Category: Life in San Francisco

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My Day In Court

So I had to go to traffic court today for a rather odd ticket I received several months ago. First the cop told me that I was going 32mph in a 25mph zone. Driving downhill on Taraval that’s pretty easy to do, but then every Muni driver would have a ticket for that. He sited me for not coming to a full stop at two stop signs which I know the first one he wasn’t behind to witness and the police station is at 24th where he sited me for the second non full stop. I know well enough to know that running a stop sign next to a police station is a stupid idea so I doubt I did that one either, but everyone has their own interpretation of things.

I thought I knew how to work the system, but apparently the system has changed in San Francisco. You used to wait and see if you name was called. If it was you were handed a written statement by the police officer who ticketed you that you could either fight in court or take traffic school. If your name wasn’t called, your ticket was dismissed. Well apparently things have changed and they don’t have to write up a report anymore so your only option is take traffic school, fight it or pay the fine. It turns out people used to opt for the fight when had done traffic school in the last 18 months because the officers usually didn’t show and it would be dismissed. Now they charge the police officer $250 if he/she doesn’t show. That option is now off the table.

So my final charges for having to go to traffic school are the reduced rate of $114 for the ticket plus $55 for traffic school. At least now you can do your traffic school online in San Francisco, but I’m still a bit irked by the douchebag cop who gave me the ticket signing his name with a line and called me a drunk or hungover because I happen to have a slight problem of tremors CAUSED BY A STROKE I HAD 13 YEARS AGO! If he thought I was drunk why didn’t he test me? I don’t mind being read the riot act when I really did something stupid. I was pulled over about 20 years ago for doing close to 60mph down Mission Street at 4am. THAT would have deserved a ticket, but I just had to sit there and be yelled at for 15 minutes by an Irish cop [accent at no extra charge] who let me go because I was only a couple of blocks from the house I was living in at the time.

I have friends who are cops and they are nothing like this douchebag. Most of the time when I’ve been pulled over the few times I have the officers have been rather cordial about it. Usually I just get a warning or a stern talking too and they let me go. Just beware if you’re driving around the Sunset of an overweight cop driving an off-road police motorcycle. They’re kind of hard to spot because they’re new, but this guy will get you. I won’t mention anything else about him so more of you will drive safer.

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SF Surfriders’s Earth Day Party

Yes, I know I haven’t posted anything in a week, but I needed a little vacation. Sunday of last week [not yesterday] I dropped in at the SF Surfrider’s Earth Day celebration out at Ocean Beach at the foot of Taraval. I actually did it twice because like always I don’t tend to make a fashionably late entrance. While there weren’t too many people there in the beginning, when I went back i really got to learn a lot about the group and what they were doing.

Now I’ll admit that at first I thought the SF Surfrider’s hit me kind of like the SF Bike Coalition, but since most people don’t drive on the waves the whole hooligan attitude is missing from them. The whole Earth Day part started at 10am at Ocean Beach with a bunch of people from the group and supporters gathering to clean up the beach. This is always a good thing as there are lots of nasty bits you can find on the beach. I actually saw a picture this morning of someone’s dog who had manage to find a rather large, umm, well, sexual device let’s just say and was bringing it back to his owner like he had a bone in his mouth. While that was one of the rather least offensive things found the beach there have been syringes that people dump into drains or flush down their toilets that don’t properly get processed or someone digs a hole and toss some briquets in to have a beach barbecue and then some one like a cousin of mine sits on the beach and ends up with 3rd degree burns on her feet because old hot coals look like sand.

I have to applaud them for this because they love to surf and why would anyone want to surf in a garbage dump? They are also concerned with the erosion that’s occurring on the south end  of Ocean Beach and I have to say that my wife and i used to like to run out on the weekend and get coffee and danish and then drive out the parking lot by the zoo to have our breakfast. There’s not too much left out there now and the SF Surfrider’s are trying to find a way to fix the problem.

I got to talk to a couple of people from the group and told them that I’d be mentioning them and I really have to say that the party they organized [after I went back for the second run] was a lot of fun. SF Surfrider’s is a very eco-friendly group and they were even using blocks of eco-friendly surfboard wax to hold down their materials and giving out roll up eco-friendly grocery bags made from recycled water bottles. They also were having a raffle for a surfboard, but I decided that I’m a bit out of shape to start up my old surfing days again. Give me a few years and maybe I’ll get back in shape for it though.

While they were the focal point there were also a couple of food trucks, Seoul on Wheels and Cheese Gone Wild as well as well as a beer garden that got bigger as the day went on sponsored by Trumer Pils. I did happen to notice for the celebrity gossip column angle that the ever sexy Nikki Blakk of 107.7 The Bone was there early on, but I couldn’t find her on my second trip down there. She might have been in the RipTide that was packed to the gills while having the Mermen entertain everyone. I was a bit bummed because I was hoping to slide a copy of my CD into Nikki’s hand so that, you know, I might get a mention or something like that on her show. Oh well, things don’t always go my way, but the party at the beach was pretty fun and I salute the SF Surfrider’s for give us a chance to see what they’re all about.

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Surfrider Foundation Celebrates Earth Day!

I’m about to head down to the foot of Taraval street to attend the Surfrider Party sponsored by the RipTide. It sounds like a good time to be had and I’m glad my friends over at Ocean Beach Bulletin for letting me know about it. I’ll be taking lots of pictures and will have a story up about what was going on tomorrow. The Taraval party is from noon – 6pm. The block party will have food trucks Cheese Gone Wild, Seoul on Wheels and Doughnut Dolly, beer from Trumer Pils, and children’s activities, with music by local legends The Mermen. A raffle will offer a surfboard, a bicycle and other prizes. Proceeds will benefit the Surfrider Foundation.

If you go look for me. I’ll have my Baghdad by the Bay ID prominently in place and will be handing out cards and talking to people and being a general nuisance.

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The Metro Tunnel Needs Wi-Fi And More

I had to take a trip downtown the other day and started thinking about some of the jobs I used to have down in the financial district before I had my iPhone. Mobile devices don’t work in the tunnel once the train starts in past West Portal station. They barely even work inside the open air station for some reason, but more importantly it can take you 20-30 minutes to get from West Portal to the Embarcadero and you don’t have access to the outside world from the inside.

You can’t make phone calls which some people appreciate because of the thick concrete and you can barely get 3G/4G service at a couple of stations and that’s only for about a minute. I think it’s time that SFMTA installed Wi-FI or at least allow 3G/4G access while in the tunnel. There are a couple of reasons for this idea that I like.

First, it eliminates the need for big bulky newspapers. I always hated people sitting next to me stretching out their hands reading the morning paper on a crowded streetcar or the occasional elbow as a person flips a page of a book they’re reading. With a mobile device you have a much better confined  reading space that fits with a crowded streetcar better than paper.

The second is that some people like to use social media apps or read their email or stay connected to their place of work in case something comes up on the way in. It’s really sad to me that I am more connected hopping a 48 Quintara to the Mission than I am on a streetcar going to the financial district.

There’s lots of things you can do to occupy yourself with a mobile device to kill the time, especially when the driver tells you there’s a delay and you’ll have to wait. Most of the apps though require a hook up to the internet to get you the information you was to use. Happy passengers aren’t grumpy and crazy. If I’m stuck by a delay and find out that after 45 minutes on the train that my wife was in a car accident or something happened to my daughter that would be bad, very bad.

BART understands this and I wrote about this previously. I hoped BART one day at Embarcadero and happened to notice as I hit the tunnel under the bay, that I could hook up for free to BART’s wi-fi service. The trip was almost an hour and the entire way I was surfing the web, sending emails, made a couple of calls just fine. I even had a cell phone signal under the bay. This leads to more productivity for some people or just happier riders for the less productive who just want to hop on in their trip from one part of town to another and watch a TV show on Hulu or Netflix. It would give them a chance to tune out the crazies or people who talk too loud to the person sitting next to them. Now we just have to figure out who’s job we would have to cut to make that happen. Maybe a marketing director or two since you wouldn’t need them if they made the trip more pleasant.

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Ditch The 66

This one has been on my mind for some time and after checking the route of the 66 Quintara bus. I think it’s time to put it out of commission. It is the shortest bus route beating the old winner the 37 Corbett and runs from 30th and Vicente to 9th and Judah now. If you need to get anywhere along that route there are other buses that can serve the need in a better way.

There was talk some time ago of making the 48 Quintara run all day and not just during rush hours which I have been in favor of since I first heard it. I have to note that I do live on a street where the 48 Quintara stops at my corner, but the 66 Quintara is only a couple of blocks away and I have had a reason to ride it in over 30 years. When I do see the 66 there’s hardly anyone on it in either direction so it’s not filling a need for riders. It used to have a longer run and my Grandmother who used to work as the secretary to the Dean of Medicine at UCSF used to take it to get to work every day. When I was a kid I used to take it with her to go to the swimming and trampoline lessons I was taking at UCSF, but it doesn’t go that far anymore. I believe it used to run down Parnassus and then somehow mysteriously continued to downtown, but it’s been so long I can’t remember anymore.

I’ve ridden the 48 to get the West Portal and have even had to ride it down to the Mission a few times. It’s interesting how it will be packed until West Portal and then it empties out [except for the few kids staying on to go to McAteer High School] and stays empty until you start to get close to 24th Street when all the Mission hipsters get on and most dump out at 24th and Mission. This is a well used route that could use more service. Work is no longer a 9-5 sort of thing. My last two jobs I would sometimes have to go in at 10-12 to start work so I’d have to walk down to Taraval and hop on the L. Granted four blocks isn’t a lot [it’s actually equal to .32 miles], but the 48 is one of the most ruthlessly on time buses coming every 10 minutes with very little variance. I can get down to 4th & Mission in about a half hour for a bus in San Francisco, that’s impressive.

The 66 has done it’s time, but I think it’s time to move those drivers over to the 48 line and lay the 66 to rest and make the 48 full time, or maybe they could move a couple of drivers over the 29 Sunset so that you don’t have to wait a half hour during rush hour to get one.

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Political Advertising in San Francisco

I was watching the Daily Show the other day because that’s where I turn when I want to see Fox News. They had an interesting piece on an ad being run by Rick Santorum called, Obamaville. We never get to see ads like this in San Francisco and it made start to think why and I think I’ve come up with an answer.

First off, San Francisco is so far to the left that people [except for Tony Hall] of the Republican kind call themselves Conservative or Moderate. The R word is something Tony Hall has the guts to utter in a public meeting place. It made me think about my parents who were Republicans until the Nixon impeachment. They were nothing like the Republicans of today such as Rick Santorum who called President Obama a snob for wanting kids to go to college. My parents would have given me a big old beat down if I said I didn’t want to go to college. Then there’s Mitt Romney who when asked if he knew any NASCAR racers said, no, but I know several of the team owners. That says rich snob to me.

You won’t see any ads for the re-election of Obama because he knows he’s got us in the bag. He did make a quick stop here for a fund raiser, but you won’t see any ads here because he knows he’s got us in his pocket. The Republicans on the other side don’t bother because they know they don’t have a chance in the Bay Area. Meg Whitman and Carli Fiorina tanked here. California while having a red section in the great white north and deep south is a dark blue state and the Bay Area is the darkest blue part of it. The only time we see political ads is when we have a Mayoral race or possibly a Governor’s race.

People who want to get into politics in San Francisco should know that using the R word won’t help you one bit. District 4’s former supervisor Ed Jew was a Republican who switched to the Democratic Party to get a chance on winning which he did, moved to Burlingame and now is serving 64 months in prison for bribery and extortion. I’m not saying Republicans are all corrupt. Whitman and Fiorino aren’t in jail. Oh wait, Meg had that undocumented housekeeper and Carli had the creepy demon sheep ad which turned against her. Not enough to imprison a person on, but not the way to run politics in the Bay Area.

For those who haven’t seen it I thought I’d give you a taste of Rick Santorum’s ad campaign tactics. Note that every person in the ad is a blue collar white person and that whenever Obama is referenced they’re actually showing pictures of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not Barack Obama. Rick Santorum’s ad has, well, Santorum all over it. While we may live in the bubble, if the Republican’s keep up their current tactics, in the next five years they’ll turn into a footnote of history like the Whig party.

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The Lazy Gardener

Spring has sprung and if you aren’t living in an apartment it’s time to take a look at your garden if you have one. Gardening was my Dad’s pastime and he used to love it spending most of his weekends out in our backyard picking weeds and planting flowers. For me, I’ve discovered that while I’m good at landscaping I pretty much suck at gardening.

Before we lived here the wife and I lived in a house we rented near the beach. We didn’t really have a garden there because our landlord lived in a cottage house in the back so we focused on houseplants. We bought several and they did quite well because they were easy to take care of. We had this one that we bought called an aeonium that was a small succulent that I think we paid $1.99 for that sat on our windowsill and was basically forgotten for several years. When it came time to move we were pulling all our stuff together and found it sitting on the windowsill. It was still alive, barely. It hadn’t grown at all sitting in a small dry clump of dirt, but we decided to bring it with us.

Oddly enough for some strange reason, probably that we didn’t have as much room in the house my wife got the idea of sticking it outside. Within a a month it had become twice the size it was when we got it [about 3″] within 6 months it was over 3′ tall and had to be transplanted several times. We had it in such a large pot that on windy nights we would find that it had blown over and a piece had broken off. We have a terraced backyard with brick bulkheads filled with dirt so for the hell of it I stuck the broken off piece in the dirt. It grew. The bulkhead planters my Dad used to plant annual flowers in and that wasn’t something I wanted to get into dropping money into every year.

We bought a few more of the small aeoniums and planted them in the bulkheads and watched them grow. When they flower they keep their flowers for a month or two. The best part about them is they are truly a plant for the lazy gardner. If you water them, they grow. If you don’t water them, they grow. They can take direct sun or shade. They don’t have any pests or plant diseases like my roses out in front are constantly attacked by. They just sit there and make your yard look nice without any hassle. If you want to take a vacation somewhere for a month or two, go ahead they’ll be fine when you come back. If they start getting too big, lop off the big pieces and stick them in the ground.

Very few people around me have gardens anymore. The lawns in front are dried up and the backyards are usually dirt overgrown with weeds. A backyard like that isn’t a place you want to bring your friends out to when you have a nice day and want to have a barbecue. You can have a home that looks like a million dollars on the inside, but if the outside looks like a garbage dump it’s just wasted space. We used to have lawn on one of the terraces in the back, but it was too much of pain for my Dad to mow so he let it go and it became just dirt. I bought some landscape fabric and covered everything up and covered it with small blue river rock and made a pathway with red lava rock to the stairs down to the next terrace. We still get weeds every once in awhile, but they’re just easier to get rid of. We took what used to be the flower beds on either side and added in aeoniums and jade plants which also don’t have a care about San Francisco weather. I can’t even remember the last time I bothered to water outside. We do have two camellia bushes that were planted long before I was born so they probably have roots tapping into some underground lake at this point in time.

If you have a garden, put it to use. Drop some landscape fabric and toss some river rock and plant some aeoniums or jade plants and you’ll definitely bring up the value of your house. Please don’t use it to run your clotheslines to hang your nasty old granny panties out to dry like our neighbors do.

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How I Miss The Elephant Train

You have to have lived in San Francisco for awhile to remember the elephant train that ran at the San Francisco Zoo. Later becoming the zebra train for some odd reason, I still miss the original zebra train tours around the zoo.

I think they cost about 75¢ at the time which tells you about how old I am. You would hop on by the Children’s Zoo and ride around the entire zoo getting a little lesson on all the animals that you’d see. It was a good way to start your trip to the zoo, then you could walk around and take your time. For elderly people who had trouble walking around the zoo it made it much more accessible. While to many the zoo seems large today, it was even larger back then when they were using more of their space.

I have heard, but can’t confirm that it original ran from Playland at the beach to the zoo back in the day when it didn’t cost anything to get in. It was also said to have been used at one time to help students get around at SF State University, which if people thought of the place as a zoo that would give them proof.

I do remember going on field trips to the zoo and that was always the best way to move the kids around the zoo quickly and then get them back to the school. Field trips like that made going to school fun back then. It’s hard to find pictures of the trains now and I couldn’t even find one of the zebra train that replaced it. It’s even harder to find any information about them, but I believe the zoo stopped them in the early 80’s. I can’t even find out when they started using them there. There’s actually more information out there about the Little Puffer train, but doesn’t mention that it runs on a shorter track today than it used to. There’s a lot of stuff out there about the old zoo like Storyland which every kid had to see back then. Sure it was a little beat up and run down when I was a kid, but it was still fun to see all your nursery rhymes and storybook characters in 3D.

I’m a bit out of shape and when we got back from taking our daughter to the zoo today I was out of breath and sweating. I think that’s part of the reason I really miss the elephant train.

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The Manly Art of Shaving

I have decided for a number of reasons to go back to old school shaving. Part is the cost of the modern day cartridges and foaming gels and the other is because there’s just something about pulling out that old mug of soap and lathering it up with a brush that I want to get back into. There are many upscale stores in San Francisco that will charge you a pretty penny to go old school, but it doesn’t have to be that expensive.

I moved up from double blades, to triple blades, quadruple blades and finally five bladed cartridges. These cost me close to $5 each. Now I only shave every other day so I can get a lot of life  out of a blade. I take good care of my blades and after I’m done shaving rinse them off in water then dip them in 90% isopropyl alcohol to completely dry them. I can get close to a month out of one of these blades. It starts to show at the end of the month when it makes it harder to get a close shave, but I never get any cuts.

I did for awhile use shaving soap and found out that a single bar lasted me about a year. I actually used the cheap Williams soap that I think including the mug cost me about $2.99. That’s a good price for a year’s worth of shaving cream. When you add hot water to the soap and then soak the brush in hot water for a few seconds and start building up the lather the first thing you’ll notice when it goes on your face is that it’s warm, not cold. This including the liquid helps soften your beard to make it easier to remove. I’ve even heard now of men who use a pre-shave oil on their face to help relax the beard stubble. Many of these are expensive, but you can use Cornhuskers lotion that you can get for about $3 and save your money.

I’ve never tried a double edged safety razor before, but Dad swore by them. I’ve found them online ranging in price between $15-$150 and while price does matter to some extent you don’t have to go top shelf at the start. You’ll have to find the blades as well which so far I’ve only seen online. I’ll start with five blades at first, but if it all goes well I’ll get 100 which will drop the price down to around 20¢ each. I’ve heard you can get about 5 shaves out of each side so with me shaving every other day that means it’ll cost me about $3.80/year for razor blades. Far less than for the cartridges. Merkur blades seem to be the standard of excellence people are recommending. There are many suggestions for how to use a safety razor and youtube has tons of videos. Some of them are quite good like the one posted at the bottom.

You’ll have to consider the brush as well. There are three types, boar, badger and synthetic. Boar is the most common, but comes in three grades the cheapest and worst usually what you find in stores. Synthetics have varying results, so I’ll suggest a badger brush since from what I’ve read they seem to be the most consistent and best overall quality. It’s also what I’ve had in the past after trying a boar brush. Badger brushes hold water better and you can find them in a few stores in San Francisco at a relatively cheap price. Oh, and by the way skip the after shave lotion and just use a squirt of witch hazel afterwards followed by a few splashes of water on your face followed by any decent after shave balm or moisturizer.

Overall, it looks like from my research that I can get into this for about $30 investment and that should hold me at least a year with only having to buy a bar of soap and some new blades for the next year. Which would add only another $5 each year. Sure the disposables and cartridges are convenient and I’ll probably take one along when I travel, but I think for the overall cost savings I’m going to give it a shot.

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The Saddest Playground In San Francisco

I’ve seen lots of changes to the playgrounds in San Francisco and a lot of them have been really good. Being a parent and having to take your kid out to a place where they can run around and work off some energy so they don’t destroy your house is always a good thing, but there are some places that still need help. This one is on 24th Avenue and Quintara Street.

This playground, really a mini playground has looked like this for close to 50 years. They did put in some of that spongy stuff down and have replaced the benches, but it’s still the same. For some reason it even warranted a plaque. I’m not sure why because other than a few swings, small slide and sandbox there’s really nothing else left.

It’s also not fenced in and a quick run into the streets. It is also used as a staging point for Abraham Lincoln High School’s PE teachers before making the kids run around the reservoir so when PE is happening the teachers and students don’t really care much if you’re a parent with a child there to actually use the playground. We were lucky in that we only visited this playground when our daughter was very young and she was just learning to walk. Now that she knows how to walk and can run around by herself there are plenty of other places to go to that offer much more energy releasing activities as well a mentally stimulating forms of play.

While there have been great improvements to other Sunset neighborhood parks so as Frank McCopping playground and West Sunset playground, this one has pretty much been forgotten. My suggestion to our local Supervisor Carmen Chu is to either upgrade this mini-playground or just remove it and add in a few of those concrete chessboards and leave it as a meeting place for people who often use it already as a place to meet up and have a chat. It’s a small area so you wouldn’t need much there, but leaving it in it’s current state of looking like it was built during Russian industrial era times just isn’t San Franciscan. Email Supervisor Chu or tweet her about this and maybe we’ll see something get done.