According to SF Gate, a brawl at an outpost of sportsbar chain Jillian’s at the Metreon early Sunday morning was going great for some gun toting Oakland thugs, they even had a limo parked out front as an escape car. After firing shots that killed 27 year old Ronald Jacques, the suspects jumped in their waiting ride, ordered the driver across the bridge to get back to their East Bay base camp to celebrate.

The only problem is … it was no ordinary anonymous black town car, these flamboyant thugs like traveling in style, and that style includes using a Nascar-ified 2006 Dodge Charger SXT 10 passenger Super-Stretch Limousine with flames & racing stripes.

According to Bay Area Racing Limos, the garishly painted custom built vehicle is worth an estimated $80,000 and features 5 flat screen monitors, high-end Kenwood sound system, Playstation II, Karaoke system, integrated Ipod port, mirrored/lighted ceiling, 3 ice chests, interior/exterior strobes, laser and rope lights. The perfect for way for the status conscious extreme criminal element to travel in radical rented style.

Unfortunately for our traveling crew, the obviousness of their getaway vehicle and descriptions from witnesses I mean snitches, those darn cops were able to find the car on 580 before it dropped off it’s criminal cargo …

Actual pics and how you can rent it (when the cops eventually release it from impound) for your next moronic murder spree or NASCAR theme wedding after the jump…
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As the plans to demolish & rebuild the city’s decrepit and neglected 1st & Mission transit center move forward, meetings are being held to inform the citizenry what plans are afoot for the interim site during the construction. A temporary facility will be located between Howard, Beale, Main and Folsom Streets. Looks like it will be a bit further for people to connect to Market St transit options during the construction, but employees of local punk rock label Fat Wreck Chords will at least have real short walks to catch a bus from their adjacent offices…

Tonight you can hear from the SFMTA on the proposals for this project from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm, at the Port of San Francisco Bayside Conference Rooms at Pier One along The Embarcadero. There is also a website about the project up at www.transbaycenter.org, which is where i cribbed the photo below.

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Oakland artist Dan Clowes, whose book Ghost World became a 2001 film, has joined the “Funny Pages” crew in the NYT magazine. The first episode of his new serial, Mister Wonderful (PDF file on the NYT site), appeared today.

His profile page on “Read Yourself Raw” has links to many of Clowes’ interviews.

Update the next day: Clowes and Ghost World director Terry Zwigoff — who also collaborated on the film Art School Confidential — will next make a satirical cyborg film to be titled The $40,000 Man, the Hollywood Reporter reported today. (Courtesy BoingBoing)

Among the many politically or culturally oriented murals in the Mission District is this lovely piece on a house on Alabama St.

Search Flickr for murals in San Francisco.

The NY Times today ran a piece on Healthy San Francisco, the city’s attempt to provide health care for some 80,000+ uninsured residents. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s likely because you don’t live in Chinatown. The only two clinics offering these gratis services since earlier this summer are in Chinatown.

That’s supposed to change by next week as over a dozen new clinics are added, but my attempts to log onto a supposed Healthy San Francisco city website went on for hours to no avail.

Maybe you’ll have better luck, go ahead try it:
( http://www.sfhp.org/HealthySanFrancisco )

Of course the fact that the website is down currently, and all the people who thought this up & are in charge of this program are simultaneously writing resignation letters due to the mayor’s personal personnel issues, either does or doesn’t bode well for the success of the program. Supposedly taxes won’t need to rise because expenses are just a few hundred million a year, rationalized as basically what’s being spent on emergency care in SF already.

That all sounds dandy, but I just don’t quite see how this form of “care not cash II” scheme” will magically eliminate the bulk of emergency care expenses. Those bills aren’t just going to simply disappear because the city offers more casual clinical care as well. We’ll still have our gun battling boys, crazed crackheads, random red light runners, drunk driving dudes, and tawdry tangential tragedies all getting into medical mayhem monthly won’t we?

At least Gavin got a nice photo op with Michael Moore out of it so far, and the lady featured in the NY Times who moved here from China last year is being seen, so good for them…

So who knows about what will happen for the rest of us, just stay tuned …

Uh,
I’m no doctor, but my advice is, if any of you have existing health insurance, don’t quit your day job…

While mayoral candidate Grasshopper Kaplan runs around town getting arrested everywhere from Ed Jew’s driveway to back at the Hall of Justice, and generally specializes in creating a nuisance, he’s not the only mayoral candidate who’s discovered they are not welcome wherever they may wish to move about.

It recently became apparent to Hunters Point activist Dr. Ahimsa Sumchai that she too is not on the “A” list, noticeable especially if one steps out of line against the local Democratic Politburo. While her candidacy and convictions are certainly sincere, (clip of last month’s announcement at City Hall below the jump), one has to wonder about her possible naivety.

Sumchai rallying against the Mayor’s redevelopment partners Lennar in a recent SF Bayview newspaper pic

The longtime Health and Environmental Science Editor of the award winning SF Bayview Newspaper was shocked that she was refused admittance to a press conference/photo op Nancy Pelosi was having at the Bayview Child Health Center with Supervisor Sophie Maxwell this week. Do you think Grasshopper Kaplan or even Chris Daly would have been welcomed?

Sumchai seems surprised by the rejection of a Democratic Party machine that in addition to criminal “fundraisers” & dubious “consultants”, includes numerous nepotism ridden relatives of elected representatives. She perhaps has no idea why they would somehow find her an undesirable at one of their incestuous affairs?

Sumchai has long campaigned against Lennar Corp.’s redevelopment of Hunters Point , and is she totally clueless that Lennar’s president of acquisitions was Pelosi’s nephew? Does she not know that when she’s railing against the quality of the local “environment” this might piss off our local “Commission on the Environment” President who just happens to be Paul Pelosi, Jr., Nancy’s Pelosi’s son and Gavin Newsom’s cousin?

The Lennar “land grab” at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard is highly inconvenienced by attention getting activists like Sumchai, and why would she expect red carpet treatment at one of their dog & pony shows featuring the pretty darn powerful pork barrelling princess Ms. Pelosi ?(Uh, who do ya think is one of the prime architects of federal land giveaways and previously arranged for The Presidio to be privatized ?).

You can meet and discuss that sort of stuff with Dr. Sumchai at 3rd & Palou this Saturday from 10 am – 12 noon where she’ll be doing a live community radio broadcast and get her account of being barred from a Pelosi Press conference after the jump…
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It’s a bit of a dovetail off Mark’s water pipe burst post because it is indeed directly related, but the Flickr images (above, by Telstar Logisitics) make for one helluva hole. Sitting here at JFK waiting to go home, I even miss our mini-disasters.

Small MSM news article with a few images is here, snip:

Officials said the collapse occurred where city Public Utilities Commission workers have been installing an 8-inch-wide pipe that will connect the main water line to a new building on Howard Street.

PUC Assistant General Manager Michael Carlin said crews dug up part of the street Wednesday night to do the work. The new pipeline broke apart Thursday afternoon for an unknown reason as workers were filling in the hole with dirt, he said.

The water caused an even larger section of the street to collapse, Carlin said. No one was injured.

Link.

Even better: Flickr photos by a couple different locals are here.

Greg Wharton and Ian Philips, the guys behind Suspect Thoughts Press, publishers of a huge chunk of the Bay Area’s (and nation’s) queer, trans, and transgressive writers, are moving to Cleveland, Ohio to continue their work and also open an independent bookstore there (map).

According to Philips’ blog, the move comes after the couple was evicted twice in two years from their Bay Area rental unit — once from Valencia Street, once from east Oakland. Thus the Bay Area loses two more artist-entrepreneurs.
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I was taking a walk today in the area around my office and I came across this cool sign. I work in the Financial District but was about a mile away and on the outside of a building. Where am I?

I was sitting in the downstairs coffee bar of the new Whole Foods at 17th and Rhode Island this morning when I became aware of a commotion at the door, which is directly on the corner. A roiling mass of water several inches deep had appeared in the intersection and store workers were frantically sweeping it away from the entrance with brooms and squeegees.

The flow lessened after about five minutes and we left the store and walked up the block. Water was pouring down the street, and in some places workers were attempting to divert it away from the store with lumber. At the top of the block we found the source: a broken water pipe and a backhoe. (Photo of that after the jump.)
 

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