This is a series, see: Coit Tower, St.Francis Elevators, Chinatown
Note: make sure to have a hangover and/or huge appetite before heading out.

Breakfast/brunch at Cafe Divine (Union & Stockton)- get seated at the sidewalk tables, and, with mimosa in hand, watch people in the park. I’d recommend the fruit bowl w/ granola or the poached eggs. Divine doesn’t have a huge menu but the ingredients are top notch. OR hit La Boulange (Columbus, Green) for a pastry and a bowl of cafe au lait. Describe how the park used to be the common for the neighborhood- the patch of ground where you could garden or keep livestock. Mention the falsehood that DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe at the church- actually just photographed in front of it.
continue reading & map!

After breakfast with fellow Metblogger Richard Ault at Just For You on 22nd, I found this shiny, bouncy new basketball court on Minnesota Street.

From Captain Dudley’s Central District email newsletter, always succinct and sometimes entertaining.

On 1/31/08 at 11:17 PM, on Jones at Cosmo, Officers Paul Doherty and
Freddy Alvarez were on patrol when they noticed a car with no license
plates stopped in a bus zone. The Officers stopped the vehicle and
determined that the operator’s license was expired, and that he had an
outstanding warrant for his arrest. The outstanding $10K warrant was for
a previous violation of driving without a license. In fact, at the time
of this arrest, the suspect had three active DMV suspensions of his
license! A search of the vehicle after the arrest yielded some
marijuana, a glass crack pipe, and an open (still cold) 12oz beer can.

This arrest gets points for:
1) Helping MUNI! Now I know who those people are who park in bus zones. Inconveniencing 100s of people for their selfishness.
2) Treasure trove phenomenon: little did they know ticketing one double-parked car would get so many warrants!
3) General stupidity of criminal (see 1&2 above)
4) The snowball effect: Get one warrant, get many more because you never dealt with that one… sad
5) Exclamation points- even jaded SF cops have a sense of wonder sometimes.
6) The “still cold” comment on the beer. And what a nice little Tuesday breakfast that makes- some crack, some dope, and a beer. Breakfast of Champions.

The Potrero View, one of the city’s best neighborhood newspapers, reported in their January issue that the new Whole Foods store at 17th and Rhode Island is hurting neighborhood businesses. According to the story, restaurants, gorceries and delis saw declines when the giant supermarket opened in September. It goes on to say that some are seeing sales recover “now that ‘new and different’ is over.”

The Potero WF is part of a mixed housing and retail development that takes up an entire city block. It includes 100 spaces of free parking, a valuable commodity in the neighborhood, and offers the usual WF mix of groceries, deli foods and lifestyle crap like clothing, yoga mats and CDs. (I’ve seen this mix criticized, but in fact, Rainbow Co-op does the same, and in fact seems to have even more non-food items.)
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We were sitting around the breakfast table- extended family of locals consisting of two sisters (who are moms), their kids, our parents- and reading the article on the Tiger Thing. Various responses:
- “It’s depressing even thinking of a tiger in the zoo. They need space. At the San Diego Zoo they have a huge pen, but it’s still not big enough. The tiger was pacing, pacing, pacing.”
- “Sad, zoo attendance is really going to be hit.”
- “That cat exhibit is old.”

I started going to the zoo quite a bit a few years ago. If you go around 4:30- right when those 3 kids went- it’s half off and you can do a quick tour. I enjoy seeing the variety of wildlife, the activities of the animals, and the giraffes are truly inspiring in their gracefulness and beauty.

I remember taking my niece, then around 4, to the cat house and her screaming at it, “Wake up kitty kitty!” You know- obnoxious in that cute kid way (really). I like the zoo- it’s a little depressing- but hoping its educational potential outshines the depressing factor.

Reading “Life of Pi” gives you a really different take on tigers- and I agree that they probably just shouldn’t be in zoos.

On 29.09.2007, 20:40 mark.pritchard@gmail.com wrote:

Hi guys! Welcome to San Francisco. This Saturday weather is about as good as it gets. Please write something about SF from your alien point of view!

…………..

What’s constituted so, only a pen can penetrate.
I got one here, let’s go!

When I was a little boy, my mother told me one day with tears in her eyes that the strongest man in the world, our national hero Arnold Schwarzenegger had to flee the country from the Russian tanks and went to America to become rich and successful. Left alone without a proper role model, we youngsters got brainwashed by Austria’s totalitarian Soviet puppet regime of Social Democrats, but blessedly - according to Professor Timothy Leary - the CIA provided us with information and sex and drugs and tekkno music, so we were able to liberate ourselves and to pave our way to the electronic frontier.

Despite repeated warnings of Dr. Richard Barbrook - “just like inventing cybernetics without Wiener, inventing Marxism without Marx had now become an ideological priority” - we choose to fully appropriate the Califonian Ideology, which means, according to Victor Pelevin, “establishing a non-contradictory unity of liberal values and revolutionary romanticism within the bounds of a sexually aroused conciousness.” In short terms, we are here not only to make critical art but also to learn from first-hand experience how to become sexy, rich and successful, too - just like our lost father.

Here in San Francisco we stay at a mixed flat share (both cyberpunks and post-cyberpunks) and, not surprisingly, we meet the same weird folks like everywere else in the world, e. g. V. Vale at Blixa Bargeld’s performance at the recombinant media labs yesterday. Later on the day we will join the Lovefest and see the afterparty’s bodypainting show done by our roommates, but first of all we have to get some breakfast and a few things done.

The hospitality of you local people is really amazing, everyone we’ve met within the last three days is so open-minded and helpful and last but not least, California girls are most beautiful groupies in the world - God bless America!

A co-worker who lives in Half Moon Bay told me this story. She was at the Three-Zero Cafe at the little airport there — evidently a hangout even for non-aviating locals. A couple of tourists were loudly talking with each other — “broadcasting,” as my co-worker put it — in negative tones, all the usual stereotypes about northern California — the liberals, the gays, and so on, as if someone had suddenly turned on one of those conservative radio talk stations. After everyone in the place had endured this for a time, the owner came over to their table and asked, “You’re not from around here, are you??” and when they proudly said no, he slapped the bill on their table and said he was sorry they weren’t comfortable there but hoped they’d soon find someplace more to their liking.
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Last year I had the opportunity to fly on Virgin Airlines, where each seat gets its own entertainment center — including a couple hundred movies and TV shows and documentaries to watch (yes, they even had Snakes on a Plane). My companion fell asleep so I decided to watch a horror movie, and saw what I thought was the best horror film last year, and now one of my all-time faves (up there with Evil Dead 2 and Dead and Breakfast). It’s splatstick, and super-gory. The Chron described it as “Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Office Space,” and that pretty much sums it up. Severance opened at the Embarcadero this weekend; don’t miss it if you love black humor, serial killers, badass babes and lots of gore.

Severance official site (Flash; sound warning). Here’s the trailer @ Apple. Link to film times; link to Chron review (spoiler alert — just go see it!)

I am sitting in my North Beach apartment, listening to the grumbling of my hungry stomach battle my internal desire not to go outside in the damp cloud of gray which seems to loom out there. I’ve been up for a few hours now, though, and the grumbling is beginning to win out. All that I can think about is the food which awaits me in this neighborhood.

Here is what I’ve discovered about North Beach breakfast spots so far:
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UPI is reporting that San Francisco police have questioned the beyond bizarre former JonBenet Ramsey suspect John Mark Karr after he was taken by Good Morning America producers on a limo tour that included stops for him to peek in windows at a local Catholic girls school.

Karr reportedly was spotted peering into the window of the Convent of the Sacred Heart school, where he worked as a teachers aid for awhile. This was of course, after emerging from a limousine hired by that cheery & wholesome breakfast program “Good Morning America” .

more bizarre baffling non-news on this lil incident , and how you can thank ABC’s parent company Disney for helping a bro out…after the jump…
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