Category: Life in San Francisco

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Live Poultry Banned in San Francisco

Not a big shocker here, but the United Nations Plaza farmer’s market has finally banned the sale of something that has already been against the law to sell in San Francisco—live chickens. What I find odd is that the city has let this go one for some time without having a problem with blatant out in the open violators of the law collecting money.

The chickens being sold are said to be spent hens and roosters that serve no further purpose to the poultry farm they came from and are sold stuffed into a sealed paper or plastic bag and given to the buyer to take home and kill as they please. This is kind of a rock or a hard place argument because there are lots of people against factory farming. I’ll have to say though if I was going to be a domestically raised chicken who had to die to feed other people I’d rather I be killed by trained professional with machines meant to do that than someone trying to wring my neck or slit my throat with a knife that probably isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.

You also have a sanitation issue. San Francisco while not the densest of cities still has a lot of people coming and going and bird feces aren’t something you want introduced into large populations. That’s part of the reason most farms are outside of towns so that you can have a town in the first place.

I’ve talked about Jackson, CA before and I’ll bring it up again because I was a city boy who spent his summers in a country town. It was easy to get to the farms outside of town. It was mostly for produce because the factory meat farms where bringing the meat in cheaper. If we wanted the odd treat every once in awhile Joe Valvo down the street from my Aunt might come by with some goose eggs from the flock of Canadian Geese that occupied his front yard. Joe mostly raised them for their eggs and only ended their lives when they were started to have difficulties and then he’d have goose meat for a few weeks. The problem was that his front yard looked like crap—literally. It also smelled pretty bad on a hot day and when Joe would hose out the front you could see it all running down the street. Now this was from only eight geese that he had. When you compare this having over 1000 factory farmed chickens twice a week in a space that probably the entire population of Jackson travels through in a day and you start to have health problems.

Some people have taken the stance that these are better to eat because fresher is better. These birds are probably worse off than the chicken you buy at the store because as I said earlier, they are spent hens and roosters, not healthy birds. They can’t reproduce or lay eggs so their food supply is cut back so that the more productive birds get what they need to make more money. These are starving and undernourished animals that are probably barely up to the legal standards for McNuggets.

People need to understand that livestock butchering put into the hands of people is not a good thing. Buying live doesn’t mean it’s better quality, in most cases it’s a worse quality bird than the Foster Farms you buy at the store. These birds don’t go through any inspections or testing before being passed on to the public. Luckily there’s only the Raymond Young Poultry company that’s doing this and now he has been relegated to Richmond, CA to sell at their Farmer’s Market twice a month. Below is a piece of footage from the Civic Center Farmer’s Market that shows the pre-bagged chickens being tossed to people. Don’t watch it if you have a weak stomach.

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Golden Gate Park: Part Two

Now that we’ve talked about the eastern half of Golden Gate Park we can move to the west end which for me started when you cross over Transverse Drive. First stop is Lloyd Lake which also is home to the portico of a home built by Alban N. Towne that was all remained of the $80,000 mansion after the 1906 earthquake. It’s a nice peaceful place to walk without much traffic.

Across from Lloyd lake you’ll encounter Speedway Meadows which has been home to many free concerts over the years and is now home to the Outsidelands and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. For me my fondest memory was being a kid and my Mom letting me and a friend go to a free concert there. It was 1969 and the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and the Jefferson Airplane were playing there. Oddly enough that was the last show for the Jefferson Airplane to play until they came back to play there once again as the Jefferson Starship. Oh, I was seven at the time. Can you imagine a parent letting a seven year old kid go to a free concert alone in the park today?

Across from Speedway Meadows you have the Golden Gate Park Disc Golf Park which I have to say I have never been there, but now I have to check it out because playing golf with frisbees sounds like my kind of game. It looks like it takes up the wooded area to the right of Marx Meadows.

Head west and on your left you’ll find the smaller Lindley Meadow which mostly used by large groups of picnickers. I used to love that meadow until we all discovered that there are tons of wasps nests in the ground and they will inundate you once you get the BBQ going.

As you get to the end of Lindley Meadow you come to Spreckels lake and the model yacht club. When you don’t see model yachtsmen sailing their boats on the lake you’ll usually find a tow truck pulling a car out of the lake that’s been dumped there for fun by some joy riding kids on a weekend bender.

Next to the west are the buffalo. Yes, we have buffalo in the park. We used to have a pen of elk in the park next to them, but apparently during mating season the elk got a bit too frisky and would jump out of the pen. Across from the Bison Paddock while you won’t see it from JFK Drive is the Angler’s Lodge where people with fishing poles can cast their lines into empty pool to catch nothing. Beer drinking is optional.

Past that to the south are the Polo fields where the game of polo hasn’t be played since I can remember, but it has been home to the occasional concert or two. You’ll mostly find joggers running around the field doing pretty much nothing else. This was usually a good place to find teenagers drinking beer which is perfect for the police because their equestrian headquarters is right next door.

Now as you start to head west towards the beach you’ll notice things get a bit more peaceful and calm. This part of the park is mostly open space with the largest part being taken up by the Golden Gate Park Golf Course. This is the “poor people’s” golf course in that it won’t cost you an arm and a leg or a membership fee to play a round if you’re into that. I have friends who have been trying to get me to go with them to play golf there, but I haven’t been tempted yet. Now that I know about the Ironwood BBQ that’s on the course, I might change my mind.

Lastly there are the Soccer Fields that I have yet to see a game there and the Queen Willhelmina Tulip Garden which is undergoing some much needed redevelopment. It was a nice place back in the day, but it definitely needs some work now.

If you’ve come this far you can stop at the Beach Chalet and eat up before catching a few waves and heading back home.

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Gardening in San Francisco

San Francisco is composed of four separate microclimates. I as you all know live in the fog belt. For a short six years I lived in the banana belt which the hipsters call the mission. Herein lies a problem if you own a house or rent one and want your backyard to look pretty.

My father used to get up on weekends, eat breakfast and go out into the yard about 10am and he wouldn’t come back until 4pm. I am not like my Dad. I am what you’d call the lazy man’s gardener. I don’t like going out every day and pulling weeds. Getting a hose down to the bottom of our 100′ backyard is a pain in the ass because of all the stuff that my Dad added in to our terraced backyard.

When my parents bought the house the backyard was pretty much flat and sand. My dad used to talk about how he’d take the dog and toss it over the back fence and let it run wild in the sand dunes that were behind us. San Francisco dirt is pretty much sand unless you bring it in from somewhere else, which is what my parents would do.

I think they spent the better part of a year driving to Muir Woods and digging up dirt and bringing it home in bags so that the water would stay in the soil for more than a couple of minutes. Still, while my Dad was a great gardner, he really sucked at landscaping. He was one of those, here’s dirt let’s stick a plant in it. That didn’t always work for him.  Well, most of the time it didn’t work for him unless you’re talking about the raised beds he built around the perimeter.

What he left us was basically a weed strewn sandy mess. We tried all kinds of plants. Foxgloves looked pretty good, but they died every year and you had to pull the remains out and replant. Annuals were not for us. We got an idea one day when we were looking at this tiny abused succulent called an Aeonium. We bought it in a tiny pot when we lived closer to the beach and stuck it in our window and forgot about it. It never grew because we hardly ever remembered to water it, but it wouldn’t die so decided to send it off to the graveyard for plants or what you would call, the backyard.

Oddly enough, the fog belt agreed with the aeonium. We didn’t have to water it because of the fog and rains so it started to grow. It moved up to 5″ pot, then a 10″ then finally to an 18″. During this time the winds had blown the pots over several times and broken off pieces. We just stuck those in the dirt of the bulkhead and they started to grow too.

Then my wife got the idea of taking the remains of the jade plants my Dad had in the front and putting them out in back. The brick bulkhead my Dad had built suddenly changed and became alive. The succulents started to grow and multiply filling in the entire bulkhead. We started to move them off to the sides and added landscape ground cover and blue river rocks to keep the weeds out.

Now our work is finished for the most part. We do have to go out a couple of times a year and spray some Round up to kill the weeds that sprout up on top of the landscape fabric, but we now have healthy plants that take little care. I kind of miss the citrus trees that we used to have out in the mission, but Meyer’s Lemon trees do hold up out here in the fog belt if you pay some attention to them. For now we’re happy with our succulents that don’t take much care. I may be a lazy gardener, but that at least looks better than our neighbors who hang their granny panties to dry on the clothesline in their sandy weed infested backyard.

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Work is Coming Back to San Francisco!

I have to say that the past couple of years have been rough. Jobs have been disappearing left and right and it’s hard for me to name a time when I can remember working a 40 hour week. Most of the jobs I’ve had in the last 4 years have been 40 hours a week when I started, but quickly moved down to 20-30 sometimes 15 hours a week.

The bosses at those jobs used to use the trick of telling me I sucked at what I was doing in order to fire me so they wouldn’t have to pay into unemployment, but I won out every time and those companies have all gone out of business.

In the last couple of years I would search for jobs daily and if I was lucky I would find three, maybe four jobs a week. Over the last month though I am beginning to find 30-40 jobs a week and I’m actually getting calls for interviews. I’ve got three interviews scheduled this week plus freelance work that’s come out of nowhere to add more change in my pocket.

I even had an interview today and they actually said that if I was hired they would include health benefits. Now how weird is that for a company in San Francisco? This wasn’t a health insurance plan that was a company of five doctors that you got to choose from, but an actually real big overpriced health insurance company that my prospective employers actually pays part of the premium like they’re supposed to, not tell the government they are, but charge it all to the employee like many have done to me in the past.

Now that fact that I’ve sent out my resume to 120-160 jobs in the last month and I’m still not employed may seem like something wrong with me, but there are lots of people who don’t have jobs and as my wife said to me today, Well, if you don’t get it, that at least means there will be less people in the pool for other jobs you find. I hadn’t thought about that, but I think she’s right.

There are lots of people who have been down and out in San Francisco over the lack of jobs, but now that our new Mayor Ed Lee is extending local tax breaks to businesses [which there are hardly any cities that charge a payroll tax on businesses] it looks like things are turning up for us. San Francisco is a damn expensive place to live in not just with housing, but also with the fact that a trip to the store revealed Oscar Mayer bacon is selling for $8.99 a pound. I don’t want to sound like an old curmudgeon, but I remember 15 years ago when that was $1.99 a pound. Of course back then I was eating rib eye steaks and filet mignon for around $4.99 and I didn’t have to go to Costco to get it.

Good times are ahead for us and don’t let them get you down.

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Buena Vista Cafe: The San Francisco Treat

The Buena Vista and Irish Coffee have become an icon of San Francisco history. While Irish Coffee originated in Ireland, it was refined to perfection at the Buena Vista on the Wharf which is still the best place to sit and enjoy a glass looking out over the bay.

The trick in making a proper Irish Coffee starts with the glass. It is a 6 oz glass as you see in the picture. 6 oz being the optimal amount to perfectly mix all of the ingredients and the Buena Vista seems to have a lock on these glasses. I luckily have a few from the 50’s that my parents picked up when they were all the rage.

You start by pouring hot water into the glass to heat it up to a proper temperature then pour the water out and fill the glass with coffee to about 3/4’s full. Add two cubes of sugar and a shot of Jameson’s Irish whiskey, no other whiskey will do. The secret technique which took a few years for Jack Koeppler and Stanton Delaplane to figure out was how to keep the cream from sinking to the bottom. It turns out that aging the cream for about 48 hours and briskly frothing it made it float. You would then pour it over the back of a spoon to neatly let it float on top creating a drink of Ireland that was inherently native to San Francisco.

While the Buena Vista sell’s Irish Coffee glasses to the public for $5.95 each, those aren’t the real Irish Coffee glasses of legend. There is no handle on them and they appear more goblet-like than the originals. Apparently what makes this drink taste so good is the glass. At least that’s what people have been saying recently. I’m not sure if that’s true or not which means I’ll have have to pull out a bottle of Jameson’s and brew up some coffee and do a taste test.

Probably the two people who helped make the Buena Vista and Irish Coffee well known as the “San Francisco Drink” were Stanton Delaplane and Herb Caen, though Herb often ordered, “Irish Coffee, hold the coffee”. For those who don’t recognize the name Stanton Delaplane, he was one of Herb Caen’s co-horts at the S.F. Chronicle and if I remember correctly Herb’s column was on one side and Stanton’s was on the other.

As a kid I looked up to these two because they made San Francisco more than it was. They were old school, kind of like Sean Connery was old school Bond compared to Timothy Dalton who’s now old without the school. That’s probably why I liked things like scotch and vodka martini’s before I was old enough for people to think I should be drinking them. Irish Coffee is one of those old school drinks that I think needs to make a comeback with the vodka and redbull crowd. Irish Coffee was the vodka and redbull of the old days. It turned you into a wide awake drunk so that maybe you’d remember how stupid you acted the night before.

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Skool Daze

A few days ago I was talking about my daughter and pre-school and how she had a great teacher. Well, that’s all still true, but I’ve had an experience with higher education that’s really appalled me. I was asked by someone to tutor their son in Adobe Creative Suite. He attends City College and was having a little trouble with a couple of programs so I offered to go into the lab with him and help him out.

Part of this is because I’m an expert with these programs and another was in part because I went to City College close to thirty years ago. I was cheap (cheap meaning free) back then and the teachers were decent but a bit quirky. In the end it turned out to work out for me because I got to get all my core courses under my belt and then I transferred to SF State where I could focus on my core courses in Broadcasting. I think my entire college experience which lasted 6 years cost me less than five grand back in those days. Honestly, while it gave me a few skills to use in the outside world, most of those skills are useless today except for the writing and communication skills.

I was referred to a speaker at TED who said something that was very important to me. I can’t remember his name, but I’m sure my friend Fitz will remind me after reading this. The speaker said: We’re preparing kids for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies we haven’t yet invented. Well then, what’s the point of college? There was no photoshop classes when I was in college. The computer courses were all about programming in languages that only came into use again during the Y2K scare and we were using punch cards to store our data not floppy disks, CD or the now ubiquitous thumb drives. Nothing was on the cutting edge back then and none of us had cell phones.

Now going back to my student. We were working last night in photoshop and the course was basically a book of exercises that said, do this, then this, then this. The problem was that this was a class teaching you how to use photoshop in which you needed to know photoshop to pass the course and if you knew photoshop you could see that they were teaching it wrong. I’ve worked previously in the print industry for over twenty years and I know what formats you use to output files. I was going over the test with my student and started making notes to take back to his teacher. One of the questions was: What is the proper format for outputting graphic files to print from photoshop. He answered TIFF and JPEG. Which is correct. For offset print work you always want to use the TIFF format because it gives you the highest resolution with no loss in compression. JPEG’s used to be problematic with some digital print servers, but the new servers handle them better, but TIFF is always the best choice.

The teacher told him he was wrong and deducted two points from his score. Two points doesn’t seem like much, but you need twenty-five points to pass the class. The correct answer according to the teacher was PNG or GIF. I wrote down that this was the wrong answer. While PNG is technically correct some print servers that the print houses use still can’t handle them, though most can. It does have some loss during compression, but the majority is unnoticeable. Many on demand print houses actually like PNG because the smaller size aids in faster rasterization getting the final product out faster. GIF is as outdated as my college education because it only allows for up to 256 colors which is far from the color range you normal see with the naked eye. OK, sorry if I’m getting a bit techie for some of my readers so I’ll try to make it easier to understand.

Essentially, this course doesn’t need a teacher. All it needs is a student that can read and follow instructions which they hopefully learned in High School. The writing wasn’t very good in the manual either because there were some steps that it just told the student to perform a task without telling them how to do it. The course book was a cheaply printed low quality book that looks like it was printed on a laser printer and tape bound and then sold to the students for about $50 if not more.

You could do better by purchasing one of the O’Reilly books from Amazon that has links to downloadable files to work with that would give you far better instruction than this course would. The unfortunate part is that an O’Reilly book doesn’t give you Adobe Authorized Certification™ when you finish it and this class did even though you’re probably not taught well enough to satisfy the needs of a company who’s looking for someone with that kind of certification.

I had to learn all of what I do from magazine articles, a few books and now YouTube videos that kids in elementary school are sometimes putting together. Some of my schooling came from the school of hard knocks which I’m sure I’ve earned a Ph.D. by now. When you have kids who are going to college trying to learn a programs that were written by high school kids who didn’t go to college so they could spend more time with their multi-billion dollar start up company it makes you wonder sometimes if there still is much value in college today because as I mentioned earlier, We’re preparing kids for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies we haven’t yet invented.

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Sandbox Suites: A nice place to work, when you need it.

I received an email from a friend of mine about a meeting she wanted to set up with a few of us who work for a non-profit. I was told it was at the Sandbox Suites and first thought, “That’s a funny name for a hotel.” I looked it up on google maps and even looking at the street view I couldn’t see a hotel that might have conference rooms anywhere. Then after searching for it on the regular google I found out I was in for a surprise.

Sandbox Suites is aimed at start up tech companies. I used to work for one and I have to say it was great. I was working from home 5 days a week with a couple of hours on Monday’s spent in a meeting when we all got together. With everything now working off of the cloud you don’t really need a big office that costs you lots of money. Each person can work from their own virtual office space and then you either get together once a week or just use something like skype to have a free conference call.

This was a change that didn’t take much getting used to and the old place I worked would use a conference room at the place we’d have our meetings when they were making pitches to investors. Sandbox Suites was a bit different. Yes, there was free WiFi and you could print out up to 50 pages/hour, but it had something other places I’ve been at didn’t. It had amenities. Not just clean bathrooms, but they had a water cooler and coffee for free and there was a small dispenser that sold candy bars and chips that sat on the counter top. The best part was that it didn’t look like it was a carpeted echo-y room. It looked and felt like an actual workplace. The room we were in was about 12’x12′ and had a whiteboard, telephone and projector [big bonus!]

I believe this room cost around $25/hour and sat the four of us rather comfortably. There were smaller cubicles on the two floors and in the entrance area they had a couch and several plush chairs with tables you could use for small one on one meetings. Very nice.

For many people they need to get out of the house to actually get their work done and I know I was a bit like that at times. When I was working with a start up I’d get up and start working around 7:30 and sometimes not finish until 8pm at night with the day broken up by trips to the store and such. Sometimes you just want to be able to say I’m done with work for the day and with a place like this you can make it happen.

The place was busy with people who were renting cubicles, but it wasn’t the least bit noisy. Everyone there seemed very happy and at least looked like they were being productive. The receptionist was more of a concierge in that he was getting us everything we wanted and when we wanted it.

They have several locations around San Francisco in the SOMA and Union Square areas and also locations in Berkeley. You can rent conference rooms by the hour and each room has an electronic calendar outside that shows who has the room booked. You can rent cubicle space on a daily or monthly basis as you need it. We’ll probably we using this place again in the near future. It’s a short walk from a short metro trip and the environment is definitely worth it.

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Mid-Market: It’s Freaky to Walk Around

Everyone is talking about the possibility of Twitter and other tech company moving to the mid-market area. I had the chance to walk around the area today to get a feel for what it would be like if I had to work there. It wasn’t a pretty sight and now I’m going to tell you all about it.

As some of you may remember I have a friend that lives in the Tenderloin just a couple of blocks from where I was today. For people like him Mid-Market works because the first thing I noticed was all the Dollar Stores. If you’re single and on a limited budget Dollar Stores are the way to go. You don’t need the jumbo Costco sized items because they usually go bad before you’ve finished them [except bacon bits which I feel you can never have too much of]. Being able to get smaller food items like cooking supplies cheap is good. So that’s about where anything good I have to say about this area ends.

After noticing all the dollar stores, I started to realize that with very few exceptions I was probably one of the only sane people on the streets. I saw people who looked normal and then they’d start screaming at the top of their lungs and banging on anything that was around. I wouldn’t call them much of a threat to anyone except themselves, but there were a few tourists who for some reason thought it would be a good idea to come up here and found out the hard way they were wrong.

Then as I made my way to Civic Center Plaza I noticed that there at least 40 people sitting around on the granite slabs and almost everyone of them either had a cane or a wheelchair. These were not elderly people either. They were around my ages and in many cases younger. These could have been props if they were asking for money, but they weren’t asking for anything. They were just sitting around talking about nothing much and they just looked like a slab of granite in the sun what about the only thing any of them had to look forward to other than making it through another day.

Suddenly I hear a group of black guys in front of me start cheering, “You go girl!” and the usual cat calls, so me being male turned around to see a woman who thought it was a good idea in the middle of Civic Center Plaza to drop her pants and start peeing. I suppose if seeing a girl peeing is the high point of your day, what exactly does that say about the quality of your life? The stench of barf, urine and excrement is very present here even though the place looks relatively clean.

If you can stomach the smell and want to find food there are a few places, but not many. Mostly fast food places some of which I remember eating at and they didn’t stand up to the same places in other parts of town. There are a few diner style restaurants, but they all served pretty much the same thing. Eggs at Breakfast and burgers for lunch. If you look real hard you might find some teriyaki, but you’d really have to look hard. There’s actually more places to eat a block away on Mission street, but I was walking Market because I hadn’t had a chance to walk this part in several years.

Yes, there is the Main Library which I’ve talked about before and that’s nice, but I don’t think too many techies will be taking their lunch break to go to the library [which oddly enough does have a decent cafe downstairs].

Twitter has been offered a sweet offer from the city to stay here and take up residence in Mid-Market that the city is hoping to bring up that area. So far it looks like that will be a long time coming for this part of the city.

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Thank you all very much!

A friend of mine and I were talking one day and we came up with the idea if you could get a million people to give you $1 a year for something that was relatively meaningful you wouldn’t have to work again.

Well, I tried that and it hasn’t worked yet, but apparently there were enough of you who thought enough to send me a few bucks to help us get an iPad 2 for our daughter. As we expected she loves it and has taken to it quickly from day one. We found several apps that are really helping her out such as the several ABA [applied behavioral analysis] apps that have gotten her talking more since we got it on Thursday. These apps show a picture of something with the word underneath and it says the word and waits for the child to repeat it. In some you can even record your own voice. We even downloaded an app that I call “Stephen Hawking” because it’s meant for people who can’t talk to be able to talk by hitting buttons on the iPad and it will speak in man or woman’s voice. We haven’t really used that with her because she’s talking more from the ABA apps.

We also found several apps that have her drawing pictures and letters and numbers in a somewhat structured way, but when she puts the iPad down and moves to crayons and paper you can see the difference. Then there are the music programs. Since my Wife and I are both musicians it’s no surprise that she’s taken to music and considering that I play guitar and my Wife plays bass it would only seem natural for our daughter to take to the drums.

I have to say that Garage Band’s built in instruments are really giving her a lot of excitement and while she’s not able to keep a 4/4 beat yet she has the virtual drum kits to help her out. The keyboard she also loves because it’s much more larger than on the iPhone apps I tried. Even though she has small fingers the iPhone. is still too small for her tiny fingers when she has some problems with fine motor skills.

My Wife downloaded a copy of Fruit Ninja for herself, but yesterday when I started to play with it Rebecca took to it in an instant. There’s not much for her to learn from the game, but she is perfecting her fine motor skills more.

Normally when we go upstairs for dinner it has to be ready right then and there or she starts throwing a fit. Autistic kids tend to be a little impatient at times, but now I just have to pull out the iPad and open up the YouTube app and we can quietly sit together and watch some of the sesame street cartoons we have saved as her favorites.

All in all I have to say that if you have a kid with special needs, get an iPad. It may take your child a few days to start to get it, but at four Rebecca’s becoming a pro already. If your kids like to tear up books like Rebecca does, there are many you can download that have a soundtrack that reads the book to them while highlighting the words.

There are many apps that are free with an upgrade so you have a chance to try before you buy which is good. For some of the apps we don’t even need to upgrade yet, but for the better ones we’ve already upgraded for the 99¢-$2.99 the apps run. So go for it. You’ll find it will change your child for the better.

Special thanks go out to Harry, Leon, Michael, Ian, Clint & Lyubov who donated. We really appreciate what you’ve done to help us help our daughter.

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Utilikilts Comes to SF!

Seeing as San Francisco has been hit with hot weather I remembered an email I got a few weeks ago. Utilikilts, a company that opened up in Seattle, WA in 2000 has just recently opened up a San Francisco Utilikilts outlet. It’s located at 5315 Mission Street just south of Geneva Avenue. Those who frequent the Folsom Street Fair will know them because they’re usually at everyone. Now it’s just easier for them since they have less distance to travel. The company tends to attract the performance artist, Burning Man types of people so I suspect the store will be very similar.

While I haven’t had a chance to visit the store yet, I am a proud owner of a utilikilt. I was turned on to them by a friend of mine who wanting to be different purchased the leather utilikilt. He was telling me how comfortable it was and I thought to myself, “well, why not give it a try.” This was during a time that you’d only see a few punk rockers or the guy who works at the “all things Scottish” store or whatever it’s called downtown wearing one. There was a bit of trepidation, but I gave it a shot.

So I get my kilt and try it on. Very comfortable. Now I understand the creator Steven Villegas when he said, “Men should not wear bifurcated garments because it goes against nature.” I always wondered why boy’s bikes had the bar connecting the seat to the handlebars so that if you got in a crash your family jewels would get bashed by a large metal bar. So why should men have to wear pants so that their junk gets all smashed up at the point of bifurcation?

You do learn about wind when you wear one. Something women have known for years unless they’ve never worn a dress. Luckily they make kilts with a “modesty snap” that while sort of turning the kilt into a bifurcated garment there’s still lots of room for the boys to run around inside. You’ll also get something for a while that women don’t usually get. That is people, usually women pulling up your kilt to see what you’ve got under it. Scottish tradition dictates that you go commando i.e. no underwear, but practicality says either way is fine. I was at a picnic on a fine spring day and decided wearing boxer briefs was best so when I sat on a log I didn’t have to pull bark splinters out of my butt. Just don’t do what the punk rockers did and where skinny black jeans under them. That defeats the purpose and comfort.

Big guys benefit the most from these because you don’t have to worry about getting a good fit on your legs. My biggest problem is what to wear on my feet with them. Tall socks and boots seem to be the common denominator amongst the people who wear them and for some reason to me sneakers just don’t do it for me. Since I like to wear mine in warm weather I usually choose to do so while barefooted. A beer in one hand also seems to be a major accessory if you look at some of the pictures on their site [or the picture above] A utilikilt makes hot weather seem a lot less hot and cold days aren’t really so bad.

My first time wearing one out in public was rather humorous. My wife and I were going to a party over in Berkeley and we decided to take BART. We got on at the Glen Park station and as we’re going down the escalator I learned about wind and kilts. I had to hold it down so I wasn’t flashing everyone. When we got on the train I only had a few odd stares mostly from hispanic men who couldn’t figure out why I was wearing a skirt, while their wives were giving me that look like they wanted to take a peek under the hood so to speak.

OK, that was easy enough. We get off in Berkeley and stop by a 7-11 and start our short walk to the party. As we were walking we happened to notice a man with his granddaughter walking behind us. We noticed him even moreso when he stated, Now Katie, what is different about the gentleman walking in front of us?

IN A PERFECT SCOTTISH ACCENT.

Oh crap, I’m about to get razzed by a Scotsman for wearing a kilt. Katie responded with, I dunno and Grandpa finished off with, He is wearing a kilt! I stopped and turned and said, It’s an American kilt.

Oh REALLY?!?!

It doesn’t translate well to words, you really had to hear it, but I think you’ll understand. We stopped and chatted a bit. He was very interested that the kilt was starting to catch on in the U.S. No razzing ensued and we went off to the party where nobody batted an eye at Eric in his kilt. So you’re wondering what I wear under the kilt?

Good girls don’t ask and bad girls find out for themselves. Now go out to the mission and check them out.

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