Author: Eric Kauschen

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Learning how to shop again

Well I hate to say it, but my Mom died about 3 months ago. It was kind of weird because she died at home, but in the end it was a good thing because she had been suffering for along time and could barely get around and hadn’t left the house for months. This is all a side story that I can save for another time, but the oddest thing that struck me after this was how we shopped.

Since there were things my Mom would need we’d have to find a way to separate things into 2 carts or in the top and bottom of a cart depending on how much stuff we were buying. My Mom used to invite friends over and of course she’d have to feed them so we always had extras on hand. Now we didn’t have to do that anymore which left us with one less piece of confusion. The other thing we realized is that a dozen eggs will last us a month and there were things that were low on our list to eat that we didn’t need anymore.

One of the biggest things we noticed is that we don’t need an 18 cubic foot standalone freezer in the garage anymore. We don’t need to buy 10 lbs of ground meat at Costco because that would last us 6 months (but we still like Costco incase I get the go ahead for that new HD flatscreen in 3D. We also don’t make 10 gallons of minestrone soup or beans and hamhocks anymore so we don’t need a place to store 1/2 gallon empty milk containers  that have been refilled with that kind of stuff. We might get a 7 cubic foot freezer for downstairs just because a pizza won’t fit in our side by side fridge/freezer upstairs and it’s nice to have a few things on hand so we don’t have to shop all the time.

We still find ourselves reaching for the jumbo pack of something and then realize that it’s only going to go bad before we’ve finished it. We have a new learning curve to go through now because before it was just the two of us, then the three of us, then the four of us when our daughter was born. Now it’s just back to the two of us plus our daughter and we don’t have another mouth to feed that was the equivalent of an 800 pound gorilla.

I’m not going to miss the mini tacos or taquitos as they were pretty horrible anyway. I’m not going to miss having 50 rolls of paper towels in the garage which led me to impose an embargo. I’m not going to miss the 100+ jars of spices that I couldn’t remember what they were used for let alone the 30 year old jar of coconut on rack in the sun (no we didn’t bother to open that.) I am trying to find a way to deep fry the lumpia so that my wife doesn’t gag at the smell of the fryer afterwards (suggestions willingly accepted), but I think I will miss the scallops that I learned to like in the last few months.

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The California Burrito is not a California Burrito

As I woke up this morning bleary eyed and slightly incoherent I noticed an article on our local sfgate.com about the “California Burrito.” WTF?!?! I guess I’m getting old, but when the burrito came north from Mexico it was  beans and rice with a little mystery meat and maybe a little cheese. Californians and Californian-Mexicans wanted a little more since our state has an abundance of produce so they took beans, rice, cheese, guacamole, salsa, sour cream plus the meat of your choice and sometimes a few more veggies [El Toro Taqueria adds peas and carrots to their burrito which is just wrong to me, but I don’t want to get off track]. This became known as the California Burrito.

Now some foodie terrorists in San Diego have infiltrated San Francisco and introduced what they call the “California Burrito.” It got carne asada [steak for you gringos], guacamole, sour cream and FRENCH FRIES! French fries in a burrito?! I’m sorry, that’s just wrong. It’s like a Mexican version of Primante’s in Philadelphia that puts fries on their sandwiches for the truck drivers to eat on the go. In San Francisco, the burrito is like ambrosia any taqueria you go into sells more burritos than tacos first off and the clientele covers just about every race we have in the city. We know burritos. San Diego which probably has a larger hispanic population than SF apparently does not. What’s next? Hot dog burritos? The culprit here is a place called Taqueria Los Coyotes. I suspect it will start showing up in more places just like the baja fish taco did. Fish tacos I don’t have a problem with since they started in Baja and moved here pretty much unchanged. But fries in a burrito I’m not so sure about.

Now I’ll have to eat my words and try one before I condemn it fully. I still have to say though that the best burrito is found outside the Mission District. [Ducks and runs for cover]

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Big-NO Tires

While this is a nation-wide company, this post is about my experience with the local franchise on Geary street of the national corp. I used to like Big-O Tires when I went there on a whim many years ago. The tires were cheap and lasted a long time and the service was pretty quick. I’d drop my car off and by the time I’d get home they’d be calling me to come back and pick up my car. What I didn’t realize is that they had been taken over by a large corporation hell bent on scamming people out of money.

And this is where my story begins…I had a tire with a slow leak. My friend Eugene at Gene’s auto service who I’ve trusted for years fixed the tire, but also told me that the nail was at the edge and the fix might not work. Total cost…$10. In the few weeks after I noticed that the slow leak came back only it was becoming a faster and faster leak, so I figure I need a new tire. I bring the car in to Big-O and tell them the problem and they look over the tires and tell me that the wear on the sides of the tires tells them that I need all four tires replaced. Now I could see a bit of cracking on the side walls of the tires, but I had only put 15k of miles on the tires I had bought from Big-O four years earlier. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me, but Johnny the rep put some pressure on me and did a good job so I agreed to have all the tires replaced because, of course, they didn’t carry the tires they replaced any more even though they were guaranteed for 78k miles and didn’t look worn on the treads. I put my faith in Johnny and Big-O.

BIG MISTAKE.

I noticed that they also do oil changes and figured it had been awhile since I had an oil change so I asked them to change the oil as well. I like synthetic oil since I had a bad experience with a Dodge Intrepid engine that when regular oil was used it tended to blow the engine. So I went for the full package. It would take a couple of hours to swap the tires and do the oil change so I hopped on the bus to my friend Pete’s house down by the beach. Two hours later I call them and Johnny tells me that they’re under staffed that day and it’ll take another hour. Mind you I dropped the car off at 10 am and now it’s about 12:30 so I figure I’ll give them a little more time. I call back at 2 pm and Johnny tells me that my battery has problems and needs to be replaced. I did notice some build up on the terminals so I figured that made sense and told him to go ahead and replace the battery and while he’s at it since they do replace cabin air filters to replace the cabin and engine air filters.

Tick tock tick. 4 pm. I call Johnny back, note all of the calls begin with I. Johnny mentions that with the air filters and oil change that it’s all combined in package to replace all fluids in the car for just a couple bucks extra. Well gee, thanks Johnny for a couple of bucks over the $50 to change the oil and filters sure go ahead (note to self a couple of bucks extra doesn’t add up to $450).

Tick tock tick. 5:30 pm. I’m hungry and call Johnny back. “Sure come on by it’ll be ready when you get here.” So my friend Pete gives me a ride and when we get there Johnny tells me that they’re just finishing up and it’ll be about an hour. Where does it’ll be ready when you get here equal it’ll be ready in an hour? So we cross the street to the Pig and Whistle for a round of fish and chips and a Boddington’s (note: best part of the day). I go back and wait and extra 30 minutes to get my car with the final bill of $1500+!!!!!!

WTF Mate!

I went in originally to have a tire changed figuring it might run me $100-$200 at the most and discovered they had bent me over and took me for a mint. I being a nice stupid kind of guy paid them and left with a car that I figured they had done all the work on.

Wrong!

My wife notices that the car sounds funny after words and I noticed that the heating and air conditioning stopped working. I was busy so I didn’t address the problem until about a month later. I decided that some was wrong and called my Nissan rep to tell them that my 2005 Altima had problems with the HVAC. Not something I expected from a Nissan. The tech head part of me suggested that I surf the web for an answer and found, “Check your coolant levels.”

I pop the hood and find there is nothing in the coolant refill and when I pop the cover of the radiator I find I can’t see any coolant. I call Big-o and tell them that I think they didn’t fill up all the fluids that they said because they were understaffed the day I dropped my car off (and didn’t get it back until 8 hours later) and they tell me to bring it in and they’ll refill and check my connections. Beware of check my connections.

Johnny comes back after 30 minutes and tells me that I’ve got a leak in my upper radiator hose AND in my radiator and that they need to be replaced. WTF?!?! a 2005 car with a 7 year extended warranty has the radiator blow? I’ve never had a car that I needed to replace anything other than the oil. He shows me the edge of the the radiator which looks fine and he reinforces it with, “see the moisture”. My bullshit detectors pops into effect when the tech is whispering into his ear and figure you dip your finger in the coolant and rub it around the edge and say there’s a radiator leak. They reinforce that with a “pressure check” where the whispering tech holds his hand over the gauge and pumps up the pressure until coolant starts spurting out of the hose.

I tell Johnny that I have an extended warranty and that I’ll deal with Nissan on that. Oddly enough Johnny makes the mistake of saying that the warranty will cover the hoses as well. Loss for Big-O. They could have scored on a hose change, but Johnny tells me he recommends that I not drive the car if I won’t let them do the work and have it towed home. Mind you they hadn’t put coolant in the car and let me drive it home and are now telling me I have a busted radiator which for some reason never left any residue in my driveway until after I denied them so I blew him off.

At the end of all this, I’m going to my trusted friend Eugene and have him check the radiator to make sure it’s not leaking as I think the only thing Big-O did was loosen the clamp on the hose which has now caused a small amount of leakage visible on my driveway that wasn’t before.

So in the end to sum up my story, I’ve done a search on Big-O Tires on the great Satan of the internet Google and found that the words spouted off to me such as, “if you don’t want us to do it your car is undriveable and must be towed” crop up quite a bit. I remember a friend back in the 80’s who used to work at a auto chain store telling me that they were encouraged to keep razor blades in their pockets to slice lines so that they could add charges on. I should have thought of him when I first entered the shop.

So now I know. Trust in those who know you like Gene’s Auto Service, not scam artists who want to rip you off.

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SF Public Library: It’s more than just a website!

I did something today I normally don’t do. I got talked into visiting my public library by my wife. This is the main branch that’s downtown. I’ve never been much for public libraries after I graduated from college. They always seemed to be like they were dank and archaic and the “new books” area always had books from 10 years ago.

OK, I got a big surprise, shock is more like it. This place is huge. Six stories with a lower level that has a cafe. Everywhere you look there are tables with power outlets and ethernet cables so you can hook up to their internet. They even have computers there if you don’t have one that not only give you web access, but some of them have Microsoft Office on them as well and there are printers that they actually let you print out to for free! Let’s also not forget all the meeting rooms you can reserve for free!

I’ve always been an online type of guy. Life with google makes it easy to find information, but today I realized that you can get more information from a book than a google search. I know what most of you are think, yeah, ok, DUH. It just hit home with me today after of course noticing that the librarians now aren’t the old grandmotherly type women with scours on their face and those glasses with the little chains on them going around their neck. The librarians are hip now!

The architecture of the building is incredible and you can get off at Civic Center BART/Muni station and all you have to do is cross the street to get in. They also have many rooms with displays and exhibits making it a sort of free museum as well. The Main library also has the largest collection of historical records for San Francisco. I was able to find all the specifics of my home and information on the builder and saw all the permits. I have to say I was pretty impressed by it all and it’s more than just books. They have a large audio visual collection and the machines for you to watch DVD’s, VHS or listen to CD’s. If you haven’t been, you definitely have to check it out since it has more than you local branches have to offer, plus when you get your free library card you can also access their online collection of eBooks and podcasts as well. If you’re not a resident you can get a visitor’s temporary card from them as well.

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Aquaponics: The new gardening

I just read an article on sfgate.com about aquaponics that I thought was intriging. There is a company in Oakland called Kijiji Grows that has created a system that is a combination of hydroponics and aquaculture. Basically, you have a fish tank and the water from the fish tank is pumped up to trays filled with pebbles that have plants that feed off the fish waste and the water drips back down into the fish tank. These systems aren’t cheap, but are elegant in design. If you have $1500 for one they’ll even come out and install it for you.

What amazed me about this was that this sort of thing has been going on in the aquarium industry for years. Large coral reef aquariums needed to be specially filtered because coral is very sensitive. So they started pumping the water up to troughs with macro algae (think of it as a type of seaweed). The macroalgae would absorb the nutrients from the tanks waste and pump it back down to the fish tank. The problem with this is that you needed 1000 watt halogen lights above the algae to help it grow. Now here is a company doing it with sunlight. These are kind of expensive systems, but you could probably do one yourself with a little labor and some handiwork.

Get a fish tank and powerhead to pump the water up to a rubber container that you place plastic planter boxes filled with cheap aquarium gravel and holes poked into the bottom. Route a hole in the bottom of the rubber container and place it over the fish tank so that the water flows back. What you get out of this is clean water for your fish tank that is well aerated and you can grow your own food on top. You don’t need to space your plants out as much because the roots tend to grow downward rather than sideways. You also don’t need any soil which means no soil borne pathogens. I had a koi pond I built many years ago out of a half a plywood barrel. I painted the inside with marine epoxy paint to water seal it and then found out after a couple of days that it needed to be covered with chicken wire so the raccoons wouldn’t be eating the fish. I could see using this as a way to feed water up to the plants and then have edge of the rubber cut to create a waterfall back to the koi pond. By my estimation, I could do this for under $100 and you wouldn’t have to keep replacing the soil like you would in a normal garden. The set up picture to the right is from home depot and costs about $249, which while not bad if you’re lazy and have the cash you could do better and much cheaper. All you have to do is feed the fish. There have even been suggestions of raising food fish as well so you get a two fold return. This is making me think more about that Tilapia farm I was considering building.

What these systems are best for is places like Africa that don’t have good soil, but lots of light. They can raise fish for food and root vegetables as side dishes. This could eliminate famine in impoverished countries and you can run the pumps from small solar panels.

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California Academy of Sciences: Praise and Rants

I’ve been going to the California Academy of Sciences since I was a little kid. I’m talking before I could walk and I loved the old place. There was tons of things to do and see and oh how I remember the awful cheeseburgers and fries served in the downstairs cafeteria by a company called Duchess.

For a kid like me who was into science this was an awesome space because there was everything you could learn about, the Hall of Birds, the Hall of Minerals, Wild California, The Hall of Man, The fish roundabout, Life through Time, The Farside Gallery, the Elkus Gallery and of course the Planetarium and Aquarium. They also had a little know “Junior Academy” downstairs that offered Saturday courses to kids in the sciences from 5-18. The little kid classes didn’t work out so well, but that lead to the adding of the Discovery Center upstairs.

They also had regularly rotating exhibits that were usually pretty big. They had one on Shakespeare, Earthquakes, geez I a can’t remember them all. Then because of the 1989 earthquake there were a few problems and they just decided to rebuild the whole thing again and make it all snazzy and eco-friendly. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that they decided to twist a few heads with the bio roof and solar panels, but it’s not the same anymore. It’s all about the Aquarium.

When you walk in you get to see the Piazza which one of the places to purchase an overpriced, but healthy organic snack. You head through there and can see the tops of a Philipine coral reef on one side and the Northern California coast on the other. The old grungy hall of reptiles has gone, but they saved the swamp area at least with a couple of gators and snapping turtles. Walk down a few stairs and you get the sparse swamp area. You can look into gator tank from below and there’s a few snakes and a lizard or two there. Of course they have to have a swamp/aquarium shop there as well. Then travel down a few more stairs and the Aquarium hits you. Big huge tanks with lots of fish. Not the 10’x10′ tanks you used to see in the old aquarium. Of course to balance this they have many more 10 gallon tanks in the walls, but over all you’re going to see a lot of stuff you’ve never seen before. My daughter loves the aquarium and even though she’s only three she has her favorite tanks she likes to hang out at and stare down the fish, That’s a whole ‘nother story I’ll get into later. So pretty much, the aquarium is very, very cool. So what else is there?

Well they’ve added something new and that’s the rainforest exhibit. To balance out the global shape of the planetarium the rainforest is a globe of glass that you have to enter through special doors so none of the stuff that’s inside gets out. Inside they have birds flying around, yet while I hear them I have yet to see them other than a macaw that tethered at the bottom of ramp just before you start traveling through the jungles. Each level has a different theme to it and  in the small flattened areas to stop at they have…more fish tanks! plus some reptiles as well and it fits in nicely, but still, it’s all about the fish. When you get to the top which is the warmest place you’ll find lots of butterflies swarming around. They’re all pretty small so nothing freaky there. Now you can go back down and out so you go down an elevator after you’ve gone through a check to make sure there are no butterflies on you and that takes you all the way down to the aquarium. If you decide to go I suggest you start with the rainforest and head down to the aquarium because there are some things you’ll miss in the aquarium that aren’t too obvious when you first enter into it.

OK, what’s left? Well there’s the planetarium which I’d love to tell you about because I worked at the old one for four years, but I haven’t had the time to see it yet as I’m always there with my daughter and I’m not sure she’s ready to sit still for 45 minutes to an hour in the dark. I’ve seen videos of it and it’s real state of the art, so I’m looking forward to going once my daughter starts pre-school. They did manage to keep South African Hall, but made a few changes. Nothing too major, except for the addition of a tank of cichlids from lake Malawi and Tanganika in Eastern Africa that was originally the Charles Bange Memorial tank that was put in place by donations by the San Francisco Aquarium Society [note I was the president of the SFAS for 4 years and on the board of directors for 10 years]. Now it has someone else’s name on it so apparently the Academy has forgotten that many years ago the aquarium was kept afloat by donations from the SFAS and now the SFAS isn’t allowed to meet at the Academy anymore. The Herbst auditorium has been replaced with the Herbst Forum on the second floor and there’s also the Naturalist Center which is sort of a small library with displays of dead things or parts of dead things from the mammalogy and ornithology departments, but that’s it for the 2nd floor.

Other than that there’s a few small exhibits that don’t make up for what they didn’t keep in there. I noticed something when I was there today though. While they made it a little bit wider which is really mostly with outdoor garden areas, it’s much thinner. The swamp is at the back of the academy and that’s it. The aquarium used to run around it with other exhibits behind that. They gave up a lot that people can learn from. I’m not sure where the scientists do there work as in the old place there used to be two levels up with offices and labs and all the ichthyology and aquarium labs were down in the basement where the aquarium is now.

Now here is where the rants will begin. The real rants. When my wife and I got married in 1996 we got a family membership to the academy. It cost us…$25. With it we each got a card that would allow us to bring in a guest as well as 10 guest passes we could give out to our friends. It cost $7 to get in back then. We also got invited to a members only night where we could walk around the academy and get behind the scenes tours and feed for free.

Now, that same membership will cost you…$500! You can get the Family Plus membership, but you’ll have to pay $75 each for the behind the scenes tour. Ticket prices to get in are now $24.99 for adults, $19.99 for 12-17 and $14.99 for 4-11.

If you have kids, get a family membership. It’s $159 and you’ll get that back 10 fold in a short period of time. There is one thing to remember though, if you’re going to go you should take advantage of the members only hours of 8:30-9:30 on Tuesdays or 10-11 on Sundays. Especially if you have small kids. We went there about 12:30pm today and the place was packed. We couldn’t even let our daughter out of the stroller because we’d have lost her in seconds.

If you want to go on the cheap the last Thursday of the month is Nightlife where it will only cost you $12 to get in, but you have to be 21+ because they have bars set up all over the place. I haven’t been to one of these, but being a member I would still have to pay $10 in addition to the drinks.

I have to admit that I like the cafe that they have as they serve a wide variety of all organic meats and veggies with enough variety to suit everyone, but that all comes at a price. We tried it once and we got a breakfast quiche, muffin, coffee and an izzy’s soda for just under $15. The quiche was small, the muffin wasn’t very large, but the coffee and soda were good. Today, I noticed as we walked through the piazza that while there were people in line to buy food, most of the people there [some of which had to sit on the floor as there were no more tables] had brought their own food. The line to purchase tickets was at least 4 deep and 100 ft long. So I imagine that the wait would be close to an hour.

If you’re a member you get to put on your best smug face and walk through the members entrance where they not only ask for your card, but you ID as well to verify you aren’t loaning your card to friends. You also get a lot of other little discounts and benefits that you can find here. The funniest thing is that maybe we should have gotten an individual membership for $99 because it says you can bring a guest in with your card. It doesn’t say that with a family membership. So if you’re a couple and don’t expect to take any out of town relatives there that’s the best way to go about it. Overall, I’d have to say that the California Academy of Sciences has changed from a museum of science to a political show off piece. Gavin Newsom is even quoted as saying it’s his favorite place in San Francisco. You don’t get to talk to the scientists who are doing the work behind the scenes, but you can watch them through glass sometimes in the lab that’s open to the public for viewing, but no entrance.

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Linden Labs: It’s just like flushing money down the toilet

So why you ask am I writing about a video game company when this is a blog about San Francisco? Well, Linden Labs who puts out the game Second Life is based in San Francisco. Phillip Rosedale [aka Phillip Linden] started the company in 1999 as a 3D way to interact with people online. You could play for free or get a premium membership for $9.95 a month. Not too bad by most MMORP games, but this isn’t really one of them. There’s nothing to do in Second Life except, well lead a second life. You can go to clubs click on a ball that makes your character dance. You can shop for clothes [which my “Armani Suit” I’m wearing in the picture cost me $1200L which is equal to about $4.61 by today’s exchange rates] or buy naughty bits and have sex with other characters.

Other than that, there isn’t much else to do. I’ve made many friends in the game in the 5 plus years I’ve played it on and off and many of them have tried to get something other than the dance, shop, sex going but haven’t been successful. This is probably because the game drains you of your finances.

To really get somewhere you have to buy land. Here’s where the tricky part comes in. To purchase an entire sim it’ll cost you $1200. Real dollars, not “lindens” as the currency is known in the game then you also have to pay an additional $295/month tier rate. Now call me a cynic, but through my sponsor you can get 480Gb’s of server space for a flat $119.99 [even less if you use my special code of LGN09]. Asking that much money for a chunk of a server that doesn’t come anywhere near the 480GB’s I’m talking about is ridiculous. Most of my friends who have bought sims have ended up selling them off. I only know one guy who has managed to keep his sim through renting out space to friends to cut his price down. Now that you have land, you’ve got a blank slate and you have to put stuff on on the land like, oh a house? That’s cost you anywhere between$5000L-$20000L. Then of course you have a house, but there’s nothing in it so you’ll have to buy furnishings. Figure on spending another $10000L to furnish the place or you can add another $3000L for a SexGen bed so you can have animated sex while you play, but to be realistic you’ll have to visit Xcite! to purchase the $1200L starter pack of naughty bits for your character.

Now renting is an interesting idea as well. That used to be easy. You wanted 2048m [that’s square meters] you’d pay between $500L-$1000L/week and you’d be done with it. Now it seems that the renters make you pay a fee like you’re purchasing the land then add on a weekly fee. Why does this matter? Well, owning land gives you lots of things like owning land in real life does. It lets you keep people out of your home like in real life, lets you set protective devices, etc. If you don’t own land then you could be walking around and someone pulls out and gun and shoots you. This isn’t so bad in Second Life as you only get sent to your home location, but say you’re working on building something and you get shot. Then you have to teleport back and start back up again only to get shot again. This is called griefing in the game and they do little to prevent it.

I’m not totally against the game altogether. There are some places like San Jose State University that conduct classes online and Nissan that will give you a free Nissan Altima you can drive around, but you have to remember that what you see there isn’t what you get. Nobody is ugly and when people start trading real life pics of themselves you might start to notice that it’s the year 2010, why are they wearing legwarmers and have overly permed hair? I’ve only met one character in Second Life who was ugly and he did that on purpose because he thought it was funny. Everyone in Second Life is sexy. Look at that pic there. That’s one of my characters we’ll call “Eddy” because most people can pronounce his real name correctly. Eddy is a chick magnet and looks nothing like me. I’m not saying I’m ugly, but when I walk into a club in Second Life people notice me. Girls flirt and the guys start to get jealous, not always, but most of the time. This is an aspect of the game that people in SL refer to as “drama”. There are petty fights all the time between couple. I even had one girl asking to have cybersex with me right after she got married in Second Life. Yes, there are marriages in Second Life. While there are a few people doing good stuff, most of the people don’t know what they’re doing and just end up creating “drama”.

When I first started I thought it was a cool idea and if there were people who were old and unable to get around as easily it would be good therapy for them. That’s not really what I’m seeing today. What I see is a lot of people acting like someone they aren’t and not doing a very good job of it. Now I think I’ll run off and check out Mouse World again, someone crazy people actually have rebuilt Disneyland in Second Life complete with the rides. I want to see if they’ve finished the Haunted Mansion. At least that is a lot cheaper than a real trip to Disneyland.

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Make Me A F*cking Supervisor!

D*ck of the month club

Supervisor Chris Daly has made a new year’s resolution to include the word f*ck in every meeting of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Such a noble venture for the most hated of all the Supervisors. He is antinomian to core. His job is just to anger people in this city by saying no to everything we say yes to and say yes to everything we say no to.

Chris serves the government less and himself more. Therefore it is at this time that announce, nay, I proclaim that I should replace Chris Daly as Supervisor of District 6! I have lived my life in San Francisco. In the Sunset District, The Mission District and Midtown Terrace. Chris Daly lives, just like Ed Jew, outside of San Francisco. He is the governing Supervisor over the Tenderloin and Treasure Island. My college thesis was on the construction of Treasure Island and I have visited it many times, probably more times than Chris f*cking Daly.

Being one of the few who was born and raised in San Francisco, I know San Francisco and you Chris Daly, are not San Francisco. I will serve this city as Supervisor as a true citizen of San Francisco, by helping to clean up the Tenderloin and create a new green community on Treasure Island by implementing the best plans that have been suggested as well as building concrete walls around the perimeter to keep the rising water from flooding our Treasured Island build in 1939 for the epic San Francisco world’s fair celebrating our city and the construction of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge.

I call upon our esteemed Mayor Newsom to hear my call and replace Chris f*cking Daly for a dereliction of duties as a Supervisor of San Francisco and for his misrepresenting our fine city to the world. He has no right to besmirch our image as the great city that we are with his foul mouthed antics and disregard for performing his job as a supervisor of this great city. I shall offer to meet Chris f*cking Daly in public debate and will offer my services to the community he presides over as well as offering to replace him for under 6 figures a year since no one in the district he presides over makes that much a year. I will also attend every Board of Supervisors meeting unlike most of the board and I will walk the streets of my district proudly meeting with those who live there other than during re-election time.

If this does not happen I will do as Emperor Norton once did and proclaim myself the royal sovereign of the Tenderloin and Treasure Island and make myself the Commander-in-Chief of the area to protect it from the pompous ways of its public enemy #1 Chris f*cking Daly!

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The Ady Gil does down

This isn’t a story about San Francisco per se, but it is about a friend of mine who lives in San Francisco. I won’t share his name to protect his anonymity, but he’s  flown off to join the crew of the Sea Shephed Conservation Society to serve a noble cause–the end of whaling. When was the last time you woke up and thought, hmmmm I want some whale today? Probably never. Part of that fact is that there has been a moratorium in place on commercial whaling for many years. The Japanese have made an end run though and saying their doing it for scientific research. What exactly is so scientific about killing and cutting up whales then putting them in cold storage?

My friend on board is an average guy yet remarkable. He is risking his life as well as his career and the possibility of facing jail time for what he believes in. Yes, you could say he’s a “Berkeley hippie type”, but he’s not. He’s the type of guy who’s trying to protect our environment and the animals that live in it. He was on a boat in the Antarctic Ocean watching as a Japanese whaling boat turned and rammed  a much smaller trimaran boat injuring several of the people on board who had to dive into arctic waters to save themselves. By international maritime law, this falls under piracy, by the laws of Australia and New Zealand it is considered an act of war. The Japanese on this ship aren’t just researchers as why would researchers need Swat armor and flash bang grenades or LRAD systems that our soldiers use? If you visit Animal Planet’s website you’ll see this for yourself.

Australia and New Zealand have condemmed the actions of the Japanese, but are also afraid of the possible loss of $52 Billion Australian dollars they get from the Japanese. From my understanding of this, while the Aussie might loose a bit of money, it will be for a short period of time. The coal and beef going the Japanese will not stop once they start getting cold and hungry.

I’ll be the first to admit, I like my meat, but I have to send out a word of thanks to a friend of mine who’s doing a good job in a place where it’s way to cold for me to go under conditions I don’t think I could tolerate. This is what San Francisco is all about, not smug yuppies that came from somewhere else who sit around drinking latte’s and swearing during our Board of Supervisor’s meetings, oh wait, that’s our local government.

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Where have all the sea lions gone?

People are talking about the loss of a big tourist attraction from San Francisco, the Pier 39 sea lions which called Pier 39 home since 1989. Everyone is writing stories about why they left, but they don’t know why. Allow me to edify you as to why the sea lions left Pier 39. They used to live on the obviously named at the time, “Seal Rock” out by the old Sutro Baths ruins. Then because they ate up most of the herring out there they left to find more and find a nice feeding ground with lovely places to rest at Pier 39.

This year, there was a large influx of sea lions in the late fall which caused the amount of plentiful herring found near Pier 39 to disappear. When the food goes, so go the sea lions. They basically ate the place dry and needed to move on to find more food. Find the herring and you’ll find the sea lions.

It’s a bit sad that they’re gone from Pier 39, but there’s lots of other stuff there to attract people. Maybe they’ll move back to Seal Rock so that people will have another place to visit in the city, and while you’re out there You should visit the Seal Rock Inn for breakfast or lunch. Great food at great prices and their Greek food is to die for, not to mention their rooms if you’re looking for a place to stay are awesome. There I got a foodie reference in.