Tom Otterness, who made a 1977 film in which he chained a dog to a fence and then shot and killed that dog on camera.
Yes, you read that correctly. He chained a dog to a fence and then shot and killed that dog.
This is a completely unacceptable use of taxpayer dollars.
I woke up early this morning to find a youtube video had been sent to me by an old friend of mine, Dave King. This is a video of Chef Gordon Ramsey tasting Shark Fin Soup for the first time to see what all the fuss was about. Not only do you get a chef’s analysis of the soup, but Ramsey also goes out to see how the shark fins are acquired. Warning for those friends of mine who are defenders of animal rights, while sharks aren’t all warm and fuzzy like a dog or a cat [which also happen to be eaten as a part of “traditional Chinese culture” in China that I have written about before] this video does show the finning of sharks, in which case you might want to stop the video after Chef Ramsey leaves the restaurant.
Senator Yee, who is a candidate for mayor of San Francisco [which I might add he filed for just a week after being re-elected as Senator of California] has a problem with animal abuse as long as the animal being abused isn’t a shark. He talks about how shark meat is available everywhere, yet you can’t find it anywhere and the basis if AB 376 is an attack on “Traditional Asian Culture” when Chinese citizens are the only Asians who consume shark fin soup. In reality, this email isn’t an attack on a man who shot a dog, but an attack upon another fellow Chinese citizen of San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee. While as you all know I am not in favor of our interim Mayor running for re-election because it goes against the promise he had made that he would not run for re-election, I also do not like the focus that our Chinese candidates for Mayor are using to focus on getting the Chinatown vote. While Chinese make up 33% of San Francisco’s population, only 18% of them actually vote and the majority of the Chinese population isn’t living in Chinatown, but the majority of non-voting Chinese is.
Supervisor John Avalos and Attorney Dennis Herrera are making huge jumps in polls because of the fact that they are focusing on the population of San Francisco, not a small eight block area of San Francisco. We need a Mayor that will focus on all of the districts to bring about change. From the Sunset to the Bayview, from the Mission to North Beach and yes, also Chinatown, but not appearing to be only in favor of helping Chinatown.
Tuesday my wife and I were out running some errands when we decided to take a trip to the newly reopened Ortega Library. I spent many a day there when I was a student at A.P. Giannini and I have to say it wasn’t a very inviting place back then, but it had books.
Well, libraries today have lots more than books. They’ve got CD’s, DVD’s, Computers and oh right, books.I have to say that the new Ortega library that one resident was trying to keep from being built to preserve an antique [and that’s generous] piece of sh*t building in tact is very nice. Like many of the new libraries there are lots of tables with pop up electrical sockets for your laptops and free WiFi that’s got a pretty decent bandwidth. While being bigger than it’s former self it’s still not that huge, but if you have a computer you can go online and find a book and have it delivered to that library which makes it very convenient to us since it’s closer to our house.
I’m really sorry I didn’t take pictures of the place, but I was busy doing so much else that my time ran out before I had to run off to get to work. On the other hand the playground outside the library I had to say is really spectacular. My wife and I oohed and aahed as we walked across the newly installed spongy anti-faceplant-then-run-to-mommy foam that was down. The play structures are well built, up to date and not the eyesore pile of sand with Russian Industrial Complex™ fixings like there used to be. I really wanted to be a little kid again and when my wife wasn’t looking I actually did begin to play around on the stuff. I figured I shouldn’t work too much since there were three elderly Chinese ladies all sitting on the triple see-saw so I suppose in there eyes I was a kid.
They’ve really done a lot of work around the library and playground to beautify the area, but we’ll all have to wait a year when all the newly planted greenery has had a chance to fit in or die. One downside I did see was that the plants all had thick layers of fine redwood mulch around them which I suspect will be grabbed by the handfuls by pixie stix amped up kids and thrown all over the place very shortly. While it’s a new playground I have to keep in mind that it is a new playground and hasn’t had to take on the wear and tear of a few years and drunken weekend teenagers who have a love for hanging out in playgrounds and acting like 8 year olds while drinking Old English 800 [not that I have any previous experience in that sort of thing of course.]
I seriously hope that the whole area holds up well because we have lots of kids in the Sunset district and the playgrounds are always used by private pre-schools around them as well as the kids, so many of them get crowded. It’s nice when you’ve got a special needs child that you have a place to take them where they can run around and play without feeling like 30 other kids equals 1000 other kids and overwhelms them. We’ll be giving it a shot with our daughter this weekend so I’ll have more to report about a weekend there when there’s more than just the Tai-Chi clan out there doing their morning workout.
Well I have to say it’s been a couple of months since I’ve had to take Muni and now I have something to compare it to and I have to say that I have to side with Greg Dewar of NJudah Chronicles on the sad state of Muni.
I have a job in Mill Valley, California. I have roughly 12 miles to travel to work by car and I can drive from the Sunset District to Mill Valley in about 20 minutes. When I went to the SF Weekly awards last Friday I drove up and parked at West Portal station to get the quick route downtown to Montgomery station. Total travel time…35 minutes, total distance, less than 5 miles.
I don’t understand how a metro service that is located underground and with no traffic interference would take longer than getting in a car to cross the Golden Gate Bridge where there is traffic and narrow lanes and tourists that don’t know the area so they drive at the speed limit or less sometimes. I have previously written about my hatred of crossing bridges in San Francisco because it was easy to get out of the city, but hard to get back. That mostly applies to the Bay Bridge. The Golden Gate is a pleasure to drive in comparison.
To take a cab downtown equals about the same time as it does for me to drive to Marin. It’ll cost you more, but if you’ve got to get somewhere quickly why is it a car does it better than a Mass Transit System? Isn’t the idea behind a Mass Transit System is that it does a better job of moving people from point A to point B more quickly and efficiently than a gas guzzling car?
You also have to remember that we’re talking about a subway system here and not buses. If you had to take a bus from point A to point B it would take you at least an hour.
Muni has been in the papers lately due to the fact that they’re paying their people a lot of money, but not delivering a good on time rate. Then there is the Central Subway debate that is supposed to run from King St. to Chinatown [which to be honest, I used to walk from Market St. when I worked at 500 Washington St in about 15 minutes.] It was originally supposed to run from King St.. to Fisherman’s Wharf and then cut back to North Beach which would make more sense as you would have gotten more tourist dollars into city coffers instead of running from Market St. to a ten square block small area of the city. I honestly can’t be in favor of any expansion of Muni lines at this point in time until they can get it right with what they already have.
Ye Gods! My head is still pounding from Friday night. After working for years right across the street from 111 Minna I finally had an excuse to go in. I definitely would have to recommend the place for people to visit if you want to get the hipster vibe of San Francisco.
There is so much going around in my head that I want to cover I hope I get to all of it. First the hip vibe of the place. Two bars with a wide selection of liver degrading beverages to offer. On this night it was open bar on Blue Moon Beer and fair trade Quinoa produced vodka. I started with samples of the vodka and then their goji berry infused vodka. Pretty good stuff I have to say, but since I hadn’t eaten anything yet I definitely started to feel it quickly. Everyone in the place had a smartphone [usually an iPhone] in their hands the entire time.
I ran into Greg Dewar of the NJudah Chronicles and then the Blue Moon started to flow. Greg made me realize that there is a part of social media that we often leave out, that’s the part where you get away from your computer and go outside your house and actually meet the people you tweet/facebook/foursquare with. Greg knew just about every blogger of influence in San Francisco and he introduced me to them [if they were there and not home writing their blogs].
My first introduction was to the most fabulous [and tall] Beth Spotswood. I frequently read her blog at sfgate.com and I think I’ll focus more on checking it out after I’ve met her. She is bubbly and vivacious and when she walks into the room you know she’s there. You don’t have to look for her. I couldn’t even get a picture of her because she always had a crowd around her.
Then I got to meet Broke Ass Stuart. WOW, what can I say. I had never seen a picture of him but he was exactly what I expected him to look like. Rockin’ a suit and tie I had about 60 seconds before a wave of hotties crashed all over him and he was swept away. I didn’t even have a chance to remind him that I was featured as the broke ass of the week on his blog a few months ago when I was a broke ass, but he was definitely the pimp daddy of the evening. Ah I remember the days when I had that kind of mojo. I need to get out more and meet these people.
There was Tom Prete of Ocean Beach Bulletin and Woody LaBounty of the Western Neighborhoods Project who I’ve know for a while. I was a bit honored when Woody referred to me and the local bloggers of the Sunset as his media reps. These are two blogs that people with an interest in the Sunset District and the Old San Francisco should definitely check out. I was sorry that I didn’t get a chance to meet Breanna Lambert of ScoutMob since we tweet back and forth with each other frequently, but it was probably an in/out for her since ScoutMob had their own party going on in the Haight.
Now let’s talk about the food. Inside there was The Heartbaker offering up some yummy desserts and luckily I got to them when it was early and I was their first customer. I tried one of their carmel brownies with sea salt. Now I’ve seen sea salt as an addition to chocolate, but I haven’t had a chance to try it. I have to say, it’s not weird. It’s great. I started to feel like one of the judges on Chopped while I was talking with them about how you’re first hit with the chocolate then the carmel slides onto your tongue adding sweetness to balance the tart of the dark chocolate followed by a salty burst at the end. Just as a side note, I have to say that seeing a group of pretty girls with lots of tattoos that could cook was a real treat. 15 years ago pretty girls with tattoos that I knew couldn’t make a cup of coffee.
Outside was where the real action was. The Bacon Bacon food truck was working the alley and they were a big attraction. Bacon, Bacon and more Bacon. Once again, they had Bacon dipped in chocolate, dredged in toffee. It was very, very good, but I could barely taste the bacon with all the great chocolate that was on it. Just so you all know Bacon should always be capitalized. That is not poor grammar on my part.
The only downside of the evening was the DJ. Not that the music was bad, but I decided to pull out my decibel meter to check and I can give the rating at Motorhead loud. It was definitely past 120db’s which isn’t very good for your hearing in the long term. Plus you pretty much had to scream to talk with anyone or go outside.
All in all it was a fun evening that warranted not just one photo, but a gallery all to itself. I would have taken more pics, but after I started meeting people I had to stop for a bit.
My friend Tom who runs the Ocean Beach Bulletin and has a pic of the day about things in and around Ocean Beach. Since I cover more things San Francisco and not just the Westside of the city I thought it would be a good idea to add pictures in and around the city. If you’re out and about with your camera and see an interesting place, snap a photo and send it to me with any info you can on the spot and I’ll post it along with your name. If you can add any more info like your camera settings I’ll add that in as well. I used to do this way back in the early days of the blog and I think I’ll start it up again. You can email the photos to me directly by clicking on link there.
