Omar Vizquel, the magically graceful shortstop employed by the Giants for the last four seasons, has turned his last double play for the team, General Manager Brian Sabean said in an extensive interview Monday with reporters. Asked about the future of the 41-year-old eleven-time Gold Glove winner, Sabean said the chances of Vizquel returning to the team were “zero.”

Vizquel’s last at-bat in Sunday’s final game was a satisfying slap hit, raising his career total to 2,657. The rennaissance man and well-known dandy — who also dances, sings, and paints — broke the record this year for most games ever played at the shortstop position, finishing with 2,680.

The Giants are transitioning to a more youthful team, moving from 2006, when they had the oldest lineup in the league, to this year when they had 18 rookies make their major league debut with the team, including 23-year-old Emmanuel Burriss, who is slated to take over Vizquel’s position.

Vizquel will be fondly remembered by Giants fans, who gave him a long standing ovation and curtain call Sunday when he was removed from the game after taking the field in the top of the fifth inning. He is even more revered in Cleveland, where he played eleven seasons, leading the Indians to a World Series championship. When the Giants played the Indians there this year, it was Vizquel’s first return in another uniform, and he was given a highlight tribute and several long ovations.

Vizquel has said he wants to continue playing — if not in the U.S. next year, perhaps in Japan.

As reported by SF Weekly, the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle’s books section, Regan McMahon, has accepted a buyout and will leave the newspaper. McMahon had been books editor only a few months. She was promoted to the post when Oscar Villalon, who had helmed the section for several years, accepted a buyout in August.

According to the report, McMahon was assured by Chronicle managers that the paper would continue the 8-page tabloid section, which is now a pullout from the slightly longer Insight section of the Sunday paper. The moves come as newspapers across the country continue to hemorrhage money, with arts coverage being particularly vulnerable.

Former Giants All Star first baseman J.T. Snow — seen at left during 2005, his last season with the Giants — has signed a one-day contract with the team so he can retire as a Giant.

Most recently, Snow has been a part-time broadcaster, part-time coach for the Giants, for whom he played from 1997 to 2005. A free agent in 2006, he signed with the Boston Red Sox but played little and announced his retirement during the 2006 winter meetings.

Rumors that the Giants’ “major announcement regarding J.T. Snow” meant him being named as team manager, or anything else, proved false.

Tonight and tomorrow only, mugwumpin’s theater piece super.anti.reluctant is performed for the last times before they take it to the International Theater Festival in Cairo. Call 415-621-7978 for tickets.

The Treasure Island Music Festival is happening, with Justice headlining. But you don’t drive there; you to to the parking lot by AT&T Park and take a bus from there.

Tom Stoppard’s Rock and Roll, a play about would-be rock stars in Stoppard’s native Czecholslovakia, opened last night at American Conservatory Theater.

An Israeli teacher on a year-long posting to a Hebrew school in San Francisco finds Pier 39 “filled with beliefs and life” and the Golden Gate Bridge “a magnificent architectural structure.” Another ball of fire writes that he “spent the summer living in San Francisco, doing exactly what I’d hoped: working in VC, reading business plans, meeting with entrepreneurs, doing due diligence and generally learning the business;” in his spare time he rode a motorcycle.

A Swedish woman now living in Hayes Valley wonders: “Can somebody please explain to me why staff in the Golden Gate Park always leave the engines running while they load and un-load their trucks in the park? While clearing shrubs, cleaning up flower-beds and so on. The engines are always on. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Previously:
Idle NY theater critic visits, finds our scene wanting
Visitor finds SF “too hilly to be dull“

According to this post on the National Book Critics Circle blog, Oscar Villalon is stepping down as editor of the books section as of August 29th. Here’s an interview with him from two years ago. I don’t know the exact story yet, but as newspaper book sections all around the country are shrinking or disappearing, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be another step towards eliminating the book section altogether.

It’s dead August. Congress is not in session, schools are empty, and your shrink is still on vacation. Without the Olympics, the newspaper would be six pages long, and four of those pages would be filled with wire stories about dead gorilla babies.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel, the Wall Street Journal fills its Page One easy-reading column — a slot where whimsical news offers the ruling class a daily relief from the seemingly endless financial doom-and-gloom — today with a typically silly idea from San Francisco nutball Rob Anderson: Encouraging bicycle commuting leads to more pollution because “Cars always will vastly outnumber bikes, he reasons, so allotting more street space to cyclists could cause more traffic jams, more idling and more pollution.”

I guess by that logic, by driving less I’m actually encouraging drilling in ANWAR because my saving gas is hurting oil comapnies financially, thus making them more desperate for oil profits. Or how about this one: By giving the Olympics to China, the rest of the world is actually encouraging progress in human rights there, because the media attention will make them less likely to oppress people openly. D’oh!

Anderson mentioned previously on sf.metblogs here, here, here, usw.

Local photographer Thomas Hawk blogged 10 days ago about a confrontation he had at SF’s Museum of Modern Art with Director of Visitor Relations Simon Blint. After spotting Hawk taking pictures from a museum balcony and arguing with the photographer — who is well known for his strenuous defense of his right to photograph in public places — Blint had Hawk 86′d, asserting his duty to defend the museum’s employees from harrassment.

The incident became widely known after BoingBoing blogged about it. Last Thursday the incident was analyzed at 10 Zen Monkeys, which tracked down and interviewed a security guard involved in a 2006 confrontation with Hawk. The 10 Zen Monkeys post, by author “Destiny” (for that matter, “Thomas Hawk” is also a pen name), depicts Hawk as a hothead who used profanity in the 2006 incident, which ended with the security guard being fired by his employers. Hawk also recently called for a boycott of Hyatt hotels after security personnel in one of them forbade him to take pictures in the hotel lobby. And Violet Blue blogged about another 2006 incident here on SF Metblog.

Clearly he doesn’t shrink from confrontation. While I tend to admire loudmouthed people who call attention to the abuses of authority, I also think the tactic can be self-limiting. What looks heroic in the short run can, after many repetitions, wind up looking merely quixotic at best, and at worst become an exercise in Ralph Nader-type egotism. But as technology makes ever-more-intrusive inroads on privacy and organizations become more secretive, I’ll come down on Hawk’s side — especially when he’s attacking institutions and not just individuals.

So in the Chron today, some relief that the Golden Gate Bridge Congestion tax is off the books. Quoth the Chron: “..congestion-based tolls would hit North Bay commuters hardest. They called it “a Marin commuter tax.” OK, but Marin has never been a team player- let’s remember that Marin didn’t want a BART extension back in ‘61 (well, I don’t remember it personally…). From official BART history, as stated on their site:

With the District-wide tax base thus weakened by the withdrawal of San Mateo County, Marin County was forced to withdraw in early 1962 because its marginal tax base could not adequately absorb its share of BART’s projected cost. Another important factor in Marin’s withdrawal was an engineering controversy over the feasibility of carrying trains across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Kind of hard to believe Marin couldn’t afford BART. Ongoing, in subsequent votes they still nixed public transit: “Since then, Marin voters have rejected rail measures in 1990, 1998 and then 2006.” (from Marin Independent Journal)

Anyone from Marin? Care to respond?

p.s. Tipped off from N-Judah Chronicles the other night on the history of Marin’s lack of fair play in the Bay Area transit game. Congrats on Best of the Bay!

Tassajara Zen Center, which closed to visitors for several weeks and was saved from burning by the efforts of fire crews and a few “fire-fighting monks,” has reopened for visitors. The buildings and facilities of the center [map], which was first opened in the late 1960s by San Francisco Zen Center monks who adapted a crumbling summer resort into the largest Zen monastery in the U.S., were mostly untouched by the fire, which burned over and past the monastery on July 10. An archive of news stories is here.

But being closed for several weeks during the summer tourist season means much lost revenue for the non-profit center, which hosts visitors throughout the summer and uses the money to run its Zen study programs for the rest of the year. A plea for donations has recovered only 50% of lost revenue. You can donate by clicking the button at the bottom of their firefighting story.

Previously:
‘Glasses’ is a ‘Zen comedy’ at SFIFF
Hartford Street Zen Center remembers John King
Visiting the San Francisco Zen Center
Zen masters, freedom, and blogging